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This week we are all at sea, when we discuss the case of Nathan Carman.
Nathan Carman was born on the 21st of January 1994, to mother Linda and Father Clark Carman. Nathan was an only child and grew up in Middletown Connecticut, the relationship between his parents didn’t last and his mother divorced his father when he was quite young. Linda didn’t go on to have any more children or remarry but her and Clark remained on good terms.
So Nathan’s father was present in his childhood but as more of a concerned party, Linda was his main stay, and they had a very close relationship, him and his mum often travelled together — going to Greece, the Caribbean, and an RV trip through Alaska.
Linda comes from an affluent family, her parents had a lot of money and were pillars of the community.
Her father John Chakalos was a very successful and wealthy self-made man who dedicated his life to his marriage, work, and community, and above all, family. His favourite motto was "without family you've got nothing; family is everything."
By all accounts, Linda was a well-liked person, she volunteered and worked as a support worker or carer for families who had kids with ASD Autism Spectrum disorder.
This work, particularly with children on the autism spectrum, was very personal to Linda because Nathan himself is autistic. As a child Nathan was initially diagnosed with Asperger’s, but this is now more generally known as a high functioning variation of autism spectrum disorder.
For the purposes of this case I’m going to use Autism or ASD as the terminology when speaking about Nathan, my wish is certainly not to offend anyone.
So let’s talk a little about Autism, according to the National Autistic society.
Autism is a lifelong developmental disability which affects how people communicate and interact with the world. One in 100 people are on the autism spectrum and there are around 700,000 autistic adults and children in the UK.
Autism is a spectrum condition and affects people in different ways. Like all people, autistic people have their own strengths and weaknesses.
Nathan himself is said to have displayed above-average intelligence, consistently earning high honours in high school. But those who knew him said he had the social aptitude of a young child.
With the help of psychiatrists and therapists, Nathan learned to make his way through the world. Though he wasn’t particularly verbal and his fine motor skills seemed underdeveloped, he liked numbers and planning. Had lots of outdoorsy hobbies a passionate interest in History as well as playing soccer and basketball. And while he preferred the company of adults to that of kids his own age, his strongest emotional attachments were to animals.
As a teenager, Nathan developed a particularly strong bond with a white Irish Sport horse named Cruise that his grandfather bought for him.
So this is Nathans Immediate Support structure, Mum Linda, Dad Clark, grandparents John and Rita Chakalos and horse Cruise.
Nathan didn’t have a lot of friends at Middletown High School, the teachers and former classmates described him as a loner, a six-foot-three child running down the hallways in oversized outdoor gear. Rarely smiling or showing much emotion he was often teased and bullied.
So it’s no wonder that his closest friends are his family. as most mothers and sons do, they had their quarrels and disagreements, but they did have a generally solid relationship.
And one thing they enjoyed doing was fishing together. Nathan was really into fishing, and Linda despite not really being as enthusiastic about it, did like to catch fish and no doubt went along because it was a way of spending time with her son.
Top mom points there.
And it was a serious hobby for them, and they would go on frequent trips together. Once, during a fishing trip in the Canadian wilderness, their canoe flipped over, and they were forced to swim to shore.
Nathan had a 31ft boat called the chicken pox, he had purchased the boat, in December 2015. prior to the events I’m going to take you through next.
Dani if you had a boat what would you call it?
(D) well if we are talking fantasy boats mine would be a canal barge (major Rosie & Jim Theme) and I'd call it some thing like the Tallulah Rose and it would be painted really traditionally with flowers – but I don’t think that the kind of boat you meant. What would you name a boat then?
(K) the sassy clam or the sarcastic mermaid 😊
On the night of sept 17th 2016 just after 11pm Nathan (22) and Linda, (54), set off on a fishing trip. They had decided that they wanted to try some deep-sea fishing, tuna fishing I believe and that would land them in the right spot to do this at the opportune time.
With the boat packed up Linda lets a friend know they will be back on Sunday evening, texting her their float plan. Usually, mum & son would head towards Block Island 20 miles from shore, but they’re trying something new and head out further to Block Canyon, it’s so far out that it would take them most of the wee hours to get there.
