Nathan Carman Charged With Murdering Mother During 2016 Fishing Trip in Wild Inheritance Scheme

When Linda Carman accepted an offer from her 22-year-old son to go on a fun mother-daughter fishing trip in September 2016, she didn’t know how things would go horribly wrong. any. The ship sank and Linda went missing at sea, leaving her son, Nathan, adrift on a life raft for eight days before being rescued, saying he was grieving and had nothing to do with the accident. tragic accident.

Federal authorities believe otherwise. And on Tuesday, six years later, the United States Attorney’s Office in Vermont announced that Nathan Carman, now 28, has been arrested and charged with the grisly murder of his mother, as well as “in connection with fraud. Fraud to get family money and insurance.”

An unsealed indictment, first brought by a grand jury on May 2, also alleges Carman fatally shot his sleeping grandfather, a man named John Chakalos, on 2013. The two alleged murders “were part of a scheme to extract money and property from the estate. of John Chakalos and related family funds,” prosecutors said.

Chakalos is a wealthy man who has made “tens of millions of dollars” in real estate development, according to the filing. To divide his estate among his four daughters, including Linda, upon his death, the tycoon established the Chakalos Family Dynasty Trust, along with several other trusts. Beginning in 2012, according to the indictment, Nathan began spending “considerable time” with Chakalos, attending business meetings with his grandfather and asking his financial advisors “expensive questions.” details” about the trust.

In the end, in the lawsuit, Chakalos convinced Linda to designate her son as the beneficiary of her share in the Tide vase. Nathan, a high school graduate in 2012, enrolled in community college but is struggling to complete most of his classes. Both his apartment and his truck were paid for by his grandfather.

Then, five days before Christmas 2013, Nathan allegedly entered the Chakalos home in Connecticut with a rifle in the dead of night and shot his 87-year-old grandfather twice, the indictment said. He then allegedly dumped the truck’s computer hard drive and GPS system. He was designated as a person of interest in the case, but denied to investigators that he had any connection to Chakalos’ murder.

“My grandfather is the person closest to me. He was like a father to me and I knew me like a son to him,” Nathan said. ABC News in 2016. “I know that my grandfather was the biggest victim of his murder but it feels like I am the second biggest victim because I have completely lost the most important person in my world” .

The large sum Carman received from his grandfather’s estate – about $550,000 – was short-lived. Moving to Vermont, he spent most of the money over the next two years, according to the indictment. In the fall of 2016, he had no cash.

So he chartered a fishing trip for himself and Linda on the Chicken Pox boat he bought. “Nathan Carman planned to kill his mother during the trip,” the indictment states. To solve the murder, he allegedly tampered with the 31-foot aluminum trawler before the pair set sail, removing the two forward bulkheads and trim tabs from the stern, leaving holes on the hull below the waterline. Carmans departed from a harbor in Rhode Island on September 17, 2016.

Linda, 54, believes she and her son will return to the harbor at noon the next day, leaving the plan to float with friends. Instead, the duo were reported missing the next day, and the Coast Guard launched a search. Carman, adrift in an inflatable life raft, was picked up by a passing freighter on September 25.

After being rescued, the 22-year-old told Coast Guard officers that he and Linda were pulling tuna when he heard a strange noise. Carman said he lifted a hatch to discover standing water in the bottom of the boat. He never activated a distress signal.

He told a judge in 2019: “I actually have a great aversion to pressing a button that will lead to the helicopter flying out, adding that he thinks he can do it on his own. troubleshooting, follow Boston Globe.

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Carman told the Coast Guard by the time it became clear they were in danger, it was too late. He claimed he had reached a life raft that had been deployed automatically, and looked around, screaming for his mother. But he never saw or heard from her again, he said.

“I didn’t hear her screams,” he told the judge in 2019 in a separate case brought by his insurance company.

Immediately suspicious, Vermont police launched a reckless dangerous investigation hours after Carman arrived in dry land. Investigators allege in an affidavit that Chicken Pox needed repair, “and Nathan carried out a portion of this repair work against his own will, which would have caused his boat to be repaired.” unsafe”, according to ABC News.

“I know I am not responsible for the sinking of the boat,” Carman told the outlet on September 28, 2016. “I know that I am not responsible for anything that led to the sinking of the boat. I know I am not responsible for my mother’s death. But at the same time, I feel I have a responsibility to my mom and me out there and under the circumstances. If I hadn’t asked her to go fishing with me that weekend, she would still be living with me today.”

Carman’s father, Clark, told CBS Boston around the same time that Linda’s death was an accident. “The past is the past, and what I want to say about that is: I wish the press would leave it alone, because he has nothing to do with his grandfather, with his mother,” he said. “It was a pure accident, and he would never do anything like that.”

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In November 2019, a federal judge ruled in a separate case that Carman was not entitled to the $85,000 insurance claim he had made as a result of Chicken Pox losses. The two-week trial determined that Carman had “directly or indirectly” made changes to the boat that caused it to sink, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. said. The judge’s decision “did not determine whether Mr. Carman intended to sink his boat or to harm his mother,” he said, according to the judge. Globe.

In an email to the newspaper, Carman denied that he was trying to harm his mother. “If I have one regret, it is that, having been raised publicly, the charges of intent brought in this case were not part of the trial,” he wrote. and therefore I do not have the opportunity to have them cleared to clear my name once and for all with a trial on those matters. “

Luckily for Carman, it looks like he will finally have a court date, with an arrangement for his criminal case scheduled for Wednesday in Vermont.