From the distant deck of the freighter, the yellow and red life raft looked almost like a misplaced toy, so small and bright atop the ocean’s heaving mass. As crew members of the Orient Lucky got a closer look, they saw a tall and lanky man, waving his arms in their direction.
It was September 25, 2016, a sparkling clear day on the ocean, and the Orient Lucky was roughly 100 nautical miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, headed to Boston. The captain, Zhao Hengdong, idled the black cargo ship, which was more than two football fields long, as chop pushed the raft toward it. A deckhand on the Orient Lucky flung down a life ring. The man, with a ragged bowl cut and scruffy beard, lunged for it. He hurled his body into the chilly ocean, sloshed through its undulating currents, and grabbed on.
The crew reeled him in, and as waves thrust him dangerously close to the ship, he used his free hand to fend off the hull. Two men climbed down a long, narrow staircase to water level and hauled him onto a small platform. He climbed up the stairs. Crew members then escorted the man to a lounge, where he sat on a couch and sipped soup from a white bowl. His name, he said, was Nathan Carman. He was 22 years old. Using the ship’s radio, he gave his account of what happened to a search and rescue controller with the US Coast Guard, Richard Arsenault.
“Mom and I—two people, myself and my mom—were fishing on Block Canyon, and there was a funny noise in the engine compartment,” Carman said, his words slow and deliberate. “I looked and saw a lot of water.” He explained that his small fishing boat, the Chicken Pox, quickly became inundated. Then, suddenly, the boat dropped out from beneath them.
Carman told Arsenault he climbed into a life raft and frantically began whistling and calling out for his mother, Linda. But he couldn’t find her. For the next seven days, he drifted on the open ocean.
The dramatic story ignited a media frenzy across New England. To many, the young man’s survival seemed nothing short of a miracle. After the rescue, the master of the Orient Lucky sent an email to the Coast Guard in which he commented on Carman’s condition. “His health looks like normal,” he wrote.
The open ocean is a dangerous place for recreational boaters—particularly the North Atlantic, where relentless winds, large swells, and frigid water temperatures are common. In 2016, the year Carman’s boat sank, the Coast Guard reported nearly 4,500 accidents at sea and more than 700 deaths in its annual Recreational Boating Statistics Report. Inexperienced boaters, rough weather, equipment malfunctions—the list of causes is long.
The report deliberately excludes any incidents known to involve assault, but out on the ocean, pinpointing what’s truly accidental is often impossible. Unlike the massive, always-on surveillance dragnet that our digital devices enable on land, the ocean is largely unmonitored. It’s a tricky place to police, particularly at night, when there’s nothing but empty darkness.
Aboard the freighter, Carman dried off and changed into a white jumpsuit. He didn’t need any medical attention. He asked Arsenault if anyone had found his mom yet. Arsenault replied that they had not. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. By the time of his rescue, the Coast Guard had spent five days looking for Carman and his mother over 62,000 square miles of ocean before calling off the search.
As Carman sat cupping his soup bowl on the freighter, the peculiar story of the Chicken Pox was only starting to unfold. Investigators quickly found out this wasn’t the only mystery surrounding Carman and his family. Then, as they tried to work out what happened to Linda, an unusual source of data emerged. An oceanographer had gotten involved in the case, and he knew that a special buoy was bobbing in the same waters where Carman said he had drifted. The buoy happened to be laden with scientific instruments that worked around the clock to collect data on the currents and the wind. The oceanographer realized that the ocean itself might know if Carman’s mother was lost, or murdered.
Nathan James Carman was born in 1994 and grew up on a hilly residential street in Middletown, Connecticut, an old sailing port turned college town. The only child of Linda and Clark Carman, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome—or autism spectrum disorder as it’s known today—when he was around 5. As a young kid, Carman struggled socially with other children his age. His parents tried to get him into group sports such as baseball and basketball, but “he never really got into it,” says Clark, a retired US Air Force avionics technician. Carman opted for more solitary activities instead.
His parents divorced when he was 10, and Carman went to live with his mother. As a teenager, Carman’s difficulty with social cues made him a target. “People picked on him in high school, even though he was over 6 feet tall,” Clark recalls. He says Carman got along better with adults, and he stood out as a bright kid who could converse on a wide range of topics. Clark, who says he remained on good terms with Linda, took Carman on fishing and hiking trips, where his son’s love for the outdoors blossomed.
