The Chilling Case of Nathan Carman’s Deadly Fishing Trip

This story is an excerpt from Casey Sherman’s forthcoming book Blood in the Water, published by Sourcebooks and out April 8. 

In the early evening of Thursday, December 19, 2013, 19-year-old Nathan Carman joined his millionaire grandfather, John Chakalos, for dinner at a Greek restaurant on the Berlin Turnpike in the town of Newington, Connecticut, just 14 miles from Chakalos’s Windsor home. They finished their meals, and Chakalos, a successful real estate developer, asked for the check. He left the restaurant and climbed into the passenger seat of Nathan’s Nissan Titan pickup truck. It had snowed recently, but the sky was clear, and the temperature hovered around 38 degrees with little wind. Since 2011, Chakalos had relied on others to drive him around after losing his license because of his failing eyesight. During the drive, they listened to a conservative talk-radio station and discussed their mutual disdain for Hillary Clinton.

They reached the family home on Overlook Drive at 8:30 p.m. Nathan then escorted his grandfather inside, where they spent a few minutes talking before getting interrupted by a phone call. It was Chakalos’s lover on the line, and she was in a playful mood. Earlier that day, he had visited the Luv Boutique, a sex shop in Hartford that specialized in toys and fantasy wear. While browsing the store’s vast collection of dildos and vibrators, he tried calling his girlfriend on the phone, but she did not pick up.

The woman called him back at 8:36 p.m., purring on the phone and wanting to engage in phone sex. The elderly man could not resist such a tantalizing conversation with the young blonde, so he quickly cut his visit with Nathan short and escorted him to the front door while he still had his cell phone to his ear.

“Nathan’s just leaving,” Chakalos whispered into his cell phone. “Give me a minute. I want to say goodbye to my grandson.”

Chakalos hugged Nathan and then closed the front door and continued the erotic discussion. After 10 more minutes on the phone, they finished their call by finalizing their holiday getaway plans to New York City. He planned to bring a new batch of toys, which he had purchased that day with a credit card at Luv Boutique, along with them. After hanging up, Chakalos took two more phone calls before 10 p.m.

When daylight broke, Chakalos’s eldest daughter, Elaine, drove from her home in West Hartford to visit her father for breakfast. A registered nurse, she wanted to make sure that her dad was taking his heart medications, which he kept on the right-hand side of the kitchen sink.

She arrived at the home at approximately 8:15 a.m. and parked next to her father’s car. Elaine then let herself into the house and called out his name. She was met with silence. Chakalos had been an early riser since his Army days in the 1940s and would normally be working at his desk by this time of day. Elaine peeked her head into his office and saw that her father’s desk was undisturbed. There was no paper shuffling and no smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting through the house.

Elaine crept toward her father’s bedroom. For a moment, she feared that he had died in his sleep or maybe was struck unconscious after falling out of bed. She opened the bedroom door slowly. The space was dark, with only a small beam of light coming in from the bedroom window. Elaine saw her father lying still on the king-size bed. The sheets and comforter were covered with fresh blood. She let out a terrified scream. Elaine ran outside and, with trembling fingers, dialed 9-1-1 on her cell phone. The time was 8:23 a.m.

Within minutes, the neighborhood was overrun by police officers. Crime scene investigators crossed the snow-covered front lawn, entered the home, and found that most of the house had been left undisturbed, including stacks of cash that Chakalos always had on hand in case of an emergency. The primary bedroom, however, was a gory mess. The self-made millionaire was unrecognizable; half his head appeared to have been blown off. Detectives surmised that Chakalos’s killer had stood at the foot of the bed and unloaded a series of rifle blasts into the elderly man’s body while he was asleep. The killer shot the developer once in the stomach and twice in the head. According to investigators, the murder weapon was likely a Sig Sauer rifle.

