1990’s Goodnight Sweet Wife opens with a frantic 9-11 call.

A man named Charles Stuart (Ken Olin) calls the Boston Police Department and says that he and his pregnant wife have just been shot.  He says that he got lost while trying to drive home and that a black man got in the car, made Charles drive to a remote location, robbed Charles and his wife, and then shot them.  When the police finally manage to track Charles down, he’s nearly dead as a result of having been shot in the stomach.  Carol was shot in the head and is pronounced dead shortly after arriving at the hospital.  Her baby, named Christopher, is delivered via C-section but dies a few days later.

The city of Boston is outraged as the crime makes national news.  The story that thousands hear is that Charles Stuart, a hard-working and financially successful man who has never had any trouble with the police, took one wrong turn, ended up in a “bad” neighborhood, and lost his wife and his son as a result.  As Charles recovers in the hospital, the police make capturing his assailant their number one priority and soon, black men are being stopped and frisked in the streets.

With the entire world mourning the loss of Carol and Christopher Stuart, there are only a few people in Boston who are willing to take a careful look at Charles’s story.  There are quite a few inconsistencies in Charles’s story, not the least of which was his claim that he was shot in a nearly deserted area of town when the neighborhood is actually one of Boston’s busiest.  Some start to suspect that Charles killed his wife and then shot himself to make it look like a robbery and the fact that Charles nearly died from his wound is not proof that Charles was actually the victim but instead just a sign that Charles didn’t know where to shoot himself in order to not nearly die.  However, even with all of the inconsistencies in Charles’s story, the police still announce that they’ve arrested a man for the crime.  Charles even identifies the suspect, William Bennett, as being the murderer.

Of course, as is revealed in flashbacks, Charles Stuart is a murderer and he’s not a particularly clever one.  He’s the type of murderer who openly talked to people about how he was considering committing a murder.  He’s the type who roped his own brother into helping him fake the robbery.  Far from being the successful professional that he presented himself as being, Charles was mediocre broker who depended on his wife’s salary to finance his lifestyle.  With Carol pregnant and planning on quitting her job to be a full-time mother, Charles decided to kill her for the insurance and he also figured that he would be able to get away with it as long as he blamed the crime on a black man.

Tragically, it turned out that Charles Stuart was almost right.  In both the movie and in real life, Charles Stuart was believed because he didn’t look like what most people thought a criminal looked like.  He was a young, handsome, middle class white guy and because he couldn’t face the prospect of having to cut back financially, he killed his wife and his son and he nearly put an innocent black man in prison.  The film does a good job of depicting the consequences of both Stuart’s crime and the rush to judgment on the part of the police.  Ken Olin plays Charles Stuart as being outwardly friendly but empty on the inside, a cold sociopath who is incapable of truly caring about anyone but himself.  In real life, Stuart chose to jump into the Mystic River rather than face the consequences of his actions.  Stuart’s brother, who helped Charles fake the robbery and later turned Charles into the police, died in a homeless shelter 30 years later.  Carol’s family set up a scholarship fund in her name to aid students in Mission Hill, the neighborhood where Charles claimed he had been hijacked.  One of the scholarship’s first recipients was the daughter of William Bennett.