The "Other" Missing Pregnant Wife

[Ksyrup]

Well, there are a couple of them, but the one that's been in the headlines lately. What a strange case. Wife goes jogging and disappears, 5 weeks into her pregnancy. Husband and wife were planning to move to NC so that the husband could attend medical school, and went so far as to find a place to live, rent a U-Haul, and have the husband's father help with the move. Now it turns out the guy never even applied to med school or graduated from college, and he's checked into a psych ward.



SALT LAKE CITY July 22, 2004 — The husband of a missing pregnant woman has been hospitalized, and police discovered that he had lied to his wife and family about graduating from college and getting into medical school, authorities said Thursday.

Mark Hacking, 28, has not appeared publicly since Monday, when he said his 27-year-old wife, Lori, never returned from a morning jog. The disappearance came days before the couple were to move to North Carolina, supposedly so that he could attend medical school.

Hacking entered the hospital Monday night or early Tuesday because of stress, according to his brother, Lance. He would not say what kind of hospital it was. Detective Dwayne Baird confirmed that Hacking was hospitalized but would not give details.
Hacking's family and in-laws said they were stunned to learn on Wednesday that he had not graduated from college or been accepted at a medical school, as he had claimed.

Thelma Soares, Lori Hacking's mother, said that she was certain her daughter had not known about the discrepancies. "Up to the time when I spoke with her last, she was deceived also," she told KUTV-TV.

Soares, addressing herself to her son-in-law, said: "We feel badly that you felt that it was necessary to perpetuate this deception. We love you, no matter what."

Police Chief Rick Dinse said "there is no question (Mark Hacking) is a person of interest" in the disappearance of his wife, but said he would have been regardless of the lies he told about his education.

Douglas Hacking said he spoke to his son at the hospital about the deception.

"He has two older brothers who are high achievers, a physician and the other is an electrical engineer," the elder Hacking said. "He felt under some pressure to excel as well. It has finally come to an end, and he's relieved."

The University of North Carolina said Wednesday that Hacking had never applied to the medical school. Also, the University of Utah said he was enrolled from 1999 to 2002, majoring in psychology, but never graduated.

More than 1,200 volunteers scoured the steep terrain surrounding a park and canyon in a search for Lori Hacking on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, volunteers took fliers door-to-door in downtown Salt Lake City neighborhoods.

Friends said the couple learned last Thursday that Lori was five weeks pregnant, although The Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday quoted police as saying that had not been confirmed. Lance Hacking said Thursday that Lori showed the positive at-home pregnancy to her sister-in-law.

[Franklinnoble]

I saw photos of that guy on the news yesterday, and he looks like a head-case.

The nutjob development does not bode well. Mark Geragos should be on a plane to Salt Lake City any minute now...

[Glengoyne]

I saw photos of that guy on the news yesterday, and he looks like a head-case.

The nutjob development does not bode well. Mark Geragos should be on a plane to Salt Lake City any minute now...
I dunno. I guess it depends on what kind of pathological liar he is. If he is the poor self-esteem rather unassuming type, then I wouldn't think that personality would lend itself to murder. If he is the Derek Smart take your lies to the grave type, then maybe.

[Eaglesfan27]

I had a friend in college who killed himself when he found out just before graduation that he didn't make it into medical school. It can be such tremendous pressure.

This situation doesn't sound good at all :(

[Peregrine]

I read this article yesterday and think it really points out something I've often thought about, how you only make the news if you're a white female, hopefully young or wealthy, despite the large numbers of people that go missing every year.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5325808/

[Jesse_Ewiak]

Well, ya know, black female that lives in the ghetto = No big deal.
Pretty white girl gets killed = SEND IN COURIC AND LAUER!

