The Final Word on a Notorious Killing
In October 1991, Mark Wahlberg’s erstwhile hip-hop crew, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, released “Wildside,” the second single from their debut studio album, Music for the People. The Boston group sampled Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” reinterpreting the rock classic as a rap anthem that warned of the dangers lurking in their New England hometown. With no surplus of elegance, the song’s third verse tackled the October 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a crime that roiled the city: “Charles and his brother came up with a plan / Kill Carol, collect a big check / Blame it on a Black man. What the heck!”
“Wildside” was arguably the most hackneyed narration of that case, in which Carol’s husband, Charles, conspired to kill her for insurance money, then told the police that they’d been attacked by a Black man. (Both of the(which included actual footage of the dying woman’s pregnant stomach), a made-for-TV film, and a episode referencing the story. More crime shows and docudramas would follow. Even have been written about the case, and of course, it’s invoked in , the 2019 crime drama co–executive produced by Boston’s unofficial ambassador to Hollywood, Ben Affleck. So what else could there be left to say about the Stuart murder? I was skeptical heading into a new HBO docuseries about the case. Considering the glut of now spanning every imaginable artistic medium, I anticipated another repackaging of a family’s . But is a worthwhile addition, largely because it resists two of the most common (and most troubling) impulses of true-crime narratives: relishing the gory specifics of a real human being’s violent death, and spending much of its run time on the psychology of a murderer. Instead, the three-part series revisits the notorious case with an eye toward how Charles Stuart’s initial accusation both relied on and intensified Boston’s stark racial divisions.
