Late on the night of Nov. 3, 1989, a Boston police detective walked into an interrogation room on the second floor of the homicide unit in Southie and sat down at a table opposite a twitchy Black teenager.
The detective was Peter O’Malley. He was in his late 50s, with white hair, a paunch, and a voice as gruff and smoky as a barroom. The other detectives called him “the colonel,” and they knew: When the colonel walked into an interrogation room, he came out with a confession.
O’Malley was considered a closer, and the Stuart case needed closing.
And he was certain that this teenager sitting across from him was the key.
It had been 11 days since a pregnant white woman was murdered and her husband shot shortly after they left a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The city of Boston was gripped by an almost hysterical terror. Photographs of Chuck and Carol Stuart were everywhere — the picture of what can go wrong when a nice suburban couple ventures into what one newscast called “a city whose very arteries are coated with layers of cocaine, crack, heroin, drug dealers, drug runners, money launderers, and fast suspects in sneakers.”
The painful old wounds from the racial violence of busing were beginning to tear open, and Mayor Ray Flynn — elected on promises of racial healing — was squeezing the Police Department to make an arrest.