Law&Crime Sidebar - Who 'Deleted' Nolan Wells’ Text Messages?

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

After a grand jury found no evidence of criminality in the death of Nolan Wells, whose body washed ashore near Horn Island off the coast of Mississippi, his family's digital forensics examiner revealed new claims that data was deleted from Wells' phone. Law&Crime's Jesse Weber breaks down the conflicting findings between authorities and forensic experts with computer forensic expert John Lucich.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: Right now you can get a free 14-day trial of Odoo’s all-in-one business solution to give your business the cutting edge! Check it out at https://odoo.com/sidebar.HOST:Jesse Weber: https://twitter.com/jessecordweberLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokeVideo Editing - Michael Deininger, Jay Cruz, Christina O'Shea, & Andrew ZuckermanScript Writing & Producing - Savannah Williamson, Heather Berzak & Juliana BattagliaGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrimeTwitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We won't quit until we get to the truth. The Nolan Wells' death investigation just took a major turn. The grand jury found no evidence to support criminal charges in connection with Nolan Wells' death. But now, the family's digital forensics examiner is raising a very different possibility. There was interactions with the phone before and after his death. So what really happened with Nolan Wells' phone and what does the digital evidence actually show? What really happened to Nolan Wells?

Welcome to Sidebar, presented by law and crime. I'm Jesse Weber. Now, before we get into everything, obviously this is a big story we're following here on Sidebar. We're kind of limited in this capacity in 30, 40 minutes, to show you absolutely every single piece of evidence in this case. So what you can do is you can go to the case file section on the Law and Crime Plus app. So we basically open up the evidence vault on all these major cases.

So you can inspect the raw body cam footage, the 911 calls, the crime scene photos, the full trial tapes, firsthand plus you get ad-free streaming of all your favorite long crime and court TV shows right now we got a special offer use my promo code side fall you get your first three months of long crime plus for just two ninety nine a month that is 50% off the regular monthly price hope you can check it out okay so back to this well the Nolan Wells case just got a lot more complicated because just one day after we learn that a grand jury found no evidence to support

criminal charges in connection with Nolan Wells death his family's attorney Ben Crump held a press conference and made some bombshell claims about Nolan's phone. Now remember, Nolan disappeared in July after going on a boating trip. His body was discovered two days later. He was washed ashore near Horn Island about eight to ten miles off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. And now the Jackson County District Attorney's Office has said there was no evidence of a crime. Grand jury didn't find any evidence of a crime. But what happened to Nolan's phone? That is what has raised some new questions. Because first, to put it into perspective, I want to place. for you what Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers-McA-Rath said in a recorded statement

about Nolan's phone, about this key piece of evidence after the grand jury's report, after the grand jury came forward and said, no evidence of a crime. Here again, another narrative allowed to flourish when my hands were tied in responding. The crump team knew better, but allowed the public to believe, among other false narratives, that our medical examiner withheld Nolan's lungs and stomach when his body was released, that things had been deleted off of Nolan's phone before it was given back to his family, that I refused to cooperate with the examination of Nolan's cell phone, that I refused to provide Nolan's autopsy results to the family,

all lies, and they knew it. So in other words, according to her, nothing was deleted from his phone, right? Her entire law enforcement team cooperated with all parties involved. No one purposely misled or mishandled anything to do with his autopsy results. Now you fast forward to Thursday. Ben Crump brings out Andrew Garrett, the CEO of Forensics Company, Garrett Discovery. This is the forensic examiner that was hired by the family to look at Nolan's phone. And it was seemingly in the possession of Nolan's family ever since.

But one of the things we do know is there was interactions with the phone before and after his death up until the time that his family retrieved the phone from the other young men that were with him that day. Were things deleted from that phone, yes? There were things that were deleted from the phone. I can't talk to intent. Unfortunately, that's not my field of expertise in psychology, but I could tell you from a digital standpoint things were deleted on the phone from the time he last had the phone up until the time that his parents got the phone.

And was the Snapchat things? They were Snapchat, correct. Wow. Snapchat material was deleted from the last time Nolan had the phone until his family received it. Is that a major discrepancy here? What is going on? So here's also, by the way, the bombshells about GPS data, okay? So according to Garrett, they were able to essentially track all of Nolan's movements from sunup to sundown, if you assume that he was the one who had possession of the phone. Here is what he said happened in the morning.

