Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2024

Crime Story Episode 23: Adrian Walker

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It occurred to me the other day that we've been sharing this show for a while now, but we haven't really made it clear why we choose the stories that we do. So I thought I'd start off today by letting you in on exactly why we found this week's story just so thrilling. For one, the twist is jaw dropping. Just wait. And two, it's an incredible reminder of how important Legacy Media really is. And three, it's podcasting at its best. So without further ado, let's get into it. Murder in Boston with host Adrian Walker. Let me set the scene.

SOUNDCLIP

OPERATOR: Emergency fire.

CHUCK STUART: My wife's been shot. I've been shot.

OPERATOR: Where is this, sir?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's October 1989, and a man named Chuck Stuart has called 911 from his car. His wife, Carol, who's seven months pregnant, was lying beside him dying.

SOUNDCLIP

OPERATOR: Okay. Has your wife been shot as well?

CHUCK STUART: Yes, in the head.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The couple was in a part of Boston called Mission Hill, a predominantly black neighbourhood in a city sharply divided by race. Chuck tells police that while on a drive home from a pregnancy class, a black man in a tracksuit jumped into their car and shot them. That call would set off a chain reaction that can still be felt today. For the past two years, Adrian Walker and his colleagues at the Boston Globe have been re-examining this case, challenging the story that's been part of Boston lore for decades.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Hi, Adrian. Welcome to Crime Story.

ADRIAN WALKER: Thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's get to the beginning of your institutional memory of this story.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Where were you? How did you first hear about the shooting of Carol and Chuck Stuart?

ADRIAN WALKER: I mean, my initial recollection is a little vague, but I think I just heard about it from the 11:00 news. It was, you know, it happened at around 8:37 at night. I had work that day, but I was, you know, I was just home, you know, basically watching television. And it was a different era. You know, there were no text messages. There wasn't all the stuff we would have now. You know, now, you would know about it almost instantly. But then, you found out about things when they came on the 11:00 news.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But it's fair to say that despite the fact that there wasn't social media, it still went viral. I mean, this story became huge.

ADRIAN WALKER: It did. Yes, it became huge instantly. It really did. You know, a couple of things about this story just instantly hitting nerves, right? First, there is the racial aspect, right? The white couple who’ve been carjacked by this black man in this, you know, dangerous supposedly neighbourhood, but also the fact that she was pregnant, you know? You know, this pregnant white woman just really elevated the story. And, you know, locally, I mean, they were coming from a hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital. It was the biggest maternity hospital in the city. Still is. So many people have been born here. I hear constantly even now from people who are like, you know, I was in birthing class there a month before that, or two months after that or whatever, you know? So it just really landed with people.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And the fact that she was pregnant, I mean, we'll get into this really as a story about race, but the fact that a pregnant woman was shot, regardless of who shot her, was a tragedy nonetheless.

ADRIAN WALKER: Absolutely. Yeah. And it was shocking and appalling to people, and rightly so.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So can we just talk about what Chuck said? So he said, as he's getting taken by the police and the ambulance, who does he say did it?

ADRIAN WALKER: You know, he says very dramatically, I've been shot. My wife's been shot. They’re loading them into the ambulance. They're asking who did it, and he says it was a black man. They asked for a description and he says, tracksuit.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tracksuit. They get to the hospital. We know Carol dies. What happens to the baby?

ADRIAN WALKER: So the baby Christopher is basically pulled out of her body, as she has died, and lives for 17 days, and then he dies. And Chuck has been shot and is taken to a different hospital, the trauma centre, Boston City Hospital. And, you know, he is in the hospital for a period of time, I think a couple of weeks, and then he's released. He had serious injuries. I mean, he, you know, he was shot badly. So yeah, he was in the hospital for a while, and he had serious injuries. They weren't Life-Threatening, at least not for any length of time, but it did take him a while to recover.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So he says that they're in Mission Hill, that it was a black man in a tracksuit. The police become myopic and what happens?

