The mysterious death of a beautiful woman at the Montauk Yacht Club captured international headlines over the summer. Nearly five months later county police have yet to announce an official cause of death, but a search for answers has continued through the media, revealing new details — including, in November, the first account from the man who was on the boat with her on the night of her death.
Martha Nolan O’Slatarra, 33, was found unresponsive on a boat docked at the club just after midnight on Aug. 5. East Hampton Town police responded initially and pronounced her dead, and around 4 a.m. the scene was turned over to homicide detectives from the Suffolk County Police Department, according to a press release issued that night.
The last official update from county police came on Aug. 5 — the day after the death — announcing that an autopsy performed by the county medical examiner found that the body “did not show evidence of violence,” and that “her final cause of death is pending further examination.”
The day after the death, multiple outlets published statements from witnesses who had been on other boats docked at the club that night, describing a naked man running down the dock from the boat, yelling for help. Two of those witnesses had climbed aboard the boat and attempted CPR on the woman, they said, and they had placed the initial 911 call that led town police to the scene.
The naked man was identified in the press as Christopher Durnan, 60, the owner of the boat where she was found. He had reportedly been the only other person on the boat that night, but his relationship to Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra was not immediately clear, inspiring further speculation about what could have caused the sudden, nonviolent death.
Over the next few weeks, photos of Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra appeared on the front pages of newspapers and tabloids across the United States and in Ireland, where she was born, with the news of her death accompanied by any details reporters could glean about her life. Originally from a small town in County Carlow, Ireland, she had studied business and digital marketing at University College Dublin before moving to New York City in 2015 with entrepreneurial aspirations.
She had since been involved in several business ventures, but her main focus at the time of her death seemed to be East X East, a brand she had launched with a business partner in 2022 selling swimwear, sunglasses, and resort wear inspired by “the natural beauty and chic lifestyle of the Hamptons.” They had opened a summer pop-up at Gurney’s Resort and Spa in Montauk just a month before her death, and Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra reportedly told friends that she was going to the yacht club that night for a meeting to discuss the business, and had texted her boyfriend, who was out of town, that she would order an Uber ride home around 1 a.m.
Her mother, Elma Nolan, told The Independent on Aug. 6 that she felt “numb and in shock,” and that the police had not told them anything about the circumstances of the death. The family was told that a final post-mortem report, including the results of toxicology testing, would take at least three months to complete, according to the outlet, and reportedly commissioned a second, private autopsy, which was conducted before the body was repatriated to Ireland for the funeral. (A family source told the outlet in November that they were still awaiting reports from both examinations.)
After the funeral, which was held on the morning of Aug. 20, there was a lull in coverage of the case — until November, when New York magazine published an in-depth feature story that included accounts from Dylan Grace, the co-founder of East X East, and Robert Holdman, an attorney representing Mr. Durnan, speaking publicly for the first time about his client’s account of the night.
According to the story, “The Mysterious Death of a Hamptons Fashion Star,” Mr. Durnan, an insurance executive, had invested in East X East in the summer of 2022. The business used the money to open a pop-up at the Montauk Beach House in the summer of 2023, which Mr. Grace said made more money than they had spent on it, but sales abruptly fell off at the end of the summer, and they had been struggling to keep the business going.
Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra met Mr. Durnan at the club at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 4, and the two cruised around on his fishing boat, Hell in a Bucket, before switching over to his other boat, Ripple, around 9:30. They discussed business on the deck for the next hour or so, Mr. Holdman said, until Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra “suddenly went limp” around 10:30 or 11 p.m. Mr. Durnan thought she was having a heart attack and tried to perform CPR, but “she was gone almost immediately,” his attorney said. “She was nonresponsive.”
“He watched his friend die in trauma. He’s absolutely destroyed,” Mr. Holdman said, and explained that his client had stripped off his clothes before running from the boat because they had been “soaked” with Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra’s vomit. He said that “there was no pause” before Mr. Durnan ran for help, though the account leaves a gap of at least an hour between the time Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra lost consciousness and the witness accounts of Mr. Durnan running from the boat, naked and yelling, which led a bystander to place the call to 911 just after midnight.
The attorney also told the magazine that his client and Ms. Nolan-O’Slatarra “actually dated,” and that he had met her family in Ireland, but when questioned further reportedly “walked back” the comments, stating that Mr. Durnan “loved her as a friend.” Questioned whether his client denied a past romantic or sexual relationship, he said that Mr. Durnan was “not interested in sharing anything like that, whether it’s an absolute ‘no’ or an absolute ‘yes.’ I don’t think he thinks it’s fair to her memory.”
Arthur Aidala, a New York criminal defense attorney who has been representing Ms. Nolan O’Slatarra’s family since August, commented on the story during an appearance on NewsNation the week after it was published.
“Obviously he is a primary person that’s being looked at, because that’s common sense,” he said of Mr. Durnan, and added that “no one is positive right now” about the one-hour gap in his account. “As far as we know he was the only one there, so primarily the police are trying to look at what he was doing.”
“I will tell you we are very pleased with the Suffolk County district attorney’s office — they are very focused on this,” Mr. Aidala continued, and explained that he had been helping the family navigate the American justice system “out of the goodness of [his] heart” since learning about their situation.
“My heart breaks for them. They’re from another country,” he said. “This is the Christmas time of year, when Martha would be going home and celebrating in Ireland with all of her family and, you know, they’re devastated about this. And not having any answers is very, very frustrating and upsetting.”
A representative from the county police, contacted by email last month, confirmed that their investigation “is continuing” and that there is “no new information at this time.”
