Lynette Hooker’s Sailboat Went Dark for 11 Hours the Night She Vanished

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Brian Hooker's sailboat had a $33,000 thermal infrared camera mounted on it, allegedly. $33,000.
That's quite a camera. Not a toy, a professional-grade system with self-tracking capability and motion detection. The kind of camera that can pick up a human body in the water at night.
On the evening of April 4th, somewhere in the waters off Abaco Islands in the Bahamas, Bryan's wife Lynette went into the ocean. Bryan says she fell from their dinghy in rough seas. He says the current carried her away and he lost sight of her. He says he paddled for hours to reach shore. He never turned that camera on, though.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:56)
Not once.

**Tony Brueski** (0:58)
And that's not even the part that should bother you the most because his own GPS pulled weeks later by federal investigators tells a story that doesn't match the one he told police. It points to a completely different location, a location Bryan Hooker never apparently mentioned to anyone.
Allegedly. So, I mean, again, we're going to get into this story. We're going to get into this story. Allegedly, in my opinion, he has not been charged yet.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:25)
So, there's that.

**Tony Brueski** (1:27)
Maintains his innocence.
Your thoughts in the comment section as we continue to work through this. Lynette Hooker hasn't been seen since April 4th. Her body has never been recovered, and the boat she shared with her husband, a sailboat called Soulmate. Hey, baby, let's go out on to Soulmate. What do you say?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:49)
Let's get out of the ocean, and let's make some love on Soulmate.

**Tony Brueski** (1:57)
Okay, there's, you know, if Barry White, he ain't no Barry White.
That sailboat is sitting in a federal warehouse in Fort Lauderdale being taken apart by forensic teams. There's something else about that night. The Soulmate had an AIS system, an electronic transponder that broadcast a vessel's position to other boats and authorities. Standard safety equipment. On the night Lynette disappeared, that system, it went dark.
It stopped transmitting for 11 hours. Then it came back on.
Is that a malfunction?
We'll get to what the expert says it is in just a moment. First, I need you to know who these people are. Lynette Hooker was 55 years old, from Onstead, Michigan, Illinois County, small town, Brick Bungalow, on Salt Lake and the Irish Hills. She had a daughter, Karli Aylesworth, from a previous marriage, around 2000 She married Brian Hooker, and the two of them lived a pretty ordinary Midwestern life for a long time. Then in 2023, they bought a sailboat, a 1980 Morgan 461 out of Rockport, Texas, a former charter boat from the Virgin Islands. Lynette appeared in a video on the deck and said it was a little rough on the edges. She smiled and said, but we knew we were up for the task. They named the sailboat Soulmate. They spent a year restoring it. They launched a YouTube channel called The Sailing Hookers, started documenting the whole thing, the Gulf Crossing, the Florida Coast, the Bahamas, the retirement dream right there on camera smiling, laughing, two people who sold the life they knew and sailed into a new one. That's what it looked like on camera. Off camera, neighbors and family members have described something different. Their marriage was turbulent, volatile, particularly when alcohol was involved. There's a police report from 2015 and a claim from Lynette's own daughter that we will need to get to. Because the things Karli Aylesworth says happened behind closed doors are the reason this case stopped being a missing person story and became something else entirely. But the timeline comes first. The Hookers had been in the Bahamas for about a month. April 4th, they went to a dinner at the Abaco Inn in Hopetown. It's a pleasant evening. They were seen together at the restaurant at approximately 730 p.m., four minutes after sunset. They left the inn and got into their dinghy, an eight-foot hard bottom inflatable with a small motor. The plan, according to Bryan, was to head back to the yacht to Soulmate, which was anchored near Elbow Cay. Bryan's account to the Royal Bohemian Police goes like this. Rough weather, high winds, choppy water. When that fell overboard, she had the ignition key on her arm when she went in. The engine cut out. The current took her. He lost sight of her. He couldn't get to her. He paddled the dinghy to Marsh Harbor. He arrived around 4am. He reported her missing the next morning. Eight and a half hours between losing his wife in the ocean and telling anyone about it. He posted to social media afterward. I am heartbroken over the recent boat accident in unpredictable seas and high winds that caused my beloved Lynette to fall from our small dinghy.