- Mark and Lori became an item.
It was the middle of high school.
- They seemed happy.
They seemed like the perfect young couple.
- Lori had her plans
of what she knew her life was gonna be.
- Mark was great.
I was very proud to have him as a brother-in-law.
- There was not ever a conversation
of there being big problems.
- Most of the furniture was packed up
because they were gonna leave in a couple of days
and go to medical school.
He said that Lori was missing.
- I said, "What?"
- She never showed up to work.
- Lori's jewelry box is on the dresser.
Her wedding ring's in there.
- Was she taken by somebody?
- He started with such small lies
that turned into such big lies.
- Just all these weird little things
start making you go, something's wrong."
با افتخار تقدیم میکند ~ .::Royal.subscene::. ~ تیم ترجمه
- I think Mark and Lori became an item...
It was the middle of high school.
Around then.
I met Lori Soares in junior high.
At school, and friends.
Lori was very organized and determined,
and she had her plans
of what she knew her life was gonna be
and are all planned out.
But she just was fun. We just had lots of fun.
- Lori and Mark were a happy couple.
Mark was here a lot during their high school years.
He used to sit on those stairs right behind me all the time.
And he fixed a lot of things for me.
They went, you know, to school things together.
So I thought, "Mark's gonna be the one, I think."
- Like, they had dated for so long
and they had been together for so long,
why wouldn't they get married?
- If you could pick a better son-in-law for your daughter,
it would have been Mark.
There... he was wonderful.
In fact, I got jealous of him
because he would do so many great things,
and I'm like, "I should be doing that type of thing."
- She seemed so happy.
Like, she was doing her job she loved
and Mark was gonna go to medical school
and be a doctor.
- He told me that he had passed the MCAT.
He was really smart.
All of those kids... The Hacking children...
Are all, you know...
IQs off the chart.
- Yes? Okay. - Okay.
I looked at them and I thought,
"This couple... these guys are really gonna make it."
I know that Lori can be really feisty,
but at the same time I know she loved Mark.
I know that she cared for him.
- Mark told me that Lori was pregnant,
and so I said...
"That's wonderful." You know?
Because they wanted a baby in their lives.
And I thought at the time,
"That's gonna be harder for them
while he's in school and Lori has to work."
When I told my friends I said, "Oh, I hope it's a little girl
and she has hair like Lori's."
- I received a call from the watch commander,
and he had a missing persons case
in Memory Grove, which is a park here in Salt Lake City.
So normally on a missing persons case
you wait 24 hours
unless there are some other circumstances
that indicate it's more than a missing persons case.
In this case, uh, we did have a patrol response
because her car had been found
parked in Memory Grove.
After I arrived, I went over and spoke with Mr. Hacking.
I introduced myself and said,
"Mr. Hacking, could you tell me your story?"
And he told me that his wife, Lori,
had gone to Memory Grove that morning to go jogging,
and that she normally would go jogging
and then go to work.
But she had not reported to work,
and nobody there had seen her.
- The belief was that she was missing
up Memory Grove.
That's a canyon with a lot of trees
and underbrush and so on.
The side of the canyon is... is fairly steep.
It's not like they're walking down a sidewalk
in a city street looking around.
After I got the search set up,
I had also requested the homicide squad to respond.
- I was out in the main squad room,
and Sergeant Miller came out of his office
and told me to head up to Memory Grove.
And pointed over to Detective Taylor West
and said, "Take Taylor with you."
We headed up just a few blocks from our station.
- Yeah, we met with Mark.
He said that his wife went running early in the morning.
She never showed up to work.
People at work were concerned.
- She's a decent, sweet little girl
who is prompt to work.
This is just abnormal.
- Not too long as the day wore on,
the media began to arrive.
Mark Hacking was speaking to anyone that would talk to him.
- And then I called her at about 10:00
to just say hi, see how she was doing,
and they told me she...
Sorry. - She never got to work.
- She... she never made it in this morning.
- He was a completely sympathetic victim.
I mean, he was compelling.
He had, you know, a lot of friends and family
and sympathizers there.
Mark told us he had just graduated
from the University of Utah and was, uh, preparing
to attend medical school in the fall.
- Lori's mother had driven up from Utah County,
which would have been about a 45-minute
to an hour drive, to find out, you know,
what she could about what was going on.
- There were some houses just at the very beginning
of the walkway up there, and so they were talking about
going down and talking to the people in those houses
to see if they had seen Lori earlier that morning.