This story is an excerpt from Casey Sherman’s book Blood in the Water, published by Sourcebooks and out April 8. / Photo courtesy of Sourcebooks

Joy Washburn, the caretaker of Chakalos’s second home, a mansion in New Hampshire, attended the funeral. At the reception, Washburn claimed that one of Chakalos’s daughters, Valerie Santilli, approached her quietly with a stunning accusation.

“Nathan killed my father,” the daughter allegedly said.

“Well, why is he here and not in jail?” Washburn asked.

“He’ll never be prosecuted for it. If anything, they’ll place him in a mental institution.”

The daughter then walked away.

Months later, in July 2014, investigators obtained a search warrant for Nathan’s residence on George Street in Middletown, where he was then living, and for his pickup truck. It was a search-and-seizure warrant for firearms against a “person posing (a) risk to self or others.” The warrant listed a number of reasons for the search, including that Nathan had discarded “both the hard drive of his computer as well as the GPS unit used on the morning of December 20, 2013,” and that he’d purchased a high-caliber rifle, identical to the weapon used to murder Chakalos.

With the search warrant in hand, investigators entered Nathan’s apartment on July 18 and found a Remington tactical shotgun and rifle scope along with a pellet gun and several boxes of ammunition. Detectives also discovered several notes written by Nathan containing intricate details about sniper rifles and self-propelled improvised explosive devices. While conducting interviews with residents at the George Street apartment complex, one neighbor said that Nathan was a “time bomb waiting to go off.” Yet despite an exhaustive search of the apartment, investigators found no sign of the Sig Sauer rifle.

Detectives from the Windsor Police Department took possession of Nathan’s shotgun and ammunition. Nathan told police that he had experience shooting guns at shooting ranges. When detectives grilled Nathan as to the whereabouts of the Sig Sauer rifle, he refused to talk. “Before invoking his Fifth Amendment rights, he had admitted to owning a shotgun but claimed that he didn’t own any other weapons,” recalled Windsor Police Chief Donald Melanson. “He never mentioned that he had purchased an AR-style assault rifle, like the one used to murder John Chakalos. He never admitted that. How did that rifle go missing soon after he had purchased it?”

The missing weapon was not the only thing troubling investigators. They were also alarmed by the fact that Nathan had discarded the GPS in his truck, and he refused to show them the route he took that morning when he allegedly went to meet his mother in Glastonbury for a fishing trip and claimed he got lost on the way there. Because Nathan had kept his cell phone shut off during the hourlong drive to meet his mother, investigators could not rely on cell towers to pinpoint his exact location. Nathan had also destroyed his computer at around the time of the murder.

The investigative team believed that it now had enough evidence to arrest Nathan for the murder of his grandfather. Windsor drafted an arrest warrant and waited for the green light. In the meantime, the team kept an eye on Nathan out of fear that he might flee the state. Investigators devised a logistical plan for how they would arrest the teenager at his Middletown apartment. Understanding that Nathan was adept at using firearms and believing that he had already killed once before, the key was getting him out of the apartment before he could barricade himself inside and before he could shoot himself, the arresting officers, or any innocent bystanders.

Then, while detectives wrestled over their approach, the arrest warrant came back unsigned, accompanied by a demand for more evidence.

Nathan Carman and his mother, Linda, before their ill-fated fishing trip. / Courtesy photo

Three years later, on Saturday, September 17, 2016, Nathan left his house in Vernon, Vermont, and drove 146 miles south to Ram Point Marina in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, for a planned fishing trip with his mother. At some point before he left, he decided to get rid of his computer, which had long been his lifeline to the outside world.

At Ram Point Marina, Nathan spent much of the day working on his aluminum fishing boat. Mike Iozzi, a fellow boater, noticed him using an electric power drill to make 1.5- and 2-inch holes in the boat. Iozzi kept his own boat, a 36-foot Mainship Sedan named Fruition, at Stone Cove Marina, just up the road in Wakefield, Rhode Island. Iozzi was enjoying a leisurely afternoon with two friends who owned the slip next to Nathan’s.

