Officials: Nathan Carman believed to have died by suicide while awaiting trial for mother’s death

Nathan Carman, accused of killing his mother while on a fishing trip in order to increase his share of the family fortune, is believed to have died by suicide while awaiting trial last week in a New Hampshire jail, officials said.

A spokesman for the New Hampshire Department of Justice would only say Monday that the “death is not suspicious,” but others said the cause is believed to have been death by suicide.

A guard at the Cheshire County jail located in Keene, N.H. discovered Carman, 29, in his single cell while making rounds early Thursday. Detectives for the Keene Police Department are investigating, according to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office.

Nathan Carman dies awaiting trial for his mother’s death in 2016 fishing trip off New England

There was no suicide note, according to Carman’s two Connecticut lawyers, Martin Minella and David Sullivan, both of whom said they are still struggling to accept reports from New Hampshire authorities of death by suicide. They said they spoke or visited with Carman on an almost daily basis and that he was invariably upbeat and confident he would prevail at trial, which had been scheduled for October.

“I had spoken to him earlier that evening for 57 minutes and quite frankly it was a very positive and proactive call in respect to what we were doing in preparation for our defense,” Sullivan said. “I truly am stunned by the news that he had been found unresponsive.”

“I am puzzled by it,” he said. “I have gone through my notes of our conversation that evening many times – of what we were doing and what we had planned the very next day. I had no inkling whatsoever.”

The two lawyers said Carman was in possession of numerous notes, but they were notes he made in connection with their conversations about his defense.

The New Hampshire Department of Justice said it classified the death as not suspicious in part based on an autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office. Minella and Sullivan said they have been told that a toxicology report, part of the autopsy, will not be complete for as long as three months.

Carman, who grew up in Connecticut before moving to Vermont, was accused of killing his mother and with seven additional counts of fraud in what federal prosecutors in Vermont, where he was charged, described as a cold-blooded scheme to increase his share of the family fortune built by his grandfather, Connecticut nursing home developer John Chakalos.

The prosecutors accused Carman of killing Chakalos as well as his mother, but never formally charged him. Chakalos was shot as he slept in his Windsor home in 2013.

Even though Carman was never charged with his grandfather’s death, that crime is at the center of the indictment that was pending against Carman in Vermont, accusing him of murder and a succession of frauds in an effort to expand his share of a multi-million dollar trust established by his grandfather.

Minella said he has arranged a funeral service for Carman in Waterbury later after learning that no one in his family has offered to collect his body from the New Hampshire medical examiner’s office. Arrangements were not complete Monday.

Carman became front page news in September 2016 after the commercial freighter Orient Lucky rescued him from the waters far south of Rhode Island, where he had been drifting for a week in an inflatable raft. The rescue ended an exhaustive search by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Days earlier, Carman had arranged to take his mother fishing beyond Block Island on a boat he owned and called Chicken Pox.

“He also planned how he would report the sinking of the Chicken Pox and his mother’s disappearance at sea as accidents,” the indictment charges.

Carman and his mother left from Ram Point Marina in South Kingstown, Rhone Island at approximately 11:13 p.m. on Sept. 17, 2016 and Linda Carman believed that she would be returning home by noon the next day, according to a float plan she left with friends.

Before departing the marina, the indictment said Carman sabotaged the boat, guaranteeing that it would sink. He was accused of removing two bulkheads and the trim tabs from the stern, which left holes beneath the waterline.

Upon his grandfather’s death,  Carman received about $550,000, $150,000 from a college fund account and another $400,000 from an account that named he and his mother Linda Carman as beneficiaries. Carman moved to Vermont and spent most of his money and by 2016, was low on funds, according to the indictment.

Prosecutors say the inheritance scheme spanned nearly a decade and began with Carman buying a rifle in New Hampshire that he used to shoot Chakalos while he slept in his Windsor home on Dec. 20, 2013. Carman then discarded his own computer hard drive and the GPS unit that had been in his truck, prosecutors said.

Chakalos’s three surviving daughters sued Carman in New Hampshire probate court, seeking to bar him from receiving any money from their father’s estate. A judge dismissed the case in 2019, saying Chakalos was not a New Hampshire resident. The probate case was refiled in Connecticut and is still pending.

Carman’s three aunts, his late mother’s sisters, said in a statement Thursday that they are “deeply saddened” by news of his death.

In 2014, Windsor police drafted an arrest warrant charging Carman with murder in his grandfather’s death, but a state prosecutor declined to sign it and requested more information. No criminal charges were brought against Carman until the Vermont indictment.