ADRIAN WALKER: The police become myopic. They start calling in a bunch of cops that night. The mayor holds a press conference outside the hospital where Carol is being treated and says, we're going to put every single available detective on this case, which is what they proceed to do. And, you know, they think they have a description and they think they have a location, or they decide they have a description and a location, and they proceed to basically go crazy.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What does that mean that they went crazy?

ADRIAN WALKER: I mean, they started knocking down people's doors.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Boston police detectives are flooding the streets, squeezing informants, stopping and searching, calling in all IOUs, trying to pry a name, a tip on the gun or any other piece of evidence that will lead to an arrest.

ADRIAN WALKER: They start searching people without anything resembling a legal basis. They start searching kids on the street and, you know, pulling their pants down and all kinds of nonsense, people who in no way qualified as suspects. And they did this for weeks.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: There's a story that you tell of this young boy who's trying to impress a girl.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Who gets pulled out of a youth centre. And it's so heartbreaking. Can you remind us of that story? Because it just for me, exemplified just how awful it was. But also, I could still hear in his grown up man voice, the sort of embarrassment and the humiliation that this left him.

SOUNDCLIP

TITO JACKSON: We were approached by two officers who got out of a squad car and told us to face the fence.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah. So his name is Tito Jackson, and he's at the Tobin Community Centre, which is like the centre of like community life in Mission Hill. And he, like a bunch, is I think 14 years old at the time, and he gets strip searched basically in front of the Tobin. And he's in front of this girl he's been flirting with and he's trying to impress and, you know, yeah, and it's this really powerful moment of shame and, you know, all done for no good reason whatsoever.

SOUNDCLIP

[podcast clip]

TITO JACKSON: At the time, the thing I was most worried about was not being dehumanized. I was a kid, so I was worried that the girl who was there that I had a crush on saw that I did not put lotion on my kneecaps. The burn that I had was anger at the police officers, but it was mostly because they embarrassed me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It was a term called stop and frisk, right? That was what was happening.

ADRIAN WALKER: Stop and frisk. Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So first explain to us what that is.

ADRIAN WALKER: So stop and frisk is something that was already going on, and it was a policy of the Boston Police Department. You know, this is a time of intense and rising gang violence in the city, right? So they are stopping and searching young black men on the street. There was a lot of legal pushback. The ACLU pushed back, the NAACP pushed back. A judge ordered them to stop. Cortland Mathers issues this order that says, you know, you have to cut it out. They didn't stop. They basically just ignored it. And so that was all going on even before, in the months before the Stuart murder, and then intensified at that time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And how many men is it suspected that they did it during that time?

ADRIAN WALKER: I can't give you a number of how many people were searched. We just don't know, but it was a lot.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In the hundreds.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, definitely in the hundreds. It doesn't take any effort at all to find people who will recall being searched.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Can we take just a slightly step back? You mentioned that police were already doing this, that it was a time of gang violence. Can you talk to me a little bit about what was going on in Boston at the time, because it was already known as a racially divided city.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, it was already known as a racially divided city. But to give you a sense of the scene at the time, I mean, you know, crack had come into Boston in the black and brown neighbourhoods. Crime was up. Murders were up by a lot. I was covering homicides every other night, basically, as a new reporter at the Globe. And yeah, so that was the atmosphere. Already, there was a lot of tension. There was a lot of anxiety being driven by crime.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And bussing. Bussing was a huge thing in Boston that I think even us here in Canada, I remember stories about. But I guess I didn't know how ratcheted up the violence was, especially against children during that time.

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh yeah. And, you know, bussing, you know, this is court ordered school desegregation that began in 1974. Black kids were bussed into white South Boston. White kids were bussed, some of them, into Roxbury and Dorchester, which were black neighbourhoods. And yeah. And there was a time of intense racial violence, and it did not stop. I mean, this continued throughout the 70s and into the 80s.

SOUNDCLIP

[protest]

REPORTER: Anti-bussing demonstrations are not new to Boston. In the last 10 years, there have been marches annually.