He watched as Nathan continued working, drilling four holes, including one that was as large as a Kennedy half-dollar, in the boat’s transom. He used the drill to remove three screws at the top of the vessel’s trim tabs, which are used to raise the windward side of the boat to block the spray that blows over it, resulting in a drier ride. Trim tabs also help with fuel efficiency and keep the boat from listing. “What are you doing?” Iozzi later told reporters he asked him.

“I’m taking out my trim tabs,” Nathan replied, adding that he thought they weren’t necessary.

“You can’t fix the trim tabs while the boat’s in the water,” Iozzi warned him. “The boat could sink.”

Nathan did not take Iozzi’s advice and kept drilling. Iozzi, who made his living drilling holes in concrete, was concerned with the repair work but decided against pressing Nathan further. Instead, he offered up a snack of turkey meatballs, which Nathan gladly accepted.

Iozzi continued his attempt to engage Nathan in small talk, asking him what his plans were for the day. Nathan told the man that he was going to go fishing out at Block Canyon. Iozzi found this strange because he did not see any fishing poles in the 31-foot boat. “You’d better not go all the way out there alone,” Iozzi told him. “Night fishing is dangerous.” It was a warning Nathan had heard many times before.

Nathan then stretched the epoxy like bubblegum and got it all over his hands and clothes. Iozzi watched Nathan work for a few more minutes before turning his attention back to his friends and thought nothing more of it.

Earlier that day, Nathan had purchased a new bilge pump at a nearby West Marine and installed it himself. He also had a rebuilt engine installed in his boat, the Chicken Pox, that past June and contacted the marina about several issues after it was installed. The United States Coast Guard had given the Chicken Pox a passing grade during a random safety inspection less than a month before and a marina technician conducted a visual inspection on the boat’s engine just 11 days prior.

Still, Nathan’s mother, Linda Carman, was apprehensive about fishing aboard the Chicken Pox, but her son had assured her that they would not venture too far out and instead stick to the immediate vicinity of Block Island, about 24 nautical miles from Ram Point Marina. Nathan had wanted to go fishing later in the week, but his mother had to work, and he had promised not to go fishing without her. “My mom and I had an agreement,” Nathan later testified in court. “She didn’t like me to go out on my own.”

When Linda arrived at the dock to meet her son, she texted their float plan to three people, including her best friend, Sharon Hartstein. “Heading out toward Striper Rock, Southeast of the windmills. Back by 9am. Call me 12 noon if you don’t hear from me,” the text message said. Linda routinely sent text messages to her friends while she was fishing with Nathan, including “where she was going, when she was due back, when to worry,” Hartstein has said. “If she pulled in and stopped to talk to someone else, she’d text that ‘we’ll be back in at such-and-such a time.’” Linda was also known to text Hartstein photos of the boat and its registration number, in case she ever needed it.

Surveillance cameras at Ram Point Marina captured video of Nathan and his mother preparing to board the boat, which was tied to a slip that Nathan had recently rented for the season. They departed the marina at around 11 p.m. on the evening of September 17 under starless skies and a light breeze. The temperature hovered around 66 degrees. Linda texted her friends, Jeannette Brodeur and Hartstein, that they were just leaving the dock.

Nathan steered the Chicken Pox slowly through the salt pond and across the breachway. Soon after, the bright lights of Ram Point Marina faded, and darkness surrounded them.

Within an hour of Linda’s texts to her friends, a fisherman spotted the Chicken Pox while on his way back to Point Judith. The vessel passed him on the right, going about 20 miles per hour and heading south toward Block Island, near the Southwest Ledge. The fisherman did a double take because the lights on top of the cabin looked odd and too close together. “I couldn’t really see anybody on board, since it was so dark,” the fisherman remembered. “The seas were pretty calm that night and they were going pretty slow…. It’s a pretty unique boat. I have no doubt that it’s the boat I saw.”

