New York Times bestselling author Casey Sherman joins Zibby to discuss BLOOD IN THE WATER, a gripping, cinematic, jaw-dropping crime tale of greed, wealth, suspicion, and revenge, perfect for anyone who was fascinated by the Murdaugh murders. Casey delves into the twisted, real-life story of Nathan Carman, a man accused of murdering his mother and grandfather for a $50 million inheritance. He unravels the shocking layers of the years-long investigation, including a mysterious disappearance at sea and a wealthy family with secrets. They also explore the emotional heart of true crime storytelling, Casey’s personal connection to violence through the Boston Strangler case, and his upcoming Hollywood adaptations.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Casey. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about Blood In The Water.

Oh my gosh, so good. Wow. What a story. Congratulations. 

Casey: I'm very excited to be here, Zibby. Thank you for having me. 

Zibby: Okay. I'm obsessed with this family now. I like can't get enough of Casey and the grandfather with the sex toys and his mistress and the mom and their special needs and oh my gosh, there's so many pieces of the story and it is like completely immersive.

And of course you write in such a compelling way that it's impossible to put down, tell everybody about this true crime, which of course is your genre that you have mastered this story and what happened? 

Casey: Sure. I think on a high level, the story is about wealth, greed and murder. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Casey: And this is a story that takes place over probably a span of about 10 years.

I learned about it in 2016 when the young man at the center of the story, Nathan Carmen, took his mother out on a deep sea fishing trip off the coast of Rhode Island. And after a couple of days at sea. He just disappears and he ends up a castaway on a life raft for what he claims to be seven days.

And when he's rescued by a passing cargo ship, they realized that his mother is not with him. When it was first announced, Zibby had made headlines around not only the country, but around the world, and it was considered almost the bittersweet story because it was a miraculous rescue of this young man at sea.

But his mother is still missing. And they basically treated Nathan, Carmen like the Tom Hanks character on Castaway for a few days. And then they bring him back to the Coast Guard station in Boston. And the, in the investigators there begin to peel away. The layers of his story and what he's telling investigators doesn't add up to them because they've spent the last several days scouring 58,000 square miles looking for any sign of Nathan and his mother, and they couldn't find any.

So they ultimately didn't believe that he had lost his the way he said he did. And they believed that he had murdered his mother on the high seas. 

Zibby: Not to mention that when he showed up, it did not look like he had been on the seas for seven days, that he wasn't parched, and he looked basically like he had just gone out a couple hours prior.

Casey: Which is such an an odd thing, and that was something that the medical doctor on the ship picked up right away. He wasn't hypothermic, he wasn't dehydrated. He managed to get up onto the deck of this major freighter fine without really any assistance. So if you're on the ocean for seven days or even two days, you lose muscle control.

You are hypo hypothermic, certainly, and dehydrated. He showed no signs of that when they plucked him out of the ocean. And when they get him to Coast Guard Station in Boston, not only are they discounting his story, but then they uncover the idea that he's also the prime suspect in his grandfather's shotgun murder three years prior, all allegedly to gain control of a $50 million family fortune. 

Zibby: Wow. And then you tell us all about that murder and how basically like his grandfather's head was half shot off and that it looked like there were two both, two shots to the head and one to the stomach, and it looked like it was from the foot of the bed and right.

Nathan had been with his grandfather before and then he had left to talk to his girlfriend or whatever, and then his aunt at the funeral was like, no, this must have been Nathan. And anyway, when did, how did this all happen? And why was he let go? It said the search warrant was issued, but then it was not, there wasn't enough evidence or something, so they couldn't bring him in there. 

Casey: Not enough evidence. No. They couldn't arrest him, so we have to go all the way back to 2013 when the grandfather, John Chakalos was murdered in his bed. Now John was a multimillion dollar real estate developer in New England.

He was at that time, 87 years old, and he was the, proud patriarch of a large Greek American family. And it's very Shakespearean the way that this whole story unfolds because on one side he is this benevolent person that does a lot for his community, but he's also got a dark side. He all of his four daughters are always vying for his loyalty and, and he's paying for his, their loyalty in many respects because he is doling out allowances to them without allowing them to, really get jobs on their own for the most part.

