When Linda Carman accepted an offer from her 22-year-old son to set out on what she believed would be a pleasant mom-and-son fishing trip in September 2016, she couldn’t have known how it would all go horrifically wrong. The vessel sank and Linda disappeared at sea, leaving her son, Nathan, to float adrift on a life raft for eight days before he was rescued, professing that he was grief-stricken and had nothing to do with the tragic accident.

Federal authorities believed otherwise. And on Tuesday, six years later, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Vermont announced that Nathan Carman, now 28, had been arrested and charged with his mother’s sordid murder, as well as “related frauds to obtain family and insurance funds.”

An unsealed indictment, first delivered by grand jury on May 2, also accused Carman of fatally shooting his sleeping grandfather, a man named John Chakalos, in 2013. The two alleged murders “were part of a scheme to obtain money and property from the estate of John Chakalos and related family trusts,” prosecutors said.

Chakalos was a rich man, having made “tens of millions of dollars” in real estate development, according to the filing. To distribute his wealth to his four daughters, including Linda, after his death, the mogul had set up the Chakalos Family Dynasty Trust, along with a number of other trusts. Beginning in 2012, the indictment reads, Nathan began spending “significant time” with Chakalos, attending business meetings alongside his grandfather and peppering his financial advisors with “detailed questions” about the trust.

Eventually, the filing claims, Chakalos convinced Linda to appoint her son as the beneficiary of her share of the Dynasty pot. Nathan, who graduated from high school in 2012, enrolled in community college but was struggling to complete most of his classes. Both his apartment and his truck had been paid for by his grandfather.

Then, five days before Christmas 2013, Nathan allegedly walked into Chakalos’ Connecticut home with a rifle in the dead of night and shot his 87-year-old grandfather twice, the indictment says. He then allegedly threw away his computer’s hard drive and his truck’s GPS system. He was named a person of interest in the case, but denied to investigators that he had any involvement in Chakalos’ murder.

(editor：)