The next day, Sunday there is no sign of Linda or Nathan and so the friend alerts the coastguard that they hadn’t returned from their trip. Concerned, the coast guard set off to look for them. The search covered 82,000 square miles of ocean all around the area of Connecticut Rhode Island and New York. Ships, helicopters, and planes were involved, and they searched the seas for days but could find no trace or sign of the Carman’s or their boat.
Plenty of theories flourished particularly from the local Boaters, Had the Chicken Pox collided with some un-surveyed natural ridge? Or suffered a disastrous hull failure? Or had they encountered a massive rogue wave? they called off the search after a week and sadly it would seem that both Nathan & Linda were lost at sea.
On September 25th, 8 days after the Carmen’s had left on their ill -fated trip a Chinese freighter, (a very big boat) sailing 115 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard spotted something in the water, the boat was called the Orient Lucky, and they had just found Nathan Carman.
Nathan was found floating in the ocean on a red life raft, he appeared tired but was able to stand and wave his arms to alert the crew. He then flung himself into the water and managed to swim to the ring the crew threw to him, and they helped him on board.
There’s some very dramatic video of this occurring in real-time and I will again pop the links in the sources, so you can see for yourself.
Nathan had been floating in the ocean for days, he had an emergency survival kit which contained freshwater packs, some energy bars, and other supplies as well as a gadget that made sea water drinkable. The crew warmed him up and fed him and contacted the coast guard.
The first people to speak to Nathan aside from the Crew were the coastguard and they began to ask him what had happened.
Nathan explained that on the Saturday when they had left on their trip, the water had been calm and all had been well. Nathan and his mother Linda had made it to Block Canyon just before sunrise and they had enjoyed watching it together. Everything was going great, and they started to fish and enjoy their trip until at approximately 12 midday they started to hear a strange noise coming from the engine compartment. Nathan investigated and found that there was water coming into the engine compartment. Nathan wasn’t overly concerned at first as he thought he would be able to rectify the situation and fix the boat, he asked Linda to pull in the fishing lines. unfortunately, he wasn’t able to fix the problem or at least wouldn’t be able to due to the speed at which the water was filling the boat. With no time Nathan grabbed the emergency raft and threw it overboard, he couldn’t see his mum at this point and with the situation quickly worsening Nathan abandons the ship and swims to the raft. He describes it as the boat just falling from under him - By the time he gets onto the raft there is no sign of Linda, and the boat is disappearing under the water. Nathan still can’t see her and uses his whistle to try and alert his mum, but she is nowhere to be seen.
It takes two days for Nathan to get back to land and he is brought back to a survivor debrief at the coast guard base in Boston to be faced with further questions, they want to know everything that happened so that they may be able to recover the boat and although extremely unlikely, find some wreckage and possibly Linda.
After the debrief, Nathan left the Coast Guard base with his father, Clark, who had flown in from his home in California. He stayed with his dad for a couple of days before returning to his own home, a white colonial house in southern Vernon, Vermont on Tuesday night, and this is when he gives his first public statement to the press.
The next morning he speaks to WBZ-TV’s Nicole Jacobs saying, “I just want to thank the public for their prayers and for their concern for both myself and my mother,”.
people thought he seemed odd. And if you didn’t know he was autistic I think that’s a fair assumption from the video; again I will link the clips for our listeners. He confuses the authorities and the public in general because he comes across unemotional and perhaps doesn’t fit with the image of a grieving son.
Nathan is tall and gaunt. He dresses almost exclusively in outdoor gear — galoshes, hunting/fishing vests, khaki shirts — as if always ready for a hunt. He had a patchy beard, acne scars, and a bad haircut but he could be considered handsome. He reminds me a bit of Josh Hartnett.
People thought him an odd one but there’s being perceived as odd and then there’s having an odd story no matter how it is delivered. There are lingering questions about what happened at sea, and to be fair these questions were around before Nathan’s rescue and his statements to the media.
Why hadn’t he activated his emergency transmitter? Why hadn’t the Coast Guard found a single piece of wreckage? Why was there no radio mayday? Why in the age of gps was there no sign of the boat?
When Nathan and his mother didn’t return, the police naturally started an investigation. They interviewed the family, friends, spoke to people who had last seen them and checked the cctv at the Ram Point Marina in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Footage shows Nathan and Linda arriving and preparing for their ill-fated fishing trip. Inconsistencies started to pop up.