But within this large family, there's this multimillion dollar business and John Cho at 87 years old, is now grooming young Nathan Carmen. Who is on the autism spectrum. He is a fledgling college student, but the grandfather wants Nathan to be his heir parent and run the family company because he is dotting on his first born male grandchild.

And I think there are people around John Chakalos and even people within family that didn't want that to happen. 

Zibby: Wow. It's so fascinating. And then how everything gets linked up later and all the suspicion and then that he died in prison. This whole thing like just keeps.. 

Casey: Which the mysteries continue to unravel.

The interesting thing about this story is when I first took it on, I've read all the newspaper reports about it, the magazine profiles, and I thought there was a clear direction. Between the allegations against Nathan, Carmen and his guilt in both crimes. And when I had to gum shoot this case.

And by that meaning really putting on my investigative reporter hat and interviewing well over 30 witnesses, the case became much more complex and more potential suspects began to emerge here beyond Nathan Carmen. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. We won't give anything away, but so interesting.

And there's so much attention ran, not randomly, maybe the time it takes to investigate, but now there's a Netflix documentary in the works about this. There's another book from one of his prosecutors coming out. This is, yeah, ..

Casey: The prosecutor is writing kind of a self-published book, which will come out in a couple years.

Netflix is doing their thing. I'm developing a feature based on blood in the water with Leo Leo DiCaprio's company, Appian Way. So we're in the process of, telling this story hopefully on the big screen as well. So there's a lot of attention surrounding this story. I think it's the Netflix case in my book that have really, triggered a lot of renewed interest in the story because Nathan dad, a couple years ago.

In his jail cell, and it's a very mysterious death. The jail officials claim that it was suicide members of his family and his legal team certainly don't think that was the case. Initially, there was rumor that a suicide note was left behind, but there wasn't. It was actually a note or that Nathan had written to his legal team.

Nathan was incredibly active in his defense and now writing this book. I will say that. I'm not sure that prosecutors would've won a conviction against Nathan, Carmen. There's too much other circumstantial evidence surrounding this, that point to other directions, and I think the defense would've had a field day with the prosecution.

Therefore, there was no real reason for Nathan to kill himself behind bars. 

Zibby: Wow. This is amazing. It will be an incredible movie, but it's. Already an incredible book. It's like, why do we have to just,.. 

Casey: It's the talented Mr. Ripley meets the Murdoch case, that's really, yes. Nathan is such an enigma, on one side he's incredibly volatile.

He's got a very difficult relationship with his mother. And then on this other side of him, he is also, kind and, certainly a loner because of, he is struggling with this disorder. And Nathan certainly felt that because he was on the autism spectrum disorder, that police immediately put a target on his back and didn't look at any other potential suspects. And I think to a degree, you know that's true. When you go back to his grandfather's murder in 2013, the murder allegedly happened around two o'clock in the morning. And that's when his next door neighbor heard a loud bang coming from the home. Therefore a gunshot must have happened.

And then there was the sound of a squeal of tires leaving the neighborhood. And they lived in a very safe neighborhood, a cul-de-sac in Connecticut. Things like that usually don't happen. But at the same time, Nathan is in his apartment several miles away, surveillance cameras at his apartment complex, pick him up, only leaving the apartment at 2:57 AM that morning and almost an hour after his grandfather was shut.

Down. And they also pick him up later at a convenience store getting ice cream. Nathan has got somewhat of an alibi where he can be tracked on surveillance video, but in why investigators focused on him, Zi, is that there was a missing rifle. A sig sour that they believed was used to shoot John Chakalos, the grandfather three times, like you said, the first time went through his torso up to his chest area that would've killed him.

And then the two other shots I think were either done out of mercy or done out of pure hate right to the skull. 

Zibby: But also, didn't you say that he had changed his laptop and phone. So you couldn't track him before, or was that for 

Casey: No, that's, you're absolutely right. So he not only changed, he got rid of his laptop.