Linda Carman, a stout, bespectacled woman with Greek features and graying auburn hair, worked as a nanny for kids with autism, among other jobs. She also received money from a trust fund set up by her parents late in their lives. Her father, John Chakalos, had made a fortune primarily as a real estate developer in New England, amassing an estate valued at more than $40 million.
Both Clark and a longtime friend of Linda’s, Sharon Hartstein, describe her as a giving person who regularly donated to charitable causes and did favors for people. But Carman and Linda’s home life was rocky at times. When the two went at it, Clark remembers Carman screaming before storming off. “But there were no attacks or violent behavior,” he says. Other family members alleged more concerning moments in his youth, such as an incident at school in which they told investigators that Carman held another child at knifepoint.
When Carman was 17, he ran away from home, making it all the way from Connecticut to Sussex County, Virginia. He was found several days later outside a convenience store. When he got home, he moved into an RV parked outside the house. He and Linda still saw each other for meals, according to Clark, but otherwise Carman kept his distance. “He was unsettled at that point,” Clark says.
Despite his troubles, Carman maintained a close relationship with his grandfather, John Chakalos. Chakalos doted on Carman. He bought him a cell phone and rented him an apartment so he could move out of the RV. He also gave Carman a Nissan Titan pickup truck and invited his grandson to tag along to meetings with his estate planning attorney.
According to Carman, Chakalos also gave him exclusive use of a credit card with a $5,000 limit and paid the bills off in full. Meanwhile, Carman picked up the popular and pricey sport of offshore fishing, and he started going on occasional excursions with his mother, who dabbled in recreational boating.
Carman also had an interest in guns. In November 2013, he drove a few hours north to the Shooter’s Outpost, a gun shop in New Hampshire, where he selected a $2,100 semiautomatic Sig Sauer rifle. It was about 3 feet long and weighed more than 8 pounds. The manufacturer’s website describes it as “built for harsh tactical environments.”
On the evening of December 19, 2013, Carman and his grandfather dined at a Greek restaurant and drove back to Chakalos’ home in Connecticut. Around 8:30 pm, as Carman was preparing to leave, Chakalos paused a phone call to see him out.
Hours later, in the middle of the night, Chakalos was shot three times in the head. He was found the next day, dead in his bed.
Officers from the Windsor, Connecticut, police department searched the home. They noticed that whoever committed the crime had been careful to remove the empty bullet shells from Chakalos’ bedroom floor. More intriguing were the bullets themselves. According to investigators, at least one was .30 caliber—the same caliber as Carman’s new rifle. Many guns are capable of shooting those rounds, but the evidence helped make Carman a suspect. Soon investigators discovered that he had discarded a hard drive from his laptop and a GPS unit from his truck around the time of the murder. Family members became suspicious too. Carman’s three maternal aunts—Valerie Santilli, Charlene Gallagher, and Elaine Chakalos—say they believe he’s responsible for their father’s death. Carman’s father, however, felt his son wasn’t capable of the murder. “There’s no way,” Clark says. “He loved his grandpa.”
In interviews with the local press, Carman denied any involvement in his grandfather’s murder. He was the last person known to have seen Chakalos alive, but he was not the only person to talk to him that night. As Carman was leaving, his grandfather had been on the phone with a woman known pseudonymously as “Mistress Y.” Carman later hired a lawyer, David Anderson, who filed court documents alleging that just days before the murder, the unnamed woman had spent the weekend with Chakalos at Mohegan Sun Casino, where they shared a room and Chakalos gave her cash.
Anderson alleged that Mistress Y knew that Chakalos always had large quantities of cash in his possession. “The fact of the matter is that living alone in a house in which he kept large amounts of cash placed John Chakalos at risk,” Anderson wrote.
Windsor police sought an arrest warrant for Carman, but it went unsigned due to insufficient evidence. One problem was Carman’s gun—it had gone missing, thwarting any chance of ballistics testing to find out if it was the murder weapon. While investigators probed deeper into the evidence, the family began digging into Chakalos’ estate. It turned out Linda stood to inherit several million dollars from her father’s passing, and a smaller portion of the estate went to Carman. In October 2014, Carman paid $70,000 for a three-story, 6,207-square-foot farmhouse in Vermont, a rundown white saltbox set back from a winding main road.
He also bought a boat for $48,000.