A Witness at the marina, Mike Iozzi, who struck up a casual conversation with Nathan hours before he left the dock, said “I thought he said they were going to the canyons which are off Block Island, I didn’t see him with any fishing poles. I didn’t even see him with food.”
Sharon Hartstein, a close friend of Linda’s said that she had told her that they would be taking the boat out toward Block Island for an overnight fishing trip.
So was that the original plan and they changed it?
Possibly, Nathan was clear they were going out to Block canyon, so perhaps the witness misheard, or Linda didn’t want to go into a whole conversation about tuna so just said Block Island? You really have to make up your own mind on that one. Nathan was planning to go to Block Canyon.
There were also a few questions raised around the boat itself and not just the destination. Lots of seasoned sailors had raised inconsistencies in Nathan’s story and so professional boating captains were brought in to investigate the possibility of foul play.
Whilst missing the police had searched Nathan’s home, the warrant citing they were looking for evidence of reckless endangerment.
During the search, the police seized a modem, a Garman SIM card, as well as paperwork outlining the trip and a letter written by Nathan.
They found that Nathan was working on the motor of his boat at home implying that the vessel might have been tampered with. But that’s not the only red flag waving on the boat nor around Nathan because witnesses came forward to say that they had seen Nathan making repairs or alterations to the boat prior to the trip.
There was one man specifically who said that he saw Nathan drilling holes into the boat, and he spoke to Nathan asking him what he was doing. Nathan told him that he was removing some bulk heads and trim tabs off the back of the boat. The man noted that it was strange to be drilling two holes into the boat, there was no reason to do that if you were removing these things. Whatever he was doing, it was wrong. So to clarify these holes would be below the water line on the boat at the back. I’m not a sailor nor a boat expert of course but I’ve read that Nathan later explained he thought these things didn’t serve a purpose and perhaps slowed down the boat, turns out they are quite helpful in preventing your boat from sinking.
Nathan admitted to the alterations, fully open about it. He said that he had later filled the holes with some kind of marine putty to rectify the problem. So he isn’t trying to hide anything.
Another discrepancy raised is that this is Nathans first time fishing for tuna, and Nathan and Linda weren’t used to fishing for them, and despite Nathan purchasing tuna fishing gear from a fisherman called Shawn Sakaske 6 months prior to the trip, their boat wasn’t really set up to fish for them nor was the boat really a deep-sea vessel, its small and it’s made of aluminium.
This is a visual representation of ‘were going to need a bigger boat” not to mention were gonna need more people too, normally you’d take a crew of 3-4 experienced fishermen to catch Tuna,
Because Tuna fish are fucking huge. I remember watching Rick Stein once and he was at a fish market in japan possibly and there was this tuna, and I was like why did I think tuna were salmon size? They’re like 13ft/4m long and weigh 2000 pounds.
Alright but humongous fish aside,
That is something that Shawn Sakaske was concerned about, saying he (Nathan) clearly wasn’t ready for it. In fact other people around the marina said that Nathan wasn’t as experienced a sailor as he made out, often struggling with the basics of boating.
The boat also had a radio system, a fully functional system that was working at the time of the trip, yet no mayday signal had been sent by either Nathan or Linda. The boat also had an emergency beacon, this also wasn’t activated by anyone on the boat to alert the coastguard and give away their location.
so what did he say about that?
Well, Nathan said he didn’t have time to radio for help as it all happened so quickly. He initially didn’t think that they were actively sinking, just taking on a bit of water and he could sort that out. so he misjudged the situation and it then escalated. He also said that he didn’t press the button to activate the beacon because he has an aversion to pressing buttons, especially one that would bring a helicopter to him. I find that hard to understand because you could have been rescued very quickly but by doing so put yourself in a situation that you are aware is uncomfortable to you. It’s a recurring theme throughout this case because I find myself asking is this attributed to your autism or are you using your autism to conveniently explain away the inconsistencies in your story.
(D) it’s a hard one because whilst it could be the truth it’s a question of safety and responsibility when in that situation
Yeah, I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this because it will deffo divide the listeners.
And then there’s the raft and Nathan’s condition when found. Nathan had survived on this inflatable raft for almost 8 days in the deep ocean. They brought experts in who said it was highly unlikely that the raft would have made it for so long out there in the deep sea.
