Posted on 07/26/2004 2:28:19 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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.
Because they've been brainwashed to believe that marriage is an essential part of life, and that once you do it, it's desperately important to hold it together "'til death do us part" -- which is unfortunately what probably happened here. Since they're so committed to the idea of getting/being married, they blind themselves to the real character of their boyfriends/fiances, who are generally showering them with romantic nonsense before the marriage. Once married, when things start to get unpleasant, they go into the "marriage is forever and we just need to work on it" mindset, for which they will receive plenty of support from society at large, and the LDS Church in particular. They are also convinced that "trusting" people is a virtue, and they are especially convinced that spouses can and should "trust" each other, so they "trust" their scumbag husbands, never verifying odd things they notice, and just plain refusing to notice red flags waving wildly.
It's a very dangerous and very common approach to life among women. Laci and Lori are just the extreme, highly publicized cases; there are literally millions out there practicing this mindset, and ending up getting beaten, watching the kids get beating, having the family finances frittered away by the husband's extracuricular activities, catching STDs from their trusted husbands, etc.
My guess is the pregnancy is the key-but exactly how, I'm not sure.
It's a scientific fact that women are attracted to men with firm, round butts. Do Peterson and Hacking have firm, round butts?
Given that Lori was an active Mormon, I'm sure she asked God to confirm that Mark was the right spouse for her, and was sure she got an affirmative answer. It's not a reliable method. Even the LDS Church warns young adults to be on guard for "hormonal revelations". Unfortunately, young adult hormones being what they are, that's about the only kind of revelation most of them will get. God provided humans with brains, and might reasonably expect them to use said brains.
I wonder if this upcoming move had been a point of contention lately. Getting closer to the time of the move, and no luck with finding housing. Which raises questions.
If she had been trying to get campus housing and he was not enrolled, thus no housing... then what house were they moving into, IF there was one?
And why leave work early?
Yes, I suspect that her finding out the truth led to a hasty change of plans on his part -- but that the end result for her would have been the same either way.
He's toast.
Also, if the husband was scamming her successfully all along, he would have said, "Don't worry honey, I'll take care of the campus housing arragements," and that would have been that. He certainly wouldn't have told her to start calling the college for any reason!
She was calling around because she was suspicious. And she got proof her suspicions were justified.
I can't imagine the horror of finding that out the very day after getting back a positive pregnancy test.
Yep. She would have been better off going to his parents and asking them how best to approach this with her husband. (That way she could get their input, and show that she didn't want to belittle him. She just might be alive if she had somehow involved his family.)
Do you know when was the last time she was seen by anyone other than her husband? He may have done away with her when she came home on Fri. Then he would have had all weekend to carve her up & dump her. Monster!
Thought I heard on FNC that they went to a party on Sunday? I thought maybe after the party he did her in, then drove the car to the park very late at night/early morning so that neighbors would notice the car gone in the morning just like usual when she went for her jog.
I read several days ago that 9 pm the night before was the last anyone but her husband saw her.
According to recent reports, the apartment had received quite a thorough cleaning -- no blood evident at first, but lots became visible when the place was treated with that special stuff that makes traces of blood visible. He must have had a good deal of time to work on the clean-up. I'm getting skeptical of the witnesses who claimed to have seen her jogging Monday morning -- suspect they just saw someone who looked like her.
It's not just LDS.
Because he is cute.
the last report I read said that the witness couldn't confirm thay actually saw Lori - just a jogger that could have been her. Apparently they did not get a real good look at the jogger.
Nobody seems to be mentioning the pregnancy. If this poor young woman learned the truth about her husband during a phone call at the office, she must have been in quite a state when she left early and (presumably) confronted him.
If it turns out to be the way it is shaping up, they ought to drag him out of that hospital by his worthless b#llocks.
Certainly not, and I hope I didn't imply that it is. However, emphasis on marriage, and especially early marriage, is particularly strong in the LDS Church (and some other churches), and that is a contributing factor. If you believe that there's something wrong with you if you aren't getting married by your early 20s, you're more likely to convince yourself of the merits of some particular man (or woman) who's expressing interest in marrying you. And if you're young and inexperienced about life in general, you're more likely to miss warning signs.
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