‘Dead In The Water’ - Chatham Attorney’s Book Details Famous Maritime Case

There are many weird true crime stories in this world, but the story of Nathan Carman, a suspect in two different family murders with a muti-million inheritance at stake, has got to be one of the weirdest.

In 2013 Carman was the primary suspect in the fatal shooting of his grandfather. Three years later he was suspected of drowning his mother 100 miles south of Block Island during a fishing trip.

 Chatham author David J. Farrell Jr. explores Carman’s improbable story in his debut nonfiction book “Dead in the Water: The Real Story of Nathan Carman” (Post Hill Press, 2026).

For 40 years Farrell has worked as a maritime casualty lawyer. In 2016, representing an insurance company, he began a nearly decade-long investigation into Carman, a young man with a flat, blank stare who was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

 “Perhaps Nathan Carman was just manipulative, perhaps he was not on the spectrum at all, perhaps psychopath is the proper term,” Farrell writes.

Farrell was in a unique position to work on this case and write a book about it. 

“I’m lucky to have grown up in Chatham with an early love of boating and fishing as the foundation of my professional career and so grateful to have built an international admiralty law practice from the sandy elbow,” he said in a recent email interview.

So what compelled Farrell, who has handled many a strange maritime law case, to write an entire book about this particular case?

 “I’d never handled a double murder case, and this had a multi-million dollar bounty, no eyewitnesses, and a body missing at sea,” he says. “We were nevertheless able to piece together all the evidence into a narrative that’s stranger than fiction. And I wanted to set the record straight — as a warning to those who think they can get away with crime on the high seas.”

 Here’s the crux of Carman’s story: In 2016 Carman, 22, invited his mother Linda, 54, with whom he had a rocky relationship, to go fishing for striped bass in his 31-foot boat. Shortly before setting out on the ambitious deep-sea fishing trip, Carman made some changes to the boat including drilling holes in the transom that may or may not have led to the boat’s mysterious and sudden sinking.

The mother and son set out from Ram Point Marina in Wakefield on the southern coast of Rhode Island at about midnight on Sept. 17. Around sunrise they reached their destination, roughly 100 miles out to sea, Carman testified. A bit later, the boat abruptly sank, leaving Carman alone in an inflatable life raft gazing at a slick of oil on the surface of the water. Linda was nowhere to be seen. Despite a Coast Guard search of an area larger than the state of Georgia, it was a full seven days later that Carman was picked up 106 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard by the Orient Lucky, a Chinese freighter.

 Did Linda fall overboard? Did Carman push her overboard? Because there were no witnesses to Carman’s version of events, Linda’s death was suspicious. Particularly since in December 2013 Nathan, then 19, was the last one to see his grandfather, Linda’s father, who had made a fortune as a real estate developer and was found in bed, shot through the head.

 When Carman filed an $85,000 claim asking to be compensated for the loss of his boat, Farrell entered the story, representing an insurance company. Working with his law partner, Liam O’Connell, and their team, Farrell delved into Carman’s shaky story. At one point O’Connell even traveled to Sumatra to track down the Orient Lucky, the ship that plucked Carman from the water.

Also, analyses of how Carman’s life raft might have drifted, given ocean currents, suggested that Carman could not have floated to the spot where he was rescued. That begs the question: Where was Carman for seven days? Farrell provides some interesting theories.

 The story has received a lot of coverage, including a 2025 Netflix Documentary “The Carman Family Deaths” and a 2025 book by Casey Sherman called “Blood in the Water: The Untold Story of a Family Tragedy.” The two books, which have similar titles, are distinctly different. Sherman’s book is told from the perspective of a journalist while Farrell’s book offers insights from a lawyer investigating the case.

 Farrell says his book “discloses for the first time all the compelling admissible evidence we assembled.” He also includes the sworn testimony from Carman. “My goal was to show the reader how we got there as we investigated for facts, built a rock-solid case on both murders, and took Nathan to trial in federal court for marine insurance fraud.”

 It is not a spoiler to say that Carman lost that insurance fraud case in 2019. And that later, in 2022, he was charged with the murder of his mother. He died, an apparent suicide, while awaiting trial.

 Farrell will give a presentation on “Dead in the Water” on Tuesday, July 14 at 5:30 p.m. at the Eldredge Public Library in Chatham. The presentation will include actual video testimony from Carman.