The mystery surrounding the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells, who disappeared and was ultimately found dead after a Fourth of July boat trip with friends, continues to make national news as details about the day and those he was with slowly emerge.
The teen was last seen alive on July 4 on Horn Island, an island 10 miles off the coast of Mississippi that is only accessible by boat. He had gone with a group of friends he knew from high school for a Fourth of July party. They arrived on the island around 11am, and Wells’ friends say they last saw him around 3pm.
Travel Concerns
The group traveled aboard three separate boats and friends have said Wells decided to stay on the island when the boat he arrived on left early because it was taking on water. It has been suggested that Wells stayed behind to talk to a girl he was interested in, and the others assumed he would get a ride back on another boat.
But Wells never made it back to the mainland. A massive search began on July 4, and, two days later, his body was found face down in the water along the shoreline of Horn Island. Wells’ parents say local authorities were too quick to believe their son’s death was an accident and brought in Benjamin Crump and Al Sharpton. Both men have a well-documented history of race baiting, which has led to a litany of racially charged insinuations about the mysterious death.
One of the allegations that has emerged is that Wells’ friends, who are predominantly white, were somehow involved with his death. Some have taken issue with the fact that the boat that he traveled to Horn Island left him behind. But it appears Wells was not the only one who needed to find another way home.
On Thursday’s Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn revealed that someone close to the investigation told the program that another boy on the same boat as Wells also chose to stay behind and catch a ride with someone else.
Megyn chose not to name the young man because of the number of threats being leveled at all sides in the case, but she noted it is “new information” that Wells was not the only person who stayed back that day.
The New Audio
At the same time, speculation is running wild regarding audio of teens on the boat Wells arrived on and was taking on water before departure. The recording features of a call made to Sea Tow on the evening of July 4 by someone on board who said the vessel was taking on water as it prepared to return to the mainland.
“Hey, we’re at the west tip of Horn, and our bilge pump stopped working. We’re sinking. Can y’all please come,” the person asked the Sea Tow dispatcher.
There was quite a bit of background noise and chatter as the man talked to Sea Tow and requested a tow, which has led some to accuse those on board of foul play. Self-described “professional audio engineer” Jeanetta Brantley released an enhanced version of the recording on Instagram in an effort to “preserve as much of the original recording as possible while making the quieter dialogue and background audio easier to hear.”
Brantley included captions of what she claims to “personally hear as an audio engineer while processing and repeatedly reviewing these sections.” Her stunning transcript includes: “Can we cover it up?” “you killed him,” “he’s already dead,” and “is he dead?”
You can hear both the original and Brantley’s edited version in the video above. “If that’s what is on this audio, everyone is getting arrested… That would be an utter bombshell,” Megyn noted, while also pointing to independent journalist Sarah Fields’ reporting about Brantley’s credibility issues and possible biases in the case.
Additionally, Brantley’s stunning accusations come up against the fact that there is currently no evidence suggesting Wells was on the boat. “Is [there] any reason to believe, other than Jeanetta’s made-up audio, that Nolan was on that boat and these boys had expressed that they had just killed him,” Megyn asked her guest Caitlyn Becker, who has been covering the case extensively as host of NY POSTcast.
“At present, there’s no evidence that we have certainly uncovered in our reporting that suggested that Nolan was on that boat at the time that this call was made,” Becker said.
She said she listened to both the original and ‘enhanced’ versions of the audio and did not reach the same conclusions as Brantley. “I heard some of the same things, not all of the same things. I heard clearly ‘cover it up,’ but there was something wrong with the pump so there is a very reasonable explanation,” she noted.
“The stuff in the middle was too goggled, even with any kind of enhancement, for me to discern what they said,” Becker continued. “But the audio is out there, so that means anybody can enhance the audio, and I have not heard any version of that where I can clearly understand what is being said in the background and that, for me as a journalist, is the most important part.”
In the meantime, Brantley’s assertions are only further rising tensions that were already sky-high. “I wish that she would have just released an enhanced version of the audio with no captions, no statements, no nothing… She is welcome to her opinions… But if you’re going to do this, if you’re going to enhance the audio, if you’re going to put it out there, and then you’re going to put your own spin on it, knowing how incendiary this entire case is, this entire mystery is, how powerful everyone who says anything about it becomes once it hits the echo chamber of the internet. It just is, I think, a little reckless to do that,” Becker noted.
Megyn said this appears to be just the latest unfounded attack on Wells’ friends. “No one has any idea what it actually says… This is just one example of what is being done to Nolan’s best friends,” she concluded. “They are all being tarred as murderers because he wound up dead… We have no idea why. No signs of foul play, according to the sheriff. The original medical examiner’s report is still out, but the medical examiner’s report that Nolan’s family hired does not suggest signs of foul play either… and we don’t have a toxicology yet.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Becker by tuning in to episode 1,371 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.