Did Nathan Carman Kill His Mother, Linda, During a 2016 Fishing Trip?

At first blush, the September 25, 2016, rescue of Nathan Carman seemed like a feel-good story. Nathan, then 22 years old, had been lost at sea for eight days after going missing during a fishing trip with his mother, Linda Carman. The two had departed on Nathan’s boat from a marina in South Kingstown, R.I. 

The Coast Guard had gone on an extensive search-and-rescue mission, combing more than 60,000 square miles of sea surface that nonetheless turned up empty-handed. But a Chinese freighter, the Orient Lucky, found Nathan alone in his life boat, 100 nautical miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.—his fishing boat and mother nowhere to be found.

It seemed like a miracle that Nathan could survive such a calamity. 

But upon looking closer, the recent death of Nathan’s grandfather, multimillionaire John Chakalos, under mysterious circumstances raised suspicion about the Carmans being lost at sea. Especially because in that death, Nathan was the prime suspect; he stood to inherit $7 million from Chakalos’s estate.

Chakalos (Linda Carman’s father) and his grandson, Nathan, had a close relationship that seemed to be in full flower at the time of Chakalos’s 2013 death. Nathan, who was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, felt socially isolated at school. But Chakalos had taken Nathan under his wing, bringing him to meetings for his real estate empire, where Nathan would take notes for his hard-of-hearing grandfather. Chakalos, who’d amassed approximately $44 million through his business, also provided heavy financial support to his grandson in his last years of life.

Nathan was also the last person to see him alive when leaving his grandfather’s Windsor, Conn., home around 8:30 p.m. on the night of December 19, 2013. The following morning, Chakalos’s daughter, Elaine, discovered Chakalos dead in his bed, shot to death by a semi-automatic rifle. He was 87.

Christopher McKee, a since-retired sergeant for the Windsor Police Department, was among the first group of officers to respond to the crime scene. He tells A&E Crime + Investigation that it was obvious, from the start, that the crime scene was “staged.”

“There was a glass door that led to the rear of the property, and the glass had been punched to insinuate that there’d been [forced entry for] a burglary,” McKee says. But the glass had been punched from the inside of the house outwards.

McKee adds, “There was no forced entry. Nothing was taken. Valuables were recovered during the search of the home. If this had been a robbery, those things wouldn’t have been there.”

As police began digging deeper into the crime, McKee says Nathan slowly became their prime suspect. 

“It was the inconsistencies,” McKee says, that primarily drove attention toward the grandson. During a police interview, for example, Nathan said that he’d never owned a gun, but investigators were later able to determine that the 19-year-old had purchased a $2,100 .308 caliber Sig Sauer rifle in New Hampshire only one month prior to Chakalos’s death. It was the same caliber rifle that had murdered Chakalos. When pressed by police for the rifle’s whereabouts, Nathan said he’d lost it. When asked why he hadn’t mentioned its existence in his initial interview, Nathan told the cops he forgot. The gun has never been found.

Nathan also allegedly destroyed his GPS and hard drive shortly before the murder had taken place. And there was approximately one hour in the early morning hours of December 20, around the time that Chakalos was killed, where Nathan couldn’t account for his whereabouts.

Nearly three years later, when the fishing boat went down, police hadn’t brought charges against Nathan yet. But McKee says Nathan was the only real suspect, and a strong one at that.

“Who loses a gun and forgets to mention it? Who destroys their computer hard drives?” McKee says. “I get that it’s not probable cause. I get that it’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But in my mind, he was the one. This was just a solvability issue.”

Three years after Chakalos’s death, Nathan and his mother, Linda, took Nathan’s boat out for the fishing trip. Following Nathan’s rescue, he claimed that his boat had sunk after taking on water approximately 12 hours after departure. He said that he then drifted until the Orient Lucky arrived.

But when Nathan filed an $85,000 insurance claim on his boat’s sinking, the insurance company sued to deny the claim.

David Farrell, a maritime attorney who represented the insurers in their suit, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that he and his team investigated not just the seaworthiness of the vessel, but also the larger possibility that Nathan had staged the sinking and killed his mom.

“The insurance company didn’t want to pay him and let him get away with murder a second time,” Farrell says.

In their investigation, Farrell says that the most damning evidence against Nathan was where his life boat was found. An oceanographer who analyzed Nathan’s alleged drift, from the location of his claimed sinking to where his life boat was found, said that the path didn’t make sense given the wind and the ocean currents.

Farrell adds that, at his rescue, Nathan didn’t seem like he was in the condition of someone who had been drifting in a life raft for a week.

“Had Nathan been in that life raft for seven days, wet and cold as he says he was, he would’ve been if not dead then almost dead,” Farrell says. “He didn’t look like he’d missed a meal, he wasn’t thirsty, there was no sunburn, and he was able to use his muscles and his fingertips." In 2019, the insurance company won its case, but on the technicalities of alterations Nathan had made to the boat, not on the grounds that he had committed murder.

Nonetheless, the investigation done by the insurance company for its civil case helped lay more groundwork for Nathan’s eventual indictment by the Department of Justice, which came in 2022 for his mother’s murder.

The following year, Carman died by suicide in his jail cell before his trial had begun.

Police in Windsor have still not closed the case on Chakalos’s murder, but McKee says this is probably a technicality.

“Police leadership may be hesitant to deem an investigation closed,” McKee continues. “But given the totality of the circumstances, I think this one should be.”