The Chicken Pox was a 31-foot, center-console fishing boat. Carman hired a boat surveyor, Bernard Feeney, who inspected it and deemed it seaworthy. Carman moored it at Ram Point Marina, an unpretentious landing in southern Rhode Island, at the end of a congested 4-mile salt pond dotted with islands and narrow channels—and 150 miles from his farmhouse in landlocked Vermont.
The following month, Carman began having trouble operating his boat. He was cruising around a nearby harbor one afternoon when the engine overheated and he got stuck. He called 911, and the Coast Guard towed him closer to shore. Carman filed an insurance claim and had the engine replaced.
But even with a brand-new engine, Carman didn’t seem happy with his vessel, Lisa Healey, the parts and service manager at Ram Point Marina, recalls. He seemed inclined to tinker with it. “He didn’t like the way the boat performed, and he said he swore there was another propeller,” she says. Just as cars often have a spare tire, some power boats are equipped with a spare propeller. At Carman’s request, she lifted up all the hatches on the Chicken Pox and “looked everywhere” but couldn’t find one. She found the incident baffling.
A few months later, during the summer of 2016, Carman removed two bulkheads, which took up valuable space on the boat. But they were integral to the boat’s structure and helped prevent water going from one compartment to another. There were also several problems with the boat’s pumps. In the fall, one of the bilge pumps had an electrical issue and stopped sucking water out of the boat. Carman replaced it on Saturday, September 17, just before he and Linda set out on an overnight fishing trip.
As Carman worked on his boat that day, Michael Iozzi, a concrete cutter from northern Rhode Island, sat nearby with some friends, having drinks. He couldn’t help but notice what Carman was up to. “I saw him leaning over the side of the boat drilling holes with a hole saw,” Iozzi says.
He asked Carman what he was doing. Iozzi says Carman told him he was repairing the boat’s trim tabs—metal finlike plates attached on either side of the back of the boat. The tabs are designed to bring the nose of the boat down, to reduce skimming over the water and to help it smash through bigger waves.
But to Iozzi, it didn’t look like a repair job—it looked as if Carman was removing the tabs, using the hole saw dangerously close to the water line. “I’ve been around the water a long time,” Iozzi says. He was “doing more destruction than anything else.” Because the holes were in the boat’s stern, Iozzi explains, they were an unlikely entry point for seawater when the boat was moving forward. Its bow would have diverted the water away from the body of the vessel. But when the boat was in reverse, the thrust of the exposed hull against even moderate chop could have meant disaster. “Once you back up a bit, you start taking in water,” he says. “It’s all over.”
That evening, Linda met Carman at the marina. They headed out to sea under a clear sky shortly before midnight, as is common for anglers who want to be in a good position by daybreak. The plan was to fish for striped bass off Block Island, approximately 12 miles offshore, and make it back by 9 am. Linda texted the plan to her friend, Sharon Hartstein. She added, “Call me at 12 noon if you don’t hear from me.” At some point on the journey, Carman recalls changing course and steering the boat to Block Canyon, an offshore fishing spot at the edge of the continental shelf, roughly 90 miles south of Block Island.
According to Carman, shortly after sunrise he had fishing lines dragging through the water as the boat moved slowly northward. Then, around five hours later, all hell broke loose. Water rushed into the boat. Carman killed the engine and yelled over to Linda to pull in the fishing lines. He opened two deck hatches to check if water had gotten in through the hull, then he grabbed emergency gear from the pilot house. He didn’t make any distress calls with the two-way radio that was inside the pilot house, despite having dialed 911 when his engine had overheated months earlier. Nor did he turn on his emergency position-indicating radio beacon—also located in the pilot house—which would have beamed a radio signal to show search-and-rescue teams his position via satellite.
Even though Carman was aware that the boat was being flooded, he said he didn’t alert Linda or offer her a life preserver. Perhaps there was no time. Perhaps he was in shock. As Carman recalls it, one second he was walking forward on the boat, and the next second he was in the water. He managed to toss a folded-up life raft, which was packed tightly in a bright red carrying case, into the water. Moments later, the raft automatically inflated. He grabbed supplies from the boat, swam over to the raft, and yelled out for his mom. Then he drifted away.
Noon rolled around, and back on shore, Hartstein hadn’t heard from Linda. That evening, she called the Coast Guard to report them missing. She told a command center team based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that Carman and Linda had planned to fish near Block Island, and that Carman kept his boat at Ram Point Marina. Marcus Gherardi, then the station’s chief of response, threw himself into organizing the mission. Members of his unit fanned out to Ram Point and neighboring wharfs. “We had Coasties walking down to the marinas saying, ‘Do you know who Nathan Carman is?’ and ‘Have you talked to him recently?’” Gherardi says.
