Lynette Hooker Case: Husband’s Body Language EXPOSED

Does Brian Hooker's Body Language before bailing from the Bahamas raise questions?

In this video, we take a closer look at the interviews Brian Hooker gave just before leaving the country. While Hooker maintains his innocence, claiming Lynette fell overboard from their dinghy in rough waters, new analysis may challenge how that story is being perceived.

Joining the discussion is world-renowned body language expert Susan Constantine, who provides analysis of Hooker’s facial expressions, micro-movements, and emotional responses.

💬 What do YOU think happened?

🔔Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TrueCrimewithMattJohnson

LINKS: Guest Susan Constantine:
🔍  https://susanconstantine.com/home
📕  https://www.amazon.sg/How-Spot-Liar-Seconds-Less/dp/0306836076

#BrianHooker #LynetteHooker #TrueCrime #BodyLanguage #SusanConstantine #MissingPerson #CrimeAnalysis #InterrogationAnalysis #TrueCrimeCommunity #UnsolvedMystery #BreakingNews #CrimeStory #BehaviorAnalysis

Transcript

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Hey everybody, Matt Johnson here. What is Brian Hooker not saying? What could we pick up? What clues in his face, his body language, and his answers during these interviews? Explicitly ask you if you hurt your wife. Of course. What did you say to them? I said, "I've never harmed Lynette and I never would harm Lynette and I want to find Lynette. I don't think I've ever been apart from her in um in 25 years for this long. Any message to those who doubt your account of the story? I have no message to those who doubt me at all ever. I'm going to keep doing what I need to do to find my wife. She belongs with me. We belong with each other. I have a very special guest to help break down his answers in those interviews and also his body language after he leaves jail and before he leaves the Bahamas. But first, do me a favor, hit the like, hit the subscribe, and be sure to share this episode with a friend because in the show notes, I also have the GoFundMe information for Lynette's daughter. She just came back from the Bahamas. I did an interview with her, but I also share the GoFundMe so that she can get back to searching for her mom. It's pretty expensive. Now, the case of missing Lynette Hooker. Here to talk about it and break it all down is a friend of the program, Susan Constantine, body language expert, jury consultant, speaker, and author of How to Spot a Liar in 7 Seconds. First off, thanks for being here and I wanted to get your take on this case. Uh because what this um you know, husband might not be saying when he's answering these questions by reporters and I have three interviews and I have them broke down and we're going to go over specific areas of the interviews. But first, I wanted to get what you thought about his body language when he left um the jail there in the Bahamas after being detained for a couple days. So, let me put that on our screen. What do you make of his movements there? And and he almost gives a smirk at the end if you watch for that. Yes. So, I that's what I'd like to talk about too, Matt, because that's not just a smirk. That's all called contempt. When you see that unilateral one-sided lip movement, corner movement, not both corners, one corner, that is called contempt. What that's connected to is uh moral superiority. Also, narcissistic personality disorder. We see a lot of that with narcissists. You know, they think they're smarter than everybody else and they have that little cocky little smirk there. He does that a lot. So, he's also he's not seems to be too, you know, frazzled at all. I mean, he's making just uh a quick little glance over to the cameras and he's kind of just staying the course with that small little smirk. So when you combine the two there, this is a guy that thinks he got away with something. He doesn't have any fear. There's he doesn't have any concern. He he's really at this point in time, you wouldn't suspect that he has done anything wrong. He's just walking out of the police station and there's nothing there is any sort of real good indicator says, okay, this guy is really bad news, you know. And it's surprising, too, because um he had been detained for a few days. um obviously he maintains his innocence um and said that he was going to search for his wife and then fled the Bahamas, which we'll talk about, but um you know, someone that's in custody for a few days and in questioning for several hours, I was just surprised in how he was kind of smirking and and it was really good to get your take on all of that. Now, we're going to break down his interviews and we're going to break it down in a few things. you know, first off, he doesn't really talk about in the interviews what he says allegedly happened, but the first clip I'm going to play, um maybe just your overall reaction to it is um the phone call that he made to a friend giving the account. And then this kind of gives us I hopefully a baseline um in his answers further on. and then we're going to get into the the video of his interviews um when he's asked about the investigation and then I'll ask you about his