Boston mayor will formally apologize to Black men wrongly accused in 1989 Carol Stuart murder

By STEVE LeBLANC
Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — Boston Mayor Michelle Wu plans to formally apologize on behalf of the city to Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett for their wrongful arrests following the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, whose husband Charles Stuart had orchestrated her killing. The killing rattled Boston, coarsened divisions in a city long riven along racial lines, and renewed suspicion and anger directed at the Boston Police Department by the city’s Black community. Stuart blamed his wife’s killing — and his own shooting — on an unidentified Black gunman, leading to a crackdown by police in one of the city’s traditionally Black neighborhoods in pursuit of a phantom assailant. The Boston Globe and an HBO documentary series has cast a new spotlight on the case.