Coast Guard officials also contacted Linda’s cell service provider to get the last recorded ping from her phone. It was logged about an hour after she and Carman left the marina, and it placed the Chicken Pox southwest of Block Island. A few small rescue boats, humming across the ocean at nearly 50 miles per hour, scoured the area, and a search-and-rescue helicopter surveyed the water from above. It was a desperate race against time. With each passing minute, the chances of a successful search on the open ocean plunge.
Back at the Coast Guard station, Matt Baker, who co-led the search with Gherardi, contacted Linda’s next of kin—her sister Valerie—to brief her on the mission. Valerie mentioned that Carman was extremely intelligent and very good with technology. But then came a bombshell: She said she believed Carman was responsible for killing her father and that, because Chakalos' estate was being settled that week, Carman may have killed his mother to gain assets she was due to receive.
Baker pulled an all-nighter, working the case until the next morning, when he handed it off to Gherardi. The boats and aircraft found no trace of either the Chicken Pox or a life raft, but the Coast Guard continued to comb the waters.
Carman said that during these days he kept drifting and fell into a daily routine. He had provisioned the raft with an incredible amount of food, enough to last 30 days. He recalls waking up at 8 am each morning and eating four meals a day: breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner. He says he was uncomfortably cold at times from lying on the raft’s wet floor, and he used sponges to soak up the water.
By midweek, Gherardi’s hope was quickly fading. The search area had become vast, roughly twice the size of Connecticut. The Coast Guard dispatched larger rescue boats and a long-range surveillance aircraft.
After five days, the Coast Guard started winding down the search. Gherardi drove from Cape Cod to Valerie’s house in Connecticut to tell her in person. Inside, Valerie, her husband, and Linda’s friend Sharon Hartstein were seated around a table, bracing for the news. Gherardi informed them that they were unlikely to find Linda and Carman. “When you deliver this news, your heart feels like it’s made of lead,” Gherardi says. He couldn’t shake the sting that the search had failed.
Two days later, on a crisp and clear Sunday, Gherardi was sitting in his truck, watching his 12-year-old daughter play soccer, when his cell phone rang. It was a Coast Guard officer in Boston.
“Hey—we found him!” the officer blurted out. He told Gherardi that a freighter headed to Boston, the Orient Lucky, had spotted Carman in his life raft 100 nautical miles off the Massachusetts coast and pulled him aboard.
“Yes!” Gherardi shouted in triumph. But a moment later, as he processed the news, his elation faded. Only Carman had turned up; Linda was still out there. At that point, she was likely dead.
After the soccer game, Gherardi and his daughter stopped for buffalo wings, and he replayed the search in his mind. The idea that Carman, for a whole week, had managed to stay outside the edges of a search area so large that it spanned three states, continued to bother him. “I was confident that if they were on the surface of the water, we would have found them,” he says.
The police launched an investigation and focused on Carman. While officers worked the case, Carman submitted an insurance claim for the loss of his boat and its accessories in the amount of $85,000. The insurance company, a division of Berkshire Hathaway called BoatUS, denied the claim and fired back with a lawsuit of its own. (Carman’s recollections in this story are drawn from his court testimony and his police questioning.) David J. Farrell Jr., a maritime lawyer who represented the company, says the rationale was simple: “We’re not covering it, and we’re going to have a court say we don’t have to.”
But there was more to it. Farrell was suspicious of Carman and says he had serious doubts that Carman had been at sea for seven days in a life raft in the North Atlantic. Farrell, who lives in New England and has practiced maritime law for nearly 40 years, decided he needed an expert oceanographer to probe Carman’s account.
While researching online, he came across the name of Richard Limeburner, a retired physical oceanographer based on Cape Cod. Limeburner is tall and soft-spoken, with a well-chiseled jawline and wispy, dark hair. He’s an expert in ocean forensics; he played a large role in locating the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which had crashed into the Atlantic in 2009, killing all 228 people on board. Figuring out how floating objects are influenced by wind and waves is his sweet spot.
At first, Limeburner hesitated. “It was a family mess, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be involved,” he says. But curiosity won out. In the time since the search had been called off, suspicion about Carman had continued to build; among other things, his aunts petitioned a court in an effort to block him from any more inheritance. In December 2018, Limeburner signed on.
