BURLINGTON, Vt. — There was a moment, after the bailiff took off his handcuffs, that Nathan Carman stood in a courtroom here looking, oddly, like a fresh-out-of-med-school resident about to head to the operating room. .
His dark green jumpsuit looked like a surgical gown. The mask she wore, to protect against COVID, added to the effect.
But it is doubtful that Nathan Carman, 28, was able to finish medical school. His only attempt at college, a federal prosecutor said Tuesday, fell miserably short. She failed all classes.
In fact, Nathanael Burris, the prosecutor, suggested that it was those college grades, all Fs, that led Carman to murder his 87-year-old grandfather, John Chakalos, in 2013.
Chakalos, a self-made millionaire real estate developer, cared about education and had threatened to cut off his grandson financially if Carman did not succeed in school. Two days after Carman got the grades from him, his grandfather was shot to death at his home in Windsor, Connecticut, with the same type of rifle Carman had recently purchased, lying about the purchase and later claiming to have lost, Burris said.
A bad report card, the government would have you believe, set off what would become a spiraling web of family murders that is Shakespearean in its scope and pathos.
Three years after he allegedly killed his grandfather, a crime for which no one has been charged, Carman concocted an elaborate plan to drown his mother, Linda, who had cut him out of her will, Burris said. Carman made modifications to his boat so it would sink when he took his mother fishing in Rhode Island, and it would sink quickly, Burris said. Carman had two devices that sent out distress signals, but he was unable to activate one and left in the trunk of his car another designed to activate automatically when he dives.
Listening to the competing narratives during Carman’s detention hearing, I’d have to conclude that he’s either a scheming sociopath or just the unluckiest guy in the world.
Carman’s attorneys, Mary Nerino and Sara Puls, tried desperately to suggest that it was the latter, that the government had built a weak case against their client based on circumstantial evidence and breathless innuendo, that he was a victim of circumstance, persecuted. by the tragedy and too enthusiastic. prosecutors But as much as the defense tried, his task was like rescuing a boat with a spoon.
While trying to persuade Judge Geoffrey Crawford to hold Carman without bail pending trial, Burris painted Carman as an unemployed, rootless loner, cut off from his family, hiding in a sprawling house in Vernon, Vt. His aunts, who hold him responsible for the murder of their father and sister, are terrified that he will be released from prison, the prosecutor said.
Puls, the defense attorney, insisted that there was no point in Carman murdering the two closest relatives to him. He said that he was self-employed, not unemployed, selling construction material. He goes to Bible study, he added. She said that he was introverted, but extremely polite. And she disputed the government’s claim that she has no remaining family ties, pointing to a letter Carman’s father wrote supporting his release.
In rebuttal, Burris scoffed at Carman’s father vouching for him and said the two have had little contact recently.
“He has no idea who his son is,” Burris said.
But the government insists that it is. The government is convinced that Nathan Carman is a ruthless and soulless young man who, seeking not fame but the fortune that his grandfather bequeathed to his mother and his sisters, was willing to kill the woman who gave him birth. life.
The evidence is mostly circumstantial, Judge Crawford acknowledged, but he also characterized it as strong and significant.
After the judge ordered him held without bail, Nathan Carman provided substance to his attorney’s claim that he is an extremely educated young man. Without being asked, he stood up and put his arms behind his back so the bailiff could put the handcuffs back on him.
Kevin Cullen is a columnist for the Globe. He can be reached at [email protected].