You can see here in the early morning. That's before 824 a.m. He went to McDonald's. There is messages you will see pop up here. On the right hand side, these are the Snapchat communications. It was happening between Nolan and his friends and people that were part of these various groups that he was part of. Through 837, they traveled to another location. I'm not going to tell you whose house or who that is, but they did travel another location,

and you can see that in a vehicle based on the speed and direction travel. Still traveling here. Last Snapchat messages asking about a jewel pod and can't I get one? These are young men. They were having conversations. There were some women in this chat group as well. And at this point, the teens had gotten to the boat ramp and they were heading out into the water just after 10 a. You can see here where they're traveling by a boat at 1030, 1040, 1054, and you can see here still there's messages and phone calls being made.

Then they were at Horn Island. It's about 1118. Then the boat stayed on Horn Island, and you can see here, it says device enters lock state. That means he clicked the button to lock the phone. phone unlocked and application activity resumes at 2.17 p.m. That is when Nolan was last using his phone. We have about 218. In order to do that, by our calculations, he was on the boat when that happened. Then there's a reported call to C-toe. At 436, there's also messages. There's a message. There's a message. that says, Captain pulled a bilge. They had a bilge pump problem. They called C-toe. I think the news has done a great job at reporting on the phone call that was made.

Then afterwards, you can see the boat went up to somebody's house, to their dock. Then they left the dock and traveled to a boat ramp. All right, I know this is a 180, but for anybody who's a business owner out there watching this, you don't need me to tell you that running a business is tough. enough. So why make it harder doing things manually, relying on dozens of apps that don't talk to each other, right? That is where our sponsor, Odu, comes in. So Odu is an all-in-one business management platform with a full suite of integrated apps that seamlessly connect all your operations, from sales and accounting to manufacturing, even shipping. Odu can automatically generate

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expert today for free. at odu.com slash sidebar. Now, one of the biggest pieces to this puzzle is how do we know the phone was with Nolan, right, or even on the boat in the first place or which boat it was on? Parts a little tricky, but here's what the forensic expert had to say about that. The phone was traveling over water at a speed and direction that would have to be from a boat, plus we also have videos from another neighboring boat of traveling in the same direction about the same speed.

And you can see here this goes up to seven. Then on land, the phone is traveling to an individual's residence. Okay, so we've made it through the day. They've tracked the phone seemingly through 7.30 p.m. And here's what we know, according to Ben Crump, Nolan Wells sent his final text, and it was allegedly to his aunt. We know that the last text message that Nolan Xavier Wells sent was on July 3rd. around 8.30 p.m.

where he said thank you to his auntie. His family shared this text specifically with the public because let's not forget that the forensic examiner said 95% of his communications were made through Instagram and Snapchat. So this final text really stood out. And this was interesting too because apparently Snapchat messages from Nolan's friends or his friend group suggested,

they were concerned about racist people on Horn Island. This is according to Ben Crump. And that after Nolan had gone missing, there was even a reference to, quote, sketchy people? Strange. Again, you put it into context here. One of the aspects of the grand jury report was about Nolan's cell phone. And if you recall, there was a lot of questions about why he would seemingly leave his phone on the boat before he left to go to Horn Island, were messages or content deleted. So this grand jury apparently reviewed a 14-page report about his cellular activity. It was conducted, by, again, Garrett Discovery, Inc.

It was actually provided to the DA's office, and that's interesting because there was a part of the story about the family and authorities, doing a mutual inspection of the phone, but apparently the grand jury also received a report about the cell phone locking state, the screen activity, the calls, the messages, the location, the app use, an over 260-page Snapchat report.

And according to the DA, again, nothing was deleted from Nolan's phone since he used it. No one other than the family had used it since he used it. And the report said that the jury panel found, quote, it is not unusual or suspicious for individuals to return from the island on boats they did not travel to the island on, nor is it unusual for individuals to place their phones and personal items on other boats, they visit and socialize on. But again, no finding of criminality. And that's just one part, by the way, because Crump's team also said at this press conference that the state autopsy found no water in Nolan's lungs or throat, the death being undetermined. that as far as the bruising or contusions or injuries on the back of his head, his team said, no white blood cells, meaning it looks like this happened before Nolan died.

Now, we talked about this yesterday, how there was this testimony from a friend or someone who saw Nolan to suggest that perhaps Nolan slipped at one point and then carried on with his conversations that day. But I do want to point this out. The grand jury did find, quote, that the position of, the condition of, time of discovery, and location of Mr. Wells' body is consistent with drowning. And the grand jury indicated that bruising to the back of the head was, quote, not a fatal injury, but it couldn't be determined what the actual cause of that injury was. Grand jury finding it found no evidence of any fatal injury or organic disease to Mr. Wells' body. And before we dive into the digital evidence a little bit more, Ben Krom said this at the presser.