I mean that’s not a great selling point of a 4,000-dollar raft considering that’s what they are designed for. I think what they mean is that it’s not all calm seas all the time, and during the lengthy time that Nathan was inside the raft, they would have thought it would have at least been tossed about a bit on huge waves etc. and not only the raft but Nathan too, like they would have expected him to have some signs of rough and tumble as well, people often get broken bones; Like he looks pretty good for a guy who’s been on the sea all that time.
He looks a little dishevelled but okay, like he’s been to a festival for the weekend. I mean it was a covered life raft he could have stayed inside the tent for the majority of the time, he had food and water. The captain of the orient lucky did comment that Nathan was not hypothermic or dehydrated in any way.
Final point I want to make is one that members of the professional search team raised. He was eventually found in the search area, a spokesperson said after his rescue. “Why didn’t he see us? Why didn’t we see him?”
According to Glen Gawarkiewicz, a research scientist who studies the continental shelf for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the currents over the shelf, where Nathan claims the boat went down flow east to west — which means Nathan should have drifted in the opposite direction.
Investigations continue and the days pass by, Nathan eventually holds a memorial for his mum about three weeks after the event, and this my friend is where it gets even bloody stranger.
So… Linda’s friends attend the event but the family, Linda’s family; namely the three sisters, Elaine, Charlene, and Valerie don’t attend.
They don’t attend because and I quote ‘they don’t want to, until they have all the answers for what happened.’
Nathan does a lot of interviews about the case, speaks to reporters following him and in the majority of them he is asking the family to reach out to him. states how much he misses them, how he wants to speak to them and wishes he could have saved his mum.
But they won’t speak to him, they want nothing to do with him. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? I mean here’s this young man on his own, his mums just died, and he has no family to support him.
The aunts are suspicious “It’s clear that there are holes not just in Nathan’s boat, but in Nathan’s story,” said an attorney for the sisters.
But to fully understand their reasoning we must go back, for the answer lies in Nathan’s past, and in particular to his relationship with his mother. The aunts who had a good, close relationship to their sister Linda, had witnessed regular hostile behaviour towards her from Nathan and there was no overlooking the fact that, with Linda dead, Nathan stood to inherit at least $7 million of the family’s wealth. But it was his relationship to his grandfather. Their dad, John Chakalos that was their primary drive, you see John who had been super close to Nathan had been murdered in 2013, and the aunts thought that he did it.
the Chakalos family issued a statement saying, "Every day that passes in these legal proceedings shows even more clearly that Nathan's behaviour is calculated, evasive, and ultimately, guilty."
Okay lets go back and discuss Nathan in a little more detail.
As Nathan grew up, he wanted more independence, he was close to his mum and his grandparents in particular John. If you remember John had bought him a horse, they spent a lot of time together; but by his late teens his relationship with Linda had become strained.
He was prone to tantrums when things didn’t go his way — he once threw a tray of cookies at a wall after Linda burned them. “Soon enough he’s going to slit your throat while you’re sleeping” her boyfriend at the time warned her.
But I mean that could be a dramatic statement taken out of context, like it’s one person’s opinion.
But there are other examples of Nathan being allegedly unpleasant.
At high School he is said to have aggressively challenged teachers and students whenever he felt they were wrong, becoming quite insistent and overwhelming at times. He would have outbursts where he might knock things off desks, become aggressive and his teachers found him impossible to reason with or placate.
On Halloween in 2009, a parent of a trick-or-treater called the police because Nathan had been handing out “tricks”: Ziploc bags filled with fish guts to children.
Would I have called the police over that? Probably not, but that character would stand out to you, you’d think that a tad of an odd thing to do.
Anyway, in 2010 A few weeks before Christmas Nathan’s horse, Cruise, died of colic.
Now, I think anyone would handle the loss of a pet badly. I cried for a week minimum when Pepper Posh Paws passed, devastated. But this was one of the central pillars of his support structure and it was something that Nathan was emotionally ill-equipped to handle.
His father Clark stated later. “The only friend he had was his horse,” “Things went downhill from that point on.”
Nathan was despondent, only communicating with Linda through handwritten notes. Plans to scatter Cruise’s ashes had to be postponed because Nathan experienced what Linda described as a psychotic episode at school. Nathan had called the vice-principal “Satan” and his secretary “an agent of the devil” Linda feared that there was more than Autism at work here and that Nathan was suddenly having “paranoid delusions” and embracing “religious idiocy.”