emotions and then I'll ask you about um his reaction to his relationship and finally um when he said that he was not going to leave the Bahamas. So, let me put this on our screen and we'll begin with his account of what happened. She basically just bounced off the dinghy in the middle of a a little blow. She had the spare dingy key in her dry bag which was with her. The wind blew us apart so fast that I think I think she tried to swim back to the sailboat back to our sailboat which was probably I don't know thousand yard or something. Um, but the waves were 3T and I was yelling for her the whole time and uh I yelled to her that I lost the ore and I threw the anchor out and anchored the dinghy and uh Jesse I yelled I couldn't see her anymore. I threw her a flotation cushion that we used to sit on the dinghy um you know right after she went in. I couldn't tell if she got she got it or not. So after an hour of calling her I could have never heard her voice. I'm never going to forgive myself. We stayed too long. We were left too dark. Um all kinds of no life jackets. Um I had to the two that you stuff, you know, under the seats that nobody ever wears for, you know, Coast Guard purposes, but we used to wear these life jackets all we had these other ones all the time. I I can't explain can't explain what happened to us, you know. Okay. So, what's your take on that? All right. So, this would take me a long time to dissect all those words. However, there were some things that really jumped out to me. Uh, first of all, his his voice inflection never really fluctuated. It was I call it like a code blue EKG. You know, there was no real emotion that you really felt when you were hearing him say that. He also gave us a lot of irrelevant information, stuff that was kind of building a story. when he's telling the story, what he's doing is that he is building up the front end of the story, why something happened and the proportions of the story is out of sequence. So, generally speaking, that you're going to see a 25% of they're going to tell you why uh what happened, then what happened during that moment, and then the tail end. So, he's doing a lot of buildup and then he's very short on the very end of it. So that's a line deceptive tactic. That's what we call the the story line is out of sequence. The other thing is he uses a word I think. Right? It doesn't I know. It's just I think is pondering. I have a couple options here. Floating a couple options. He also uses the three foot. Remember the three-foot ways. Number three is the number one lying number. We found in research that people when they're lying, they'll always um divert to three, three o'clock, three times around the corner, three blocks away, they tend to go to the number three. The other thing is what he does is um he uses the word basically. So think of basically, sort of, kind of is a sloppy way of saying that what something occurred. So, did he push her and then she basically tipped over? So, he is lying by what we call omission. It's what he's not telling us. So, he's not really giving us some really good solid stuff. He's telling us why he thinks something happened or the three-foot waves. So, lying by omission he also says is the word just. Just is a minimizing response. I look at certain words that they use because every single word matters. How they structure their sentences, how they build up them, the structure of them, the tonality and the types of language that they use. So I ran him through what we call deception AI which I would mention to you earlier and I analyzed his statements and he is deception detected. So what does that mean? means all throughout that statement that story not that there was a high level of deception but there's deception indicated meaning that the story didn't happen the way he said it did that is fascinating and it makes me question how many times I say three and basically in my own conversation well three you know I say three times too you know but when people are trying to hide something a lot of times they go into the number Great. That's so interesting. Um, and he does it a lot and I'm sure I'm going to be listening for that um, as we watch the video clips. So, this is a compilation of ABC, CBS, and NBC clips, but I'm putting them in categories for us. And the first category is when he's asked about the overall investigation, what he can share. And by now he's lawyered up and he's not answering questions after he did that initial video or um phone call to his friend. Um and he's asked about being called a suspect. Police still look you as a suspect. Why do you think that is? I think some of it is probably the media attention. Um which is understandable. My time in the in with the Bohemian police was a small part of hell and a bigger part of hell that I'm really in right now. But I they have to do their job. If there's anything you can share about Easter weekend that you remember? I cannot share anything. As you can imagine, things are chaos and hectic, and I welcome any attention, anything that helps me further my goal of finding Lynette. Any message to those who doubt your account of the story? I have no message to those