[protest fades up]

ADRIAN WALKER: And it was beginning to taper off perhaps in the mid-80s. But I mean, that's how long it went on.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And that was in the memory of everyone in Boston, is just those massive crowds of angry white people throwing things at children on buses.

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Rock and buses. You know, the first day of school in South Boston High in 1974, I mean, it's lore.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: It has become a staple of the Boston night, a sudden unexplained eruption of urban violence. We are faced with a clear and present danger. It is here, it is now, and we're dealing with it here and now. The Boston Police Department is dealing with it right now.

ADRIAN WALKER: And, you know, you can watch documentaries all over the place and see the footage. I mean, it all happened.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So we'll go back to the shooting. Eventually, police make a, quote unquote, breakthrough. They set their sights on a man named Willie Bennett. Can you tell me about how they got to Willie Bennett, who lived in Mission Hill, am I right?

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: He was part of that black community there.

ADRIAN WALKER: Willie Bennett was actually suspect number two. The first black male with a track suit who was a suspect was a guy named Alan Swanson. And the case against Swanson, such as it was, fell apart in days, and then they land on Willie Bennett. And what happened was that, you know, this group of kids, including Willie's nephew, Joey Bennett, were talking in a bedroom. One of them claimed they'd heard Willie Bennett confess to the murder. This, in an incredibly roundabout way, gets back to the Boston Police Department, and they swoop down and decide Bennett is a suspect.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: They arrested him?

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, they arrested him for something else and had him in custody on other charges while they claimed they were putting together the case to indict him for murder.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Willie was a character, though. I mean, you do talk about his personality, and he had an incredible path.

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh, Willie was a badass. Oh yeah. No, Willie was the neighbourhood badass. Everybody knew Willie. All the cops knew Willie. You know, the wannabe thugs looked up to Willie. Yeah, he was a big character.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So landing on Willie, he had a criminal record, right? He was not…

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. Just to make it clear that they knew who he was. And the police, it wasn't hard for police to jump to Willie when they heard his name.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And there was even a point where Chuck Stuart himself comes in and identifies Willie as the shooter.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes. At the end of December, Chuck Stuart comes in to the homicide unit in South Boston, and there was a Line-Up and he identifies Willie. I think he was coached quite a bit, but he identifies Willie as the shooter. Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You talk to a couple of members of his family and people who are involved in them looking for Willie. Can you tell me about the night? Like what was happening around the Bennett family while they were trying to apprehend Willie?

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, they decide to search Willie's mother's house in the Mission Maine housing project. So they break down the door and they go through the house and it's, you know, it was just absolute mayhem. They found a bullet, which ended up having nothing to do with the murder, but which they claimed at the time, tied him to the murder. And yeah, it was absolutely horrible.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Those raids, you talked to some people, was it his sister, who still talks about today, how she has a hard time sleeping because of that.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes. Veda Bennett, Willie's younger sister, talked to us. And yeah, you know, she never recovered from it. And his mother never recovered from it. You know, that trauma never even began to leave them. It’s with the Bennett family to this day.

SOUNDCLIP

MOM: Yes. I mean, it hurts. It hurts for people to say it’s over. It’s not going to be over with the Bennetts. It’s never going to be over. This is we’re stuck. So I'm never going to forget. I'm never going to get over it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So both this story has such a long tail individually and larger in the city.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. But eventually, it becomes very clear that Willie was not the one who did it because something happens. Can you tell us how that becomes clear?

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, January 3rd, 1990, Chuck's brother Matthew goes to police and says, my brother did the murder.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Charles Stuart's heartbreaking story of a gun toting thief robbing, terrorizing, shooting him and his wife after a child birthing class was a lie, a hoax, a scam.

ADRIAN WALKER: And I helped him get rid of the gun and I was there at the scene right afterward and so on. And the next morning, January 4th, 1990, around 6:30, 6:45, Chuck jumps off the Tobin Bridge.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Investigators say Charles Stuart took his reasons for killing his wife with him when he jumped off the mystic Tobin Bridge this morning.

