Evan Lubofsky, producer and consultant on Netflix’s murder mystery documentary “The Carman Family Deaths,” spoke to Suffolk University April 9 about the process of finding the cracks in a story, trusting your intuition and bringing a story to fruition.
Lubofsky is the editor of Oceanus Magazine, a Falmouth-based publication that details the research and researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. His work has been published in prestigious publications, including Wired, The Verge, The Smithsonian and Hakai Magazine, with his acclaimed, long-form Wired magazine story turned Netflix documentary titled “His son is rescued at sea, but what happened to his mother?” catapulting him into the world of murder investigation and documentary.
With ample experience researching oceanography, Lubofsky could not ignore the Carman family case. In 2016, 22-year-old Nathan Carman was found floating adrift at sea for eight days. He had gone on a boating trip with his mother, Linda Carman, off the coast of Rhode Island and was found alone, his mother nowhere to be found.
“The media started calling the rescue a miracle right off the bat,” said Lubofsky. “But then, investigators started looking into this guy and found some interesting things, not the least of which were questions about his wealthy grandfather’s murder three years prior.”
Many signs pointed to Carman being the prime suspect in both his grandfather’s and his mother’s deaths. Lubofsky had three main questions that gripped him about the case. Was Carman a cold-blooded killer? Was he just an innocent victim being framed? Or was he just a misunderstood young man on the autism spectrum?
When he started to look deeper into the case, he uncovered that Carman’s story of the boat sinking, the mom suddenly vanishing and drifting 45 nautical miles in the ocean solely on a raft was interesting because the Orient Lucky, a freighter ship that intercepted him, saw him in the ocean standing on his raft, his hands waving to be rescued.
Lubofsky was acutely aware of the problem that there are a number of offshore surface moorings, large instruments that record wind and weather used by scientists for climate studies. According to Carman’s story, he would have passed right by these buoys, which are recording current and weather data 24/7. They would have picked up Carman’s presence.
“I looked into that weather data and talked to some oceanographer colleagues of mine on the Cape, and discovered that there’s pretty much no way a non-motorized raft could have drifted this way because all of the currents were blowing westerly. So, in fact, he would have ended up towards New York. But he was rescued south of Martha’s Vineyard. So how did he get there, was the question,” said Lubofsky.
This science and technology backing was the green light Lubofsky needed to take heed of the story. Shortly after his discovery, he pitched the story to Wired Magazine as a long-form narrative piece. With interesting characters, technology and a murder mystery in real time, Wired was all about it.
The project was greenlighted by Wired and it took Lubofsky about a year to write, finally being published in July 2021. The day after its publication, he got a call from Wired Studios asking to talk about a movie adaptation.
After many discussions, Loki Films, a woman-owned, New York-based documentary company, joined the project. Now, it was just a matter of pitching to all of the streaming networks. In the end, Netflix won the bidding war, kicking off a second phase of the story.
“We started film planning. We worked in New York City and I was a consulting producer on the project, so it was an at-will position, when I wanted to be involved or how I wanted to be involved, which was really cool,” said Lubofsky.
The documentary seemed to be coming along swimmingly — interviews with lawyers, family members, ocean experts and authorities. They planned to make the documentary based on this big criminal trial of Carman’s for the murder of his mother and grandfather in Burlington, Vermont, October 2023. That is, until there was a big twist.
Nathan Carman, awaiting his trial, was found dead in New Hampshire.
The implications of Carman’s death caused a restructure of the project. Lubofsky didn’t know if Netflix would understandably want to pull out or continue with the documentary, but ultimately, Netflix decided to go through with it.
In the first few weeks of the documentary’s release, Netflix reported 20 million viewers.
Lubofsky shared with Suffolk students numerous nuances throughout the filming, researching and production that helped build the case around Nathan Carman.
Interestingly, Carman attempted to issue an insurance claim for $85,000 after the sinking of his boat. If an insurance company does not find it fitting to pay, they will conduct their own investigation into the matter. The lawyer who ended up dealing with the insurance claim for Berkshire Hathaway was very suspicious of Nathan Carman to begin with, after seeing the story on the six o’clock news, so when Carman’s claim fell on his desk, he treated it like a murder case, rather than any old insurance case.
“Had Nathan not filed the insurance claim, no one would have probably paid attention. It would have just been this kid, who survived this amazing ocean thing,” said Lubofsky.
The research process for Lubofsky, dating back years ago, as he wrote his long-form narrative for Wired, included many interviews and consultations with experts. One of whom was a doctor at Mass General Hospital.
“I remember talking to him for a while and he was just like, ‘There’s no possible way that someone can be in a raft for seven days in those temperatures,’” said Lubofsky. “He had said in his testimony that he was wet for a lot of it. It would have been a couple of days before he was hypothermic and died. Humans are known to go on these crazy journeys and survive all of these crazy things at sea and experience adrenaline, but it was very unlikely that his story would hold up from just a health standpoint and it certainly didn’t hold up from the oceanography standpoint.”
The main oceanographer on the story, Richard Limeburner, is credited with helping find Air France 447, a huge ocean mystery, including SS Portland.
Carman was even found sending inquiries to estate lawyers asking what would happen with the family’s fortune and assets if both his grandfather and mother were to die. For Lubofsky, he was “constantly fascinated” by the research process.
Carman’s story was off by about 90 nautical miles. He was the oldest son and grandson and the heir to millions of dollars from a wealthy New England family. What started as a tragic boating accident evolved into a complex, freelance passion project for Lubofsky, a Netflix documentary and an unsolved murder mystery. In an aside project from his day job, Lubofsky started the Carman family murders with profound journalistic excellence.
