Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey, everyone. I'm Ann Emerson, and this is Criminally Obsessed. Lynette Hooker disappeared one month ago. Her husband, Brian Hooker, says she fell off their dinghy in the Bahamas, that it was a terrible accident. No one believes him? No one. Not his stepdaughter, not his friends. Well, maybe his attorney.
B (0:22)
Your reaction time would have to be so unimaginably slow. Somebody goes over the side of the boat. I don't know how slow you could possibly move to before you're, like, reaching out for that person.
A (0:34)
That's Alex Beer, a forensic diver and a police officer who grew up on a sailboat. I've brought him back to talk about the case because I have so many more questions about where the investigation stands and about where Lynette could be. Let's say if you got into a dinghy and you decided to go into the mangroves and put a body somewhere in the mangroves, is that a good hiding place?
B (0:57)
It would be once you're in there. I mean, usually it's shallow, the roots are very twisted, very difficult to get through. But if you were willing and you were trying to get back in there and hide something, it would be as good a place as any to hide to do that. It is incredibly difficult terrain to search.
A (1:14)
And even if her body is gone, she should have left something behind.
B (1:20)
I would have divers in the water, just doing patterns, looking for that shirt or a pair of sunglasses that hasn't been down there that long.
A (1:28)
Let's get into it. Thank you so much for taking a break in your busy day, because I know you're in the middle of a lot of stuff, but I wanted to get back together with you to talk about the Lynette Hooker disappearance and the investigation into what happened in the Abacos. What would you do if you were on the ground right now and you were one month in and we don't have a body? And I know that the Coast Guard's investigating heavily, but. But what would you be thinking about right now?
B (2:02)
I think at this point, you're at a month in. I would continue with the search in and around the water only if it were to find any sort of articles or anything. So I said missing items, you know, eyeglasses, things like that. If you could still narrow that. I wouldn't necessarily give up on that yet. I believe at this point in the case, I believe they've executed a search warrant for electronics from the boat. I know that takes time. I'm not a electronics analysis or forensic specialist, but I know that takes a considerable amount of Time to sort of get into it, see what they can draw from it, come to any kind of conclusions they may come to based on the information they're gathering from that, whether that was the GPS system or cell phones or smartwatches or any sort of data collection device that they could get into and see if there's any sort of clues there as either where to go or look or if there's any evidence of tampering to determine, you know, that sometimes the evidence that why has it been erased or cleared or factory reset? And that's usually a telltale. That's for lack of a better term, I guess, an admittance of guilt that there'd be no reason to factory reset your GPS in the middle of this or at the beginning of this, other than if you were hiding something.