The assignment struck him as a chance to apply impartial data to the case. “I really don’t want to be guided by subjective thoughts, I want to be objective,” Limeburner says. “What if the kid’s telling the truth?” Perhaps Carman’s boat had been a lemon. Maybe investigators had been too quick to suspect him. Here was a line of inquiry that didn’t hinge on Carman’s storytelling.
He started by gathering two pieces of information: the positional coordinates of the Orient Lucky when it picked up Carman and the time at which he was found.
Then he turned to a data source that he knew could be extremely valuable to the case: a bright-yellow buoy the height of a young giraffe that sat right in the middle of Carman’s alleged drift path. Known as an offshore surface mooring, the buoy held a suite of scientific instruments. Above the surface, a tangle of solar-powered, research-grade weather sensors jut into the air; below the waterline, an anchored cable laden with sensors stretches down to the seafloor—all of it collecting measurements of wind speed and direction, surface currents, and other information about the water for each of the seven days Carman was adrift.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the buoy is one of 10 in the area, and it beams its data to a web server via satellite. This particular swath of the North Atlantic is one of the few areas of the world’s oceans under constant observation. The stretch is relatively close to shore—reachable within a day by research vessels—and of high scientific interest. It spans the edge of a continental shelf where shallow and deeper ocean waters mix, a process that churns up nutrients and sustains a great deal of marine life.
Limeburner downloaded oceanographic and meteorological data from the ocean monitoring network for the seven-day period starting on September 18. “If he drifted from Block Canyon to 100 miles south of the Vineyard, he had to go right by” the sensor-packed buoy, Limeburner says.
Typically, scientists rely on ocean monitoring networks to investigate how changing ocean conditions affect marine ecosystems, biology, and climate. But in this case, Limeburner knew that the technology might be capable of either supporting or contradicting Carman’s account. His life raft must have been at the mercy of the surface currents and winds—the specific information the buoy had captured.
Limeburner spent the winter in front of the wood-burning stove in his living room, unlocking the secrets of the wind and waves while nor’easters battered the coast outside. He pounded away at his laptop, consulting the buoy’s output for the week of September 18. There were large data sets to process that included hourly average measurements of wind speed and direction, as well as data on currents linked to the tides, wind, and other less common sources.
He wrote custom programs to help crunch the data, which he says were “huge freaking files” in their raw .csv formats. And he applied drift-analysis techniques similar to those he used to estimate the tracks of bodies and debris from the wreckage of Air France 447 a decade earlier. His goal was to synthesize wind, wave, and current data to estimate Carman’s seven-day drift path in two ways—starting from Block Canyon, to see where he’d end up, and working backward from the Orient Lucky recovery location, to see roughly where he ought to have started.
To make sure the buoy was working as it should, Limeburner dug up historical wind and surface-current records for the area for comparison. The data all lined up and pointed to a westerly—not easterly—drift that week, the opposite of what Carman’s story suggested. Even if Carman was mistaken about the number of days he spent on the raft or was way off about his starting location, he still should not have drifted from west to east to intercept the Orient Lucky. Whatever happened at sea that week, it seemed evident to Limeburner that the life raft did not begin its journey anywhere near Block Canyon. He wrote up his analysis in a 63-page forensics report. It was packed with figures, graphs, and maps that attempted to reconstruct Carman’s drift path.
One of the maps is particularly unsettling. It contains a Google Earth snapshot of the Block Canyon area, overlaid with a bright red dot marking the spot where Carman said his boat went down. Trailing off from the red dot is a yellow squiggly line, a computer-generated output from Limeburner’s data analysis, estimating Carman’s weeklong drift path. The line travels north for a bit, but then, instead of hooking east toward Massachusetts where Carman was rescued, it heads west—the complete opposite direction—and keeps going for nearly 45 miles toward New York. Propelled by the ocean alone, he should have been nowhere near the Orient Lucky.
So how did he end up there? A second red dot on the map marks the position of the freighter, and a white squiggle meanders off from it, showing where Carman ought to have started so as to end up at the place of his rescue. Limeburner concluded that if Carman had indeed drifted for seven days, he’d have had to jump into his life raft deep offshore, several miles beyond the continental shelf. To Limeburner, the location didn’t make sense. “It’s a no-man’s land out there,” he says.
The map seemed to blow Carman’s story to bits.
