Case turns on troubled husband

SALT LAKE CITY - By all accounts, Mark Hacking was fun to be around - a loving husband who wanted to be respected and, like his father, become a doctor.

But in the hours that he was supposedly studying for medical exams, Hacking often was hanging out at a neighborhood store - refilling sodas, eating hot dogs and smoking Camel menthols.

He told store clerks he was a therapist, and asked them never to reveal his cigarette habit to his wife; both are Mormons and aren't supposed to smoke.

He got his wife to pack up and move to North Carolina so he could attend medical school - where, it turns out, he wasn't enrolled.

He kept textbooks spread open around his apartment, but in fact, he had dropped out of college.

Years of deceptions are catching up to the former night-shift hospital orderly, and he has become the focus of the investigation into the disappearance of his wife, Lori Hacking.

Mark Hacking is being shown by Salt Lake television stations on videotape standing in a kitchen and lying about his education. In one scene, Hacking entertains friends by making loud palm noises, then in another he talks about college.

"I started off in social work - No, I lied. I started in sociology," Hacking deadpans on the videotape. "I finished my degree in psychology and yes, I do love it. And now I am moving on."

As the search for Lori Hacking enters a third week without a trace of the 27-year-old woman, her friends and co-workers are recalling moments when they believe she discovered her husband's propensity for lying.

Detective Phil Eslinger said police are trying to build a "rock-solid" case, but they lack one important piece of evidence.

"We need a body," Assistant District Attorney Bob Stott said Friday. Dogs trained to locate cadavers were used this past week to search a municipal landfill.

Mark Hacking reported his wife missing on July 19. The next day, he was taken to a psychiatric ward after he was seen running around at night naked in sandals.

Doctors are trying to "sort out what is going on in his mind," his father said.

Mark Hacking, 28, never was on track to become a doctor, nor is he a therapist. State records show he is a licensed health care assistant, a job he resigned July 23. Records show Lori Hacking, a stock broker's assistant at Wells Fargo, graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Utah in 1999. She put her plans to pursue an MBA on hold until her husband could graduate from medical school.

Her colleagues say she had been trying on July 16 to make some arrangements at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where she believed her husband had been accepted into medical school, but they believe a school administrator returned a call that day to say her husband wasn't enrolled there.

That night, she showed up with her husband at a going-away party at her boss' mountain cabin, betraying no sign of distress. She was last seen by friends Sunday night, July 18, and failed to show for work the next morning at 7 a.m.

Mark Hacking has told police his wife didn't return from a sunrise jog July 19, but his timeline is falling apart. Police don't believe Lori Hacking ever went jogging at a city park, as he said.

And they doubt his claim that he jogged the route before reporting her missing. They say he was across town at a store buying a new mattress at 10:23 a.m., before alerting police at 10:49 a.m. Police have recovered the old mattress from a trash bin in their neighborhood, but have not commented on its condition.

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