Finding New Life After a Brutal Death : Legacy: Carol Stuart was murdered, but all of Boston bled. Now a foundation set up in her name has received a flood of responses.

BOSTON —  The donations to the Carol DiMaiti Stuart Foundation Inc. have come in small increments, often as little as $5. With the checks come prayers and letters that tear at the emotions of a family that has already seen its heart ripped to shreds.

“I am 70 years old and living on a fixed income, otherwise my check would be for a larger amount,” wrote a woman who enclosed $10. “I had a beautiful 26-year-old daughter who was murdered by her husband, and I believe I know the heartache of her family.”

Another couple sent in an equally sad story along with their $10 check. “My wife and I lost our 18-year-old son in December, 1984. He was shot to death, and his girlfriend was raped. They have never found his killer, and after five years, we still live with this every day.”

Sometimes the donations are more lavish. David Rockefeller Jr., a Cambridge resident, gave $1,000. Vice President Dan Quayle sent $150. Gov. Michael Dukakis sent $50 and invited the DiMaiti family to lunch. Rep. Barney Frank, the Democratic congressman from Brookline who has had troubles of his own of late, included this handwritten sentiment with his check for $150:

“The word is overused, so I generally avoid it, but you have done a genuinely noble thing. We are all in your debt.”

Small and large, the gifts to the foundation Carol Stuart’s family started in honor of the woman whose bizarre murder last October shocked the city have “gone beyond our wildest dreams,” her brother, Carl DiMaiti, said here Monday. Since it was announced just a month ago, the Carol DiMaiti Stuart Foundation has amassed more than $270,000.

“We are just amazed by the positive response we have received,” said DiMaiti, 37. “We get bags and bags of mail. Caring letters, personal letters. Letters from people we have never met, some of whom tell us that they, too, have lost sons or daughters.”

Does it help? Carl DiMaiti was asked.

“It helps,” he said. “It definitely helps.”

Like almost everyone who heard the story, which received national attention, the DiMaiti family at first accepted Charles Stuart’s account that he and his wife, Carol, had been abducted by a black gunman who leaped into their car as they were leaving a childbirth class and later shot the couple, killing Carol and seriously wounding her husband. The crime, which occurred in Boston’s racially mixed Mission Hill area, stirred fears of urban violence and summoned up racial anger and tension.

Carol Stuart was 7 1/2 months pregnant when she died. Delivered prematurely by Cesarean section, her son Christopher lived for 17 days after the assault.

From his hospital bed, Charles Stuart wrote a tender, moving letter to his wife that was read at her funeral. Later, he recovered sufficiently from his wounds to view a police lineup and identify a suspect, Willie Bennett, as looking most like the man Stuart said shot him and killed his wife.

But then Stuart himself became a suspect in the crime. His younger brother Matthew told police that he had been at the crime scene, and he had picked up a bag containing a revolver and Carol Stuart’s handbag. Matthew Stuart said when he got home and opened the handbag, he found jewelry that included his sister-in-law’s engagement ring. On Jan. 4, Charles Stuart plunged to his death from a bridge over Boston Harbor, an apparent suicide.

The sensational case is now under investigation by a grand jury, which this week heard testimony from several of Charles Stuart’s five brothers and sisters. In addition, charges of racial harassment by Boston police against early suspects in the case--all of them black--have brought the FBI into the matter.

Carl DiMaiti said his family has had no contact with the Stuart family since Charles Stuart’s death. He said he would have no comment on the grand jury’s inquiry.

Few people would have blinked if the DiMaiti family had chosen to turn its back on the whole sad saga. But three weeks after Charles Stuart’s death, the DiMaitis called a press conference at which their lawyer, Marvin N. Geller, announced the formation of a scholarship fund in Carol DiMaiti Stuart’s memory. In an effort to “promote better race relations throughout the city and greater Boston,” the foundation will grant college scholarships to students from the Mission Hill area, where Carol Stuart was killed.

Reading from a statement the family prepared together the night before, 64-year-old Giusto DiMaiti, a former pasta salesman, lauded his daughter as “truly the brightest of lights in our lives, a light that will never go out in our minds. . . .

