It has been five weeks since 18-year-old Nolan Wells disappeared and was ultimately found dead after a Fourth of July boat trip with friends, and there are still more questions than answers about what happened to him.
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, after going with a group of friends from high school for a Fourth of July party.
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 reported 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 vessel. But Wells never made it back to the mainland. A massive search began and his body was found two days later, face down in the water along the shoreline of Horn Island.
Wells’ parents, who have said they believe local authorities were too quick to rule their son’s death an accident, are working with known race-baiters Benjamin Crump and Al Sharpton. That has led to a litany of allegations against Wells’ mostly white friends who were with him on the day of his death.
A New Timeline
Late last month, speculation ran wild after a self-described “professional audio engineer” claimed she ‘enhanced’ the audio of a call made to Sea Tow around 4pm on July 4 by someone on board the boat Wells arrived on. The man said the vessel was taking on water as it prepared to leave the island.
According to her stunning transcript of the ‘enhanced’ recording, the mostly unintelligible background noise and chatter that could be heard as the man requested a tow included, “can we cover it up?” “you killed him,” “he’s already dead,” and “is he dead?”
In that scenario, Wells would have been deceased prior to the call being made, but accounts from new witnesses are casting doubt on that bombshell timeline. During an appearance on The Officer Tatum podcast, Edward Paltzik – the attorney representing Wells’ friends Morgan Seymour, Jax Pitalo, and Warren Hudson – shared new information about what happened after his clients left Horn Island.
“Morgan, Warren, and Jax left the island at about 4:30pm That’s it. They were gone. That is not open for debate. So that’s a fact. They were gone, and at that time, Nolan Wells was still alive,” he explained. “Now, I’m not going to name them out of respect for their privacy, but just as one example, there are two very fine, upstanding members of the Ocean Springs community who saw Nolan Wells at about 10 minutes to 6pm. So about an hour and a half after these fine young men had left the island… Nolan Wells was alive.”
Paltzik described the witnesses as “very reliable” and “very credible” people who “have known Nolan for years” and, therefore, “there is no chance that they made a mistake.” Even so, Paltzik told host Brandon Tatum the timeline can also “be corroborated through other evidence, other eyewitness accounts, and that’s the end of it right there.”
On Tuesday’s Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn said she too can confirm Paltzik’s account. “I have reason to believe the same. I’ve come by similar information about two independent adult witnesses who knew Nolan, who can place him on the island as as late as 10 of six that night – long after these boys had left the island and long after they were allegedly on tape confessing that he was dead, which is just an internet bullshit interpretation of some tape that is garbled and indecipherable,” she explained.
Where Is Wells’ Phone?
There are also questions about who is currently in possession of Wells’ cell phone, which is believed to have been left on the boat he traveled to Horn Island aboard before being returned to his mother by his friends. Independent journalist Sarah Fields reported the Wells family has not turned the device over to law enforcement to aid the investigation.
“According to a credible source with close proximity to and knowledge of the investigation, more than 30 days after the death of Nolan Wells, his mother, Christine Wells-Wonsley, has allegedly NOT surrendered Nolan’s cellphone to authorities,” Fields posted on X Monday. “This is the same cellphone that became a major point of speculation almost immediately after Nolan’s disappearance and death.”
As Fields explained, Wells-Wonsley initially accused her son’s friends of tampering with the device before later clarifying that she didn’t actually know if anything had been deleted. Fields noted investigators would be able to determine if there was any foul play, in addition to uncovering potentially useful information about “location information, application data, [and] account activity.”
The Wells family has not commented on Fields’ reporting, but attorney Jonna Spilbor told Megyn the phone is a “huge piece” of evidence. “They’re going to get it one way or another, and I know that you can’t fully destroy things… They’re stored in the cloud… thankfully,” she said.
If the phone has not been handed over, lawyer Mark Eiglarsh told Megyn it could be because the family is concerned about how it might change the narrative. “Either there’s something that they don’t want law enforcement to see as it relates to this, or what’s extremely likely is I wouldn’t want anyone to have my kid’s phone,” he speculated.
“There’s stuff on there, even unrelated to this, that may make them look a little less angelic. And right now, that kid, to a certain you know group of people in this community, is angelic,” Eiglarsh noted. “You don’t want his name to be sullied by texts and things that might be unrelated, like people have on their phone between friends.”
Spilbor said law enforcement will get the phone one way or another and then the investigation will proceed from there. “When they get his phone, that’s probably going to lead them to get other people’s phones once they figure out who he was last communicating with and what was being said,” she explained.
“It’s going to come out,” she concluded. “And I would want to know, if I were his parent, how my kid died.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Eiglarsh and Spilbor by tuning in to episode 1,377 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.