The Carman Family Deaths is the latest true-crime documentary film released on Netflix, which takes a look at the strange and mysterious deaths of the Carman family members in Rhode Island, USA. The film presents the arguments and counterarguments as established by the prosecution and the defense during the court trial that had taken place after the death of 54-year-old Linda Carman, who was believed to have been killed by her own son. Overall, The Carman Family Deaths makes for a crisp and entertaining watch, keeping us wondering about what must have really taken place.
What happened to Linda Carman in September of 2016?
On the morning of September 17th, 2016, Linda Carman and her 22-year-old son, Nathan, had set out from the Ram Port Marina in Rhode Island on a fishing trip aboard their private boat, named the Chicken Pox. It was quite common for the mother and son to go out on such fishing expeditions by themselves, as their friends and family members were all aware of their love for outdoor activities, and Linda had told her close friend Sharon Hartstein that she expected to return by the afternoon of the 18th. But when Sharon did not hear back from Linda till the evening of the 18th, she contacted the police, and soon it was realized that the mother and son had not been in touch with anyone since they had left. Soon, the coast guard deployed search operations in the area for the missing citizens, as they had reportedly travelled to an area just south of Block Island, some 13 miles away from the marina.
In the next few days, the entire area was searched as carefully as possible, with numerous coast guard teams going out to sea every day looking for any traces of the missing people, but to no avail. 6 days later, the search operations were finally called off when absolutely no sign of Linda and Nathan Carman could be found even hundreds of miles around the spot they had seemingly gone missing from. To good friends like Sharon, or Linda’s ex-husband and Nathan’s father, Clark, this felt like an unfair decision to just give up on the search and treat the matter as an unsolved case so soon. But there was a sudden new development on the 25th, 8 days after the two citizens had gone missing at sea, when a freighter at sea spotted a life raft floating around, with Nathan Carman still alive aboard it. There was instantly an operation to get close to the raft and rescue the survivor, and Nathan was finally home, to the delight of the family members.
But there was no sign of Linda on the raft, and when Nathan was rescued by the freighter and brought back to land, he too had no idea where his mother was. He reported that the boat in which they had sailed out to Block Island had sustained some serious damage, because of which it sank very quickly, without giving Nathan and Linda much time to react. Although Nathan did manage to get to the life raft, he could not see his mother after the boat capsized, and hoped that she had somehow made it back to the coast safely or that she had been found and rescued before him. Unfortunately, that was not the case, and even weeks after she had gone missing, no trace of Linda Carman could be found anywhere. Friends and family members now had to accept what seemed like the sad truth—that Linda had died in the boating accident, drowning at sea after her boat capsized.
Why was Nathan’s account suspicious to experts?
Nathan bravely surviving the dangers at sea and being able to return to the mainland was initially seen as a heroic return for the brave young man, and there was an understandable fascination with regard to how he had achieved such a difficult feat. He started appearing on TV talk shows and in newspaper interviews for some time, but the more he revealed about his almost unbelievable experiences, the more they sounded suspicious to authorities and experts. As revealed in bits and pieces throughout The Carman Family Deaths, there were numerous reasons, essentially holes in his story, for the experts to suspect that Nathan was not telling them the truth, or at least the entirety of what had actually happened to him and his mother during their fishing trip.
To begin with, the physical and mental condition of Nathan when he was found floating around on the life raft was extremely odd and unusual as per the experience of the experts. When the freighter spotted him and made their intention of rescuing him very clear, Nathan jumped into the water, abandoning the raft he had supposedly spent 7 long days on, and swam to the life ring that had been lowered for him. The manner in which he was able to swim and kick in the seawater made it clear he was extremely fit, and when the medical team aboard the freighter checked him, they confirmed that he was not suffering from dehydration or hypothermia. According to the coast guard investigator Eric Gempp, he has never seen a case in his illustrious 26-year career in which an individual exposed to the dangerous conditions on the open sea had not suffered dehydration or hypothermia. To him, it was clear as daylight that Nathan had simply not been on an inflated raft for 7 days, as he was claiming.
