This is an odd story. She travels first to Turkey...stays a few days...flies to Amsterdam for 24 hours, then onto Munich for 3 days....and back to Istanbul (was only going to stay 48 hours before leaving for the US). No, she’s not known as a international traveler either.
My humble opinion is that she was a courier for diamonds or drugs. This story has too many points about it. Supposed to have been her first trip overseas...but she spends almost $10k on this episode.
As for Istanbul...around seventy percent of the city is fairly safe for anyone to walk around...day or night. I’d suspect she was in on some deal and screwed up somewhere in the middle of it.
Her erratic travel patterns, hard to believe backstory, and the bizarre details of this case tell us that this is not just a simple story of a naive tourist.
From the start, I thought there was something odd about the whole thing. She may have been involved in something criminal, but it could also be that she had met this Turkish man earlier on the internet and was going to Turkey to meet him, concealing it from her husband by covering her tracks with other travels and a story about a friend who couldn’t travel with her at the last minute.
Never underestimate the stupidity of women (I say this as one) when it comes to men.
She supposedly was an amateur photographer who went to Istanbul to take pictures. But she did not have a camera - all she took with her was an iPad and her smartphone. That doesn't sound like any photography bug I've ever met.
The FBI is saying that she met with known criminals when she first arrived in Istanbul and before she went to Amsterdam.
Her family had to raise money from local parishes to pay to have her body shipped back and to fly her husband there. Her busband is described as a "cash-strapped" bus driver and she had declared personal bankruptcy.
Her friend who supposedly cancelled her own trip apparently pulled out a couple of weeks ahead of time because the trip was too expensive. If they were staying in a hostel, the most expensive part of the trip was airfare - did the friend not even have tickets for that trip?