He also took his he turned his phone off later that morning when Nathan allegedly was supposed to meet his mother to rendezvous for a fishing trip. Investigators could not track where he was during those critical hours. So there's a lot of question about why Nathan would do that. And every day I wake up and I wrote the book, and one day I'm gonna wake, I wake up and I think this guy is a criminal mastermind. He murdered his grandfather. He murdered his mother. Then the next day I wake up and I think. There's no way this kid could have pulled it off. His brain just didn't work that way. I think that this, what this book allows for are those parlor games, those great debates between readers. One side is gonna say he's guilty, the other side is gonna say he's innocent. And maybe the truth is somewhere there in the middle. 

Zibby: Wow. So you have this ability to not only get all these interesting facts, but tell uncover stories and tell them in a new way that makes them feel like so propulsive.

And like you have to stop everything in your life to focus on these particular stories. And when I first met you in person at the bookstore, you were talking about a colder case of a Hollywood murder. 

Casey: Sure. 

Zibby: Which now has by the way, it's like everywhere. And I'm like, that's like from the bookstore, that's the same talk.

Like I hear about it all the time and I hadn't. Why don't you talk about that and then how you've had so much success adapting all of your stories to from Patriots Day to like, there's just so many and now you have a play in the works. Talk about the adaptations and also the Hollywood murder and how you find all these stories.

That was like a hundred questions, but yeah. 

Casey: No, but I, I can go way back a little bit because, I call myself the accidental author z I never believed I'd be writing books one day, but that is until I was thrust in the spotlight because of my work on one case, one of the biggest cases in the history of American crime, the case of the Boston Strangler.

Now, for those of you in your audience that don't know. My aunt, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, was the youngest and final victim of that notorious 1960s murder spree. So I, the questions around that case led me to journalism school in the late 1980s and led me to really where I am today, always looking to uncover something new about a story that really either has been overlooked or not even touched. And you mentioned a murder in Hollywood, which is how we met a year ago at your wonderful bookstore. This is a story from 1958 involving a Hollywood superstar named Lana Turner. And Lana Turner was basically Marilyn Monroe before Marilyn. She was the icon of the silver screen in the 1940s and early 1950s.

And in 1958, she's dating someone who turns out to be a really bad guy. A gangster named Johnny Stompenato, and Johnny is very violent. Johnny beats her regularly Now, Lana, in 1958, can't go to the police. There's no, no such thing as a restraining order at that time. Zibby. So Lana just takes the beatings hoping that Johnny will one day go away, but Johnny doesn't.

Instead he really. He leans in on the violence and one day Johnny makes a mistake and says, Lana, if you ever leave me, I'm going to kill you and I'm going to kill your 14-year-old daughter too. Now, her 14-year-old daughter is Cheryl Crane and she becomes very involved in the story. So I think, we're parents, right?

So I think Lana had the epiphany that, that moment, what do I do to protect my child, not to protect me, but to protect her at all costs. A few weeks go by, Lana rents a beautiful mansion at north Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. The first thing she buys is a set of cutlery. Which I always thought was odd because Lana didn't even know where her kitchen was.

She didn't cook. She always ordered out or had somebody. 

Zibby: No judgment. No judgment. 

Casey: No judgment. 

Zibby: It's all good. 

Casey: I'm the same way, but I think, Lana needed a weapon because Johnny was gonna get violent again, and certainly Johnny did. And Johnny ends up dead. In the bedroom of her Beverly Hills mansion and in the public's mind and what history will claim is that Lana's 14-year-old daughter Cheryl, heard the violence, heard the fight, grabbed a knife and broke up the fight between her mother and Johnny, and stabbed Johnny in the stomach.

And that's what history would lead you to believe. But my story's a little different. I put the knife in Lana's hands and I do so not to make her a villain. To me she's a feminist icon. She's somebody who had to survive the studio system, somebody who had to survive multiple abusive relationships until she had to take, action for herself.

And that's what she did. It's interesting I show people all the crime scene photos of the murder scene and they're all out available on the internet and Johnny is left on a white carpet in the bedroom and he is almost, he looks like a Hollywood prop. And there is one thing that's curious.

There's no blood. No blood anywhere in the bedroom because all of the blood had been cleaned up before police arrived and Johnny was basically murdered on a bed. They took all the bedsheets, they put them, sent them out and they burned them. I've investigated 200 homicides in my career.

Gut injuries, especially a knife wound. Those are very bloody crimes and no one questioned it. 