[sterlingice]

I was going to post my typical "But how in the hell is this national news?" post but my job has already been done here. Go, Peregrine, go (as well as Jesse but he gets the main credit because he said it first). :)

SI

[sterlingice]

Anyways, where's a soap box icon when you need one:

Why are kiddnappings suddenly the major news du jour. You can't tell me this is all the national media has to talk about? I read the first MSNBC story about how it's basically white, upper-middle class women who make the news. What's even more interesting is that the finger pointing is all going to local news. The claim is that the national news doesn't know where to get stories from so they rely on local news. So, of course, I'm sure that's why they chose some Wisconsin (or wherever that other one was) woman as a major news story and a North Carolina one. Madison and Raleigh are the pulses of the nation, right?

I find this article (linked from the suggested one above) more interesting than the first, kindof like a companion article that's also good reading: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4669495/

SI

[EagleFan]

Go figure. Headlines about a possible black criminal get met with "all you ever hear about blacks on the news is something negative". Now headlines about possible white murder suspects get "you never hear about the black people".

It's ALL ABOUT THE STORY!!!! If she had gone missing AND the husband hadn't checked into a psych ward AND had been lying to his family about something as major as this, there would have been no national headlines unless it was someone famous.

[Ksyrup]

It's ALL ABOUT THE STORY!!!! If she had gone missing AND the husband hadn't checked into a psych ward AND had been lying to his family about something as major as this, there would have been no national headlines unless it was someone famous.I agree. The Laci Peterson case was only a story because the media latched onto the sympathy factor of it occurring around Christmas. Once Scott became a real suspect and his lies and affair were public, that was just gravy for the media. Had all of that post-abduction stuff not occurred, and had she just been murdered by a stranger who wanted her purse or something, that story would have died.

For instance, the case of April Greer has been pointed out as one very similar to the Laci Peterson case, except April was poor, so the media didn't run with it. Well, she might have been poor, but there was no "story behind the story," either. The boyfriend killed her. Period. End of news.

http://rdu.news14.com/content/headlines/?ArID=28027&SecID=2

The issues surrounding the MWP phenomenon are interesting. The female part I understand; females are generally considered as unable to defend themselves and sympathetic victims, because of the possible sexual abuse factor in connection with an abduction that typically, a male victim won't have. Why only white people? Ask the media. The "we're just giving the public what they want" angle might be true, but I don't think they've done enough similar stories about missing black people to test that theory out.

[hhiipp]

The media is looking for the white OJ story.

[Ksyrup]

Why? The black OJ story was too small?!? That one had more to do with celebrity, anyway - at least the media coverage. It wouldn't have mattered whether Nicole was white or black, it was OJ that was the real story.

[hhiipp]

Just thought I'd throw that out there and stir you up a little bit ;)

[cuervo72]

Would the resulting chase then be in a black Bronco?

[Ksyrup]

And instead of a mansion in Brentwood, the chase would end at a crack house in Compton.

[Noop]

That was so funny I forgot to laugh.

[cuervo72]

"And then his wife put her titties in my hands"...

[Ksyrup]

Not looking too good for this guy...



Report: Man bought mattress before reporting wife missing

Mark Hacking called 'person of interest,' not suspect, in Utah case




SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AP) -- Around the time Mark Hacking called police to report that his pregnant wife never returned from her morning jog, he was at a furniture store buying a new mattress, according to local news reports.

Hacking, 28, has not appeared publicly since Monday, the day he said his 27-year-old wife, Lori, vanished. Family members say he has since been hospitalized for stress.

The Deseret News and television station KSTU reported Thursday that police found Hacking at a motel about a half-mile from the couple's apartment early Tuesday. The report said Hacking was hospitalized after being found.

Police said only that they were called to a disturbance involving Hacking and that the matter was turned over to medical personnel.

Det. Dwayne Baird said police considered Hacking a "person of interest" in the case but not a suspect, and that he had been interviewed as recently as Wednesday.

Lori Hacking was five weeks pregnant when she disappeared just days before the couple was to move to North Carolina, where Mark Hacking said he was going to attend medical school, family members said.

