'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse (23 page)

Three other men were eventually arrested, including the triggerman, and all said it was Carruth who hired them to kill his girlfriend. They said he had given them the money to rent the car and to buy a gun. They waited at a nearby gas station for the pair to leave the movie theater, and then followed them along a predetermined route. Cherica Adams died on December 14, and Rae Carruth, who had been free on a $3 million bond, was now wanted for murder. Instead of turning himself in, he fled with a friend to Tennessee, where he was caught several days later hiding in the trunk of a car.

Carruth claimed he was innocent of any crime and didn’t even know Adams had been shot until the following morning. But during his subsequent trial the gunman, Van Brett Watkins, a reputed drug dealer with a history of psychological problems, testified to Carruth’s involvement in the murder and also said Carruth offered to pay him $5,000 to beat Adams and force a miscarriage. According to Watkins, after some thought, Carruth decided instead to have Adams murdered. Watkins and the other two men all testified that Carruth was at the scene. Additionally, a girlfriend of Carruth testified that he confided to her that he hated Adams for becoming pregnant and forcing him to have a child he did not want.

The jury found Carruth guilty of conspiracy, and he was sentenced to nineteen to twenty-four years in prison. His son, Chancellor, whose life hung in a delicate balance for weeks after his birth, now suffers from multiple sclerosis and lives with his maternal grandmother.

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A
S
a child Rae Carruth was ambitious with a strong focus. He wanted to be a professional football player. In high school he was an all-American boy who was popular with his classmates. At the age of twenty-three he signed his lucrative four-year contract to be a wide receiver for the Panthers. But upon breaking his foot, after only his first season, he became more of a liability than an asset to his team. His expenditures began to exceed his income. In part, pricey child support payments, due to a lost paternity suit, contributed to his spending, and he was now accountable for at least $3,500 a month. This annoyed him tremendously. With money tight and his injury affecting his ability to play football, his future looked somewhat precarious. During this stressful time, Cherica Adams learned she was pregnant with Carruth’s child. For Carruth, a ladies’ man who enjoyed dating a number of women simultaneously, their relationship had been a casual one. When he asked Adams to get an abortion, her refusal must have disturbed him.

Many professional athletes have a “the world is mine” mentality, and Carruth was certainly no exception. Star athletes command millions of dollars in salary and endorsements and create billions of dollars in revenue for their companies and teams. This places them in such a privileged position that, unfortunately, many acquire a false belief that anything is possible. Some athletes exhibit an exaggerated sense of self-importance, believing that rules don’t apply to them. Such stars are also prone to act out their impulsivity aggressively.

Society contributes to this behavior by paying professional athletes more money than they would likely earn any other way. Their life often looks like a fantasy, and to ensure the success of that fantasy, everything revolves around winning. And success fosters a feeling of entitlement. The downside to such thinking is that, inevitably, even star athletes cannot control everything. Cherica Adams was a prime example of something uncontrollable. Carruth was learning this lesson the hard way; first with his lost paternity suit in 1997, and now with this estranged girlfriend’s pregnancy. If someone has a narcissistic rage problem (and Rae Carruth fit the profile perfectly) and something uncontrollable goes against the individual, it can trigger homicidal rage. In Carruth’s case, his “problem” required him to hire a hit man to do his dirty work for him; the solution meant getting rid of the very pregnant Cherica Adams.

Rae Carruth could not tolerate someone exerting power over him or telling him what to do, particularly when he was feeling insecure about his own professional future. The combination of factors encouraged his murderous impulses. Sadly, many athletes like Carruth do not know what to do without their athletic prowess to count on. It’s especially hard for them to adjust to life without the adoration, attention, and hero status once gained through their sport. It would not be surprising if Carruth, with his future career prospects unstable, was feeling vulnerable and in danger. Perhaps the idea of a premature retirement with two children to support was intolerable to him.

