Boston Noir- a Tale of Two Murders

Two women were killed in the Boston area within a couple months of each other in the last quarter of 1989: Carol DiMaiti Stuart and Susan Simoni. The murder of Susan Simoni received a fair amount of publicity, but nowhere near the amount of press that the murder of Carol DiMaiti Stuart received.

Carol Stuart was killed by her husband, Charles. He shot his wife (who was seven months pregnant) in the head, wounded himself and then claimed that some Black dude had jumped into their car, shot them both and taken Carol's purse. Neither the weapon or her purse were found at the scene, because, as it unfolded just after New Years Day of 1990, one of Chuck's brothers had taken the gun and Carol's purse away. Before that story came to light, however, the Boston cops went kind of nuts looking for Black Sumdood. They arrested some dude who had a record and, if you can believe the allegations, subtly tipped Chuck to ID the guy at a lineup.

The cops were well on the way towards sending Sumdood off to MCI Walpole when one of Chuck's other brothers persuaded the first brother to confess before a grand jury, supposedly by threatening to spill the beans himself. The first brother then told the tale. Chuck parked his car at the middle of the Mystic-Tobin Bridge and jumped to his death. There were questions as to who was the real shooter, Chuck or someone else, but the answers died with him and the case was closed.

While the Boston cops were going batshit arranging their frame of building a case against Sumdood, Susan Simoni, a mother of three who worked as a secretary for a doctor or dentist, was found shot to death in her car one evening behind the Walpole Mall. She had been shot twice with a .38. Susan had married into the Simoni family, a multi-generational florist/garden supply family in Norwood, Massachusetts.

Her husband, Brian, had a .38 registered to him and he had a box of ammunition with two rounds missing. Most people figured that he had whacked his wife. The state took the case to two different grand juries, neither of which charged him.* No charges were ever brought against anyone. The case is still open and unsolved.

Carol DiMaiti's family set up a foundation in her name to provide scholarships to students from the same neighborhood which had been the focus of the dragnet for the purported killer.

The Simoni garden business failed a few years after Susan Simoni was killed, whether from inattention by the family or from a drop-off in business for obvious reasons. The property was bought later in the `90s for the site of another automobile dealership along the Dedham-Norwood "automile".
____________________________________________
* The District Attorney at the time amassed a track record for allegedly not prosecuting killers.