But he had lied to his wife and family -- he never graduated from college, nor was he accepted to any medical school, authorities said Thursday.

Meanwhile, The Salt Lake Tribune and KSL TV reported that Monday morning, in the minutes before he called police to report his wife missing, Mark Hacking was buying a new mattress.

The owners of a Salt Lake furniture store told the Tribune that Hacking came in about 9:45 a.m. Lisa Downs, the wife of store owner Chad Downs, said the credit-card purchase went through at 10:23 a.m..

Police have said Hacking called them and reported his wife missing at 10:49 a.m.

Friends told the Tribune that he had called them about 10 a.m. about his wife's disappearance and said he had twice run his wife's usual jogging route, three miles each way.

Police removed items from the couple's apartment Monday. They would not say what they have taken from the apartment, but television news footage showed paper bags, boxes and a box spring being removed. Police impounded a large trash bin from behind the apartment complex.

Mark Hacking's family and in-laws said they were stunned to learn Wednesday that he had not graduated from college or been accepted at a medical school, as he had claimed.

Thelma Soares, Lori Hacking's mother, said that she was certain her daughter had not known about the discrepancies. "Up to the time when I spoke with her last, she was deceived also," she told KUTV-TV.

Douglas Hacking said even though his son is incapacitated by grief, they spoke of the deception Wednesday night at the hospital.

"He has two older brothers who are high achievers, a physician and the other is an electrical engineer," he said. "He felt under some pressure to excel as well."

[Glengoyne]

He doesn't seem near as competent as Scott Peterson.

[Ksyrup]

I'd say things are getting worse for this guy.



SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (AP) -- The last day her co-workers saw her, Lori Hacking was heading home for the weekend after getting a phone call that left her stunned and sobbing, The Associated Press has learned. She never showed up at her office the following Monday.

Several colleagues at Wells Fargo Securities Services said Hacking had been arranging for on-campus housing at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and that they believe the school was returning a call to say her husband, Mark Hacking, was not enrolled there, as he had told her.

"She was visibly upset. She started to cry and got up to walk away," her supervisor, Randy Church, told the AP on Monday. He said that when co-workers asked her what was wrong, she replied, "It's no big deal; I'm OK. But I think I will go home."

Wells Fargo employee Darren Openshaw told The Salt Lake Tribune he overheard the phone call to his co-worker. "I could hear her say things such as 'But he's already been accepted. He's already applied. This can't be correct,' " he recalled.

Openshaw told the paper that he believes the caller was from the University of North Carolina.

He said Hacking seemed fine when she arrived for a going-away party later that evening, according to the newspaper.

At the time of her disappearance, the couple were packing to move to North Carolina. But after she vanished, police and family members learned that besides lying about being accepted to medical school, Mark Hacking had not even graduated from college.

Lori Hacking left work early after receiving the call Friday afternoon, July 16. Mark Hacking reported his wife's disappearance the following Monday. She is now feared dead, and her husband has become the focus of the police investigation.

Mark Hacking, a 28-year-old nightshift hospital orderly, has been at a psychiatric hospital since police found him running around naked in sandals the night after the search for his wife began. Police refused to say whether he was being held involuntarily.

His family has hired defense attorney D. Gilbert Athay, who said Monday he has spoken to Hacking many times since being hired Thursday. He refused to characterize the conversations.

Lori Hacking, a 27-year-old trading assistant who just learned she was five weeks' pregnant, was a private woman who did not share personal troubles, making her breakdown in the office all the more unusual, her colleagues said.

Her co-workers gave accounts of the phone call to homicide detectives after she was reported missing. Officials at the University of North Carolina were trying to determine whether one of their administrators made the call.

"We wouldn't have any reason to doubt" the Wells Fargo employee accounts, Detective Dwayne Baird said Monday. He would not comment further but later dismissed suggestions an arrest was imminent.

