With “Murder in Boston,” Jason Hehir examines how the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart — a pregnant white woman whose wounded husband falsely claimed that a Black man had shot them both — played out in a city that had seen violent clashes between white and Black communities. Hehir’s previous HBO docuseries work includes the Emmy-winning Michael Jordan doc, “The Last Dance.”
While some detectives and reporters doubted Chuck Stuart’s story at the time, the police and the media focused their intense attention on the residents of predominantly Black neighborhood Mission Hill. Willie Bennett, who unfortunately fit Stuart’s vague description of the assailant, was convicted.