Nathan was committed to Mount Sinai Rehabilitation Hospital in Hartford. He blamed Linda for his confinement, refusing to see her; Only seeing his grandparents John and Rita.
Nathan was eventually released from the hospital and according to a police report, doctors determined “that he was not psychotic nor schizophrenic.”
Once home, at Linda’s house where he lived in an RV on the drive, far enough to appease Nathan’s independence but close enough for her to watch over him, Nathan kept himself to himself. He would go out early to the library, fishing, or to see his granddad John, but Linda was still worried,
Living conditions in the RV weren’t great, he was peeing in bottles, and Linda wasn’t sure if he was eating properly so, desperate for help, she called social services. When a case manager sent police to do a welfare check on Nathan, he was infuriated.
It sounds like she had a right to worry, but Nathan obviously didn’t see it that way and two days later Nathan disappeared. When he didn’t return home from his daily outing Linda filed a missing-person report. The next day, she received a two-page letter in the mail from Nathan saying he’d run away, blaming everyone he was closest to except his grandfather.
The family were really concerned about him and set up a search party., who used dogs to track Nathan’s scent and a helicopter to scan wooded areas. His parents also hired a private investigator.
The media picked up on the story and there were appeals on the news. Nathan was eventually spotted on cctv boarding a bus and was, from the sighting, found four days later in a small town in Virginia 600 miles away from his home. He was loitering outside a convenience store. He had a moped, $4,244 in cash, two photos of himself and Cruise, and a plastic bag containing hair from Cruise’s mane.
When Nathan was brought home, he had a lot of mental evaluations and assessments. Nathan potentially having delusions, paranoia, mood disorders, and depression are not necessarily characteristics of autism, so there was a concern there.
He has had a lot to deal with though. He’s grieving. Without a doubt, a lot of emotional upheaval for him but I think that generally a young person with autism to be potentially seeing Satan, they wanted to be sure he wasn’t experiencing another separate diagnosis. And as we said the doctors didn’t find him to be psychotic or schizophrenic, so I do wonder if he did just have an extreme reaction to his grief.
I also do wonder if Linda was perhaps overreacting like maybe, he just called them Satan, not that he actually believed they were Satan. As we said he’s been through a lot, he’s a teenage boy and isn’t necessarily equipped to handle the situation he finds himself in.
Back at home, seventeen-year-old Nathan grew even more isolated. He felt unwelcome at school so just kept his head down, he rarely left his RV and according to neighbours. Every night, for around a month wild noises would emanate from the camper. “It sounded like he was taking it apart limb from limb,” one neighbour said.
In late 2011, Linda and Clark decided to take drastic action: They signed over guardianship of 17-year-old Nathan to a behavioural-correction camp. Late one night, men from the camp arrived and took Nathan from his RV to the wilderness of Idaho.
I asked a friend of ours to read through my notes for today as he himself is on the spectrum and I asked him what he thought of this type of camp.
What are your thoughts, Dani?
(D) I think things like that seem like a recipe for disaster to be honest
(K) Fucking abhorrent. Any sort of behavioural therapy that involves kidnapping and fucking torture in my eyes is fucked up in my opinion.
And I think most well deemed medical experts, consider such “boot camps” to be harmful to children on the autism spectrum.
But when Nathan returned a few months later, things seemed to improve.
Days before his 18th birthday in 2012, he started classes at Central Connecticut State University. He moved out of the RV and into a cousin’s house and he began helping his grandfather with his business, and John paid for Nathan to move into his own apartment.
John suggested that Nathan move to New Hampshire and live at his grandfather’s weekend mansion permanently.
(K) bloody weekend mansion? I mean…. just fucking rich people, eh?
(D) That’s a whole different world from the one I live in
His grandfather was proud of his first-born grandson, and they had a good relationship. Where they would regularly meet up for dinner and spend time together.
Things seemed to be looking up for Nathan until November 2013, when sadly his grandmother Rita died of lung cancer at the age of 84. Another support beam down and it also affected his grandfather because John Chakalos slipped into a deep depression. “He didn’t want to live anymore without Rita,” a family friend was quoted as saying. They had been together since high school.
less than a month after Rita’s death on Friday, December 20, 2013, at approximately 8:30 a.m. The eldest of John’s four daughters, Elaine, went to check on her father at his house in Windsor.