When Linda Carman went fishing with her son, she frequently sent information about her whereabouts to her friends. / Courtesy photo

Hartstein was expecting a call from Linda on Sunday, September 18, and by noontime, she was staring at her cell phone, wondering why she still had not heard from her friend. Meanwhile, Brodeur was also concerned when she had not heard back from Linda. “Maybe you’re tired and it’s raining,” Brodeur texted her. She got no response. Hartstein called Linda’s cell phone, but there was no answer. Her mild concern grew to outright panic, and by that evening, she called the U.S. Coast Guard to report Linda and Nathan missing.

Immediately the Coast Guard jumped into action. “It came in as a search-and-rescue case, an overdue boat with two people on board,” recalled U.S. Coast Guard Search and Rescue Controller Richard Arsenault. “There was no distress beacon activated. When you get an overdue case, there is uncertainty, and you begin thinking about ‘what if?’ scenarios. You’re not sure what’s really going on.”

Police in Rhode Island told Arsenault and his team that the missing boaters, whom they identified as Nathan and Linda Carman, had intended to fish a few miles off Block Island. Authorities also stressed that the vessel had been scheduled to return to Ram Point Marina around 9 a.m. Arsenault did not believe that the Carmans had simply lost track of time, as they were now nine hours late returning to port.

It was time to get to work. From the watch floor at the First Coast Guard District in Boston, Arsenault and his team began to develop search models for the missing boat. Verizon Wireless allowed rescuers to analyze Linda’s cellular data to identify the last known location of her cell phone: At 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, September 18, 2023, it was on the south side of Block Island. Arsenault dubbed that part of the Atlantic Ocean “Search Area Alpha.”

The Coast Guard Search and Rescue (SAR) team mapped out probable areas where Nathan and Linda had gone fishing and then developed a drift scenario with their computer programming tools based on wind and ocean currents that included a probable search radius. Then the Coast Guard team developed four search models within that radius, covering 1,282 square nautical miles from Rhode Island Sound to the northern tip of Long Island.

Some five hours after the initial Coast Guard alert, operators on the watch deck in Boston contacted SAR mission coordinators across New England, and two aircraft were deployed to lead the recovery effort. Both helicopters combed the area for almost six hours for any sign of the Chicken Pox, a life raft, or floating debris. They found nothing. The Coast Guard also launched a 45-foot medium-range response boat from Station Point Judith to search the vicinity of Block Island. Once again, there was no sign of the missing boat or its two occupants. It was as though the Chicken Pox had vanished into thin air.

There was no sign of the missing boat or its two occupants. It was as though their vessel had vanished into thin air.

Aboard the fishing boat, Nathan would later tell Coast Guard investigators, he and his mother rode out to Block Island and spent about an hour fishing for stripers. At around 1 a.m., he urged Linda to extend the fishing expedition and travel further out with him to Block Canyon to hunt for tuna with the gear he had recently purchased. But, once again, she expressed trepidation about going that far out—75 miles or so in a small aluminum boat with her son, who had no experience with offshore fishing. She had planned to return to the marina later that morning and possibly meet Brodeur for their weekly hike. A trip to the canyon meant that she would not make it back until nightfall. “I almost felt like I twisted her arm,” Nathan later recalled in court.

Linda was concerned about their safety, and she was also worried about missing work. She had a new job taking care of children with special needs in their homes. After struggling for years to keep a steady job, Linda felt that she had a real aptitude for caring for children with physical and intellectual challenges, and she did not want to let them down. The kids would not understand that Linda had missed work because she was deep-sea fishing with her son.

Nathan said they reached Block Canyon just as the sun was rising, and the weather conditions were near perfect, so neither of them had put on a life preserver. But the next moment, everything changed. “I heard a noise on the belt on the engine. It was picking up water and kind of spinning it,” Nathan has claimed. “I knew that there was a serious problem [in the bilge], but I didn’t think we were sinking. I thought I was going to diagnose the problem and that we were going to go back to shore.”

