Missing Woman Said Sobbing After Call

SALT LAKE CITY July 26, 2004 — Three days before her husband reported her missing, Lori Hacking took a phone call at work that left her stunned and sobbing, her colleagues at a brokerage house told The Associated Press.

Several colleagues said that Hacking had been arranging for on-campus housing at the University of North Carolina medical school 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.

Lori Hacking left work early after receiving the call the afternoon of Friday, 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.

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

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.

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, said colleagues at Wells Fargo Securities Services.

"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."

Lori Hacking's 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.

Church said detectives showed up the day after Hacking's disappearance and inspected her e-mail and computer files.

Lori Hacking's mother, Thelma Soares, was unaware her daughter had received the upsetting phone call, but did not get a chance to speak to her the weekend before she vanished, family spokesman Scott Dunaway said.

Results on some of the evidence collected by police, including a mattress recovered from a trash bin and a box spring taken from the couple's apartment, could come back from a laboratory this week.

Brandon Hodge, another trading assistant, said that at about 10 a.m. on Monday, July 19, Mark Hacking placed a call to his wife's office, speaking first to Hodge.

"By the way, how is Lori?" Hodge quoted Hacking as asking. Hodge said he replied, "Well, she's not made it into work yet."

Church, who had been expecting Lori Hacking at 7 a.m. and says she was never late to work, then took the phone. He recalled Mark Hacking saying his wife had not returned from a sunrise jog at Memory Grove, a downtown park near the office. Hacking made it seem as if he was calling from his apartment, Church said.

"Oh, my God, her (work) clothes are still here," Hacking reportedly said to Church.

"I said, `You need to call police immediately. Just get off the phone,'" Church said.

But Hacking did not immediately call police, and police say he was at a store buying a new mattress shortly before reporting his wife missing.

Three of her co-workers who spoke to the AP said they showed up at Memory Grove before Mark Hacking joined them. When he arrived in his Dodge Durango, they told him his wife already had been reported missing. He then placed a call of his own to police dispatchers.

Hacking began an aimless search, walking and pondering before taking off on his own and abandoning Lori's co-workers. But first, he sat in his sport utility vehicle with an address book on his lap, making calls, apparently to relatives.

Here is a similar article:

SALT LAKE CITY — The focus on Mark Hacking's (search) possible involvement in the disappearance of his wife tightened Monday in light of several disturbing reports, including one that Lori Hacking got an upsetting phone call at work three days before she vanished.

Lori's co-workers at Wells Fargo Brokerage Service said she received a phone call at the office that prompted her to leave work early, sobbing and visibly upset.

Lori's supervisor said she received the call on July 16, believed to be from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That's where her husband had supposedly been enrolled for medical school.

Lori Hacking (search), 27, had been trying to arrange for housing at the campus, but her co-workers said the call from the school was to tell her that her husband had not registered at the school.

Several workers gave their accounts of the call to homicide detectives after she was reported missing the following Monday, July 19.

Also troubling were press accounts that police found a bloody knife with brown hair on it in the couple's apartment and took it away for testing.

There were additional rumors that authorities, using blood-detection techniques, had found a significant amount of blood inside the Hackings' home and unearthed a clump of brown hair in a Dumpster only two blocks from where Mark Hacking purchased a new mattress just before he told police his wife was missing. They didn't yet know whether the hair found in the trash was Lori's.

Mark Hacking, 28, has been in hospitalized in the psychiatric unit where he worked as an orderly since early Tuesday, a day after he said his wife disappeared.

Detective Dwayne Baird, a police spokesman, wouldn't confirm or deny a Deseret Morning News (search) report citing unnamed sources that a bloody knife with strands of brown hair stuck on it was among the evidence removed from the Hackings' apartment for testing.

"We took a lot of things out of that apartment," Baird said. He said police were still waiting on test results from a search of the apartment and surrounding area.

Baird said Mark Hacking was still a "person of interest" in the case, but he would not elaborate.

Lori Hacking vanished — seemingly into thin air — one week ago, just days after she learned she was five weeks pregnant and days before she and her husband were to move to North Carolina. Mark Hacking reported her disappearance to authorities, saying she'd gone out jogging while he was sleeping and never showed up for work that morning.

But since then, inconsistencies in his story and his bizarre behavior have intensified suspicion that he might have been involved. The couple was moving to North Carolina, where Mark had said he was going to attend medical school.

As it turned out, he had lied to his wife and family — he had not been accepted to any medical school and never even graduated from college.

He also had initially said his wife did not wake him up after coming home from an early morning jog, as she usually did, and never showed up to work. But police confirmed Friday that Mark Hacking was at a furniture store buying a new mattress just before reporting to police that Lori was missing.

Footage from a surveillance camera shows Mark Hacking looking for a mattress in one store but then leaving, apparently when he found out he couldn't take his purchase with him that day, FOX News has learned.

Instead, he wound up buying the mattress he came home with from a store across the street.

He has been under psychiatric care since police found him early Tuesday running naked around a motel not far from his home.

Lori Hacking's family and her in-laws have said they want to keep the focus on finding Lori, not Mark's inconsistent statements.

"We continue to entertain all possibilities and we are prepared for whatever the outcome may be," Douglas Hacking, Mark's father, said in a written statement given to The Associated Press. "We would like to think Mark had no part in it. Our love for him has not changed and our ultimate goal is still to bring Lori home."

The family has been holding as many as two news conferences a day since Lori was reported missing. But they have been more reluctant to face reporters since questions arose about the credibility of Hacking's husband.

"We are all exhausted and we feel we need to concentrate our efforts and our energies on finding Lori," said Thelma Soares (search), Hacking's mother.

They hired a new spokesman, Scott Dunaway — a leader in Soares' church — who said that though the family was distressed by the news reports, they were waiting for official confirmation from police before they commented publicly.

Mark Hacking's family said they'd visited him in the hospital as recently as Sunday and he was doing well, asking for video games to pass the time and inquiring frequently about the investigation. They also said they have been careful about what they've been telling him.

About 200 people attended a candlelight vigil for Lori Sunday night at Memory Grove Park, where her husband said she went jogging the day she disappeared. Lori Hacking routinely ran in that park.

FOX News' Alicia Acuna, Catherine Donaldson-Evans and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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