Given that Carruth came from a broken home, it was a great feat to rise to the level of football star. Additionally, Carruth’s abandonment by his birth father was no doubt etched into his psyche. It is possible that Carruth’s interpretation of how his own father felt about him was recycled into Carruth’s feelings toward Adams’s unborn child. In getting rid of this unborn child and pregnant girlfriend, he becomes like his father (whether he realizes it or not). Many fathers-to-be who, like Carruth, despise their fathers may also fear that their own sons will, in turn, grow up to hate them. Unable to cope with the unknown, Carruth was feeling a loss of freedom that enraged him and, in his case, he would do anything to steal it back.

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CHARLES STEWART
also felt entitled. During the early evening hours of October 23, 1989, emergency 911 operators in Boston, Massachusetts, received a frantic call from a desperate man who said he was in his car with his wife and both had been shot. The man, Charles, thirty, was seriously wounded, with a bullet in his stomach. His wife Carol was lying unconscious, with blood pouring from a gaping wound to her head. She was seven months pregnant.

The couple had just attended a childbirth class at a local hospital and were returning to their suburban home, but somehow they had ended up in a crime-ridden, drug-infested neighborhood. During the thirteen minutes that Charles remained on his car phone he begged and pleaded for help while trying to ascertain his condition. Curiously, not once did he try to comfort his wife or even attempt to talk to her. When police arrived, a barely conscious Charles said a mugger had attacked him and Carol. Charles described the mugger as a black man with a raspy voice who took their jewelry and other personal items before opening fire.

Carol died, as did her son Christopher, who was delivered by cesarean section but survived only seventeen days. Charles spent six weeks in the hospital, enduring two operations to repair various organs, and was forced to use a colostomy bag. While recuperating he wrote a farewell letter to his wife that read, in part, “you have brought joy and kindness to every life you’ve touched. Now you sleep away from me.” (The letter later was read by his best friend at Carol’s funeral.) Carol’s death, as told by her husband, shocked the community and the nation, and fanned racial tensions throughout Boston.

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T
HE
Stewarts had been married for four years after meeting at a local restaurant where he was a cook and she was a waitress paying her way through law school. Carol was immediately smitten with Charles, who was outgoing and gregarious. He was the son of a bartender and grew up in a large family in a blue-collar section of Boston. A high school athlete, he had little use for school, and after graduation he lied on a job application, claiming he had attended Brown University on an athletic scholarship. His charming manner got him the job nonetheless, and he eventually earned $100,000 a year managing a Boston fur store. His ultimate goal, though, was to open his own restaurant.

Carol was described as cheery and delightful. She was an attorney who worked for a publishing company. As a couple, the Stewarts appeared perfect, happily entertaining friends on weekends in their suburban home and always telling each other “I love you” at the end of their phone conversations. Yet tensions had developed in their relationship after Carol learned she was pregnant. The news did not sit well with Charles, who believed a baby would derail his plans to open his dream restaurant, and instead keep him ensconced in a job and career he had no desire to continue or pursue. Charles wanted his wife to abort the pregnancy, but she refused.

Just weeks after the shooting, police arrested William Bennett, thirty-nine, an unemployed black man who once shot a police officer, and charged him with Carol’s murder. Boston police had stopped and searched nearly every black man in the neighborhood, infuriating civil rights leaders along with residents, but they believed they had their man in Bennett, who was said to have told a nephew that he had been involved in Carol’s murder. Charles had picked Bennett out from a police lineup. The mayor of Boston was present for the announcement of Bennett’s arrest.

With the chief suspect now in custody, Charles moved forward with his life, cashing in Carol’s life insurance, which included an $82,000 check and, over time, additional payments totaling over $100,000. But just after New Year’s, in 1990, Charles’s brother, Matthew, made a startling admission: He knew his brother Charles had killed Carol Stewart.