As Linda reeled in the fishing lines, the Chicken Pox began taking on water—fast. The deck felt spongy under his feet, so Nathan rushed to the pilot house and grabbed three packages of survival gear, or “ditch bags,” and then moved to the bow of the boat to prepare the life raft. He had a functioning alert system onboard the vessel, but he did not make a mayday call. Nathan has claimed that the emergency was unfolding too quickly. “I was walking on deck, and it was there and then it wasn’t,” he said. “I knew that we had a problem, but I didn’t know we were sinking until we sank.”

According to Nathan, his 31-foot boat just dropped out from under him, and he tumbled into the ocean. He suddenly found himself in the water clutching a bag filled with safety gear. The plunge left him disoriented and fighting to reach the surface of the sea. He searched above the water line but did not see his mother anywhere. He swam 15 feet to the life raft, which had inflated automatically, and pulled himself aboard. Nathan said he did not hear his mother call out, and he feared the worst. “I don’t know if she got hit on the head. I don’t know if she got tangled in the fishing lines,” he later testified.

Nathan claimed that he then called out repeatedly for his mother and blew a distress whistle three times with three loud, short bursts. “I assumed that if she had been on the surface and conscious that she would have been calling out, and I would have been able to find her,” Nathan has said. “But I didn’t know why that hadn’t happened.”

Nathan did not leave the four-person, double-bottomed life raft and dive for Linda underwater. He saw debris on the surface and an oil slick where the boat had gone down, but his mother was gone. Nathan has said at that point, his focus shifted away from his mother toward his own survival at sea.

Nathan told law enforcement that his boat, the Chicken Pox, sunk off the coast of Block Island. / Photo courtesy of the U.S. Coast Guard

Eric Gempp was working in his cramped office on the United States Coast Guard Academy campus in New London, Connecticut, when his telephone rang. A veteran agent for the United States Coast Guard Investigative Service, Gempp was informed by his counterpart in Boston that Coast Guard crews were searching for two missing boaters off Block Island. It was merely a courtesy notification that rescuers were active in the area. He thanked his colleague for the heads-up and thought little about it after that and went about his day. As he continued to receive courtesy calls about the attempt to locate Nathan and Linda, the investigator was curious as to how their fishing boat could have disappeared. “The Coast Guard has the best search-and-rescue operation in the world,” Gempp later explained. “Because of its success rate and the weather and time of year, it was very puzzling to me that they had not found something to that point.”

Coast Guard rescuers found a sliver of hope in the case when two local fishermen discovered floating debris off Block Island. The items included a marine deck box cover, a pillowcase, and empty engine-coolant containers. Once again, Coast Guard crews were deployed to search the area around Block Island, but to no avail. Investigators found no evidence to tie the debris to the Chicken Pox.

Before the debris was found, Hartstein told a reporter that it was unlikely Linda and Nathan would change plans without Linda telling her. “I know she would never decide to extend the trip without letting someone know, and she also wouldn’t not show up to work without letting someone know,” she said. “This is not normal.”

While all of this was going on, Nathan later claimed, he was battling the elements at sea in his tiny life raft. He said that he had spent the first two days calling out desperately for his mother. When it was clear that Linda would not answer, he prayed in the morning and again at night that, somehow, he would be saved. Nathan opened his survival kit and drank several freshwater packets to stay hydrated. He had also purchased a device that allowed him to convert seawater into drinking water and rationed his emergency food supply. His “ditch bag” was also equipped with smoke flares, a flashlight, seasick pills, and a mirror to signal oncoming ships. The smoke flares were never used.

Nathan claimed that his two biggest concerns were that he would starve to death out on the ocean or that a large wave would roll in and topple his lifeboat and kill him. During most days, the seas were calm, but they sometimes turned violent at a moment’s notice, with wave heights reaching 13 feet. When rough weather hit, Nathan said he zipped up the small opening of his life raft and rode out the turbulent waves. Since he was alone in a raft designed to hold four people, he had very little ballast and flopped around inside his floating tent like a pair of socks getting tossed in a clothes dryer.