Zibby: What is it about the crimes that is so compelling to you and does it not turn your stomach having to like all the gory details and all of that? 

Casey: Sometimes it does, but I try to find humanity in these stories.

Because again, my family has experienced deadly violence and I think, I come, my approach is empathy. Toward the victims. I want to give them agency and a voice. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called Hell Town. And it's about Kurt Vonnegut Norman Mailer, these two literary icons investigating a real serial murder case in Provincetown in the 1960s.

And that was a case Zibby where I had to step away from my computer several times during that journey because I was constantly researching and staring at the autopsy photos and the crime scene photos, and they were the worst I've ever seen. Oh, this looked like something that Jack the River had done in the 1880s in London, but it was actually a serial killer Provincetown, during the age of Aquarius.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. How do you feel. Like walking down the street and living in the world. When you have, when you spend so much time investigating the darkest moments. 

Casey: My head's always on a swivel, I'm always prepared for the worst. I've come face to face with, gangsters, murderers, and, you have to have a thick skin over time, but, you're still in the presence of these very dark and evil people.

So it takes a lot to get used to. I don't think you ever get used to it. You just do the best you can to write the best story you can and not necessarily glorify the killers in these stories. A lot is a different case, but I don't, I want to deconstruct, these serial killers because there's so much attention and fascination and celebrity, regarding these serial killers, and I know what killers do.

The families, my aunt was murdered in 1964. That loss is still felt within my family in 2025. So the ripple effects that these crimes take over generations is profound. 

Zibby: My gosh, I'm so sorry that happened to your family. 

Casey: I appreciate that. 

Zibby: Can you tell us any more about that? 

Casey: Sure. My aunt was a 19-year-old girl who had just moved up to Boston in the winter of 1964, and she moved into an apartment on Beacon Hill, which is if anybody's been to Boston, the cobblestone streets, it's every post garden in Boston is basically from that neighborhood, very safe. But on January 4th, 1964. My aunt was murdered. She was strangled with three ligatures, two scarves, and a nylon stalking wrapped very tightly around her neck. She had also been sexually assaulted Zibby with a broomstick.

Oh because the crime had happened just after New Year's. The killer showed he had a carb sense of humor. He left a Happy New Year card placed by her left foot. And growing up in an Irish Catholic household, Zibby, things like that weren't talked about. So I was a young child. I wasn't even born when my aunt was killed, but I knew the hole that she had left in my family.

And I had heard whispers about the Boston Strangler and my Aunt Mary Sullivan for years until I was a teenager. And I saw the film, the Boston Strangler, an old movie starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. And I thought, okay, now I know what happened to my aunt. So I broached the subject to my mother, Diane the next day.

My mother was 17 when her best friend and sister was taken from her. And I said, mom tell me about Mary. And she said, Casey Mary just wasn't my sister, Mary was my best friend, and my mother was getting emotional. Kind of for the first time because she'd been very protective of her children and not, the perennial victim, if you will.

But I could see that she was getting a little emotional and I hugged her like any child would, and I said, mommy, at least they got the guy. And she looked up at me, Zibby, and she said, I don't think they ever did. And it wasn't, she had no facts to base her beliefs on. It was merely a sister's intuition.

It was a bond between two sisters that couldn't be broken. That bond led me to journalism school to investigate this case and where I'm today. And what I found out, unfortunately, which was a much darker story than the public had been led to believe that wasn't just one Boston Strangler. There were several men committing these crimes under the guise of this Jack the Ripper type character, resurrected to stalk the women of Boston. 

Zibby: Gosh, how terrible. I'm so sorry. That is just horrific. So horrific. 

Casey: It's horrific. And, just to show you how close you get in these cases, I had to have my aunt's remains exhumed for DNA testing and I also had the remains of the killer Albert de Salvo exhumed.

So I've actually held his skull in my hand. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Casey: And you know what I was thinking? Am I holding the skull of one of the most notorious killers in American history or am I holding the skull of someone who was a conman, a predator, and a thief, and who confessed to these crimes in an effort to make money?

Which is what I think he did. 

Zibby: Really? 

Casey: Yeah. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So you don't think that the, that he was her murderer, and that is, is, do you think your aunt's murder is still at large, or he was a,.. 