He said, we simply cannot close the chapter and say, wash our hands of it, put a bow on it, and say, nothing to see here. So there you go. That's what's going on. but I want to talk about what we're seeing with the digital evidence. Okay, I got a great guest to talk about this. I want to bring in John Lucic. She's a digital forensics expert, a perfect person to talk about it. John, thanks for taking the time. Look, my main question is, why does there seem to be a potential discrepancy here?

From what I'm reading from the DA, there seems to be a suggestion that nothing was deleted from Nolan's phone since the last time he used it. But you have this family forensic expert saying that the Snapchat content, was allegedly deleted from the time known last used it to when the family got it. Can two things be true? I mean, I guess I'm just, how does he know that? Okay, so two things. Number one, what's he comparing it to?

And I'm not sure if he actually has the phone. Typically, once that phone is taken into evidence, it's not returned until the end of the case. So one thing I have to tell you here, the family never gave the phone over, apparently. So that was one of the big aspects of this phone. It seems the phone has always been, in the custody of the family.

In fact, the DA had said earlier on in the case, I believe the other day, you know, we had no legal mechanism to actually seize the phone because of the circumstances of this case. Just wanna put that out there. So if they didn't take the phone, how can they make that claim? If they didn't forensically extract that phone

and review that phone, I don't know how the DA can make that claim that nothing's been deleted, unless they're looking at two different things. Number one, you know, DA's and the prosecutors across the nation have access to a variety of things, including, including, including getting a subpoena out of court order or communications data warrant out in order to get

access to the data that's on Snapchat directly, not from the cell phone. If they never got the cell phone, I don't know how they can make a claim that nothing's been deleted from the cell phone. So if the family's looking at that, but there's a lot of couple of things to remember with Snapchat. Number one, once a video or picture is viewed, it disappears. Unless you change those settings by default, that disappears. If a message is unread and not access for 30 days, it's deleted off the Snapchat.

Again, by default, but depending upon the settings, and you can change those settings. With group chats, it's usually seven days. So if those things got deleted after he passed, then that's exactly what the discrepancy is. But I don't know what the DA is using to compare that to. Okay. So in other words, there might not be something nefarious here, although I will tell you, It seems that this digital forensics expert from the family said it requires input from a user to be able to potentially delete these messages. What does that mean?

I mean who would have had access to it? How would you have been able to do that? What does that mean you requires input from the user? So number one, I've done this for a long time. And I know kids share pass codes. They share phones. They get on each other's phones. So who was in contact with this device at that time, you know, after he had passed?

those are the questions that have to be answered. It's not ever been in the possession of law enforcement based upon what you heard. Then it's certainly not law enforcement's not responsible for that. So I wouldn't know who's responsible or what happened. Family members had access to it or kids had access to it before the family members. I would need to know more on who had access to it before making any type of determination. And when you're talking about Snapchat messages being deleted, is there any way that you would know what the message? are that were deleted? Are they still backed up in a cloud, a server of some kind? Would you know what they were deleted, when they were deleted, anything like that? So if they're not stored on the phone, then no, you wouldn't have access to that. Without a communications, data warrant, but I

Snapchat is huge. And they've got people, I don't know what their retention policy off the top of my head is, but if they don't have it anymore, then it's gone forever. Let me ask you a better better question. Is there a digital signature that's left behind that says, I know something was deleted on this phone? I know something was deleted on Snapchat. If the messages were there and they have access to the databases, now I know that sometimes you come out with a new version of Snapchat that the different products out there, whether you're looking at their key, great key, or with Celebrite, do not decode, right? So they have a lot of it. So Celebrate has App Genie and it has SQL Wizard. So those are the things they're going to have access to the

databases and try to decode it because once you forensically extract a phone, then you have to actually decode everything to be able to make sense of it, to rebuild the file system, to get access to the databases. So if the data is in the databases and there are references to that, yes, you can tell that data was there, but it's no longer there. Which brings me to this point, apparently the phone had a new version of Snapchat, that it didn't work with the usual software that's used to extract the data. So they had to manually process the data. decrypt the data, I think there was like over a million artifacts of data. Can you explain what that means? Can you explain how complicated that process would be?