ADRIAN WALKER: Which is this huge bridge that connects Boston to its northern suburbs, including the one he grew up in.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What motivated Matthew to go to the police?

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, now, this has always been slightly murky, but some people believe Matthew had an attack of conscience and did the right thing. Some people believe Matthew was afraid that Chuck would somehow implicate him and decided to get ahead of it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What do we know is the true story, or as much as we know of the true story? Because there is still some question. But I'm curious to know what you guys feel is actually what happened that night.

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, let me put it this way. There have been questions about whether Matthew's role has ever been fully explained, right? There were always questions about whether Chuck really shot himself. There were doctors who treated him, trauma surgeons who firmly believed, given the location of the wound and also the severity of it, that he did not shoot himself. So it's always been an open question. I mean, what we know for sure is that Carol Stuart was murdered and that Chuck Stuart was shot. The question is whether Matthew had a bigger role than he confessed to.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What do we know about Chuck Stuart?

ADRIAN WALKER: What we know about Chuck Stuart was that he was a very slick kind of a con man. You know, he worked for the first store on Newbury Street, which is this, you know, Fancy Street in Boston. And, you know, he was married, and it seemed like he was ready to not be married and not psyched about being a father and kind of wanted a different life. And, you know, we know that he approached other people about helping him kill his wife.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Kill his wife. Yeah.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, in the months before it actually happened. It's just diabolical, all of it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you talk about Chuck being a con man. You do get into his early life, and he was lying from an early age. Even Carol didn't know who he was.

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh yeah. He claimed he went to Brown University on a football scholarship. They don't have football scholarships, and he didn't go to Brown. And yeah, there was a lot about Chuck that wasn't as it appeared.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So this comes out. It becomes very, very clear that not only did he lie about who shot his wife, that it was the sort of incredible story of a husband who actually did kill his pregnant wife and his child. There's this sensational story of Chuck, but it also starts to really put a spotlight on the racial issues in Boston. How does the black community respond to what happened?

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, first of all, you can't overstate the sense of shock in Boston that morning, the day Chuck goes off the bridge, right? And the immediate question becomes, how did this story take hold in such a powerful way? Why did everybody buy it? How did he get away with this? How did Willie Bennet almost get indicted? And, you know, and it becomes clear that, you know, the reason he could sell his story was because it was easy for people to believe that a black guy would shoot a white woman, you know, and race was really at the heart of this story in a way that people had not wanted to acknowledge in the two months leading up to this.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because I want to talk to you a little bit about sort of the bigger theme of this and that in the United States is this idea of the black man attacking the white woman. And that has a long, awful history in the United States. How does that play into that? And where did that start?

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah. I mean, God knows where it starts because it has such a long tail.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: yeah.

ADRIAN WALKER: But yeah, absolutely. It plays into it, you know? My colleague Renee Graham who was a Globe columnist here had said to us, you know, it's the whole idea of the black bogeyman. You know, there's this myth here, and he wasn't the first person who successfully sold it, and he wasn't the last either, you know?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But you're a black man, and you believed it, at least initially, right?

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, I don't know. I'm not going to say I believed it. I always wondered why Willie… why if they were so sure Alan Swanson did it, he never got charged. And I always wondered why if they were so sure Willie Bennett did it, I was always like, so where's the charge, right? Because it was six weeks of police, you know, very openly whispering, yeah, we got this figured out. We got this figured out. Okay. So. And I had covered, you know, crime for my whole career up to that point. And I was always like, okay, if everybody's so sure, how come nobody's charging him? Where's the case?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right.

ADRIAN WALKER: So I would not say… I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, I always believed it. No, I didn’t.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. Fair. How did the paper, how did your paper and how did your colleagues deal with this big shift in the story?

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh, it was complete chaos. I mean, you know, we were as confused as everybody else. And, you know, we had to answer the same questions of how did this story get so far? And there were no neat pat answers to that, you know?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, I wanted to ask. Like what did you come up with? I appreciate that it's a nuance and there's more than one answer. So within this investigation, and you really do do such a wonderful job of talking to those people who covered it and exploring those who questioned and those who didn't. But what did you come up with?