What she found was shocking, John was dead in his bed, he had been shot three times in the head and back.
There was no sign of forced entry. Nothing had been stolen, and the murderer had taken care to pick up the bullet-shell casings before leaving the crime scene.
It’s terrible, but especially for Nathan. That’s the final pillar of his support structure apart from Linda and Clark on the periphery, gone. First his horse then his grandparents, and especially with John being murdered.
The police instantly start an investigation into the murder John was a nice chap by all accounts although people who knew him described him to be “ruthless” and “a pain in the ass” at times. But as I said earlier both him and Rita were upstanding members of the community, they did a lot of charity work in their local area and there is still a charity in their name, The John, and Rita B. Chakalos Fund for the Children of Chesterfield.
The police however quickly uncovered a complex web of family secrets they sought to obtain the phone records of at least 11 persons of interest but quickly focussed on two in particular. Nathan and Linda.
Nathan was the last person to see his grandfather alive. They’d had dinner together the night before, but when they spoke to Nathan, he was unable to account for his whereabouts later that evening.
In fact he had missed a scheduled meeting with his mum, they were due to go fishing together. Linda drove out to meet him at 3 a.m. but he didn’t show, she returned home and didn’t hear from Nathan until 4 a.m., when he called to say he was in Glastonbury waiting for her. She met up with him and they proceeded to go fishing in Rhode Island.
It would appear they both have a good window of opportunity there, Nathan in particular.
But what of motive? I honestly can’t think of one for Nathan but allegedly, John and Linda often argued, and it was usually about Nathan or money.
John couldn’t understand why Linda never had any cash had despite receiving generous financial support from him. Her life, by all accounts, was a touch chaotic.
She couldn’t hold a steady job, and her house always looked like it was unkempt. In her defence that could describe me if you didn’t know me better, but Linda has a millionaire father readily bailing her out, she should be able to afford a maid.
The ex-boyfriend from before stated that Linda was depressed and liked to drink and gamble. Gambling was apparently Linda’s guilty pleasure, but at what point do you admit it’s an issue? She had once flown to Mississippi for a ten-day gambling trip and had drained at least one trust fund her father had set up for Nathan. I think it was serious because her father actually put Linda’s youngest sister, Valerie, in charge of a new trust fund which Linda had no access to.
When Nathan had been in the mental facility, John had argued with Linda about his care, Linda believed John blamed her for Nathan’s problems at home and school and that John was interfering. There had been talk of her finances as well with John threatening to cut her off and things quickly turned violent.
This culminated in a physical altercation where Linda was arrested for assaulting her father. She grabbed him by the balls apparently!
She told police that she needed her father’s money. Linda had apparently argued shortly before her father died, and she would stand to inherit a lot of money, we’re talking millions here.
I mean Linda isn’t coming out of this so great is she at present. Clark however described the incident as perfectly normal for the two. “They seemed to enjoy the animosity,” he said. “Every gathering, Thanksgiving, Greek Easter, there’d always be something like that. Then they’d move on.”
And apparently Linda and her sisters all passed a polygraph test. The police were satisfied that despite having a clear motive, Linda wasn’t the killer.
Nathan however refused to cooperate with investigators. When police searched his apartment seven months after his grandfather’s murder, they found a gun locker in his bedroom closet with a Remington shotgun, ammunition, and a pellet gun, neither of which was linked to the murder.
But the next day, they discovered a receipt and ammunition, proving that before his grandfather was killed Nathan had purchased a Sig Sauer Patrol 716 assault rifle, which was the same calibre as the gun used to kill John.
When police asked Nathan why he hadn’t told them about the assault rifle, he said he’d forgotten about it. When they asked him where it was, he said he’d lost it.
That doesn’t look good.
In Nathan’s apartment, investigators found handwritten notes with details about “self-propelled Improvised Explosive Devices” and “sniper rifles on an aerial video stabilizing platform.”
To avoid misinterpreting Nathan’s autism as evidence of “deceit or avoidance,” police consulted a forensic psychologist. If Nathan had committed the crime, they would expect him to have researched it on his computer, likely returning to the same websites over and over to check his work.
But any hopes were dashed when investigators discovered that the morning after John was killed Nathan took his computer hard drive and his cars gps and disposed of them.
