Beneath the blue waters

Carbon monoxide poisoning?
Three months after Lana and Chuck disappeared, there was a surprising development: Lana’s toxicology report revealed she had a high level of carbon monoxide in her system when she drowned.

After all the speculation, was this the answer?  Was it an accident after all?  Were Lana and Chuck just swimming dangerously close to her boat’s exhaust?

Chris Hansen, Dateline correspondent:  A lot of people believe that.

Tammy Swanson, Lana Stempien’s cousin: I don’t. I don’t know who would swim with the motor running. You shut if off.

Hansen: So if she was in the water voluntarily, she would have shut the boat off.

Swanson: Absolutely.

Chris Crowley, Lana’s cousin: I think the carbon monoxide makes the possibility that this was an accident less. I don’t think that either Chuck or Lana would jump off the back of the boat and swim in the exhaust.

Hansen: There is the possibility though that carbon monoxide or fumes got into the cabin.

Crowley: For both of them to be overcome and to fall out of the boat, seems a bit of a reach.

Lana’s cousin also believes if Lana’s boat was releasing dangerous levels of odorless gas, they would know. After police returned “Sea’s Life” to her family, they used it to search the waters of Lake Huron.

Hansen:  Did anybody feel dizzy, sick, nauseated?

Crowley: No. We didn’t experience any problems and some of my cousins and friends spent days on the boat.

And both of the attorneys working with Lana’s family argue it’s a big mistake to assume carbon monoxide equals accident.

Hansen:  Does, that in your mind, rule out foul play?

Jack Cote, helping the Stempien family in the investigation:  No, because a person could be forced to expose themselves to a certain high concentration of carbon monoxide poisoning.

One theory is that if Lana were thrown off the boat, she could have inhaled a high dose of carbon monoxide and she struggled to get back on.

Andrew Jarvis, Lana's friend, now-Stempien family attorney: If it were foul play and she were thrown off that boat, she’d swim to the back platform and try and get on, which is where the exhaust would be bubbling up. If somebody were trying to prevent you from getting in the boat.

The toxicology report revealed something else: there were only negligible levels of alcohol in Lana’s system, eliminating the theory that Lana and Chuck were partying and accidentally fell overboard.

No answers
All of it puts Lana’s anguished family right back at square one— with all those unanswered, troubling questions.

Hansen: The watch, the fact she had no clothes on, the GPS, the knob, the line, the fenders, what is the most bothersome part of all this for you?

Swanson:  That the answers aren’t coming fast enough.

Detective Sexton: This has been frustrating. We wish we had more answers than we do.

Unsatisfied, Lana’s family paid for a private autopsy, and has hired a private lab to do a thorough forensic exam of her boat.

Hansen: Is it possible, you’re pushing this beyond where it needs to go? It’s a tragic accident, and we should just live with it?

Crowley:  No, I can’t subscribe to that. I know that we loved her deeply and we’re a very emotional family, but we’re a very rational family. I firmly believe somebody knows something.

Hansen: How far will you go to get answers here? 

Crowley: We’re not going to quit. We’re going to work for the next 40 years if that’s what it takes to get the answers.

Answers that may lie beneath these icy waters, answers the family of an accomplished young man hopes will come soon, answers the family of a beautiful model turned successful lawyer needs to ease the wrenching pain of losing someone so vivacious, so radiant.

Swanson: She was full of life. She had things to do. We had plans. And to be taken this way...

Pat Koszcara, Lana's aunt: Some days, I can’t think about it. If I think about it, it becomes real. I don’t want it to be real yet.

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