"Our most important focus in this case is the fact we have a missing person and, coupled with that, it's under very, very suspicious circumstances," he said.

Church said detectives showed up at Wells Fargo the day after Hacking's disappearance and inspected her e-mail and computer files. Results on some of other evidence collected by police, including a mattress recovered from a trash bin and a box spring taken from the couple's apartment, are pending.

Mark Hacking said his wife did not wake him up after coming home from an early morning jog July 19 and never showed up to work.

Police later said he was at a furniture store buying a new mattress just before reporting that Lori was missing.

Meanwhile, Lori Hacking's family halted the search for her Tuesday, citing concerns for the safety of volunteers working in the steep canyons and hills around Salt Lake City. The family hopes to resume the search Wednesday with the aid of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles, according to family spokesman Scott Dunaway.

[rkmsuf]

this dude is going to plead insanity and go to cooky land. is it a front or insanity? hmm...

[cuervo72]

Lori Hacking, a 27-year-old trading assistant who just learned she was five weeks' pregnant...

Is that apostrophe supposed to be there, AP?

[Easy Mac]

is "person of interest" the equivalent to "enemy combatant?"

[mrsimperless]

Mark Hacking, a 28-year-old nightshift hospital orderly, has been at a psychiatric hospital since police found him running around naked in sandals the night after the search for his wife began.

Snoop! Snoop-a-loop! Come on, we're going streaking! Through the quads and the gymnasium!

[Franklinnoble]

Police: Hacking Said He Killed His Wife
<!-- End Headline --><!-- END PRINT --><!-- BEGIN PRINT --> <!-- Dek/FirstParagraph --> Mark Hacking Told a Patient He Killed Wife As She Slept, Salt Lake Authorities Say in Statement
<!-- End Dek --><!-- END PRINT --><!-- BEGIN PRINT --><!-- END PRINT --><!-- BEGIN PRINT --><!--The Associated Press-->
The Associated Press
<!-- END PRINT --><!-- BEGIN PRINT --><!-- END PRINT --><!-- BEGIN PRINT --><!--RemovedFirstParagraph --><!--FirstParagraph --><!-- END PRINT --><!-- End FirstParagraph --><!-- STORYHIGHLIGHTS --> <!-- Story -->
<!-- BEGIN PRINT --> SALT LAKE CITY Aug. 3, 2004 — The husband of a missing pregnant woman told a "reliable citizen witness" in the psychiatric ward that he killed his wife as she slept before throwing her body in a trash bin, according to a court filing. The statement, released Tuesday by the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Department, also says investigators found human blood on a knife in the bedroom of Mark Hacking's apartment and on their bed's headboard and a bedrail.

Blood found in the bedroom matched traces of blood found in Lori Hacking's car, according to the statement.

Mark Hacking was arrested Monday on a charge of aggravated murder, two weeks after he said his wife failed to return from a morning jog. He has not been formally charged and is being held without bail.

[Shkspr]

Explains why he needed the new mattress, at least.

[duckman]

Who actually thought he didn't killed his wife? :rolleyes:

[Franklinnoble]

I just don't get this recent phenomena with these guys killing their hot, pregnant wives... I mean, how bad could it be, having to come home to a woman like Laci Peterson or Lori Hacking?

[Ksyrup]

It's called a motive. Not only was this guy lying about having gone to college and getting into law school, he apparently had an alias and had a run-in with the law that she (and all of their relative, apparently) knew nothing about. And there's evidence that she found out "some disturbing news" on the Friday before she was killed.

With Peterson, who knows what the real reason was, but he certainly had a couple of options - the affair, financial problems, etc.

I guess when some people get in certain circumstances, murder become a more reasonable alternative than divorce.

[rkmsuf]

I like how they said the Peterson guy was studying the tides of the bay. Tides must not have been his strong suit.