The Coast Guard officially suspended its search-and-rescue mission on September 24, 2016, after one of the largest operations in the history of the service. At the First Coast Guard District in Boston, the disappearance of the Chicken Pox gnawed at Arsenault and his team. “We didn’t have any more threads to pull. We pulled all the threads that looked like they were attached to something,” Arsenault said. “And we wondered, why isn’t there any evidence out there, no flotsam, no oil spill? It’s scratch; nothing. There is something missing. Our result wasn’t appropriate for such a massive effort.”

What had begun as a search-and-rescue mission for a lost mother and her son quickly morphed into a criminal investigation. When Coast Guard investigators reached out to Linda’s next of kin, they got a tutorial on the complex dynamics of the Chakalos family. Instead of showing concern for her missing sister and nephew, Valerie Santilli launched into a vitriolic diatribe against Nathan, calling him the “town freak” and accusing him of murdering her wealthy father, John Chakalos, in 2013. She also told investigators that Nathan had plenty of reason to kill his mother, as Linda stood to inherit her father’s mansion in New Hampshire, in a probate court settlement meeting that was scheduled the following week. If Linda was gone, she said, the home would go to Nathan.

Valerie did not know that Linda had already cut Nathan out of her will. The Coast Guard called several law enforcement agencies, including the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, police, who scrambled a cruiser and two tow trucks to Ram Point Marina to impound Nathan’s pickup truck and his mother’s car so that he could not escape if and when he made it safely back to dry land. Investigators also began working to track the credit card records for both Nathan and Linda, fearing that the son may have killed his mother, ditched his boat, and was now traveling on foot. Detectives in South Kingstown also grabbed surveillance footage from the marina security cameras. They watched as Linda arrived at the marina and began loading supplies into the boat. At no time did she appear to be under duress.

One night, five days into the search, Valerie, her husband, and Hartstein gathered in the kitchen at Santilli’s Connecticut home to receive an update from the Coast Guard. Marcus Gherardi, the Coast Guard’s chief of response in Southeastern New England, made the drive from Cape Cod to Connecticut with a heavy heart. He knew what lay ahead—delivering news that they were suspending the search. “When you deliver this news,” he would later recall, “your heart feels like lead.”

Nathan Carman’s Vernon, Vermont home on Wednesday, December 28, 2016. / MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images

On Sunday, September 25, 2016, two days after the U.S. Coast Guard had called off its search, the Chinese cargo ship Orient Lucky left Providence for Boston to refuel. When it was positioned about 100 miles off Martha’s Vineyard, the crew spotted what looked to be an orange ball bobbing up and down on the choppy waves. When they realized it was a life raft with a person inside, the crew launched a rescue mission, tossing a life ring to Nathan as he swam and kicked his way through the rough waters toward the giant freighter.

Aboard the ship, Nathan was given water and food, was allowed to shower, and then was handed a white crew suit. The next day, he spoke about the ordeal to Arsenault, calling from the First Coast Guard District in Boston. Arsenault figured that he would hear distress and fatigue in Nathan’s voice after having been adrift for so long. “To sit in a raft in that position with saltwater beating your body for days, he should have been in a much worse condition than he was,” Arsenault said. “We had rescued some people off Haiti that had been in a boat for four days at sea, and some of them were severely dehydrated to the point of being unconscious and immediately needed a couple bags of saline to get them back on their feet. Now here’s a guy who has supposedly been out at sea for a week-plus, and he’s right as rain.”

When the ship doctor did a cursory examination of Nathan, he noticed that his lips were not cracked to the point of bleeding, which is normally the case for anyone surviving in salt water for days. He also had no loss of muscle control and was not dehydrated despite minimal water intake. Nathan also did not appear to be disoriented. He answered Arsenault’s questions in a direct, matter-of-fact manner as if he’d spent seven days on a cruise ship instead of being adrift at sea.