'Cause you couldn't miss her, you know?
She was quite small but she had all this hair.
And it was dark and curly,
and so she was easily seen.
Mark was there with his brother, Scott.
I remember Scott ran up the hill,
and he came back and he told the police
that he'd passed, uh, a place
where there was a bunch of hobos living in the canyon.
And he was worried about that,
because if there were young girls running up there,
all of these guys could have easily grabbed them.
- That's been kind of a sore spot with the city
for a number of years, is we've always had
homeless living in that area of the canyon.
It may be something suspicious for us to say, "Hey,
was she taken by somebody, uh, as she was jogging?"
- I was involved in the search for Elizabeth Smart
when she was kidnapped,
and the encampment that she was taken to
was well over three miles away up canyon from her house.
And we simply just didn't go far enough,
so I was gonna make sure
that we went far enough on this case.
- They set up a command center.
They call in the bike units
and K-9 units and patrol units.
- Can I just make one... - Sure.
- Plea?
Everybody, anybody who can come...
Please come tomorrow morning.
We're gonna... I don't think
they're going to let the volunteers up there tonight,
but we're going to start at 6:30 tomorrow morning,
and anybody who can possibly...
If you can make it, please come.
Thanks a lot.
- He was really interested in finding his wife
and... and finding, what had happened to her, and...
- We get almost an immediate response
of people who want to help.
- Mark had no criminal history with us.
He wasn't someone we'd dealt with before.
Aspiring medical student just getting ready
to move his wife away to medical school.
- So I took the initiative.
We got an incident commander en route as well as the
Department of Public Safety helicopter
and Salt Lake County Search and Rescue.
So the search was on in the canyon for Lori.
- So patrol starts looking and searching.
- Obviously we have to consider all possibilities,
and one of those possibilities
is she could have been kidnapped by someone
and taken away from the scene.
- Well, Mark, uh, told us that she was pregnant,
and I think she was only pregnant
by a month or so, or two.
It became an interest to the public.
what would have happened to a pregnant woman?
Where had she gone, or what had happened to her?
And I think it height... Heightened the interest
of the public.
- As I finished my conversation with Mr. Hacking,
I looked him in the eye and I said,
"Mr. Hacking, we're gonna do everything we can
to find your wife."
- Now, we were very concerned that perhaps, um,
Mark... or even Lori, for that matter...
Was maybe involved romantically with someone else.
So that's a... a strong theme we hammered on people
that we interviewed, is, "Hey, does Mark have a girlfriend?
"Does Lori have a boyfriend?
"Is there any chance that, you know,
she ran off with someone?"
- So I know, at that point,
there is something wrong in this marriage.
- The only options are that she was abducted
or she ran away.
- The bathtub is immaculate...
Spotless... And it smells like bleach.
- The morning of Lori's disappearance,
we met with Mark somewhere there in Memory Grove.
He said that his wife went running
early in the morning.
She never showed up to work.
People at work were concerned.
That's when he reported her missing.
- Taylor and I go over and meet with Mark
and tell him that we need to take him
to go up and look through the apartment real quick.
- To get some, uh, pictures that we could release
to the media to help find her.
- A main thing when you're investigating things
is seeing how these people live,
what are... their environment, what's going on in their lives.
So Taylor and I go up to the apartment
where Mark and Lori live.
When we walked into the front room,
there are boxes... 'cause he had said he...
They were moving.
He's gonna be going to med school.
And on one of the side tables right there
is a red purse.
That's Lori's purse.
Women don't go places
without their purses.
Mark has said she's driven to Memory Grove
to go running.
Didn't take her purse, didn't take her wallet.
And also on the counter,
there is a big vase full of flowers.
There are two types of flowers that men give their wives.
They have the, "Honey, I was thinking about you
and grabbed them from Smith's."
It's a small little bouquet of carnations or such.
And then there are "I screwed up
and you're mad at me" flowers.
And in this vase are those kind of flowers.
They're expensive flowers.
Huge bouquet.
So I know, at that point,
there is something wrong in this marriage.
When you walk straight into the bathroom,
the bathtub is immaculate... Spotless...
And it smells like bleach.
It's all circumstantial evidence,
but it starts building that there's a pattern
of... of behavior.
Somebody is not telling the truth
about what's been going on in that apartment.
Taylor and I go into the bedroom.
The first thing that I see on the bed
is a new pair of sheets.
When people buy new sheets, they wash them
because sheets have sizing that makes them nice and crisp
and look good in the package.
