Fisherman
Appearances
20/20
Family Lies?
Nathan and his mother, they'd taken a boating course. They had some fundamental knowledge, but they stuck pretty close to land and were fishing for stripers and blues.
20/20
Family Lies?
Nathan has excellent line of sight on her the whole time, and yet he says he never saw her afterwards.
20/20
Family Lies?
The initial videos showing this guy walking up the gangway of the ship without any great problem, he seemed to be just fine.
20/20
Family Lies?
He gets really defensive if people pry a little bit too much. And the way that he shut her off on so many questions and wouldn't cooperate, he was shooting himself in the foot on national TV.
20/20
Family Lies?
You know, I spent a lot of time with Nathan. I think he was cold, calculating, and had this whole story planned out to explain the disappearance of his mother and the sinking of the vessel.
20/20
Family Lies?
It happened very promptly, and that indicated to me that this guy's really serious.
20/20
Family Lies?
We filed our suit to deny insurance coverage. We were in for a fight. We came away with the distinct impression that almost everything he said to us was a lie. There were holes in every aspect of his story.
20/20
Family Lies?
There were pictures of Nathan that were on the front page of newspapers all over the world because everybody thought that this was a wild story.
20/20
Family Lies?
It wouldn't work. My theory is that he was trying to make it look like he was deliberately altering the boat in a dangerous fashion.
20/20
Family Lies?
He's very calculating. He wanted people to be able to point to, oh, no wonder the boat sank.
20/20
Family Lies?
No, and he had ample opportunity because each of the times that he went into the wheelhouse to carry gear forward, he was within arm's length of the microphone for his VHF radio, a good one.
20/20
Family Lies?
Yeah, right here. A microphone within arm's reach. And he came in here three times to get survival gear and bring it up to the bow. So he was within arm's length three times he could have picked it up.
20/20
Family Lies?
I got an oceanographer to assess whether it was possible for him to drift in a life raft to where the Orient Lucky picked him up seven days later. And was it? Absolutely impossible. Physically impossible. I looked at drifting buoys.
20/20
Family Lies?
The newspapers reported it as a tremendous win for Nathan. I wasn't too troubled by it.
20/20
Family Lies?
The judge asked him, what's going on with your mother during all this time? And Nathan's peculiar answer was, my mother was part of the problem rather than the solution to a sinking boat.