When Nathan was asked about how he had managed to survive despite the dangers, he kept stating how he had rationed the food and water supplies on the life raft and how he kept his mental health steady by focusing on how to survive the ordeal. But there was simply no answer for how fit he was when he had been found, or even how he managed to climb up the stairs of the freighter without any trouble at all, which is once again impossible to do after spending 7 days in seawater with very strong currents. Just a few days after his return, the police officially announced him as a suspect in their investigation and searched his car and truck, from which they found a document that clearly stated why he did not want to cooperate with the police, whom he deemed to be just an organized criminal network. During the interrogation, Nathan mentioned how he had bought bait to go eel-fishing with his mother, but crucially, this bait was found in his truck and not on his boat, meaning that he had never loaded the bait onto the boat, for some unexplained reason.
Although the mother and son had originally planned to go to the southern end of Block Island during their fishing trip, they ended up traveling further, 60-70 miles away from the shore, to a spot called Block Canyon, where the sea was much rougher. Experts immediately suspected that Nathan must have planned on this detour for a long time, as no inexperienced sailor would decide to go to such dangerous waters on a whim, and there were more reasons to believe that he always had shady intentions. Nathan had bought a device to filter seawater into drinkable water, and he had this device on the life raft even, almost as if prepared for things to go wrong. What was even more suspicious was his description of the accident, as he stated that he had suddenly realized the boat had holes in it and water had already flooded in, to a concerning level.
Nathan’s reaction to this discovery, if it was indeed true, was extremely bizarre, as he did not warn his mother about this development, as he apparently felt that it would only scare her and make her panic. Moreover, he did not use the radio system to alert the coast guard or other boats about the emergency aboard the Chicken Pox, as he supposedly believed that they were too far away from the coast or from any other boats. A natural response to an emergency in which a boat is capsizing would be to immediately seek help from others through the radio communications. But all Nathan did was stay extremely calm and cool-headed, technically abandoning his mother right away by not informing her about the situation, and then managing to get on the life raft and surviving for 7 days.
How he described the boat to have capsized very quickly after he realized that there were holes on the side was extremely unnatural, as experts state in the documentary that boats do not sink in this manner. Lastly, details about the area of the supposed accident were matched with the direction of the current at sea on that specific day, and it was determined that Nathan was found floating on his raft about 800 miles in the opposite direction to where he should have ended up according to the direction of the current. Almost every part of Nathan Carman’s story was riddled with holes, making him appear like a terrible liar, and he was quickly confirmed to be the prime suspect.
What had happened to John Chakalos?
Three years earlier, Nathan Carman had been the prime suspect in another gruesome crime when his millionaire grandfather, John Chakalos, had mysteriously passed away in his home. In December of 2013, John Chakalos was found dead in his bedroom, and it was clear that someone had shot him thrice in the back of his head from a very close distance. As a police investigation began, it was revealed that the wealthy and influential businessman did not have the best of relations with Linda, one of his four daughters, because of their conflicting perspectives on life. Hailing from an orthodox Greek family, John always wanted to control the lives of his family members, especially his daughters, as he believed this to be the duty of a patriarch. Therefore, when Linda had wanted an independent life, they had had a falling out, and she had cut herself off from the family for a few years.
When Linda married Clark and gave birth to Nathan, John once again got back to good terms with her, only for the sake of the baby, the first male grandchild of John. Still driven by his traditional perspective on the world and life, John refused to believe that Nathan was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, because of which he required special care. When the teenager’s only friend, a pet horse that his grandfather had gifted him, passed away, Nathan had some concerning fits of rage and frustration, because of which his parents decided to get him admitted at a mental health facility. This is when multiple rifts started appearing among the family members, as Nathan did not want to go live in the facility and felt that his mother was forcing him to be a patient only to feel good about herself. On the other hand, John also did not want his grandson to be living in and receiving treatment at a mental health facility, and so he ultimately got the boy released.
Following this incident, John started paying a yearly allowance to Nathan in order to support his grandson in every possible way. Charles Lapenna, a nephew of John Chakalos, appears throughout the Netflix documentary and talks about how his uncle had brought Nathan to his house one day and asked him to let the boy stay for some time. It is Charles who reveals that John had supposedly told Nathan to pursue a college education and then build a life of his own, essentially stating that he would no longer be paying for the boy’s living expenses. Either because of his genuine troubles with autism, or because of a lazy perspective on life, or perhaps a combination of both, Nathan just did not want to do anything by himself in his life, especially since he knew that he would be inheriting huge amounts of money from his grandfather and his mother, which would be enough to last him a lifetime. Before the mysterious murder of John, Nathan had sent memos to the family attorney, specifically asking about the details of the millionaire’s will, and clearly looked for clarification as to when and how he would receive his grandfather’s money, especially in case John died all of a sudden.
