How ‘Murder in Boston’ Director Jason Hehir “Trojan Horsed” a Social Justice Story Into True Crime
The third and final installment of HBO true-crime documentary series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning airs Monday night — and, true to the genre, it unravels the facts around the 1989 killing of Carol Stuart with as much information and perspective as is available. But what those behind this hour of television also want viewers to consider is the crime’s less public victims.
For those who’ve yet to tune in to Murder in Boston, it follows the fatal shooting of the pregnant 30-year-old by her husband Charles “Chuck” Stuart. He evaded capture and even suspicion for over two months by claiming a Black man committed the crime, putting the predominantly Black community of Mission Hill through a grueling and misguided police investigation that led to countless Black men being subjected to stop and frisk tactics and the arrest of William Bennett. Even when Bennett’s innocence became apparent, he remained incarcerated before spending 12 years behind bars for a dubious robbery charge.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
“I had just turned 13 when this all went down, and the rest of the Greater Boston area was transfixed,” says director Jason Hehir, the documentary filmmaker behind André the Giant and The Last Dance who grew up in neighboring Newton. “Normally, a lot of the gossip in Boston is politics or sports — but no one was talking about anything except for this case from the time that the murders happened until the day that Chuck went off the bridge.”
After that, however, Bennett’s fate and the racially charged and botched investigation that sealed it fell out of the news.
This has never gotten the proper documentary treatment before. Did that surprise you?
It’s relatively recent that true crime has proliferated as one of the most sought-after genres. But a lot of the stories being put on the screen are tragedy porn or gore porn — just sensationalistic. Anytime I would see something like that, I’d think, “Someone is going to do the Stuart case.” Because this is microcosmic of the history of racism in the city of Boston. The murder itself and the twists and turns are riveting, but it’s also about what it says about a region that is known nationally for being one of the most notoriously racist areas in the country. This felt like a way to Trojan Horse a bit of a social justice story in the guise of a true-crime story.
After The Last Dance, I started getting a lot of inquiries as to what other stories I might want to tell outside of sports. I’d been waiting for that for years. As much as I love sports, it’s really the characters and new perspectives that I enjoy. I think the sweet spot for me in a documentary is either an incredible story that no one’s heard or a new perspective on an incredible story that everyone knows. In Boston, a lot of people know this story. If you’re over the age of 45, you know this story. If you’re under the age of 45, you don’t. So, in a lot of ways, this was a brand new story to tell people, not just nationally but locally, as well.
How was the research process here different from your previous work?
So little had been done on this case. Normally, if you have a story that’s big enough for three parts, you have a lot of prior projects — books, other documentaries, lots of material to review. I’m 6-foot-1, and I had a stack of books up to my waist that I read for the Jordan documentary. I did two years of research for that. For the Stuart case, there were a couple of books that were written right in the aftermath and a TV movie that I couldn’t even find online — not that it would’ve been valuable to my research. We really had to go back to the beginning. This is where The Boston Globe came in and helped us a lot. They got a hold of the grand jury transcripts in the months during the investigation. That’s when everything clicked for me. I rented a place in the mountains for a couple of nights and read 1,500 pages of grand jury transcripts. I came back with a really clear idea of exactly what had happened and what went wrong in this investigation.
What surprised you during the process?
Just how obvious it would’ve been if the police had looked in the right places and if the investigation were handled properly. If the police went to Revere, they would’ve found a growing web of anywhere from a dozen to three dozen people who knew the truth and weren’t speaking proactively to the police. If they had started pounding on doors and intimidating people the way that they did in Mission Hill, then they could have gotten to the truth a lot sooner, with a lot less pain inflicted on an innocent community.