who doubt me at all ever. I'm going to keep doing what I need to do to find my wife. She belongs with me. We belong with each other. It struck me when he keeps on saying we belong together or she belongs with me. Yeah. So we is close, right? We and us. Um he's trying to create this bond like we had this phenomenal relationship. So she and I are one person. Uh we do look for or I look for when that separates from we to I um is showing distance. But I think that this is intentional that he wants to show that we were very connected to one another. We loved one another. And then he says find my wife. Um he didn't say I'm trying to find my wife or I'm looking for my wife. He forgets a pronoun there. So that's kind of omitted. And then a lot of things that he does is he does a lot of what we call thumb shrugs. So he does this, you know, he's talking like this and he'll you see these thumbs go out like that. So uh we see thumb shrugs, we see hand shrugs, we see shoulder shrugs. Those shrugs or a mouth shrug. Those are associated with deception. So he does that when he's talking. Normally you and I when we're having a conversation, you roll with your conversation with your hands. It's called illustrators that add to the story, brings clarity to it. But he's real casual. His hands are in his pocket. He's just kind of strolling along. you know, you would expect him to be using more gestures. You know, we I don't know if you know Phil Waters. He's a phenomenal um he's been on your show before and when you were with Court TV. And you know, when they're rolling their gestures, this is more open honesty. The way I feel, this is my experience. When they're casual, why has he got his hands in his pocket? It's way too casual for me to think, you know, you're not taking this seriously enough. So when you take that in totality with again his language his interactional style we call interactional style the flow of his language the the language use usage all of that are kind of they're combined in what we call clusters and when I see clusters there's deception indicated now this reporter is not asking there he's asking probing questions but he's not asking something that's going to increase cognitive load like did you kill your wife or did you do this? He didn't do that. So that would have increased cognitive load and then you would have seen them firing more indicators firing off. But he had control in this conversation because it was very conversational. There was no jeopardy involved with the questioning. Yeah. And you know, you're getting to what's on everybody's minds. You know, is this guy showing real emotion or not? Because so far, you know, you're describing it how a lot of people online are seeing it where he's why are you so casual? Your wife is missing. Why aren't you like just out there beating the drum, hitting the pavement? Why? You know, I mean, that's what's going through everyone's mind. So, let me put this back on our screen. And um so these are the clips where I found what appear to be a motion. And I'll get your take. What was it like being in police custody knowing that the search was still ongoing for your life? It was hell. It was a little a different chapter of hell and a giant hell that I'm in. You're still in it? Yes. I don't have a wife. She belongs with me. I will always think there was something I could have done differently. My one job, my one job was to look out for her and that has not happened. And I'm going to keep looking out for her now as best I can. You want to keep looking for Lynette? I'm going to need somebody with more authority to tell me to stop. It's been 10 days. It's been a long time. I don't think I've ever been apart from her um in 25 years for this long. I don't like it. Okay. Okay. Alex Murdoto, we got the same thing, right? We've got that performing cry. The emotions are illtimed. So, and then they shut down really fast. So, you can hear him try and Alex Murdoch did the same thing, right? He would trend like he's crying and then he would cough. Coughing the um emotions going on and off like a light switch. That's not how natural emotions happen. Natural emotions have an apex and they glide right back off naturally. And then there's no sadness. His mouth becomes stretched. You don't see a chin boss. You don't see the horizontal wrinkles. What we're these wrinkles in the center of the grief muscles. You don't see any of those, right? And so then he's trying to use convincing. He raises his eyebrows, right? And he's trying to convince you because that's I did not have sex with that woman. He does one of those kind of things, right? So that's what they do when they don't when they're trying to convince someone because that's the only thing he's got. Number one is how is he responding to me? Do they believe me? And then he's feeling threatened. So he's got to therefore kind of sell it a little bit better. His emotions are not authentic. Okay. So all of your viewers, he's faking it. Okay. This is a fake and a bad performance. We're looking at another Alex Murdoch incarnate right here. So no, he says I I you want about his wife. He mentions I don't have a wife. That's a very odd thing