Nathan’s father, Clark Carman, had been closely following news reports of the Coast Guard search for his son and ex-wife from his home in California. When Nathan was picked up by the crew of the Orient Lucky, Hartstein called Clark immediately to share the bittersweet news that Nathan had been saved, but that Linda was still missing. “I immediately flew back there to New England and rented a car,” Clark recalled. “I got a call from Valerie’s husband saying where Nathan was and when he was coming in, and that’s the last I ever heard from them.” Clark drove from the airport to the First Coast Guard District in Boston to await the arrival of the Orient Lucky.

Coast Guard Investigator Gempp was standing near the bow of the Block Island ferry as it cut through the waters back to the mainland at Narragansett when his cell phone rang. He was informed that Nathan had been rescued by a passing Chinese cargo ship. Gempp knew those waters like the back of his hand. He had grown up in the small town of Warren, Rhode Island, but had spent 26 summers on Block Island with his brother, sister, mother, and father, who had worked for 60 years as a commercial fisherman. “Working the boats with our dad was a rite of passage in our family,” Gempp recalled.

His father, Herman “Bo” Gempp, had passed away, and Gempp was returning from a memorial service for him on Block Island. Gempp was told that Nathan had been fishing for tuna with his mother when his boat suddenly sank. Gempp stared down at the sea and saw pods of tuna swimming just below the surface of the ocean off the port side of the ferry. It was the perfect time of year for tuna fishing, but there were so many questions swimming around in the investigator’s mind. “We were just monitoring the case at this point because it was still considered to be a search and rescue and recovery situation,” Gempp recalled. “But we started talking to the South Kingstown Police Department and Rhode Island’s Department of Environmental Management just to make sure that we were staying engaged.” The investigator was told that Nathan was en route to Boston, and he wanted to make sure that he was there when the Orient Lucky arrived at port.

Meanwhile, Hartstein had questions of her own. “I don’t know how one got on the raft without the other,” she told a reporter. “Where did it happen? Did they even reach their destination? Did they have the right equipment? Did they have the right fishing gear for tuna or just stripers?” Hartstein was also frustrated that it was taking so long for Nathan to get to Boston. “It seems like a long time,” she added. “I understand that it’s a big freighter ship, and it’s hard to get around the Cape. But I’m surprised the Coast Guard didn’t just go out and get him…. I don’t know the statistical hope at this point, but Linda is very strong. If there is any way she can survive, she will. If not, we still want her home. We want closure.”

Nathan Carman was rescued about 100 miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard by a cargo ship. / Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Still wearing the white crew suit that had been given to him by his Chinese rescuers, Nathan stared blankly at the throngs of reporters, videographers, and news photographers who were lined up at the dock taking his picture and shouting questions his way. He spent hours behind closed doors being interviewed by Coast Guard officers. They were perplexed by his account of his rescue and the disappearance of his mother. “If he had been in that life raft during that length of time, we would have found him,” Coast Guard Captain W. Russell Webster, who had overseen thousands of search-and-rescue missions, later recalled. “There’s no possible way, with the technology we had, including forward-looking radar, that a person who wanted to be found could slip through our nets.”

Coast Guard officers had serious questions regarding the spot where Nathan claimed his boat had sunk and the location where he was plucked out of the ocean by the Orient Lucky. The location had directly contradicted all Coast Guard drift models, as the currents would have pushed the life raft in the opposite direction. “He showed up 35 miles east of where he should have been,” Webster added. “In that general area, the currents flow from east to west. In his retelling, the currents somehow pushed him west to east, which is not at all possible.”

