Facebook, Gmail May Offer Clues To Woman's Disappearance In Aruba

Robyn Gardner, the woman who went missing in Aruba this week, apparently sent disappointed Facebook messages about her trip there to several friends. And now her boyfriend suspects her traveling companion of hacking her email account.

Gardner, 35, disappeared Aug. 2 while traveling with fifty-year-old Gary Giordano, apparently her friend. Giordano said she disappeared while snorkeling, but not everyone buys this. Her roommate, Christina Jones, was suspicious of Giordano before the trip — she tells CBS, “I was not excited about her going away with Gary.” She adds that Giordano had reacted oddly to a previous change of plans: “When she changed her mind, the way he responded set off a firework within my own self, so I got worried when she said she was going to leave to go to Aruba with Gary.”

Meanwhile, Gardner’s boyfriend Richard Forester doesn’t believe the snorkeling story. He tells People, “She wouldn’t have gone snorkeling and gotten her hair and makeup messed up. She would have been drinking by then. She would have been laying out by the beach.” Both say Gardner seemed to be having a bad time on the trip — she apparently messaged both of them on Facebook to say, “This sucks.” And Forester thinks Giordano may have been using Gardner’s Gmail account. He explains, “Throughout Wednesday and Thursday her indicator lights were green, orange and gray. This was after she was reported missing. So someone was on her Gmail account.” Forester adds,

A woman who used to date him contacted me and told me Giordano is very technologically savvy. This woman said he’d get into a person’s email account, pick up their personality and would then take on that persona.

Giordano is currently being detained for questioning in Aruba, and as it turns out, he has a history of abuse accusations. According to the Washington Post, one ex-girlfriend says he “stalked her, secretly videotaped them having sex and then posted pornographic images of her on the Internet.” His ex-wife accused him of attacking their son. And then there’s this story, eerily reminiscent of Jones’s early misgivings about Giordano:

Another woman who dated Giordano, Jeanette Farago, said in an interview with The Washington Post that Giordano stalked and harassed her while they both lived in Montgomery County. At one point, Farago said, Giordano offered to take her on a two-week cruise and bought her a ticket, but she refused to go. Giordano also showed up outside her window wearing a deer mask and illuminated his face with a cigarette lighter, she said. “He was just really creepy and scary,” Farago said. “He scared the bejesus out of me.”

It’s not clear what Gardner’s relationship was with Giordano. Jones says the two had “a roller coaster friendship, you know, good one day, not so great the next.” Meanwhile, Forester says Gardner told him Giordano was her “gay friend.” It’s also not clear what his questioning will reveal — his lawyer says “there’s no proof and there’s no motive” for him to kill Gardner. Meanwhile, her parents are still hopeful she will be found alive. They’ve released a statement saying, in part,

We can only pray that she will soon be with us and bring back the joy into our lives. She means the world to us.

Roommate Of Woman Missing In Aruba Speaks Out [CBS]
Robyn Gardner’s Boyfriend Recounts Her Disappearance [People]
Robyn Gardner Suspect Has ‘No Motive,’ Says His Attorney [People]
Gary Giordano Of Gaithersburg, Held In Aruba, Was Accused By Two Women Of Abuse [Washington Post]
Robyn Gardner’s Boyfriend Speaks On ‘Today’ About Aruba Trip [Washington Post]