Reveal

Note: This episode contains descriptions of violence and suicide and may not be appropriate for all listeners. 

In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting. 

He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.

Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit. 

Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.  

For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe and the Murder in Boston podcast, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few white people in power wanted to confront.  

To hear more of the Boston Globe’s investigation, listen to the 10-part podcast Murder in Boston. The HBO documentary series Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Max. 

This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.

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More To The Story: In January, the federal government released updated dietary guidelines for Americans that reimagine the nation’s longtime food pyramid by literally turning it upside down. The guidelines, which once prioritized foods like grains while minimizing fats, now recommend red meat, whole milk, proteins, and healthy fats. It’s one of the most unmistakable ways that US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought the Make America Healthy Again movement into the federal government. Over the last year, RFK Jr. has reshaped the country’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, fired thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, and revised the CDC’s stance on the unfounded link between vaccines and autism. The moves, often influenced and cheered by folks in the MAHA movement, are ones that infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera says are not merely misguided, but dangerous. On this week’s More To The Story, Rivera examines how Big Ag has influenced the nation’s latest dietary guidelines, whether the US is on the cusp of a national measles outbreak, and why the CDC dropping vaccine recommendations could have potentially long-term and deadly consequences.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Read: Measles Cases This Year Near 1,000. That We Know Of. (Mother Jones)
Listen: Why Trump Deemed Basic Sanitation Illegal DEI (More To The Story)
Read: RFK Jr. Wants to End the “War” on Unproven Treatments Like Stem Cell Therapy (Mother Jones)

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Two veteran journalists set out to document Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health care system: hospitals attacked, medical workers killed, doctors detained and held for long periods without criminal charges. The BBC had commissioned the film. 
But their Palestinian sources in Gaza and the West Bank were skeptical. 
“We really had to try and persuade them…to talk to us because they didn’t—and don’t—trust the BBC,” says reporter Ramita Navai. 
One source doubted the BBC would air the film. “And I was quite shocked he felt that way,” says reporter Ben de Pear. “But actually, he was 100 percent right.”
Over the last couple of years, big media organizations have been criticized—from the left and the right—about their coverage of the war in Gaza. But it’s rare to get the chance to peel back the curtain to see what exactly was happening inside one of those organizations to learn whether political pressure played a role in journalistic decision-making.
This week on Reveal, we’re partnering with the KCRW podcast Question Everything to tell the story of a film the BBC wouldn’t air and what it says about the future of journalism.

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More To The Story: US and Israeli military strikes against Iran that killed several of the country’s top officials, including longtime supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have ushered in a new and unpredictable era in the Middle East. Within hours, Iran retaliated, striking US allies across the Persian Gulf, including US embassies and a military operations center in Kuwait. At least six US service members had been killed. In Iran, days of military strikes have reportedly killed hundreds of people, including dozens of girls at an elementary school.
 
Davar Ardalan knows Iran inside and out. She lived in the country before the Islamic Revolution, when it was ruled by the shah, and afterward, when it was run by the country’s ayatollahs. For more than two decades, she was a journalist at NPR, where she produced major stories about the country. She’s also the author of My Name Is Iran: A Memoir, which highlights three generations of women living in both Iran and the US during times of revolution. On this week’s episode, Ardalan examines how Iranians inside the country are reacting to the ever-widening conflict, the long history of outside intervention in the region, and who might lead the country moving forward.
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Copy editor: Nikki Frick | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

Read: What a War Powers Resolution Vote on Iran Actually Means (Mother Jones)
Listen: Jeffrey Goldberg on Signalgate, Pete Hegseth, and the Risk of WWIII (More To The Story)
Read: My Name Is Iran: A Memoir (Holt)

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The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. 
According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third-grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.
In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.
“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.
This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk. 
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2025.

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