Casey: My aunt's murderer died a couple of years ago, but not before I confronted him. 

Zibby: Really? 

Casey: Yes, I had to, I felt I owed him, his story.

And he was a 19-year-old kid at the time, dating one of my aunt's roommates, and he was looking to find some type of evidence that she was cheating on him. She was, they're 19-year-old kids, so he stole the apartment key from his girlfriend's key chain the night before slips into 44 H Charles Street.

Doesn't realize that Mary Sullivan, my aunt, is moving in her belongings that day. So she catches him, confronts him. Now Mary was a tough Irish kid from a tough Irish family. She could give as good as she got, but he was bigger than her and he was stronger than her, and he killed her. And then he made it look like Boston Strangler murder out outcomes.

The broomstick outcomes, the Happy New Year card. Police were smarter. They knew right away he was the prime suspect. They gave him three lie detector tests, which he failed. A witness was able to put him at the scene of the crime looking through the window of my aunt's apartment that morning. But once the police went with Albert Desal with strangler, because he wouldn't just confess to one murder, Zibby had confessed to all of them, and they never charged him with any of the murders.

These murders are still open according to Boston Police, but in the public's mind, the case was solved and this prime suspect disappeared until I found him. 40 years later, and he was working at this as a golf pro at a resort in Northern New Hampshire. So what did I do? I booked a golf lesson under an assumed name, and that's how we met at the golf course.

And you can imagine it was like the ghost of Christmas past coming back to haunt him so many years afterwards. And at first he said he wouldn't talk. Then Zibby, all he could do was talk and he began to stutter. He had a pronounced stutter, which I thought was revealing because two months after my aunt was murdered, her roommate got a call from a drunken young man who said he had a pronounced stutter, and he said, I'm going to do to you what I did to that Mary bitch, and here's that stutter coming back 40 years later.

Ultimately I was able to prove that this suspect's, alibi was a complete lie, brought this to the attorney's general in Massachusetts and all the police departments, and nobody would touch it because. Yeah and one of the reasons I think that is the case is because so many people within the Boston Police Department made their careers off saying that they caught the Boston Strangler.

When I was heavy, in this case, Zibby, I used to get calls at home saying, will you know what route you take to work every day? Stay away from this case. I didn't think those calls were coming from killers. I thought they were coming from somebody within law enforcement who wanted to keep a lid on this case after 40 years.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Wait, is this a book? Did you write this? 

Casey: This is a book, it was my first book. It's called Search for the Strangler, and it's it's still in print. I wrote it 20 years ago, but people can find it at their local library. They can find it. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

Casey: Online. 

Zibby: Wow. I did not know that story.

Good for you for finding him. And I'm sorry. 

Casey: I appreciate that. Thank you. 

Zibby: Wow. But did you not wanna be like a detective? I feel like, did you ever occur to you? 

Casey: I am in many ways, law enforcement does its thing. I do mine, sometimes we collaborate, I always tread over.

Some of the work that they did, whether it's really great work and a lot of it is, or whether it's, sloppy work and a lot, police officers are like any other industry. You got your great cops and detectives, and you got your terrible cops and detectives and ultimately some of the the holes that I find in these cases are, based on sloppy detective work.

Zibby: Wow. All of this explains why your current book, Blood In The Water is as great as it is. There's all this background and experience and they just keep getting better. It's just amazing. Wow, you're like a, this like quiet resource at large. 

Casey: Yeah, certainly. I'm always consulted, people will call me whether they're families looking for justice for their, loved ones or investigators looking for me to review something that may, they may have missed.

I'm working on my 20th book right now, which is a story about Frank Lloyd Wright, the oh world famous architect. Frank was involved with a mass murder. In 1914, which changed the trajectory of his career and how he designed his buildings. It's a horrific crime, and I'm knee deep in the research right now.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. I can't wait to read that. Wow. Okay. Casey, thank you so much. Thank you for all the work that you do, and essentially a public servant who knows how to write. So it's pretty awesome and thank you for these stories and for trying to get to the truth, which is really all that we have. So thank you.

Casey: Amen. To that. Zibby. Thank you for having me on. This has been a great conversation. 

Zibby: Thank you. Bye. Good luck. 

Casey: Thank you.