Following William Bennett’s arrest, a guilt-ridden Matthew confessed to a dozen friends and relatives that his brother was the real culprit. For weeks the brothers had grappled over their secret, unsure of what to do. But in early January, Matthew told his story to police. In his shocking account, Matthew admitted conspiring with Charles to stage a fake robbery of Carol’s jewelry, ostensibly to cash in on the jewelry insurance money.

The brothers had staged a practice run the night before, said Matthew, and on the night of the murder Matthew pulled up alongside his brother’s car, but was unaware that Carol had been shot. Charles, said Matthew, reached out and handed him a bag filled with jewelry, his watch, and a gun. When Charles learned that his brother had confessed to the police, he drove to a bridge during the early morning hours and jumped into the icy water below. His body was found the next day.

During grand jury testimony just a few weeks later, a friend testified that Charles had asked him to help him get rid of Carol. Her pregnancy was a roadblock to his plans to open a restaurant. Charles, said the friend, wanted to work for himself, not others.

Additionally, his relationship with a former coworker was revealed. She was twenty-three, and police learned she had used Charles’s credit cards to call him in the hospital. Police also learned that Charles had bought her a gold brooch two days before he killed himself.

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C
HARLES
enjoyed the sympathy and support of the media when he informed the Boston police a black mugger injured him and killed his pregnant wife. No one ever suspected this handsome, successful businessman would ever be involved in such a heinous and brutal crime. Yet, although the Stewarts appeared to be a happy and devoted couple on the outside, Charles always seemed to have another agenda that was very difficult for people to access. If one could unlock his mysterious side, they would have gained a glimpse into his dark and more sinister motivations. Underneath the good looks and well-paying job was a man with antisocial personality disorder. The nature of the disorder is that of rage.

Charles’s rage was carefully masked, but nevertheless very present. Like many people with personality disorder tendencies, Charles was manipulative. He appeared to be charming, but his charm masked his self-serving nature. He expected unconditional surrender from the people around him and believed that he was entitled to everything he wished for. Some theorists believe that people who are diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder are, like everyone else, people with a deep wish to be loved and cared for. Despite the outside overconfidence, Charles felt inferior to others.

Charles had a tendency to feel bored and empty. Life never fully offered him the excitement and feelings of importance he craved. When he first met and married Carol, he thought that her lifestyle and her impressive career as a lawyer would give him status in the world that had previously escaped him. In the 1980s, it was all about “yuppie” status. He had achieved that, but it still was not enough for him. He needed more.

Charles needed excessive stimulation in order to feel fully alive; it was his way of warding off a debilitating and paralyzing depression. As we now know, Charles had a very violent self-destructive side that he fought to assuage, and as much as he had a tendency to target his aggression toward others, he also had a tendency to target it toward himself. The effect of such internal aggression was severe. Charles began to wonder if life was really meaningless. The only thing that kept him going was his dream to become a famous and successful restaurateur and yet, as we also know, he believed that Carol’s pregnancy would put an end to that dream.

Prior to resorting to murder, and to escape the realities of parenthood, Charles began to go out more with the guys, which greatly upset his very pregnant wife. On some level she knew that he was avoiding her. She also felt emotionally abandoned. Moreover, unbeknownst to his wife, Charles had a deepening attachment to a younger, single, unpregnant woman.

According to Joseph Scalia, author of
Intimate Violence,
some men have a Madonna/whore mentality when it comes to their wife’s pregnancy. It is one thing for a wife to have sex; it is quite another thing for her to enjoy it. To some of these men, a wife’s enjoyment of her pregnancy makes her seem vulgar. It may be one thing to have sexual relations, but it is quite another thing to advertise that one has sex and even likes it. For such men, pregnancy means just that, that a woman not only has sex, but likes it—which makes women seem like whores.

Men with Charles’s personality problems can either be fascinated or terrified by the thought of having children: Charles was terrified. A child can be unconditionally adoring or completely demanding, diverting important attention away from oneself. A baby consumes a lot of time, energy, resources, emotions, and attention. Charles knew in his heart that a baby would be a menace to his life and that it was utterly unnecessary for him to have one.