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A Diary, Bible and Mystery From Sea

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It was a zippered lingerie bag, lying on the water’s edge last Saturday morning at San Onofre State Beach, that caught Tom Hooker’s eye. He snagged it and looked inside. Its contents: a large Bible and another book that also held loose scraps of paper. He looked around and saw no likely owners.

He took the package -- a mystery with some clues -- to his Mission Viejo home and showed it to his wife, Lois.

“It just captivated me,” she says, “because I realized it was a diary. And when you find a diary in the sea, your imagination runs away with you. We both started obsessing that maybe it was from the victim of some murder.”

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Tom thought out loud about the possibility of some kind of shipwreck.

With that for openers, Lois began separating the contents, which aside from the diary and oversized Bible, consisted of dozens of pieces of paper, such as a prescription refill, a pay stub, a letter, a bank transaction and receipts for gas, motels and a Wal-Mart purchase. The bank balance was less than $100.

The diary, with entries beginning in October 2005 and ending in February 2006, was roughly 8 1/2 by 11 inches. “It looks like it was meant as a journal,” Lois says, “because it has a bookmark ribbon attached.”

The items were moist but not saturated. Because they were legible, Lois theorized they hadn’t been in the water for an inordinate length of time. She’s verified with authorities that no unidentified bodies have been reported found in the area. Lois spread the items out so they could dry and began reading, believing from the outset that the items hadn’t been left accidentally on the beach.

I ask why not. “It was just too personal,” she says. “It never entered my mind [they had been left by mistake], plus I couldn’t see hauling that stuff to the beach in the first place.”

I should mention that the Hookers are friends of mine. Tom owns a civil engineering firm and Lois is a researcher who spent 10 years with The Times and now works for a Newport Beach law firm. Her professional expertise is in using databases and other information sources to learn things about people.

For her, then, the bag’s contents sent her on a quest. “I’m just fascinated,” she says. “I wanted to know more about the story. I assumed she was dead. I assumed that, if you find a Bible and a diary in the water, someone died.”

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The large Bible (Lois thinks the water-logged cover might even be some kind of light wood) and diary were bound with heavy-duty string. “The diary pages were wet, so I had to be really careful to try and separate them,” Lois says, “so I couldn’t spend a lot of time in the diary right away.”

But in the four days since, she’s put some things together. She believes the woman had recently joined a church in Mission Viejo and worked, at least for a short time, at an agency that sends people to help the elderly in their homes. Those entries, of course, are now seven months old, at least.

Some items included the woman’s name, but I’ve decided not to reveal it -- mainly because I don’t know the circumstances of how the bag ended up in the ocean.

I checked Wednesday with both the church and the care-giver agency. A church official wouldn’t let an employee check their rolls, and an agency official said he couldn’t verify the identities of any former employees without contacting them.

Lois says diary entries and receipts indicated the woman had traveled in the western United States and had some mail correspondence with people with Nebraska and Oklahoma connections. Lois believes the woman has two sons, but picked up no clues about her age.

The diary entries have a theme, Lois says. “They were written at a very distressed time of her life,” she theorizes. Interspersed with entries about mundane things like doing laundry or eating dinner, other darker sentiments emerge. Lois thinks they sound almost like prayers put into print.

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“She’s talking about things wrong in her life, feelings, it’s really kind of hard to describe,” Lois says. “Some of it, I almost didn’t understand.”

Lois says her database search isn’t turning up much. The papers indicate only a post office box address in Mission Viejo. Lois says the woman refers to being homeless. Lois is certain she’s religious, because the Bible is heavily annotated and underlined, from Genesis to Revelation. She wrote in the margins of a church brochure.

The most disturbing entry, Lois says, came in January: “Everything gone, no hope. I took enough pills to kill a horse, but apparently I’m not a horse.”

That and other clues suggest a dire scenario, Lois says. However, Lois has an alternative, more uplifting theory, too. “Those were her two most personal things,” she says of the Bible and diary. “That suggests that something happened, but I could also see her turning her life around for the better” and, as if to purge herself of the past, discarding both items.

Lois would like to reunite the woman with her possessions, if indeed they were lost. But, for now, she’s engrossed in the hunt.

“With me, it began with the mystery,” she says. “You know I like a good mystery. When I think of my research background, it’s the kind of stuff movies are made of. And the fact is I’ve been at it since Saturday. I couldn’t wait the other day to get back to the diary and read it. Maybe I’m being voyeuristic, I don’t know.”

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I think not. She wants to know how the bag ended up in the surf, to clear up the loose ends, to complete the quest. “It’s haunting, when you read how articulate she is,” Lois says. “That’s what makes the difference for me. It’s not the rantings and ravings of a crazy person. It sounds much different than that.”

I ask her what she’ll do if she hits a dead end.

“I’m not ready for it to dead-end yet,” she says. “If it does, I probably wouldn’t want to keep it, but it’s hard to picture what I’d do with it.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.

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