Free Murder in Boston by Ken Englade

against policemen, Bennett has been a problem for law enforcement officers since he was fourteen.
    A not-too-bright student who was having a rough time in school to begin with, Bennett dropped out in the seventh grade and took to the streets. His first recorded arrest was in January 1964, when the fourteen-year-old was picked up for robbing parking meters. Five months later he was arrested again for stealing a woman’s purse. Over the next few years he built a sizable record for minor crimes. But in 1973 he moved into the big leagues when he was sentenced to six years for shooting a policeman in the leg.
    According to a Mike Barnicle column, Bennett and another man decided to rob a taxi driver. The man had only forty-two dollars, and that apparently made Bennett angry. So he demanded the man’s shoes, too. When the driver was slow to comply, Bennett allegedly shot him in the stomach. Later he discovered that the man couldn’t give him his shoes because he didn’t have any. He was an amputee.
    Two years later, in 1981, Bennett was stopped for a traffic violation and decided not to accept the ticket. When the officer offered the paper to Bennett, Bennett reached under the seat of his car and came up with a shotgun. Relieving the officer of his pistol, he shot out the front tire of the patrol car so he couldn’t be followed, threatened to shoot the cop if he tried to do anything, and sped off. Three months later police tracked Bennett to where he was staying in the apartment of a friend. When the officers burst through the door, Bennett scooped up a .357 Magnum and screamed, “You ain’t taking me alive!” Before he could fire, one of the officers, in a scene straight out of a John Wayne movie, shot Bennett in the hand. Bennett was eventually sentenced to seven years for assault and armed robbery.
    In retrospect it was almost inevitable that he would not be at least questioned in connection with the Stuart incident. In the early days of the investigation, police still were thinking that the attack was perpetrated by someone who had a record of violent crimes. As a matter of routine, they combed their records for people meeting that profile. Not surprisingly, Bennett’s name surfaced very quickly. Unfortunately for Bennett, his name was already in the mill.
    Three weeks before Chuck and Carol were shot, a black man wearing a red baseball cap, a blue jacket, and jeans had sauntered into a video store on Boylston Avenue in the Brookline neighborhood, which is not far from Mission Hill. Glaring at the clerk, he whipped a snub-nosed, nickel-plated revolver from his pocket. “I want everybody here,” he said, waving the terrified clerk into a corner. Summoning the store manager and a luckless customer, he ordered them, along with the clerk, to lie spread-eagle on the floor. “I’m going to kill you all,” he growled, reaching into the cash register drawer. While they trembled in anticipation of instant death, the robber scooped up the money—$642, it turned out—spun around, and dashed out the door. When asked later if the robber had any distinguishing physical characteristics, the victims said that, as a matter of fact, he did. He had a scruffy beard and a raspy voice.
    Ah-ha, thought the police. Listen to this: Baseball cap. Black man. Scruffy beard. Raspy voice. Snubnosed, nickel-plated revolver. Armed robber. Little apparent regard for life. Right age bracket. Same general size and weight. He sounded like a strong suspect to them. But there was more.
    Bennett had a nephew named Joey Bennett, who lived in Mission Hill. The fifteen-year-old Joey was something of a braggart. And he liked to boast about his uncle’s exploits.
    Joey Bennett had a friend named Dereck Jackson. On October 24, the day after the Stuart shootings, the seventeen-year-old Jackson, who also lived in Mission Hill, went to visit his friend Joey. While he was there a man he did not know came in, and Joey introduced him as his uncle Willie. What