Local police had little experience handling murder cases, and one detective was later demoted for mishandling critical evidence.
Despite a somewhat shoddy investigation and a problematic suspect a prosecutor can’t build a case around a missing hard drive or a gun that was lost. Despite the hole in his alibi on the night of the murder, there simply wasn’t enough evidence to arrest Nathan, much less convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.
And as we mentioned before, Nathan doesn’t have a clear motive for this. Apparently when he was younger, he hadn’t been super close to John, but his own father Clark said that John was the most important thing to Nathan “at times I think he felt he was his father more than me.”
John supports him and wants him to be independent. why would Nathan kill the person in his life who seemed to understand him best and he considered a father figure.
The only reason I could think is if John asked him to kill him, because he didn’t want to live without Rita and he knew Nathan had experience with weapons. It’s bonkers granted but so is this whole case, mate.
The family continue to plea for help in solving the murder, they put up billboards appealing for information, but it remains unsolved.
in 2017 the FBI decide to search the family home as well as another property owned by the family, in the hopes of finding the gun they find nothing. They have never found the murder weapon or Nathan’s gun.
Nobody at this point officially considered Nathan as guilty of any involvement in his grandfather’s death except the police. And if they did, they didn’t say so outside of private conversation, never publicly; again there were no witnesses to say that Nathan and John had anything but a good relationship.
That is until the ill-fated boat trip for Linda. But much like with John’s still unsolved murder, apart from theories and suspicions - Criminally, not enough evidence to find Nathan guilty of a specific crime regarding his mother, Linda. He’s in the clear.
and you would think that would be enough for one episode but no, this story just goes on.
in July of 2017, his aunts filed a civil lawsuit against him, accusing Nathan of shooting his grandfather and killing his mother to get a portion of the family’s multi-million-dollar estate.
This is part of a probate suite, where the aunts instigate a slayer clause prohibiting a killer from benefiting financially from a victim’s death.
The sisters are quoted as saying they “cannot stand idle while their father’s killer, and perhaps also their sister’s killer, profits from his actions,” their lawyer, Dan Small, added that if their suit were successful, they would donate Nathan’s portion of the inheritance to charity.
A massive legal battle ensues but the aunts cant make a civil case stick any more than the police can charges against Nathan.
So let’s discuss the financials for a minute, Nathan isn’t wealthy, he has no job, his house is paid for, and he lives off a trust fund, this is controlled by Aunt Valerie. It’s for 270,000. Nathan was barred from accessing it during this time, because he wanted to use 150.000 of it for legal fees to fight the aunts. It was initially denied, he applied to have Valerie removed as trustee and was then granted 200,000 which he used for legal fees.
Nathan maintains his innocence in court, in April of 2018 he categorically denies killing his mother and blames Johns death on his grandfather's unnamed mistress.
According to court documents, a 25-year-old woman, referred to as "Mistress Y," had been in a long-term relationship with John. He had bank rolled her for some time giving her $3,500 for breast enhancement surgery. They had spent the weekend together at the Mohegan Sun resort. A Connecticut casino Linda used to visit, just days before his death.
Mistress Y had allegedly had a 19-minute phone call with John on the night of his murder just as Nathan Carman was leaving his grandfather's Windsor home.
That lead goes nowhere and in 2019 a judge rules against the aunts in the slayer suit, and it seems due to geography rather than the suspicions around Nathan that cause this. Carman’s attorney claimed his grandfather was actually a resident of Connecticut, not New Hampshire where the lawsuit was filed, and the judge agreed. I’m no lawyer but this is a civil probate case, it involves the money not the alleged crime although the alleged crime is what is cited as the reason for the objection by the aunts to him getting the money.
He isn’t being tried in a criminal court for an alleged crime.
The inheritance, is said to be around 7 million but it could be a lot more factoring in Linda’s assets as well.
Some might say it would be worth spending at least 200,000 to get access to 7 million or more.
His aunts said in a statement they were disappointed in the judge’s decision, and they plan to explore what other options they have in New Hampshire and Connecticut to hold their nephew accountable.
but whilst this is going on, Nathan decides he wants to claim the insurance on the boat, and he hires lawyers who tried to blame the ex-owner of the boat, a man called Brian Woods, but again it was found that the boat when he had it was in good condition and Nathan had used it for months before he altered it.