[Ksyrup]

Yeah, that's interesting. The problem with it is, it seems to contradict other evidence that suggests the death was accidental or "in the heat of the moment." That's obviously being used to suggest pre-meditation, but what about changing his story about going golfing at the last minute, and his inability to explain what kind of fish he was fishing for?

From everything I've pieced together, it seems like something changed or happened right around the day before she disappeared, he did what he did, and had to start making it up as he went. But the tides evidence dates back to December 8, which is over 2 weeks before she was killed.

Hell, who knows. Maybe he's just really, really bad at planning a murder.

[rkmsuf]

maybe he had considered it but maybe not when he actually did it. Something happened and he "snapped" which accelerated the whole process thus explaining the faulty tide analysis that was only half done. He had figured out how to get the body out but was planning further research on keeping it out.

[Ksyrup]

Given where they washed up, I'm thinking he didn't study hard enough.

[MacroGuru]

It's pretty weird around here. The Hacking guy grew up down in this area where I live, and a lot of people that I know, went to school with him, and you know...they paint the picture that he was such a great guy.....they never saw a bad side of him...blah blah blah....but now that he has been charged, they have some weird stories about how he had flipped out in high school, and fights and such.....

Don't know why Im adding to the convo, as I have nothing substantial....

[duckman]

It's pretty weird around here. The Hacking guy grew up down in this area where I live, and a lot of people that I know, went to school with him, and you know...they paint the picture that he was such a great guy.....they never saw a bad side of him...blah blah blah....but now that he has been charged, they have some weird stories about how he had flipped out in high school, and fights and such.....

Don't know why Im adding to the convo, as I have nothing substantial....
It's human nature to tear someone down after finding out something like this. It's a way to justify it in their minds.

[GrantDawg]

It's human nature to tear someone down after finding out something like this. It's a way to justify it in their minds.
True. It is a way to deal with the "how did we not know" quilt.

[clintl]

Yeah, that's interesting. The problem with it is, it seems to contradict other evidence that suggests the death was accidental or "in the heat of the moment." That's obviously being used to suggest pre-meditation, but what about changing his story about going golfing at the last minute, and his inability to explain what kind of fish he was fishing for?

From everything I've pieced together, it seems like something changed or happened right around the day before she disappeared, he did what he did, and had to start making it up as he went. But the tides evidence dates back to December 8, which is over 2 weeks before she was killed.

Hell, who knows. Maybe he's just really, really bad at planning a murder.

Well, based on the daily news reports in the paper and on TV (and I live in the same media market as where the Peterson murder took place, so there is a lot of coverage), the prosecution doesn't seem to have much real evidence, and so if he did do it, he is going to get away with it. Geragos has poked holes in the testimony of just about every significant prosecution witness, and often gets them to admit that another explanation is actually just as reasonable or more so. The prosecutors are looking like total idiots so far.

[Franklinnoble]

The prosecutors are looking like total idiots so far.
That's the problem with these high-profile murder cases... the defense attorneys that are attracted to these sort of cases are infinately more talented than the prosecution... especially in a small town like Modesto.

Peterson will get off, but probably be sued in civil court and lose, O.J.-Style. Because the Rocha family can get their own high-powered lawyer to take the civil case on contingency - assuming Scott Peterson is worth suing.

[clintl]

That's the problem with these high-profile murder cases... the defense attorneys that are attracted to these sort of cases are infinately more talented than the prosecution... especially in a small town like Modesto.

Peterson will get off, but probably be sued in civil court and lose, O.J.-Style. Because the Rocha family can get their own high-powered lawyer to take the civil case on contingency - assuming Scott Peterson is worth suing.

In once sense, I agree with you, but in another sense, I think these guys are making it easy for Geragos to pick their case apart. A lot of the evidence they have is extremely flimsy. They've repeatedly broken the discovery rules, until finally the judge got fed with them and threw out the entire testimony of one of their witnesses. One of the cops lied on the stand. The whole presentation of the case is completely incoherent. I can't remember a case ever where the prosecution looked as bad as they do on this case.