to say. I don't have a wife. In in other words, you should have been saying, you know, I miss my wife. I'm trying to find my wife. I love my wife. I don't have a wife anymore. So, he's already assuming she's dead. If you're still out there looking for him, why are you're using uh uh past tense or future tense stuff, which is you're already assuming that she's dead. I don't have a wife. What do you mean? What does that mean? If if we knew she died and they had already recovered the body, then that would make sense, but they haven't recovered the body yet. Okay. Stephen Stern did the same thing and a lot of his language, right? When he was talking about Meline was to start school. That's right. It was to start school. Was to start school. So, you have to look at past tense future tense. And here's the interesting thing about behavior, Matt. They will always give themsel away. I don't care if they're a psychopath. They'll either control the words they use or they're going to control their body language. For them to control both at the same time and have it work together like a really fine machine over a length of time when they're being asked probitative questions, they're going to screw up. They'll screw up in the language. Their voice inflection will show the vocal tremors of deception and their vo vocal tones will t uh jump down. or in this case what he's doing is trying to create a little bit more like you know like he's really worried but then you look at the facial expressions and it's not congruent when you're looking at body language and voice it all needs to be congruent given the context or the account when it's off it's off for a reason so bad performance liar liar pants on fire as Julie Grant would say right yes yes exactly um I really found that that was fascinating that you mentioned that as well about the fact that um he always coughs or at least he did it twice in two different interviews when he was appearing to try appearing to be emotional or attempting to cry or whatever that was. Yeah, that's called psychophysiology. So that's one of the channels. There's six channels of communication, right? One of them is psychophysiology. That is like when their mouth is dry, they're licking their lips, they're coughing, they're showing flushed skin tone, their skin becomes white, um coughing, yawning, all of those are under psychophysiology. So when that happens that what when you're lying, it dries up the mucous glands. So what do they do? You got to do that to try to bring up some sort of um moisture into your vocal cords. And that's all part of the psychophysiology. So when you're looking at um the behavior, remember I mentioned to you a lot of times on your show is we're looking for 327 three indicators. That's one vocal fry, right? We're also looking at inongruent facial expressions, which is called a face anomaly. So we already got three right off the bat. You don't even have to go any further than that. It's already telling me that he's always going to be lying himself through it. You don't. But when you when you look at all the indicators and there's like 136 of them. Okay. So, in each channel, there's multiple indicators that I look for that are associated scientifically to deception, and I just named three of them. Well, let's move on to um the relationship. So there's been a lot of reporting about that it they've had a troubled past this husband and wife and there was allegations of domestic abuse and even witnessed by the children. So family and friends have spoken about your relationship with Lynette. We've seen a police report of a domestic incident that left you with a bloody nose and her in handcuffs. Is there anything that you want us to know about your relationship with Lynette? I want you to know that Lynette and I loved each other the most. We've been together almost half our lives. What do you want people to know about your marriage with Lynette? I want people to know that Lynette is my life and we've been together half almost half my life and we belong to each other. Did police ever explicitly ask you if you hurt your wife? Of course. What did you say to that? I said, "I've never harmed Lynette and I never would harm Lynette and I want to find Lynette. It's been 10 days. It's been a long time. I don't think I've ever been apart from her um in 25 years for this long. I don't like it. Okay. A whole bunch. All right. Did you see the thumb shrugs? I did. I was looking for that after you mentioned it. Thumb shrugs. Okay. And also, it's kind of like smiling throughout, right? So, it's sometimes people will smile when they're uncomfortable. So, it's like going to a funeral and sometimes people will smile or laugh just to kind of kill off some of their anxiety, but it's kind of an awkward smile. The other thing is that he says when he's talking about he loves his wife, go back and look at it and you'll see him first shake his head no. When he says that he loves his wife, he really loved his wife. He's shaking his head no. Inongruent face anomaly. That's a inongruent facial inongruent head nod for saying uh a certain certainty u statement. They also his expression is very flat again, right? So