So those are programs that actually do that to decode those databases to get access to that. So what it says is we were unable to decode that, but if you want to try it manually, there's actually a manual process to do that. It's not like somebody's sitting there one at a time and doing it. So in Snapchat with, depending upon what tool you're using, there are tools to be able to get the, so there's a thing called my eyes only in Snapchat, where nobody can see it, but the user without a pin number. There's ways to recover that pin number. So depending upon what this expert is using, would depend upon whether he's going to get access to that.

But apparently he says he's gotten access to that, according to what you said. So he should be able to see what was on the phone and what might have been deleted. But it's got to be compared to what's actually in the Snap-Batch SNAPS. But remember, if you don't open something within 31 days, and maybe some of that stuff got expired at 31 days after he had passed just by, you know, a day, a half a day, whatever it is, not to mention the fact that in group chats, it's seven days. And once you read something, it gets deleted automatically. So if someone picks his phone up after he had passed and they read that memo,

they saw that video or picture, it would delete right there, again, depending upon the settings. But it does that by default. By the way, just to put this out there, when I'm talking about this process, is there room for error? like can you make mistakes in terms of the history of the phone or the app? Well, room for error as far as the officers or the expert, no, I don't believe so. Okay.

The only error I could see is not doing something, but it seems like this guy knows what he's doing and he did what he was supposed to do in order to recover that. So, no, there's no room for error because you're not doing it. The software is doing it for you. So he said one of the things we do know, Mr. Garrett, one of the things what we do know is there were interactions with the phone before and after his death up until the time his family retrieved the phone from the other young men that were with him that day. What would you want to know? What's the missing piece here? What would you want to know about this phone? Well, as a retired

state law enforcement officer from the Attorney General's office here in New Jersey, and having that background, I'd want to ask these guys, I want to number one identify everybody who came in contact with that phone. And that's not going to be too hard to do. All you have to do is do a tower dump on the nearest tower that he was connected to during the time that he'd passed, and I would get every single cell phone number out of that tower that connected to that tower between those dates. We do a lot of cell phone location analysis. And then I would get every cell phone, look them up and find out who's in his contacts that might have been with him and grab those people and pulling me for questioning. And that's where finding out information

that you need to know. There's a lot about the GPS data. There was a lot about, you using it to track Nolan's movements. Talk to me about how accurate that data is and what we should take away from it. Okay, extremely accurate. I'm a former commercial pilot, blind cargo and passengers for almost 50 years now, at least being licensed. I left aviation to go actually into law enforcement. But cell phone location data from call detail records, not accurate at all. It puts you in a general area. So we had a gentleman here in Pennsylvania where we were able to track his whereabouts using his GPS data that we located on the phone and found out he was not in the area of three shootings.

They'd be able to tell his exact movements if his cell phone, and most of his cell phones do, start creating GPS data. You can find it in exit data in the pictures. You can find that every time this thing moves and generates anew. That's exactly how you do it. That GPS data, so much more accurate than cell phone data will ever be, you know, cell phone location data, which comes from the providers. And if you were assuming that it was Nolan who had possession of the phone, if it was with him, I thought it was really interesting.

They say, you can tell that it was traveling over water at a speed and direction that it would have, it would have had to have been on a boat. That's really, I think, interesting too. Yeah, no, so we had a gentleman who actually many, many years ago got killed in his first year, was killed in his first year of college. And we were able to track his cell phone location and determine that at least he had. had to be in a car during this segment. So absolutely they can you can't be from point A to point B if that if that is like a mile in like two minutes. You can't be swimming that and you can't be. So it sounds like they've got a guy who actually knows what he's doing, which is nice to see. John, this is interesting. Look, this is a piece of the puzzle. I wanted a little bit more

explanation about it because this just came out. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much. No problem. I hope they find out who is in possession of that phone and who of that. why are they deleted it and who deleted it? If that's what happened, right? There's two different perspectives here because the authorities are saying, again, grand jury found new evidence of criminality and the prosecution, the DA, is basically saying

no one touched that phone, no one deleted anything from that phone between the time Nolan used it and was given back to the family. So you have competing narratives here, not sure what to make of it. It just doesn't make sense, though, that they're saying that never took part,

never took possession of that phone. They have had to take possession of that phone in order to do that. But we'll see. All right. Thank you so much, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you.

That's all we have for you right now here on Sidebar. Everybody, thank you so much for joining us. Please like and subscribe. I'm Jesse Weber. See you next time.