A Michigan couple with a “volatile relationship” on a  sailing trip in the Bahamas. A supposed dinghy accident sending the woman into the water after a trip to shore. A husband who didn’t report her missing until more than eight hours later. And six weeks later, still no sign of her body.

What could possibly be wrong with that picture?

Mystery and suspicion have only deepened in the April 4 disappearance of Lynette Hooker, 55, and the story told by her husband Brian, 58, offshore from Hope Town in the Bahamas.

Not since the 2005 disappearance of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway in Aruba has an international case generated so much attention not only in the viral world of true crime podcasters and social media, but also in mainstream network outlets featuring developments on the evening news.

Here is the timeline, based on news and police reports:

The couple, who had been married 25 years and lived in western Michigan, began sailing the Atlantic in their boat called the “Soulmate” in 2023, documenting their full-time sailing life in an account called “thesailinghookers” on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

On April 4, the couple reportedly left Hope Town’s Abaco Inn on an 8-foot hard bottom dinghy heading for the anchored yacht. Conditions, the husband reported, were rough and windy during the return to sailboat.

During the crossing, Brian told Bahamas Police force, his wife went overboard  in rough seas with the outboard’s keys, causing the engine to die, and was carried away by strong currents on a moonless night.

After losing sight of her, he said, he tried to paddle ashore only to end up washing up eight miles away in Marsh Bay.

Hooker then contacted police. By that afternoon an intense several-day search was underway by Bahamian authorities on land and sea, including divers and help from the U.S. Coast Guard.

Three days later, a flotation device Hooker said he tossed to his wife was recovered along the shoreline.

Lynette Hooker, however, had vanished without a trace.

On April 8, Brian spoke publicly about the supposed accident, saying he was heartbroken. The U.S. Coast Guard opened a criminal investigation into the case, as did Bahamian authorities. The next day they took Hooker into custody for questioning. He was held for the next four days for questioning but released on April 13 without being charged.

Since then, questions and accusations have mounted.

Hooker gave interviews to major news outlets, telling CBS Evening News early this month he was staying in the Bahamas and was going to continue looking for his wife “until someone with more authority to tell me to stop.”

But just hours later, he was back in the United States, he said, to see his ailing mother. He apparently hasn’t returned to the Bahamas since.

Hooker did not call his wife’s mother, Darlene Hamlet, who told the network her daughter said in March that she was planning to leave their rocky marriage.

“She bought a [plane] ticket but she never came,” an emotional Hamlet told the network.

The sailboat, which authorities now apparently consider a potential crime scene, lay anchored offshore for days until last week when it was spotted 40 miles off the coast of Melbourne, Florida, being piloted by a delivery captain and his first mate.

Hooker was not onboard. It was seized by U.S. Coast Guard air and sea assets as part of its investigation. It remains in custody of the Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS).

Hooker is represented by counsel and has denied any wrongdoing. A recording emerged of him telling a friend the details of the night of her disappearance, saying that three-foot waves bounced her off the back of the dinghy.

One of the podcasters who is all over the case and working primary sources has been true crime sleuth Ashleigh Banfield who claims, “Everything [Brian Hooker] has said is a lie,” and that evidence shows seas were calm where he claimed his wife fell overboard.

Banfield, who hosts her Drop Dead Serious podcast, said she believes investigators were looking at Soulmate as the actual scene of a crime, including the reported recovery on the boat of her Apple watch, which she appeared to be wearing that night on their visit to the mainland.

“Well, if she bounced off the back of the dinghy, she never made it to Soulmate,” Banfield reported. “How would her watch be on there?”

A look into the couple’s past and reports from the missing woman’s daughter, Karli Aylesworth, have revealed the relationship, despite being a long one, was clearly not smooth sailing.

She told News Nation that her mother told her of an incident years ago where Hooker allegedly choked her and threatened to kill her and throw her overboard.

“He’s threatened it, I’m pretty sure, multiple times,” she told the outlet. “He’s done actions to her that have hurt her. The fact that this is happening now is kind of coincidental. It’s just funny because he said he was going to do this and now it’s happening.”

The daughter also questioned why Hooker, according to one of his friends, stayed on the boat for 24 hours after he reported his wife missing and didn’t make more of an effort to find his wife.

Another daughter, Karli Aylesworth, has questioned her stepfather’s version of what happened. She went to the Bahamas to talk with authorities soon after her mother’s disappearance.

“I hope this was just a freak accident, but I just have a hard time believing it at the moment,” Aylesworth told NBC News in mid-April. “I just want to know the truth.”

She added, “I feel like this was probably preplanned, if anything, like, it doesn’t seem like just some accident.”

She also said her mother and stepfather, while both experienced sailors, have “a history of not getting along, especially when they drink.”

Police records show incidents of alleged domestic violence as far back as 2005. That year Hooker was investigated and charged by Kentwood Police with child abuse for allegedly choking his daughter from his first marriage during a visitation.

A jury acquitted him the following year.

In 2015, police also investigated domestic violence in the home, with both husband and wife alleging their spouse was guilty of assault. Police found there was insufficient evidence to determine who started the assault.

The case continues to produce new developments.

Most recently, daughter Karli Aylesworth told a news outlet she believes her mother actually was on the sailboat where “something may have happened.”

She reportedly told the Daily Mail that security footage of the yacht showed a bright “flash of light” on or around the anchored Soulmate just 17 minutes after the pair left dinner at a local hotel at 7:30 pm, and another allegedly around midnight.

“It’s kind of weird that they couldn’t make it to the boat,” she said. “They were right there. They could have almost walked in the water to the boat from the Abaco Inn; it was really shallow. And it was relatively sheltered from winds there, too.”

The celebratory social media posts by the couple are now peppered with demands by observers for Hooker to explain the inconsistencies, with one posting, “Where is your wife, sir?”

On the advice of his Michigan-based attorney, Crystal Marie Hauser, Hooker is no longer granting interviews.

“I would ask those watching to treat him the way you would want to be treated, to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Hauser told ABC News.

Veteran crime writer Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.