Murdered Wife

Hacking Pleads Guilty

By John Yewell, 4-15-05

I remember July 19 well. I was sitting in a local cafe near my Avenues neighborhood home when someone came in and asked the barrista if she could put up a poster about a missing woman. I asked the woman with the posters what had happened, and she told me the woman whose picture was on the poster, Lori Hacking, had disappeared that morning. Her husband, family, and half the neighborhood was looking for her.

The next day I rode my bike to City Creek Park, six blocks from my house, to join in the search. The canyon was crowded with people on foot, horseback, bicycles, all looking for the young jogger. It seemed a hopeless task -- City Creek Canyon stretches for several miles into the hills above Salt Lake City. After a while I gave up and went home, leaving the army of volunteers to continue the search in a more organized fashion.

Then the questions started to dribble out. Why had Lori’s husband, Mark, bought a new mattress the same morning he reported his wife missing? And what were these reports about friction between the too? Mark, it turned out, had been caught in an elaborate lie about being accepted to medical school in North Carolina.

A few days later Mark Hacking checked himself into the same local psych ward where he worked as an attendant, and within days everyone knew the jig was up.

The story that had become tabloid fodder for weeks played itself out in my neighborhood -- the Hackings lived about a mile away. Today, the play ended. Mark Hacking pleaded guilty to shooting his wife in the head with a .22 caliber rifle as she slept, then dumping her body and concocting a story that quickly unraveled.

Just as the story he told his wife had unraveled.

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