ADRIAN WALKER: I think what I learned here is that we listened too much and gave too much credence to official sources. You know, we over listened to the police. We over listened to the district attorney. We listened to people who claimed they knew and the people we would listen to on any murder. But this was not any murder. You know, this was a different kind of case.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How did the police respond to this? After what they had done, gone into that neighbourhood, you know, with such a heavy hand, arrested an innocent person, how did the police respond?

ADRIAN WALKER: The police had an internal investigation of their conduct, in which they concluded that they had done nothing wrong. You know, they examined themselves and they didn't find anything. They were following what Chuck told them. They were following where the leads took them. They had people who had said that Willie Bennett did it, so it was perfectly legitimate to be looking at him. And they have never acknowledged any wrongdoing to speak of. One detective, Peter O'Malley, the lead detective in the case, got a five-day suspension, later overturned, for swearing at witnesses in interrogations, which was about as token a gesture as they could come up with.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But you guys uncover that actually, in those months that Willie was in prison, lots of people knew.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes, lots of people knew because criminals can't keep their mouths shut, you know? And so by the time Chuck goes off the bridge, there were 33 people who knew for a fact that he'd done it, which is just mind blowing to me. That's the single most shocking thing to me. They were family members. They were friends of family members. They were girlfriends of family members. It was all that kind of thing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Of the Stuart family, not of the Bennett family.

ADRIAN WALKER: This is the Stuart family. Yes. Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And distressingly, they even knew it during Carol's funeral. I mean, they were holding this back from very, the very, very early beginnings of this.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yes. And it's astonishing to me that they would all know, not all of them knew that early, but that they would know and nobody did anything.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did you ever talk to anybody who explained why?

ADRIAN WALKER: No, because the people who weren't talking in 1989 and 1990 still aren't talking.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The police also knew during this time. There were… you guys uncovered that the police were aware that people were suggesting it might have been Chuck.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, there was some sense of that. The initial two detectives on the case were always skeptical. And they thought Chuck should have been the main suspect, although they eventually got taken off the case. And yeah, the police had some leads, and they just didn't follow up on them.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What about Matthew? What happened to him?

ADRIAN WALKER: So Matthew Stuart is a sad story. I mean, he eventually died in a homeless shelter in Cambridge in 2011. He was in and out of jail his whole life, and nothing ever really went right for him.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you guys go into talking about what you feel would have happened to Willie Bennett had this not happened, how he would have been if Chuck hadn't killed himself. You're pretty sure that he would have been wrongfully convicted. And there was a lot at stake for Willie.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah. Without a doubt, he was on the glide path to getting indicted. I mean, once they had Chuck's id, they had everything they needed to indict him. And it's not hard to imagine that he would have been convicted. Sure.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Tell me a bit about why this story never let you go and why you wanted to dive in the last two years in the way that you have.

ADRIAN WALKER: Well, I didn't know it would take two years, but…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: We never do, right?

ADRIAN WALKER: Right. I thought it would take one year, and I didn't know if I wanted to do that. But no, there was just something about this story. It was just such a unique, you know, it was just the way the city exploded at that time, you know, that for all of us who covered it, I mean, we talk about it all the time. I mean, I mentioned Renee Graham earlier. We covered this story together. And, you know, we covered lots of stories together, but it was the only one we'd still go to lunch and talk about, like, you know, remember the day Chuck hit the water? You know, there was something about that story, and I would revisit it when I'd get a chance to, you know? I wrote about it many times over the years. I wrote about Mission Hill when Ted Kennedy’s funeral was in Mission Church. And when Matthew Stuart died, I tracked down Willie Bennett, and we had a short phone conversation and wrote about it then. So yeah, there was something about this story that was just always kind of stuck in my head.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And like so many stories about crime, the victim often kind of gets put aside for the sensationalness of the investigation. But Carol was the one who lost her life in all of this, and her baby. But her baby obviously didn't have a chance to become any kind of full-fledged person. Tell me about Carol, because she really was an endearing, quite a special person, it sounds like, from what you guys were able to figure out.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, we were… yeah, she was absolutely an endearing person. People talk about her warmth. People talk about her great sense of humour, you know, how much they loved being around her. And that's one of the things, you know, that was always missing in the original reporting of this story. There was never any sense of Carol Stuart as a person. And so that's one of the things I'm glad we were able to unearth a bit. And the other thing I'm happy about is that we were able to really centre Mission Hill as a community and the people there, because that was always the big missing piece of this story, you know? You know, we wrote about the investigation and we wrote about where it stood and what about Willie Bennett and all that stuff. But Mission Hill, the community, the people there or the way it was torn apart is something that was always hugely neglected. So I'm glad we were able to focus on that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Can you tell me about Mission Hill at the time and even then where we are today? What's it like today?

