Carol Stuart would have turned 60 last March and celebrated a life cut short 30 years ago in a murder that still summons up vivid memories for her brother, former Lynn St. Mary’s High School Principal Carl DiMaiti.
“I can’t believe that amount of time has passed. I can’t believe how easily he duped my family and the greater Boston community,” DiMatti said.
“He” refers to Charles Stuart, who police concluded shot his pregnant wife and then himself on Oct. 23, 1989 in Boston after they left a birthing class. Stuart initially told police an African-American gunman forced his way into the couple’s car, demanded cash and jewelry and shot them.
The shootings and Carol Stuart’s death dominated newspaper headlines and television coverage and unleashed a police dragnet in Boston’s minority community.
Charles Stuart’s story collapsed on Jan. 4 when he jumped off the Tobin Bridge, falling to his death hours after his brother Matthew spoke to police, providing information that made Charles Stuart the prime suspect in his wife’s murder.
Attorney John Dawley, who met with Stuart the day before he killed himself, declined Friday to discuss the murder but said the 30th anniversary deluged him with calls seeking comment.
“People died — it would be disrespectful to comment,” he said.
DiMaiti, a Medford resident, recalled the emotional rollercoaster ride he endured after hearing of Stuart’s suicide.
“My first feeling was guilt: That somehow we hadn’t supported him enough. I never suspected he was involved. I was shocked,” he said.
He said the abdominal wound Stuart sustained after shooting himself as his wife sat dying initially convinced him that an assailant shot his sister and her husband.
DiMaiti said his father, Giusto, now 94, collapsed from a heart attack after hearing police fingered Stuart as his daughter’s killer three months after Stuart’s brothers helped carry Carol Stuart’s casket at her funeral.
DiMaiti said he has not spoken to a Stuart family member since that day in January, 1990.
Six months after his sister’s death, DiMaiti went to work for St. Mary’s as a social studies teacher and track coach. He credits the people he met in the Lynn school with helping him slowly rebuild the trust in people that was shattered by his loss.
“St. Mary’s will always be special to me,” he said.
He retired after 13 years as St. Mary’s principal in 2013 and worked as interim head of school for Pope John XXIII High School before the Everett school closed in May.
DiMaiti visited his sister’s grave in Malden on Oct. 23. But happier memories are sustained by his 24-year-old daughter, who was named after her aunt and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Merrimack College.
“She studies exactly the way my sister studied sitting hours at a time at the kitchen table,” he said.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].
