Linda Carman, 54, departed with her son, Nathan, for a fishing trip on September 17, 2016, and never returned.

The Carman Family is a very wealthy Greek family, thanks to the hard work of John Chakalos. Linda Carman was one of four daughters of John, a wealthy Connecticut real estate developer. Chakalos was known for his love for his grandchildren, including Nathan, Linda’s son with husband Clark Carman. Nathan’s parents divorced when he was young, and he grew up primarily with his mother. Mother and son often traveled together, including a trip to Greece, a Canadian fishing excursion, but their relationship became increasingly strained as Nathan reached high school.

Nathan was diagnosed in childhood with Asperger syndrome. He struggled with social interactions and had difficulty making friends. Sometime around age 16, Nathan’s beloved Irish Sport horse named Cruise died of colic. Linda and Clark struggled to make sense of their son’s behavior, signing over his guardianship to a behavioral correction camp in 2011. A behavioral correction camp is a term for a facility that aims to change a youth’s behavior through strict discipline, often military-style. These camps can include boot camps, which use physical exercise and drills, or wilderness therapy programs, which may combine rugged setting with counseling. While some have therapeutic components, many are controversial due to cases of abuse, neglect, and even death, leading to concerns about their effectiveness and safety. 

I personally think that sending Nathan to a behavioral correction camp was a bad idea, after the loss of his horse. The more appropriate thing to do, in this situation, would have been to buy him another horse, that he could bond with, as he was so fond of horses. People with autism are well known to do great with animals and it’s a very therapeutic way for them to help through life’s many challenges. I think his parents misunderstood their son and didn’t want to accept the challenges that comes with having a child that has autism, instead of doing their own research and trying to help their son in a more loving, caring manner. I wonder if sending Nathan to that camp made him resentful toward his parents. Through his letter to his priest, you could tell how intelligent, sensitive and aware Nathan was of his mother’s behaviors toward him. He understood very well that her treatment of him was not right.

Children dealing with Asperger are often very sensitive people, they struggle a lot to talk and express themselves, but I know that they are also very smart kids and much more aware of everything around them. People often misinterpret their behaviors and social struggles, with just being weird and often want nothing to do with such individuals, which is pretty sad.

On December 20, 2013, Chakalos was found dead inside his Windsor, Connecticut, home. He had been shot three times in the head and back, with no sign of forced entry. Police questioned both Linda, who had a gambling habit, according to sources close to the family, and stood to inherit millions after her father’s death. Nathan was the last person to see his grandfather alive, eating dinner with him the night prior. Eventually, investigators discovered Nathan had purchased an assault rifle matching the caliber of the gun used to kill Chakalos. He claimed he had forgotten about the firearm when questioned and lost it. Additionally, Nathan had destroyed his computer around the time of the killing. The Windsor Police Department drafted a warrant for Nathan’s arrest, but it was left unsigned without enough concrete evidence.

It’s making me mad watching those investigators interviewing this young man. It feels like watching Making a Murderer all over again and I personally think that investigators should never be allowed to interview people without proper behavioral experience or bring in an expert before interrogating a person with autism. They often misjudged people with autism, schizophrenia, or any mental health problems they may have. It often leads to miscarriage of justice, accusing the wrong people and sending innocent people to prison. It’s truly disgusting that this is how the justice system is towards these people. They have no protection against investigators, who rush to conclusions. Autism is becoming more and more frequent in people over the past years as more people are diagnosed with it. You would think that law enforcement would at least try to do better.

This part really aggravated me when asking Nathan why he was an hour late to meet his mother. I have gotten lost before ! God forbid we are humans and make mistakes, but of course this is suspicious, and god forbid a young man with autism would make a mistake like that. When I was a younger, inexperienced driver, I made a lot of mistakes and got lost often as well, especially under stress. It sounds like Nathan also might have had an alibi when his grandfather was shot. Those investigators were horrible during John’s death investigations, just making assumptions after assumptions. One of them said:” She looked like she wanted to say something, without saying anything”. What does that even mean ?

Less than three years later, after the murder of John Chakalos, Nathan became tied to another mystery, this time including his mother.

Around 11 p.m. on September 17, 2016, Nathan and Linda departed Rhode Island, for a fishing excursion on his boat. But when three of Linda’s friends attempted to contact her the following day with no response, they reported the boat missing. The Coast Guard began looking for any sign of the vessel and its two passengers, but found no trace and suspended the rescue mission on September 24. The following day, more than a week after he and his mother had gone missing, Nathan was found floating at sea in an emergency raft by the crew of the Orient Lucky freight ship. He was rescued about 100 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. Nathan claimed the boat had a malfunctioning belt in its engine area and began capsizing. In the ensuing struggle, he didn’t place a distress call and lost track of Linda. “I got onboard the life raft and was looking around, and I was calling out to my mom. I did not see or hear my mom, and I was blowing the whistle with three loud, short bursts, which is a distress signal,” he told ABC News. “I assume that if she had been on the surface and conscious she would have been calling out to me, and I would have been able to find her. But I didn’t know why that hadn’t happened.”