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah. Well, Mission Hill’s changed quite a bit, but Mission Hill at the time was, you know, the black and brown residents of Mission Hill were basically… were mostly living in two big housing developments, which is still the case. And then there was a white part of Mission Hill at the top of the hill. And, you know, it always seemed kind of unlikely as this sort of centre of this terrible crime. It wasn't associated with big crime in the way that other parts of the city are. So it was always kind of odd that it was Mission Hill where this happened, despite its proximity to the hospital, its, you know, less than five minutes from Brigham and Women's, which is how this all unfolded. But yeah, Mission Hill, I'm glad we were able to talk about the richness of the community of Mission Hill. Mission Hill now is a lot different. Mission Hill is also surrounded by colleges, and it's become a big student area now. You know, it's now like full of college students and it's like a student ghetto in a way that it was not in 1989.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So, you know, you talk a lot in the podcast about the way that this investigation of what happened affected the black community. Where does Boston fit today in race relations? Are we anywhere further along the road of being so racially divided?

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh, Boston's changed dramatically in the time I've lived here. I mean, when I moved here, I was told, you know, don't go to South Boston, don't go to Charlestown, you know, Hyde Park is pretty iffy too. And there's hardly any of that left now.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Are they black communities or white communities? Sorry, I don’t know.

ADRIAN WALKER: I'm sorry, those are white communities that black people were urged to stay out of.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Right.

ADRIAN WALKER: And, you know, Boston's changed tremendously now. I mean, we have an Asian American female mayor who isn't even from here. And there are so many elements of that that would have been unthinkable then that I can't even begin to list. It's a lot different.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How has this story affected you and the work that you do as a journalist and an investigator?

ADRIAN WALKER: It's a little early to say, but I think this, you know, this story certainly has always had this big hold on me. And I think, you know, one of the things I've learned from this story is just to be more sceptical, you know, more sceptical about official sources and official versions.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's so hard, isn't it? Because they send you information with such authority that it's such a hard thing to make your brain say, be critical of this.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, yeah, it really is. That's right. You'll be talking to the district attorney who says, yeah, we know he did it and this is how we know and we'll probably indict him tomorrow. And you think you got a ton of great stuff, and maybe you do, and maybe you don't.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. I have to tell you that this really reminded me of the importance of a newspaper, because generally, it is newspapers that exist in the city that are part of the city's history and have that long term memory of what goes on in a place. And without the fact that you guys and all of your colleagues having had been there for all those years, I think this story and the way that it evolved in your podcast and in your reporting, I don't think it would have been told.

ADRIAN WALKER: Yeah, I think that's true. I think that it really is an example of the power of Legacy Media. And I think it would have been almost impossible for somebody to just come in from scratch and do what we did. You know, that institutional memory was really important.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Adrian, thank you. Again, congratulations on the podcast. I know it was such a group effort, but it really is spectacular. And I appreciate the time you've given me and I appreciate your work.

ADRIAN WALKER: Oh, thank you so much. I'm really glad we were able to do this. So thanks for having me on.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcast True Crime Channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 23

More Stories Like This