Nathan claimed it wasn’t about the money but about setting the record straight for him. the claim on the boat is for $85,000. So he hasn’t got a lot of money and is mostly it would appear concerned about the insurance claim than anything else.
On November 4th, 2019, this time with Lawyers for the insurers alleging in court filings that Nathan sabotaged the boat to kill his mother and had previously killed his grandfather in a scheme to collect a multimillion-dollar inheritance. The court found that the repairs and alterations Nathan made to his boat were faulty, causing the boat to become unseaworthy and directly or indirectly causing the loss.
So basically that is saying that Nathan is responsible for his mothers death, whether he planned to or not.
And by pushing forward with the insurance claim he has opened himself up to a potential criminal case. His testimony from the civil case could be used against him in a criminal case. And that doesn’t seem to concern him.
“If I have one regret, it is that having been raised publicly, the allegations of intent made in this case were not part of the trial, and thus I was not afforded an opportunity to take them head on to clear my name once and for all with a trial on those issues.”
John’s murder is still an open case, the police don’t have enough evidence to charge anyone with the crime, but Nathan is still a suspect.
Nathan is still apparently still living in Vermont; he is said to be a recluse for the most part and doesn’t give interviews as a rule or speak to reporters. Locally he is somewhat of a macabre celebrity.
Financially he isn’t that well off, he has his house, that John bought him, which he spent months renovating, and transforming it into a four-story abode, but I did read he was selling it to pay for legal fees.
There are so many theories - Some are plausible (Nathan didn’t know what he was doing or where he was when the boat went down). Others are a bit more creative (Nathan killed his mother, sank the Chicken Pox, and then hid on another boat until shortly before his “rescue”). And my personal favourite far-fetched one (Nathan and Linda planned the whole thing, and she is now working in a bar in the Caribbean).
The main theme in the majority of them is that Nathan carefully planned to kill his mother. Missing from those theories is why Nathan would choose such a daring plan? One that could hypothetically involve, killing and dumping his mother’s body, hiding out for a week whilst avoiding detection by the Coast Guard and then purposefully sinking the boat later?
Surely if he wanted to kill Linda there would have been an easier way to do it? And Motive, for what reason? why do this?
Was it in a fit of anger? Like so many people had witnessed in the past. Had Linda refused to go to the canyons, did she mess up the fishing lines? maybe she brought up her father’s murder. Or maybe Nathan blamed his mother for his grandfather’s death.
The entire story is ‘off’, and I can’t fully understand Nathan’s behaviour, I do view him differently, but I do also acknowledge that whilst people with ASD are often very black & white about the law, rigid around rules in general, they do commit crimes.
All the way through this case I have been torn between Is Nathan a Criminal mastermind or the unluckiest guy I’ve ever heard of? I also wonder if it weren’t for Nathan’s Autism would he have been in a criminal court by now.
I also can’t see how Nathan has benefited from this at all, he is effectively in a prison, although not the one I feel his aunts want for him, he has his dad Clark for family and no friends, He’s probably worse off than if his mum hadn’t disappeared, unless of course that’s what he wanted.
And this is where I fall on the case. If I didn’t know about John then I would air on the side of accident regarding Linda, plausible Nathan survived, it happens. Stranger things have happened at sea. But I do wonder about their relationship, I can see why Nathan was keen for independence, did Linda hold him back a bit. See him as a patient rather than a son?
I do think that there are too many questions around Johns death in relation to Nathan.
It’s the gun for me. Nathan was passionate about his right to bare arms, he’s outdoorsy he has a gun cabinet, but yet he just loses a gun? specifically the same type as was used to kill his grandfather. I find that hard to believe, combine that with the gps and the computer being disposed of. FISHY!
Also I read a good point about Linda too, a charter boat captain doubted that she would have agreed to a long trip on a boat that didn’t have a toilet!
well I hope everyone enjoyed this weeks episode, if you want to do some further research of your own then the links are below.
So next week we will be back with a mini episode for you, until then stay safe.
D&K – BYE.
Sources.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a35gmb/the-25-year-old-accused-of-murdering-his-mother-and-grandfather-is-on-trialfor-boat-insurance
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/07/18/nathan-carman-mom-aunts/
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/criminal-justice/criminal-justice/professionals
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