Of all the things that don't quite add up about Taylor Hicks and the case of his maybe fake girlfriend—and there are lots of them—the one that bothered us most was this: if Caroline Lyders and the girl from the beach are actually two different people, why has Beach Girl never come forward? (More background detail can be found here.)

After all, at one point, Hicks was a relevant national figure. A properly-timed revelation from Beach Girl outing the sham would have been big news, and could have garnered her material gains far beyond what Hicks could have conceivably paid her. (Assuming that a bribe is why she never talked in the first place. If she exists.)

Let's venture even further into the realm of the unsubstantiated: we are now hearing from semi-reliable sources that the reason Beach Girl hasn't come forward is that she's actually... a high-class escort. Which would explain, among other things, why Hicks freaked out after the initial batch of photos were released, why he scrambled to cover his tracks, and why he's staunchly refused to comment on the matter since. (Taylor, get back to us and put this to rest, once and for all! We'd honestly prefer to stop writing about you.)

One thing we do know for sure, however, is that we did not pay off Lois Gibson, the forensics expert we had look at the photos (her opinion: two different people). Gibson, it seems, has been inundated with emails from Hicks supporters alleging that she is involved in our sinister plot to ruin Taylor's good name. Her rebuttal:

I have gotten some feedback from fans and they are not acting logically at all. First of all, I used photos that are in the public domain and high resolution photos that belong to the Splash News Agency and other private photo agencies which Radar has access to. One can see they have not been altered. The ones in the article comparing and showing the drastic differences in the bones of the head and neck areas of the two females are just as they were when they were published before I conducted my analysis. The photos were not altered in the least. The only changes were to make them larger or smaller, which is always done when one puts photos in publications. This does not change the image and I did not alter any image besides sizing them for a one-on-one comparison.

I believe it is impossible for fans who disagree to have looked at the photos. Just in the two profiles side-by-side, one skull is over an inch wider! This was the case in every photo. With only this difference it makes it impossible for the two to be the same female!

This does not count the fact about the mandible is much larger on Lyders, her ear tilts back back further, and her neck is much longer and thinner. No person in the world ever varies on any of these flesh-and-bones landmarks after they finish bone growth.

We all can agree the female is an adult, right? Your bones do not change appreciably after you are an adult unless:

(a) you lose most or all of your teeth, in which case the mouth area looks "caved in" after a few years. This still would not make your neck longer or shorter, nor would it make your skull wider or narrower in profile. Since all the photos show a female with full dentition, this is not applicable.

(b) You are in an accident where bones in your skull or neck are broken. Since all the photos show a female with not even a tiny visible scar on the face, and since breaking one's neck would leave one paralyzed or dead, and since all photos show females that are neither dead or paralyzed, one can assume no major bone-breaking accident has occurred in the head/neck area.

(c) You have aggressive plastic surgery. However, there is no plastic surgery available to (1) make your neck longer, (2) make your skull wider from the profile view, or (3) make your mandible larger all the way from the chin to the temporomandibular joint (the location where the mandible attaches to the calvarium directly under the ear). There is surgery to make the chin in front pull back to correct prognathism, but nothing to alter the bones that run along the bottom of the chin up to the ear, and this is where Lyders' chin is much larger. To make one's mandible shorter in the horizontal plane, the mandible is sawed off a bit, reattached, and the mouth is wired shut, leaving the individual eating all meals from a straw for over a month. Lyder's colleagues would have noticed this drastic surgery.

These giirls have almost identical nose endings, haircuts, ears (both shape and size are almost identical) and are both similar skin color— as do hundreds of thousands of females in the continental. Bones however, which I based my observation upon, cannot be painted on nor are they changeable by anything but the most drastic means.

By the way, I am an absolute fan of Taylor Hicks. I just love him, his voice, his personality and everything about him. I want him to make blockbuster hit after hit. I was pulling for him from the beginning and never missed a time he sang on American Idol. I wish I could hear him all the time on the radio. I would love for him to make music so I could hear him more, I cannot get enough. But that does not change the bones in the two females I compared in photos taken when he was with them.

Sincerely,

Lois Gibson