“All she ever wanted,” Giusto DiMaiti read as his wife, Evelyn, 58, fought back tears beside him, “was to be a good daughter, wife and mother and be happy in her life.”

Were she able to see the outpouring in her memory, Carol Stuart “would cry,” her brother said Monday. Seven years his junior, Carol Stuart wore her emotions close to her sleeve, he said.

Like his late sister, Carl DiMaiti, a former high school teacher and track coach who now owns a wholesale pizza company, has a big, ready smile that seems particularly forthcoming when he is talking about Carol. But he also confessed to a hint of big-brotherly bullying when it came to his little sister’s special blend of constant cheer and easy tears.

“To torture her as a kid, I would make her watch things like ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ” DiMaiti said, and laughed.

In some ways, DiMaiti said, it would have been easier for his family to “just put the nightmare behind us, pretend that it never existed, at least publicly.”

But “walking away was never really an option,” the son who has become the family spokesman said. Until this week, when he agreed to discuss the foundation but not the crime in which his sister was killed, even Carl DiMaiti has refused interviews. His parents have still chosen to remain in seclusion.

“We have a moral obligation to Carol,” DiMaiti said. “There’s just too much to say about her that existed prior to that one night.”

DiMaiti said he and his parents bristle, for example, when they hear Carol Stuart “pigeonholed” as “a yuppie, an upwardly mobile lawyer.” It is true that she graduated in the top one-third of her class at Boston’s Suffolk Law School, DiMaiti said, “but she also had huge loans when she got done.” All through law school, he pointed out, she worked as a waitress at a bar and lounge in the blue-collar town of Revere. It was while working there in the year after graduating from Boston College that she met Charles Stuart, then a young dishwasher and assistant chef.

Even while working her way through law school, his sister was “a studyholic,” DiMaiti said. Her efforts were especially appreciated, he added, by a father who “went way beyond adoration” in the way he loved his only daughter.

“Listen, my father used to carry her report card around in his wallet,” DiMaiti said.

Still, DiMaiti said, the family never even considered establishing a scholarship at Boston College or at Suffolk Law School.

“We just thought it could do the greatest amount of good in Mission Hill,” he explained.

In the wake of her murder and of the tensions aroused by the tale of racial crime that Charles Stuart spun, “I think there’s an unspoken bond between us and the residents of Mission Hill,” DiMaiti said. “An unspoken bond as victims.”

More than simply memorializing his sister, DiMaiti said he hopes the scholarship fund might help to heal the wounds suffered by the community as a whole.

“I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to think this is the end-all,” he said of the foundation, whose exact workings have yet to be determined. “But it may help.”

The gesture may help his family as well, he said. Calling the family’s involvement with the foundation cathartic, he said, “I think this has given us a different focus. It’s not that anything is over, but that there is a new beginning.

“Carol is gone, there’s nothing we can do about that, but there is something we can do” to help keep her spirit alive.

Before the foundation was announced, DiMaiti said the family was racked by doubts. “We asked ourselves all those questions: ‘How can this be happening to us? How can we have been so naive? How can she have been so naive, because she was such a smart girl?’ ”

By shifting their attention and their energy to the foundation, DiMaiti said, he and his parents have let go of some of those painful feelings. “We have a commitment to stay here and see this through,” he said. When the foundation does begin issuing grants to the young people of Mission Hill, he went on, “I think every student who receives a scholarship will remind my parents of Carol.”

Sometimes, DiMaiti said, he still battles the anger he felt when he learned that his brother-in-law’s story of a black gunman was pure fabrication, and that Charles Stuart may have pulled the trigger himself.

“Can you imagine going to the hospital to see him?” he asked incredulously. “Can you imagine comforting him? That’s what I find so mind-boggling now.”

But he acknowledges that such feelings are part of the “roller coaster” his family has been on since last October.

“You think your faith in mankind can’t get any lower,” he said. And then, with the flood of support the foundation has experienced, “you get pumped up. But never back to the same level. You know it will never be the same.”

But Carl DiMaiti obviously shares his late sister’s sunny insistence that a smile will brighten any darkness.

“I know I keep coming back to this, but this is the only positive thing we could do out of all this,” DiMaiti said.

“I think that gives us a tendency to hold onto it even harder.”