While these memos were already a strong enough suggestion, the police kept investigating Nathan, and six months after the murder, they finally found records of him having purchased a new assault rifle just weeks before John’s death. The murder had been clearly carried out by some kind of an assault rifle, as per the bullet casings found at the crime scene, and the empty rounds matched exactly with the kind of gun that Nathan had purchased. Upon being confronted, he told the police that he had completely forgotten about having bought the gun and had also lost it, which is why he did not tell them about this weapon during the initial questioning. Despite all this clearly pointing to the fact that Nathan had murdered his grandfather to immediately get his inheritance money, he could not ultimately be charged, as there was still not enough evidence to prove his involvement, according to the law.
What is the most plausible theory behind the death of Linda Carman?
Interestingly, Linda Carman had appeared to have been too shocked and stunned following her father’s murder, much more so than her siblings, which seemed a bit odd to them as well. One of her sisters, Charlene Gallagher, appears in the documentary and claims how Linda was clearly distracted by something after John’s death, and how it was evident to the siblings that she had been hiding something from the rest of the family. At this time, Charlene and her sisters already suspected that it was the extremely odd-behaved Nathan who must have killed John, and this was the reason that Linda seemed to be hiding the truth, as she knew that it was her son who had carried out the crime. But despite their best efforts, Linda did not open up to them.
Charles recalls how in his very last meeting with Linda he had warned her against her own son, Nathan, since Charles had witnessed the angry outbursts and almost manic episodes that Nathan would have while the boy was living at his house. This was why Charles had warned Linda against going on fishing trips with her son randomly, and had even told her that she might just never return from such a trip. Thus, when this is exactly what happened, nobody doubted that Nathan had something to do with it, including the authorities. The most plausible theory behind the death of Linda Carman is that Nathan had already planned the whole thing by the time the pair left for their fishing trip, as Nathan wanted more money and knew that his mother’s death would bring him more inheritance immediately.
Thus, Nathan must have killed Linda some time after having set sail, following which he dumped her dead body at a location where it could never be found. He then drove the Chicken Pox boat back to somewhere near the coastline, knowing all too well that the coast guard would be searching for him and his mother many miles out to sea and not near the shore. Then, on the seventh or eighth day, he drove the boat towards Block Canyon, dumped the boat somewhere in the middle, and then floated around on the life raft for a few hours, waiting to be found by the freighter, which he knew was to pass through the area on that very day. He had also seemingly destroyed the raft with a knife that he carried on his jacket in order to leave no evidence that could be used to check his claims. Finally, on the 10th of May, 2022, the office of the Vermont District Attorney issued an arrest warrant for Nathan Carman, who was charged with the murder of his own mother, Linda Carman.
What happened to Nathan Carman ultimately?
Although Nathan Carman had initially gotten away without any legal persecution, he himself unintentionally helped the authorities find more evidence against him when he filed a lawsuit against the boat company, stating that they should be held responsible for the terrible accident that had killed his mother. The boat company was confident that this claim could be easily dismissed, and so they carried out an extensive investigation that yielded results that ultimately helped the police catch Nathan. While his defense team and a few supporters claimed, and still claim, that he had been targeted because of his unusual nature, which was a result of his autism, there was just too much evidence against the young man.
Nathan pled not guilty and was detained at the Cheshire County Jail in New Hampshire. However, before his trial could take place in October of 2023, Nathan Carman was suddenly found dead one day on the 15th of June, 2023. The autopsy ruled that he had taken his own life with the help of his shoelaces, meaning that Nathan could never be tried, or punished, for his crimes. Linda Carman was officially declared dead in October of 2023, and her case was closed, since the prime and only suspect was now dead as well. The murder of John Chakalos, which was certainly committed by Nathan as well, has now been classified as a cold case, with no new suspects or theories having emerged.
