Rescue at sea focuses attention on an unsolved 2013 killing
HARTFORD, Conn. — It was a crime that stunned a quiet suburb and stumped investigators: an 87-year-old real estate developer killed in his home, shot three times with a rifle.
Nearly three years later, the unsolved case has received new attention with the revelation the victim’s grandson Nathan Carman, who was rescued Sunday after a week in a raft on the Atlantic Ocean, had been a Nathan Carman spent a week at sea on a life raft. suspect in the killing.
Carman’s mother, Linda Carman, was not found with him and is presumed to have drowned after their boat sank during a fishing trip that is under investigation by federal, state and local authorities.
Nathan Carman, of Vernon, Vt., has denied having anything to do with his grandfather’s 2013 slaying. His father also said Nathan Carman could not have been involved, and his mother had told her lawyer that he was innocent.
“She was convinced he had nothing to do with it,” Linda Carman’s lawyer, Gerald Klein, said Thursday.
Police were so confident they had enough evidence against Nathan Carman, 22, that they applied for an arrest warrant charging him with the murder of John Chakalos at his home in Windsor, Conn.
But a prosecutor returned the warrant unsigned to investigators with a request for more information. No arrest has been made in the case.
A search warrant said that Carman was the last person known to have seen Chakalos alive, that Carman had bought a rifle consistent with the one used in the crime and that he discarded his computer hard drive and GPS unit used around the time of the shooting.
The warrant also said investigators learned Carman was “capable of violence” based on past behavior, including when he held another child hostage with a knife.
The state’s attorney in Hartford, Gail Hardy, did not respond to questions about why the request for an arrest warrant was sent back. The state Division of Criminal Justice said it doesn’t comment on pending investigations.
Chakalos left an estate worth over $42 million to his four adult daughters, including Linda Carman.
Nathan Carman denies involvement in his grandfather’s killing, saying Chakalos was the closest person in the world to him.
He said suspicions about his account of the sinking of his boat are compounding his grief over the apparent drowning of his mother.