The most galling detail that I didn’t realize — and that a lot of people to this day don’t realize — is that Willie Bennett served 12 years in prison for the video store robbery, which is specious at best. They were holding him just to be able to know his whereabouts so that, in [retired Boston P.D. detective] Billy Dunn’s words, he wouldn’t flee to Canada. Dunn said, “That’s just part of the process.” To me, that was maybe the most galling soundbite in the entire doc: Billy Dunn saying that holding Willie Bennett on a vague description so that they would know his whereabouts while they were trying to gather information to indict him for the Stuart murder ended up with a conviction that put him behind bars for 12 years being part of the process. That process is clearly flawed and unjust.
This is the guy who is unrepentant about the investigation and even laments the progress that’s happened in Boston since?
Yeah. The level of ignorance, brazen and proud ignorance, was infuriating while we’re making this. The biggest regret that I have in this doc is that we didn’t get cooperation from more of the Boston police officials who were involved with the investigation, because I don’t think that Billy Dunn should be an avatar for the Boston Police Department. Especially in 2023, I don’t think he represents the views and behavior of the Boston police. If he does, we’re in a lot of trouble.
Not having that access, not being able to speak with Willie or to Carol’s family, how did you fill in the gaps?
The reason I made the documentary was to help Mission Hill and the Bennett family express the pain that has gone unexpressed properly for 34 years. I was interested in their perspective more than I was interested in the perspective of the Carol’s family or especially the Stuart family. I don’t care why Chuck killed his wife. He was a sociopath. What I do care about and have been curious about for decades is that he lied and knew that if he blamed a Black man in Boston, it would divert attention from him. I’ve been endlessly curious as to why I believed the story with the rest of the city of Boston when we read this in the papers. Why we readily believed this without questioning what now seems to be the obvious.
Have you gotten any sense that this is finally inspiring some regret in Boston?
I don’t know how much it resonates. It’s so difficult to cut through. We had a captive global audience for The Last Dance. It was the only new thing on television at the start of the pandemic, and people all over the world had nothing else to watch. This, I don’t know. There’s a sea of really good content out there. Who knows what the formula is for why people watch what they watch and or if it can even gain the attention of the media in its home city? I haven’t been contacted by many people.
Having this final episode drop right before the holiday break will probably help.
You could watch it in one night. It’s only about two and a half hours long. Hopefully people are waiting for it all to be out there. I have noticed online that some people are upset that they have to wait for the last episode. We’ve become such an impatient culture. We want all the episodes, so we can consume them and go on to the next — which I’m guilty of myself. I’m the guy who listens to podcasts at 1.75 speed, so …
That’s horrifying!
Yeah. It drives my wife insane.
Just to pivot before I let you go … You spent time with Elon Musk when filming Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, the 2021 doc series about SpaceX sending civilians into orbit. What’s been your take on his public devolution in the time since?
Well, I only spent 18 minutes with him. (Laughs.)
That’s all?
I waited 10 hours to spend 18 minutes with him. An armed guard followed me to the bathroom. There are a lot of creepy guys down at Starbase. Heavy security. We were actually told that we had to interview [Elon]. I didn’t really feel like he was part of the story. Obviously, they were going up in a SpaceX rocket, but the story was about these four civilian astronauts who were about to orbit the Earth on their own. It still shocks me how many people don’t know that happened and that, when I explain it to them, they don’t care. We’ve reached the point of saturation where people think that anything is possible. But I can’t speak much to Elon besides what you probably feel. Everybody’s just watching him from afar, scratching their heads and hoping that he doesn’t interfere in global politics so much that he gets us all killed.
It’s funny that you say that about people not being impressed by these feats or revelations anymore. There were congressional hearings this year that basically announced that aliens are real, and everybody was just sort of like, “Ok, next …”
I remember saying to a well-educated friend — or I thought so, at least — that someday Jared Isaacman might be one of the first people on Mars. And he said, “Well, we’ve landed on Mars already, right?” (Laughs.) People take this stuff for granted. I just try to keep my head down and do the best work that I can. My audience is the people in the edit room. I trust them so much that if they like it and it satisfies their taste, then we have to be confident enough to put it out in the world and say, “OK, we hope you like it, too!”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