there's no modulation like I really love my wife. There's no hand gestures going here. He's very rigid in his posture. That's also called tension in the body when he's sitting very straight up like almost like in like an um like it's a statue almost sitting in the chair, right? And he's not using gestures and so forth. That's someone that's controlling behavior, right? He's trying to control behavior. No illustrators, no movement in his body. He also changes the word from where the interviewer says about um hurt and harm. He changed the word. He asked someone hurting. He said,"I never harmed my wife." So he changed changed the term. Any time somebody changed the term, there's a change in the context. So the way these kind of people think is like even in like in a sexual assault, they'll say, "Well, I never ne they won't say I never sexually molested the child." They'll just say, "I never hurt them." You know, they use they use minimizing language. He's also using what we call manipulator. So he puts his hand up over his mouth, does this kind of thing, right? Those are manipulators. Those are things that we do when we're feeling a lot of emotion or I don't say take that back. We're feeling emotion, but it's emotion that is associated with deception because they're self soothing, vocal fry. You hear them go pitch up and then there's no tears. Yeah. No tears and not even the appearance of tears, you know. And then he's talking about this relationship and then he just kind of brushes over the the question al together. It it very bizarre when you dissect this stuff, right? So if we had like a whole hour, we could take just that one part. We could go on for an entire hour. We could break it down to every word he said, every shrug he did, every lack of uh expression at the right moment, head shrugs and things like that. There's so much of it. and the language. You can't control what you're going to say and the body language and their facial expressions and how he interacts with the interviewer and have it perfectly make sense according to the content and the account. So what I look for is is are those all in congruent to A, B, and C, their baseline or their account, their baseline and the context. And so when I know what the indicators are of deception, I look for my cluster and then are they in congruent with A, B, and C? And there are massive clusters that are within every single one of these video clips. So is he focusing more on what he's saying and being careful there or is he also thinking about his his body movements or the lack of I mean what is he? Let me tell you what he's doing. It's called impression management. Impression management. He is trying to appear like a caring, loving, he's doing it Alex Murdoch. you know, I am trying to set the impression that I'm really concerned that I love my wife, we have the strong relationship. That's all about impression management because if that if the interviewer didn't ask that specific question, then he goes into outer space and starts adding all this extraneous information that is important to him because what he's doing is creating the impression. So, he's really concentrating right in the these videos here or this video impression management. And these reporters are tap dancing around because the attorney, they've each said in the reports that the attorney was standing off to the side and they were not going to get into um his account of what happened. He was no longer answering questions of that. So, it would would have just wasted time, you know, no comment, no comment, no comment. So, try to think on the spot of what to ask this guy. what he's constantly doing, he's using um omission, not telling you the whole story. He's evading and he's dodging. So, when you think about that, why are why does he feel like he needs to do that? And then he goes back to one of the other clips is, well, you know, he goes back to the legal part. I'm not supposed to be talking about this or I can't really express that. And that's a way for to lying by omission. I don't have to tell you that. I'm not going to answer that question. Why? Because it's harder to lie. you know, the more he gets he's asked a direct question, um, it's too hard to lie. That's why he kind of gets on the surface like he's just all this superolous stuff. He doesn't really find he doesn't, you know, focus in on the answers. And when you were talking about managing uh the image, so to speak, you know, and uh shaping the narrative, both the public and the police narrative that he's trying to portray. Then he's asked about, "Are you going to continue searching for your wife?" And we know he doesn't because we know that he's left. But here's his answers to that. Any message to those who doubt your account of the story? I have no message to those who doubt me at all ever. I'm going to keep doing what I need to do to find my wife. She belongs with me. We belong with each other. My sole focus is finding Lynette. My goal is to go back and speak with the Hopetown Fire and Rescue volunteers, the search and rescue volunteers. Uh they have been, I believe, still looking whenever they can. Even while I have been uh