Titan sub mastermind planned to kill himself on dive

 Stockton Rush, the mastermind behind the Titan submersible expedition of 2023, didn't just want to tour the wreck of the Titanic - he intended to die there.

That's the disturbing claim made by a close friend of the late OceanGate CEO, who alleges that the multimillionaire engineer was having self-harm thoughts and hellbent on writing himself into the mythology of the world's most infamous shipwreck, even if it meant sacrificing four others in the process.

Karl Stanley, an expert in commercial submersibles, told Matthew Gavin Frank for his new book, Submersed: Wonder, Obsession and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines, that: 'Rush's ego was so big, he was willing to die and kill to be pivotal to the character of this story.

'He wanted to go [die] at the wreck [of the Titanic]. The more high-profile, the better. He didn't just murder four wealthy people and get paid a cool mill to do it - they are all part of the Titanic mythology now.'

Twelve days after Titan imploded in the North Atlantic in June 2023, killing five, Stanley messaged Frank via WhatsApp with a chilling declaration: that Rush had known exactly what would happen during the vessel's final fateful trip.

Stanley claimed that Rush actively plotted for the fatal plunge to be a one-way trip - a deliberate death dive engineered to cement his legacy in the history books, aboard a 'futile' vessel that had never been intended to return.

'He was in fact a good engineer,' said Stanley. 'He set a new standard for going out with a bang.'

Titan expert claims doomed sub was a 'mousetrap for billionaires' 

According to Stanley, Rush named his doomed sub after the fictional British oceanliner Titan, from the 1898 novella Futility by Morgan Robertson, in which the fictional ship sinks in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg, in an eerily similar fashion to how the Titanic met its fate 14 years later.

Stanley alleged that in order to extend, and to be a part of the wider Titanic folklore, 'Rush needed to compel more than just his own death, and he needed to knowingly fabricate a 'futile' vessel, costumed in a titanic name, as his murder weapon,' Frank writes.

The fellow sub enthusiast further claimed that Rush designed the Titan to be a 'mousetrap for billionaires'.

Asked if he truly believed that Rush actively intended to kill everyone on board as part of a self-harm vanity project, Stanley didn't waver: 'I know this is what happened.'

Four years before the Titan disaster, Stanley had accompanied Rush on one of the vessel's test dives in the Bahamas, where the pair and two others dived to a record-breaking, Titanic-level depth of 12,336 feet.

The day after the voyage, he wrote an email to Rush, raising alarm bells about what he deemed to be significant safety issues.

His concerns stemmed from ominous gunshot-like sounds thundering out every three to four minutes during their hours-long descent.

Stanley feared that the deafening noise was the sub's hull buckling under the immense pressure of the deep.

'The sounds we observed yesterday sounded like a flaw/defect in one area being acted on by the tremendous pressures and being crushed/damaged,' he wrote.

'From the intensity of the sounds [and] the fact that they never totally stopped at depth… [it] would indicate that there is an area of the hull that is breaking down/getting spongy.'