TOM LEONARD reveals hidden clues to Hannah Kobayashi's 'kidnapping'

Written neatly on a notebook page adorned with doodles, 30-year-old Hannah Kobayashi had set down everything she’d planned to do on a 4,900 mile ‘bucket-list’ trip from Hawaii to New York.

Instead, her journey has ended in a chaotic double tragedy after she went missing earlier this month. On Sunday, her distraught father took his own life after fruitless attempts to find her.

Ryan Kobayashi, 58, was found dead near Los Angeles Airport after jumping off a multi-storey car park – two weeks after his daughter, a budding photographer, had been expected in the Big Apple on a five-day trip to photograph live music gigs as well as visit relatives outside the city.

Having spent thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and concert tickets, she’d just been given a Press pass and, says her family, couldn’t have been more excited.

However, in a deeply puzzling mystery that was gripping the US even before her devastated father’s suicide, investigators now fear Hannah never got farther than LA.

Mr Kobayashi, who was divorced from Hannah’s mother, had been among family members and friends who’d flown from their home on the Hawaiian island of Maui to look for Hannah.

A support group for the family said his death had ‘compounded the family’s suffering immeasurably’. They remain deeply worried about her safety and, after she was pictured leaving LA’s main airport with an unknown person, fear she was kidnapped.

Mr Kobayashi, also a photographer, had spent 13 days searching LA, including Skid Row, where homeless people and drug addicts live in a squalid tent city. He had earlier told CNN: ‘Hannah loved to travel. She loved photography, art, music. I wasn’t too close with her . . . growing up.’

He added: ‘I’m just trying to make up. I’m trying to get her back.’

His former sister-in-law, Larie, said he ‘just died of a broken heart’. She added: ‘Being on the streets and seeing what the possibilities of where his daughter could be. No sleep. The speculating rumours that are going around. It just took a toll on him.’

She said that increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories swirling on social media may have worsened Mr Kobayashi’s fragile mental state. They include bizarre speculation that she was brainwashed by a New Age cult called Twin Flames or that she was being blackmailed by African hackers.

Her family sought to cut off another wild branch of conjecture by stressing that Mr Kobayashi had no involvement in his daughter’s disappearance. They also addressed claims that Hannah had had a psychotic breakdown, insisting that she had no history of mental illness.

And yet a more mundane explanation for her disappearance remains elusive.

Hannah flew from her native Maui to LA on November 8, arriving at 9.53pm local time. She was meant to make a connecting flight to New York, having booked tickets with a boyfriend with whom she’d since broken up.

They’d decided to keep their tickets as they couldn’t get a refund and simply go their separate ways in New York.

However, while the ex-boyfriend – who has not yet been named – was able to make the connection, Hannah told her family that she’d missed it, and was trying to get on a new flight. But security camera footage captured her leaving the airport, carrying only a backpack. And the following afternoon she went into an art bookshop at a smart shopping centre called The Grove in downtown LA – ten miles away – for reasons her family can only put down to her love of exploring.

Staff at the Taschen bookstore say she asked them if she could charge her phone while she went to get some food. She even filled out a mailing list and gave her Hawaiian address. Staff say she seemed in good spirits. However, she then sent an electronic payment to two people whose names her family didn’t recognise.

The following day – November 10 – Hannah returned to the same shopping centre and, say staff, to the same bookshop. At 3.40pm, she appeared in the background of a video shot outside a Nike event at The Grove featuring basketball star LeBron James. She posted a photo of the event on Instagram. Hannah, who has a tattoo of a knife on one forearm, was wearing the same clothes – black hooded sweatshirt and tie-dye leggings – she’d had on when she got off the flight from Hawaii.

A day later she was back at LAX Airport arranging an American Airlines flight to New York. Again, she didn’t get on it. However, by then, her family and friends had started receiving oddly phrased messages that her aunt described as ‘super strange and alarming’.

‘We started getting texts saying that she didn’t feel safe, that someone was trying to steal her funds, that someone was trying to take her identity,’ said her aunt, Larie Pidgeon. In one, Hannah wrote: ‘I just finished a very intense spiritual awakening.’ She said she was heading to New York but ‘I might need some help getting there, it’s a long story’.

Another message apologised for her ‘craziness’, adding she had been ‘intercepted’. In others, she said she was worried someone might be trying to steal her money and identity. ‘I got tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds,’ read a message to one of Hannah’s friends. A second to the same recipient added: ‘For someone I thought I loved.’

A particularly sinister text said: ‘Deep Hackers wiped my identity, stole all of my funds, & have had me on a mind f*** since Friday.’ In another, she said: ‘Matrix style . . . I’m safe . . . For the good of all . . . I will keep you posted.’

Her relatives now believe they were either sent by someone else or by Hannah under duress.

As her aunt explained, Hannah often used emojis for words – and yet the messages they received didn’t contain a single emoji. ‘There were words like “funds” . . . Who uses that word?’ she said.

Hannah’s phone was reportedly switched off at the airport and has since sent no more messages. However, she was later spotted on CCTV on November 11 getting on a Metro train in LA with an unidentified person she hadn’t mentioned to her family.

‘She knows no one in LA. Our entire family knows no one in LA,’ said her aunt.

At around 10pm that night, footage shows the pair leaving the Pico Metro Station in a rough central LA neighbourhood that her family insists their daughter would never normally visit.

Images have not been released – but Hannah’s family said in a statement: ‘It is evident that Hannah does not appear to be in good condition and she is not alone.’

They filed a missing persons report the following day and LA police launched a social media campaign to find her, although Hannah’s loved ones have complained the authorities didn’t take their claims seriously for ten days.

Her Aunt Larie said Hannah had been determined to get to New York and planning the trip for months. ‘She’d finally got a Press pass…it was one of the biggest accomplishments of her life,’ she said. She dismissed speculation that she had been drunk or on drugs when she disappeared.

‘Everything just doesn’t add up,’ said her father Ryan shortly before his death. ‘There’s so much confusion.’ His death, tragically, has only increased it.