What started as a desperate search for answers ended with a handful of keepsakes, and even more questions.
After 55-year-old Lynette Hooker vanished from a boat in the Bahamas April 4, her daughter traveled there hoping to piece together what happened. Instead, she returned home with only a few of her mother’s belongings.
“I went and got some of her belongings, like a headband. I got her ‘L’ necklace that she used to always wear. I got a picture frame I made for her, something that my grandma sewed for her,” Karli Aylesworth, 28, told ABC News.
She later shared a tearful selfie taken on her flight back to Lowell, Massachusetts, wearing the gold necklace with the “L” charm.
“Just makes the story sound more sketchy to me”
During her time in the Bahamas, Aylesworth and her boyfriend spent two days retracing her mother’s final movements. But instead of finding clarity, she said the experience only deepened her concerns.
“I retraced their steps from that day, and it just makes the story sound more sketchy to me,” she wrote in a update on a GoFundMe page on Saturday.
She added: “I would like to head back down again soon if I can to not only remember my last times with her, but to also get to the bottom of what really happened.”
Visiting the exact locations tied to her mother’s disappearance was overwhelming.
“It was eerie, almost. I was crying the whole time,” she told News 8, according to New York Post.
She said she visited both the couple’s sailboat and a local bar where Lynette and her husband had drinks just hours before she vanished.
Lynette Hooker vanished from a boat in the Bahamas
The bartender at the local bar – one of the last people to see Lynette alive – previously described the couple’s visit as uneventful. Still, he said parts of her husband Brian Hooker’s account didn’t sit right with him.
“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,” the bartender said, referring to the peninsula settlement a few miles across the water, where the couple’s boat was anchored.
“What catches my eye is they left here at 7, 7:30 and [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,” he added.
Brian Hooker, 58, has told authorities that his wife disappeared after falling from an 8-foot dinghy as they were returning to their sailboat in rough waters near Elbow Cay.
He was detained on April 15 in connection with Lynette’s disappearance but was released days later, and has denied any wrongdoing.