Linda was never found, and attention quickly turned to Nathan’s conflicting version of events. That I found very suspicious though. Your mother disappeared on the boat and you have no idea where she went ? There weren’t any storms that day where she could’ve accidentally fell out the boat into the sea. He didn’t hear any screams, anything at all and it was just the both of them. He kept saying to the investigator that he didn’t hear her scream or saw her at all. You would think that your own son, as a mother, would be frantically looking for you before getting into the lifeboat.

As police continued to investigate Linda’s disappearance, Nathan filed an $85,000 insurance claim for his lost boat. The claim was denied because of “holes in his story.” For example, an oceanographer determined water currents should have pushed the emergency raft to the west, while Nathan drifted east. According to the FBI, Nathan had purchased an anchor incompatible with his boat shortly before the excursion, as well as lengths of chain.

Investigators suspected Nathan was trying to inherit his mother’s estate based on his behavior surrounding the death of his wealthy grandfather, John Chakalos. A 2022 indictment alleges that the deaths of both Linda and her father were part of a scheme to obtain money and property from the estate of John Chakalos and related family trusts.

The documentary shows a video message that Linda had recorded for her son in which she tells him that she was not going to leave him her house, because he didn’t wash his hands after fishing. The message was recorded during a tense period in their relationship when Nathan wasn’t speaking to his mother. This poor young man only had his grandfather to turn to. Law enforcement also zeroed in on a memo Nathan sent to his grandfather’s trusts and estates attorney prior to his 2013 death asking for clarification on what he would inherit upon the deaths of both his grandfather and mother. 

Experts on autism interviewed in the documentary argue that these details were misinterpreted by police. Elizabeth Kelley, an autism specialist attorney featured in the documentary, says autistic people like Nathan are frequently misinterpreted because their “robotic” and overly detailed responses could sound “cold and calculating” to some in law enforcement. John Elder Robison, another autism defense expert, who describes himself as autistic, says that Nathan’s planning nature was part of his autism, but that people who aren’t autistic “think we’re up to something.” Nathan’s father Clark Carman insists throughout the film that his son did not murder Linda. He says that Nathan was only a suspect because police could not accurately evaluate his demeanor because he was autistic. “Because of his autism, because of his ability to be alone, Nathan, of any individual that I know, could have coped with being lost at sea,” he says in the film. “And I’m sure he used all his ingenuity in those eight days.”

Clark calls his wife’s death “a severe accident,” arguing, “I know if Nathan had the ability, he would have saved his mother.” He says Nathan’s mood was subdued when he returned home, so much so that “you could tell the inability to have saved her was riding on him immensely.”

Investigators say Nathan didn’t follow basic protocol when his boat was in trouble, like calling for assistance on his radio. “I didn’t think the boat was going to sink,” he claims, per audio of police questioning excerpted in the documentary. Back on land, a South Kingstown, R.I., police officer found bait in his truck and points out that it’s suspicious that he didn’t bring his bait on his boat for a supposed fishing trip. Well maybe he forgot ?

When authorities asked Nathan why his mother wasn’t wearing a life vest on the boat when he noticed that there was two feet of water creeping into the boat, Nathan says he asked her to bring in the fishing lines, arguing. “I need to keep my mom occupied while I’m trying to fix the problem.”

FBI agent Lisa Tutty also argues that Nathan was in remarkably good shape for being adrift at sea for a week, climbing the ladder to the rescue boat with ease when he should have been weaker and stumbling. Mike Sarraille, a retired Navy Seal and expert witness featured in the documentary, argues that adrenaline would have kicked in for Nathan. The main theory presented in the film as to how Nathan murdered his mother argues that he killed her and disposed of her body far away from where the Coast Guard was searching. He may have stuck to the Connecticut coastline because he knew the Coast Guard wasn’t looking there and hid in his boat in nooks. Investigators theorize that after about a week, he made a beeline to the ocean, got into the life raft, and sunk the boat shortly before the freighter Orient Lucky came into view so he would be in a good position to be rescued quickly. Years later, when lawyers asked Nathan whether his mother disappeared, he responded, “Objection. Your question’s ambiguous.”

Tutty points out that the ocean makes for a challenging crime scene because evidence can be lost and destroyed instantly. To this day, law enforcement believes Linda and the boat Chicken Pox are still at the bottom of the ocean. Awaiting his trial, Nathan took his own life while in prison. His aunt says that he did that to avoid going to prison for possibly the rest of his life.

It seems that Nathan’s maternal family was quick to judge him and make him a suspect in his grandfather homicide as well as his mother. Did he do it, or did he not do it ? We will never the truth. I personally don’t think that he killed his grandfather, but buying the riffle before John’s death is indeed suspicious. I am not sure what to think, what about you ?