Gempp drove to Boston with Detective Lieutenant Alfred Bucco of the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, police department. Gempp got his first close look at Nathan while Bucco interviewed him in the presence of his lawyer. Gempp also interviewed crew members of the Orient Lucky and reviewed the ship’s video footage and several photos taken of the rescue. “There were some observations that were made based on the video that raised more questions,” Gempp recalled. “If we take it in sequence, the Orient Lucky is in position to recover [Nathan]. He’s in the life raft, and he’s waving a flag. If you’re in a life raft for seven days with limited water and food, are you physically able to move, manipulate, and hold a flag?”

Nathan told authorities that he had only seen one other ship at a distance during his seven days at sea. After his debriefing with Coast Guard officials and his grilling from Bucco, Nathan exited through the back of the building and climbed into his father’s blue rental car, and the two drove back to Nathan’s house in Vernon, Vermont. “We didn’t discuss the actual sinking of the boat,” Clark said about the ride home. “He just kept asking if anyone had found his mother.”

When they arrived at Nathan’s house, the area was crawling with reporters. Clark did not stop. Instead, he drove to a local motel for a few hours of rest. When they returned to the house, it appeared that the gaggle of media had doubled. Wearing the same red shirt that he had been rescued in, Nathan stepped up to the crowd of microphones and addressed the media and the public for the first time. “I feel healthy. Emotionally, I’ve been through a huge amount,” Nathan said, thanking “the public for their prayers and for the continuing prayers for my mother.”

WBZ-TV reporter Christina Hager spoke with neighbors in the small town of Vernon, where news did not travel quickly. “Some people didn’t know that he was missing or what he’d been through. He didn’t socialize with his neighbors much either,” Hager recalled. “When we told townspeople about what had happened, they were very sympathetic to him. They told us that he seemed like a good kid and how hardworking he was.” Hager and other reporters filed their stories with common themes of courage, survival, and painful loss.

But just hours later, a seismic shift occurred when law enforcement executed a search warrant for Nathan’s home. In the midst of the missing person investigation, Bucco had written up an application for a search warrant stating that investigators were looking for books, computers, documents, handheld electronic devices, GPS devices, and maps that may provide clues to Nathan and his mother’s location on the Chicken Pox, and where they had intended to fish. Bucco was also searching for receipts for boat parts and repairs for the ill-fated vessel. “This investigation revealed that Nathan’s boat was in need of mechanical repair and that Nathan had been conducting a portion of these repairs on his own volition which could have potentially rendered the boat unsafe for operation,” Bucco wrote in the search warrant affidavit.

The search warrant also claimed that Nathan was “capable of violence” based on his past behavior, which included an allegation that he held a child hostage with a knife when he was a youth.

At least eight police cars, including officers from the local sheriff’s department and State Police, searched each level of Nathan’s four-story home. They seized an internet modem with cable, a SIM card, and a letter handwritten by Nathan. Police did not find his computer.

A family member suspected his involvement in the murder of his grandfather, John Chakalos, though he was never charged. / Photo by Steven G. Smith for the Boston Globe

Later, detectives also searched Linda’s home in Middletown, Connecticut. To gain access to the home, officers walked past yellow remembrance ribbons attached to a nearby fence and fastened to porch railings with posters handwritten in blue magic marker that read, “Never give up. Come home safe.” “Please pray for mom.” “God Bless Linda and Nathan.” Investigators spent hours inside the home, eventually hauling out several bags and boxes of evidence along with a computer and three big jars filled with handwritten notes. “[Linda] filled the first jar with notes that made her happy, the second about things she wished would get better,” Monty Monteiro, Linda’s friend and roommate at the time of her death, told the Boston Globe. “The third jar was for the problems she was leaving up
to God.”

As police searched for answers, reporters began unearthing Nathan’s possible ties to an earlier crime—the 2013 murder of his grandfather, John Chakalos. Soon, the image of the shy young man who had tragically lost his mother transformed into a characterization of a sinister, criminal mastermind who was hellbent on killing his family members in a calculated effort to seize the family fortune. And as investigators began to dig deeper into the case, what they discovered would force them to ask a chilling question: Had they been searching for a lost fisherman, or hunting a calculating killer all along?