At about 7:30 pm on April 4, Lynette Hooker fell from her dinghy near Hope Town, The Bahamas, while motoring with her husband Brian back to the boat they have lived aboard for the past 10 years.
In the strong breeze and chop, Brian Hooker claims he lost contact with his wife and asserts that the outboard’s emergency tether was attached to Lynette so the engine shut down and he could not restart it.
Without outboard power, the dinghy and Brian were blown across a four-mile-wide sound and ended up on a beach near the main town of Marsh Harbour. Hooker says he came ashore at about 4:15 am or roughly 9 hours after Lynette went overboard.
An intensive search failed to recover Lynette’s body. In the aftermath, Brian was taken into custody by the Bahamian police and held for five days while being questioned and while his boat and dinghy were searched for evidence. He was released last week and has since flown home to the States to be with his sick mother.
Lynette’s daughter Karli Aylesworth arrived in the Bahamas late last week to help with the search for her mother. She spent three hours speaking to the police and still has serious doubts about the story her stepfather, Brian, is telling.
The New York Post reports: “I feel like this was probably preplanned, if anything, like, it doesn’t seem like just some accident,” Aylesworth said.
This week a reporter from the New York Post interviewed a bartender named Ken, 38, at the Abaco Inn where the Hookers had drinks by the pool on the afternoon of the 4th. He is a local and knows the waters around Hope Town and Marsh Harbour well.
Ken served the Hookers rum and cokes and told the Post that he did not see anything unusual about the couple. He did say that he did not see Lynette with her husband when he served them even though they were at the Inn for over two hours.
When Ken heard the news of Lynette’s disappearance the next day, something just didn’t make sense to him. As the Post reports: “It’s weird … for him to be going from here to there, then ending up in Marsh Harbour and nobody sees the lady, it’s weird,” Ken said. “What catches my eye is they left here at 7, 7:30 her going missing supposedly happened right after they left here, and he didn’t make it over there until 4 a.m. or something like that, in 25-mph winds.”
“It’s only four miles that way. It shouldn’t have taken eight to 10 hours to get there. Even if he was only floating, it should have been a much quicker time,” he said.
Despite the time-line question, the failure to find Lynette’s body and Alylesworth’s previous claim that the Hooker’s had a “volatile” relationship, the Bahamian police have ceased searching for the victim and have not charged Brian with a crime. The case remains open, however.