detained by the Royal Bahamian Police Department, I was speaking with a volunteer the day that I was detained to go out on one of their boats. They were going to take off work and take me searching some more areas. Um I won't be able to stop looking. You want to keep looking for Lynette? I'm going to need somebody with more authority to tell me to stop. Well, we know that that didn't happen and he stopped. But, you know, giving him the benefit of the doubt, his mom is sick and you know, my interview with the stepdaughter, she explains all of that, but he left to take care of mom and he stopped searching. Uh, as far as we know, no plans to come back, but uh, in all these clips, you know, he was super focused on staying. Yeah. I don't know why he felt he needed the permission to stop. That's interesting. You know, do you need a pink slip, a permission slip from the teacher? I don't understand that part. So, shoulder shrugs, you can see him kind of this shoulder shrugging, the thumb shrug. When you do that, you can erase the sentence before it and then you have to question anything that happens after that. It's shrugging them off. So that's part of the deceptive indicator. Of course, we see the performance in the cry, the jagged on and off emotion, not authentic. So when we look at that in all in the entirety, um I found that to be really interesting and plus that long pause like he had to think about it. So, it's like, hm, he asked a question that was what we call uh a high cognitive load question. And he was like the the brain had to take a second for it to kind of think about what it was going to say and to pull it out and then respond. And that's when he said, right, well, he's not going to stop until he's basically saying until he's told not to stop. He needed permission. I don't know about you, Matt, but if I had a loved one that was missing, especially your spouse, um, you would be going, I don't care what they say. I'm we're having our own investigation, you know, you know, and I I just am perplexed. And plus, this actually makes my job very easy when I do these kind of things because I just go, this is like a no-brainer. Like, you know, I have to turn attorneys send me videos all the time happens on the reports and I'm like, dude, you know, your client's lying to you. I, you know, maybe you can do a plea bargain. I don't know because he's lying. Well, it would be interesting if this ever goes to a trial. I guess in the States it may go to a civil trial if it gets that far because we're talking Bahamian courts here. But, um, I think that you really made sense about a situation that makes no sense to anybody. Like, that's right. And that's what you know, and it's interesting you say that because Matt, for me and for you, we have no skin in the game. I could care less whether it was innocent or whether he's guilty. We just want to know what the evidence tells us. And I analyze people not based on my own personal bias or feeling or opinion. It is based on research. So I go, okay, there's clusters here that's associated with deception and that's what I present. So uh that way you don't get emotionally involved in cases. you can separate yourself and be objective and not not being emotional about stuff. And that that's how what makes my job easier because that's all I'm looking at is just the research and the science. Well, people love hearing your opinion and your analysis. You're so good at it. You've been doing it uh for for quite a while and you did it for the government. Um you're also working on several trials, high-profile trials. Um you're a speaker. You're going to be at Crime Con. I'm excited to see you there. Yes. And your book. Let's talk about your book. I know. I know. I'm so excited because it's finally on, you know, for sale that you can pre-order. So, listen guys, it's not going to be out until February, but it's now on pre-order. I would go to Barnes & Noble and you can order it, pre-order it there, and it's going to be in Kindle and it's also going to be an audio version, which is going to be my voice. And then, of course, the hardcover copy. And my dear friend Matt gave me a wonderful endorsement. And of course, he has worked with me for on so many cases. I had to give him a big shout out at the end of my book because I'm so thankful for all the work he's doing. And Matt, you you always got a close, you know, place in my heart because we started off together way back when in the CA case, you know, here in Orlando. Yeah. You know, um well, I'm just such a big fan and I'm excited to see you at Crime Con. I've also ordered the book. Um, I'm excited to gift it to my sister and to other people I know. I'm going to have information in um my show notes below so people can find it and find you and your website. But I really appreciate your time. It's my pleasure. Thanks, Matt. Let's keep Lynette's family and friends in our thoughts and prayers and hope that they get answers soon. Again, please hit the like, subscribe, and share this episode, especially the GoFundMe for Lynette's family so that they can get back out there to the Bahamas and search for her. Take care of yourself. We'll see you next time.