`The Pathetic' Motive That Spurred A Killer

BOSTON - Last night, as detectives drove Matthew Stuart through Mission Hill and listened one more time while he talked the cops through the events of last Oct. 23, another law-enforcement officer sat at a desk downtown and stared in amazement at a piece of paper that finally provided a motive for the crime that has damaged so many people and destroyed so many lives.

The officer sat in his chair and looked out the window on an evening when the cruelty of this murder dominated most everyone's discussions. It was a killing that gained national attention when a wounded and apparently disoriented Charles Stuart, calling from his car phone, tried desperately to direct police to his car. He said his pregnant wife and he were robbed and shot by a black man. Carol Stuart died. Their son was delivered by Caesarean section and died 17 days later.

But last week, Stuart committed suicide after learning he had become a suspect in the case.

``He killed her so he could get money to open up a restaurant,'' the officer said of Charles Stuart. ``Turns out it's that simple and that pathetic. On the morning Chuck

Stuart jumped off the Tobin Bridge there was a check waiting for him at the Prudential Insurance Company. He was supposed to pick it up last Thursday morning.

``It was for $480,000. It was payment on a life-insurance policy he took out on his wife. It was maybe the one thing the guy ever did that she questioned. She couldn't figure it out.

``She said to a friend of hers, `I can't understand why Chuck has so much insurance on me.' Chuck handled everything in the house. He made out the mortgage payments, bought the cars, got the insurance, everything.

``Chuck and Brian Parsons, the guy who was best man at his wedding, were going in on a restaurant. Parsons says he didn't know anything about the murder.

``Chuck's brother Matthew was going to get 10 grand from his brother for taking care of the handbag that night. Matthew says he didn't know his brother was going to kill his wife. John McMahon, Matthew's friend, threw the gun into the river as a favor for Matthew. McMahon says he didn't know the gun was used to kill Carol. . . .

``Amazing. That's how the whole thing comes down,'' the officer said. ``. . . His wife was a nice, sweet, gullible little girl. She loved this guy. She believed everything he ever said. She was nuts about him.

``Everybody was. The whole family, on both sides. This guy was a god to his brothers. Chuckie had a heated pool in his back yard. Chuckie had a Jacuzzi. Chuckie had this. Chuckie had that.''

Charles Stuart wanted to be important. Eight years ago, he was making $4.80 an hour cooking hamburgers and hot dogs in a Revere restaurant.

Last year, he made $103,000 selling fur coats to women with husbands who never had to buy anything on time. He was the kind of guy who just had to have a car phone because a little thing like that would fuel the illusions that danced in his mind.

He talked casually about killing Carol Stuart at least two times in the month before the actual murder. Early on the Sunday afternoon before she was shot, Chuck took Matthew on a dry run so that his little brother would know exactly where to park the following night.

Stuart loved to wear expensive suits. That Monday, before taking his wife to a birthing class, he changed his clothes, putting his suit into a hanging bag, dressing instead in a jogging suit so that his business pants would not get wrinkled. Then he placed the hanging bag in the back window of his car. Later it would block from sight the woman next to him, slumped dead in the front seat.

Matthew, believing in his brother - that it was an insurance scam with his cut to be 10 grand - drove alone to Mission Hill to wait. Within five minutes of the time he said he would be there, Chuck Stuart came slowly down the street in his own car, pulled alongside Matthew and tossed Carol Stuart's Gucci handbag into the open window of his brother's vehicle. The bag contained her jewelry and a .38-caliber handgun.

Then, Matthew drove to Revere, met McMahon and asked him to toss the pistol into the water. McMahon, wanting to help his best friend, did what he was asked.

Back in the middle of the housing project, cops were told by Stuart that the couple had been assaulted by a black man with a raspy voice. It was a statement that heightened racial tensions that the city still is trying to defuse.

Later, in the hospital, Chuck Stuart composed a farewell love letter to his wife. Brian Parsons, the prospective restaurateur, read the note to the crying crowd gathered at Carol Stuart's funeral.

Then, as the baby, Christopher, clinically dead from the night of the shooting, finally approached a medical examiner's definition of death, Chuck Stuart asked to hold his son just one last time before his life ended. A nation shared the father's grief.

During the same week of this crime that grabbed a whole city by its lapels, Matthew Stuart told his brother Michael what had happened. Michael Stuart, a Revere firefighter, was stunned, sick with the discovery that his brother was a killer. Yet some members of the Stuart family - Matthew, Michael, Michael's wife, and his sister Shelley - sat with their knowledge through the holidays.

Last week, something - conscience? grief? regret? fear? - ganged up on Matthew Stuart and he decided to step forward.

When Chuck Stuart learned that his dream of bright lights and a perfect crime was nearly over, he called a lawyer. The lawyer told him that he could not represent him because he despised what Chuck had done and who Chuck was. The lawyer told Chuck Stuart to find himself someone good at criminal law, and he told him not to go home because the cops were waiting for him. The lawyer suggested he go to a hotel and think the thing through.

Stuart went to the Sheraton Tara in Braintree and then decided to stop on the Tobin Bridge before he got to Reading. He went over the side, into the darkness of the cold water below, and took his sickness with him.