Police Focus Attention on Missing Woman’s Husband

SALT LAKE CITY —  A 12-day search for a missing pregnant woman has turned up virtually nothing except a web of apparent deception that has made her husband the prime “person of interest” in the investigation, authorities here said Thursday.

Mark Hacking, 28, has not been charged with a crime in the disappearance of Lori Kay Hacking, 27. He is in a psychiatric ward where, until recently, he worked as a night orderly. Hacking was sent there after he was found wearing only a pair of sandals outside a hotel shortly after reporting his wife missing.

Though it was Hacking who called Salt Lake City police to report his wife missing July 19, shortly after she learned she was pregnant, investigators said they were increasingly focused on tracking his actions in the days and hours surrounding her disappearance.

Authorities said they no longer thought that Lori Hacking went jogging the morning she disappeared, as her husband had reported. They also said he may have deceived those closest to him, including his wife -- who thought he had been accepted to a North Carolina medical school to which he had never applied.

“I’m not going to put any kind of label on him,” Salt Lake City Police Det. Phil Eslinger said Thursday. “But he has clearly led a deceptive lifestyle. The deception presents a problem for us. There is an issue of credibility.”

Credibility questions have left residents drawing parallels to another disappearance of a pregnant woman, Laci Peterson. The Modesto woman vanished in 2002; her remains and those of her unborn son washed ashore in San Francisco Bay in April 2003. Her husband, Scott Peterson, is on trial charged, in her death.

Residents here say they are loath to think that Mark Hacking, a strapping man who wears a goatee and a shaved head, might have had something to do with his wife’s disappearance. Hacking is a doctor’s son and a former Mormon missionary who has been married to Lori, his high school sweetheart, about five years.

“I really don’t believe it could have been him,” said Deanna Morrell, a special education teacher who lived in the same apartment building as the couple. Mark Hacking was moonlighting there as a manager. “He was way too nice. They were the cutest couple, I thought,” she said.

To others, however, the lies that Hacking appears to have told do not put him in a good light.

“The lies about his education plans are kind of the tip of the iceberg of a man who seems to be living a double life,” said Carole Fleming, a nursing student at the University of Utah.

Fleming was walking her dog in a popular Salt Lake City park called Memory Grove. The park is next to City Creek Canyon, where Lori Hacking jogged often -- and where her husband says she went the morning she disappeared.

“A lot of us are kind of in denial about the fact that this could happen among us,” Fleming said. “There’s a high premium paid on honesty and integrity in our community.”

Neither Mark Hacking nor his parents could be reached for comment Thursday. The defense attorney he hired, Gilbert Athay, did not return phone calls. A woman who answered the telephone at a hotline established to coordinate efforts to search for Lori Hacking said her family was no longer speaking to the media.

Mark Hacking called police on July 19, saying he was concerned because his wife had not yet arrived at the financial firm where she worked. He told investigators that he had run his wife’s jogging route twice that morning to try to find her. Investigators said they have since learned that he was seen buying a queen-size mattress that morning at a furniture store.

The Hackings had told relatives that they were preparing to move to North Carolina, where Mark was to begin medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But the school has no record of his application, investigators said. Nor has he graduated from the University of Utah, though his wife and relatives thought he had.

On July 16, Lori Hacking’s co-workers overheard her speaking to someone who appeared to have been a representative from the University of North Carolina. Darren Openshaw, who described Lori Hacking as a “friend and colleague,” said in an interview that Hacking was protesting during the conversation, insisting that her husband had “already been accepted.”

Though authorities consider Mark Hacking a “person of interest” in the case, not a suspect, “there is not a quantum leap between the two,” Det. Eslinger said.

“A person of interest is someone that we feel strongly about having some sort of involvement,” Eslinger said.

Meanwhile, the search for Lori Hacking continues. Authorities are sifting through the Salt Lake County landfill, digging 45 feet in some spots. They have declined to reveal why they are digging there.

Investigators have also seized evidence from the Hackings’ apartment, including a box spring. Local media accounts have said that authorities found traces of blood in the apartment, but Eslinger said Thursday that he could not confirm those reports. Analyzing the evidence could take weeks. Eslinger said his department was prepared for an “extended investigation.”

Simon reported from Salt Lake City, Gold from Houston.