A couple of months later, some of the spouses and families of my co-workers were still literally afraid to come to that part of the city in broad daylight to go to the office Christmas party. To those of us who worked there, this made no sense; yes, the neighborhood abutting that side of campus was a poor one, but the typical crime in that neighborhood that affected a member of the medical community was usually some resident getting relieved of his wallet while trudging home from a late shift after midnight. I certainly had no fear of walking down the street there during the day to run an errand at the drugstore (either before or after the Stuart shooting.) But for a few months after the murder, it was almost as though white suburbanites expected the neighborhood to burst into open race and class war. It was all really venomous for a while. Besides being a murderer, Charles Stuart caused a racially charged situation of fear and distrust that plagued the city for a long time.

Sadly, the same night that Carol Stuart was killed, there was another domestic-violence murder in the same neighborhood. The victim and killer were neither white nor rich, and the poor woman’s death got barely a mention in the back pages of the papers.