The insurance case went to trial in Providence, Rhode Island, federal court on August 13, 2019. There, Limeburner testified to the inconsistencies he found and how Carman’s story didn’t jibe with the movement of the ocean.
Another expert witness, N. Stuart Harris, an emergency room physician at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital and chief of its Division of Wilderness Medicine, told the court that Carman’s condition upon rescue was not consistent with his alleged seven-day drift. With seawater inevitably pooling inside the raft, he should have displayed severe deficits in his gross motor skills and been in dire need of medical attention.
Per court documents, Bernard Feeney, the boat surveyor, explained that the Chicken Pox likely sank due to water intrusion into “inadequately sealed holes below the boat’s scuppers with exterior covers.” He later said, “In all the years I’ve been around boats—60 years—I’ve never heard of anyone removing trim tabs and not fixing them properly.” Michael Iozzi, who watched Carman drill the holes into his boat just hours before his fateful trip, also spoke at the trial.
In his pretrial testimony, Carman explained that he had removed the trim tabs from the Chicken Pox because he felt they increased the boat’s drag and therefore its fuel consumption. He testified that his navigation and piloting abilities were very limited, and that he was unfamiliar with latitude and longitude. When asked why he hadn’t made any distress calls, he responded that it had become ingrained in him not to signal for help unless “your life or limb is in imminent jeopardy.”
The court had a mountain of evidence to consider. In the end, the case was decided on a plain-old insurance policy breach. US District judge John J. McConnell Jr. handed down the ruling on November 4, 2019. “Considering all the documentary evidence and witnesses’ testimony, the Court finds that the Policy does not cover Mr. Carman’s loss,” read the decision. It went on to say that the Chicken Pox was unseaworthy when it left Ram Point Marina, because Carman “improperly repaired the holes he created by removing the trim tabs, and he compromised the boat’s stability by removing the bulkheads.”
The decision was clear about Carman violating the terms of his policy. Of course, this was a civil case; Carman wasn’t standing trial for murder. But it also attempted to set the record straight about something else. At the very bottom of page 12 of the decision read the following footnote: “To be clear, the Court is making no determination of whether Mr. Carman intended to sink his boat or to harm his mother.”
The investigations of John Chakalos’ murder and Linda Carman’s disappearance remain open. Carman has not been charged with any crimes. Linda’s body has not been found. The Chicken Pox is still missing. Investigators from the Windsor, Connecticut, and South Kingston, Rhode Island, police departments declined to comment for this story. Since the boat-insurance trial concluded, Carman has largely managed to stay out of the public spotlight.
When I reached him by phone, he declined to answer any questions. He and his lawyer also didn’t respond to multiple inquiries from a WIRED fact-checker. Carman’s aunts also declined to comment for this story, except to say they had created a “Justice for John and Linda” tip line at (800) 245-7791. Their attorney, Bill Michael, says they want resolution. “Our whole belief is that Nathan should face justice for what he has done,” he says.
Their day in court may come. A prosecutor with the Coast Guard recently reached out to Limeburner to see whether he’d be willing to testify if Carman is brought to criminal court. Limeburner agreed. He still wonders what happened between the time Carman left Ram Point Marina and when the Orient Lucky picked him up a week later. Perhaps the Chicken Pox never took on water and is parked somewhere—or sank days later than Carman claimed. A shorter sojourn on the life raft would help explain why he was in such good shape upon his rescue. “He could have gone into some harbor in Rhode Island or Connecticut and covered his boat and hid,” Limeburner suggests. That scenario still leaves open the question of how, when the ocean was pulling to the west, he ended up so far east.
Investigators have a lot more to learn. It’s possible Carman was mistaken about where the Chicken Pox sank and that the chaos of the moment prevented him from saving his mother. Perhaps he didn’t realize that drilling holes just above the waterline would compromise his vessel. Maybe his awkward demeanor aroused undue suspicion, adding to his struggles as a young man with autism. Some information might yet emerge to explain why Carman’s location was wildly off from where ocean dynamics ought to have placed him. That’s the reality of policing the open seas: It takes a lot of resources and scientific detective work—and a fair bit of luck—to bring the truth to light.
In this case, the ocean was able to bear partial witness. But in its dark and roiling depths, even bigger secrets remain tucked away.
Nearly a year after the publication of this story, Nathan Carman was arrested and charged with killing his mother to inherit an estate worth millions.
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