Her Son Said She Drowned in a Boating Accident That He Miraculously Survived. But What Really Happened to Linda Carman? By Chris Spargo

Linda Carman didn’t particularly like fishing. But she loved her only child, Nathan Carman, and their boating trips on Rhode Island’s Block Island Sound were rare occasions when their normally tense relationship eased for a few hours. Just before midnight on Sept. 17, 2016, the pair were seen leaving a marina in South Kingstown, R.I., in Nathan’s boat Chicken Pox, bound for a favorite early-morning fishing spot south of Block Island. But they wouldn’t return as planned. 

The following evening, concerned friends alerted the Coast Guard, who mounted a massive recovery effort, combing an area of the Atlantic Ocean larger than the state of Georgia before calling off the search on Sept. 24. They found no signs of the missing boaters or their ill-fated vessel. It seemed the Carmans had vanished into the sea. And then a miracle happened—or so it appeared. On Sept. 25 a freight ship spotted a life raft carrying a survivor more than 100 miles from the last known location of the Carmans’ fishing boat. Nathan was pulled aboard the ship, alive and in good health. He said he had survived alone at sea on emergency rations and desalinated water. But where was his mother? 

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Now a new Netflix documentary, The Carman Family Deaths, revisits Nathan’s remarkable rescue, as well as his troubled upbringing in a wealthy Greek American family and his possible role in the sinister deaths of the two people closest to him: Linda, 54, whose body was never recovered from the ocean, and her father, John Chakalos, 87, a real estate developer with a $42 million fortune who was shot to death in his bed in 2013 (see sidebar). As Linda’s sister Charlene Gallagher says in the film, “This whole situation is just one big Greek tragedy.”

The only child of Linda and Clark Carman, Nathan was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in childhood and, as a teen, lived alone in a camper parked outside his mother’s home after his parents’ divorce. His grandfather doted on him from the day he was born, eventually buying him a truck and paying his college tuition and rent for his first apartment, a family member who asked to remain anonymous tells PEOPLE. Yet authorities quickly considered Nathan a suspect after Chakalos was found dead in bed from gunshot wounds to his head shortly after he had shared a meal with his grandson on Dec. 20, 2013. Police learned that Nathan had discarded the GPS device in his truck and disposed of a hard drive. He also told police that he had “lost” a recently purchased semiautomatic rifle that used the same type of bullets fired at Chakalos. But police lacked enough evidence to bring charges.

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Nathan apparently used some of his inheritance from his grandfather to buy the boat he piloted on the disastrous trip with his mother in 2016. Although the vessel was equipped with a radio, he admitted to authorities that he never sent a distress signal. Once in the life raft, he added, he never thought to use his flares to signal for help. Based on that and other evidence gathered by investigators, several relatives grew convinced that Nathan staged the boating accident. In May 2022 he pleaded not guilty to Linda’s murder, but the case never went to trial: On June 15, 2023, Nathan died by suicide in his jail cell. Says the family member: “It hurts my heart that neither Nathan’s mother or grandfather ever got justice.”