But the sheets on the bed have the creases
that come from the packing.
So they haven't been slept in, they haven't been used,
and they haven't been washed.
So they're brand new, so the bed has just been made
with those sheets.
Lori's jewelry box is on the dresser.
I just glanced, and her her wedding ring's in there.
She does not take her ring off to go running.
And so it's... again, just all these weird little things
start making you go, "Uh, something's wrong."
- After we left the apartment and went back to Memory Grove
there was... a command post had been established.
There was dozens of police officers involved
in an active search as well as... her coworkers
and friends and family were now coming there also
to help search for her in the Grove.
- When you have a situation
where you may have someone missing,
it involves two families.
We're talking about a couple, here.
A man and wife. The wife is missing.
Her family is going to...
To certainly be concerned about it, but so is his family.
- Doug Hacking now feels certain
that his daughter-in-law was abducted.
- The only options are that she was abducted
or she ran away,
and the option that she ran away is...
Nobody believes that.
- So from there, we directly brought him...
I brought him to the police station.
- We need to do some quick interviews,
get some background information
and some history of what's going on.
So I take Mark
into one of the interrogation rooms
to interview him.
He said there were no problems in the marriage.
I start asking him questions regarding who he is.
What is his life like?
He said that he is going to be going to med school,
and I said, "Mark, you know, what are you specializing in?"
And he says, "Oncology."
I said, "I don't mean to sound dumb,
but how do you spell that?"
And he couldn't spell it.
So I'm... Okay, there's a problem here.
He came across as lying.
He was trying to do the dry cry.
You know when somebody's crying and being honest about it
because their nose is running.
And if somebody's crying and there's no snot,
they're not really crying.
When we get back to Memory Grove,
patrol has set up grid searching.
They've set up zones.
We have, now, bike squad,
K-9, bunch of officers.
So we have a two-pronged investigation going on.
So, the homicide unit, you're headed in one direction
and patrol's handling the other.
We separate them so they can deal with the searches.
They're checking sex offenders.
Tons of activity.
Helicopter overhead.
You can... It's a massive search now.
On the west side of the street is Mark's red truck,
and I say, "Mark, can I look through your truck real quick?"
And he says, "Yeah, go ahead."
- And while we were searching the car, he's standing
right next to Detective Kent and I.
- And on the front seat of his truck
there's "Yellow Pages."
And under the phonebook is a receipt.
It's to a local mattress company,
and the date on the receipt
is the day Lori went missing.
Why is he buying a mattress?
- We confronted him about that.
his statements then definitely set us into a state
of thinking that he's hiding something from us.
- The things that I see in the apartment...
The purse, the flowers,
the bleach, and sheets that are brand new...
The story he's telling doesn't make sense.
And if it doesn't make sense, it's not true.
So, again, now we know he's really lying
and this is something big.
So I pick up the receipt
and wave it in the air at him
and say, "Hey, T, look at this.
This is a receipt for a new mattress."
And Mark looks at me.
The expression on his face totally changes.
He goes from this grieving, upset husband
to this straight-on glare, and he says,
"You think I hurt her?"
And I said, "I know you killed her
and I'm gonna effing prove it."
- We turn around and Mark is gone.
He has disappeared.
- And we found out Mark had returned
to his apartment,
and so we returned there then.
- So we knock on the door,
and he opened the door.
- He was cooperative with us.
He was, "No, feel free.
Search what you want."
- I say, "Okay, well, we're gonna look through
the apartment again."
Here, and we have what's called
a "consent to search," so he can give me consent
to search the premises
without having to obtain a search warrant.
- Yeah, so we explained to Mark, "Hey, we have
"some questions about the mattress receipt
we just found in your car."
- Well, now we pulled back the blankets.
And we're looking, and I notice
that the mattress is brand new
and the box springs are not.
And they're two different colors.
Again, people, they buy mattresses
and box springs that match.
- I located, in his night stand next to his bed...
I found, um... I think there was a couple knives,
but there was one knife in particular.
It was a sheathed hunting-style knife.
[suspenseful music]
When I pulled it out of the sheath
I could see what I believed to be blood
and a bloody fingerprint on it.
And asked why it was bloody,
and he said he used it to hunt.
Although we had suspicions and belief
that he was responsible for Lori's disappearance,
we weren't even sure if Lori was dead at that time
or if she was missing
or if she was being held captive.
Mark asked to leave the apartment.
We tell him, "Yeah, we're gonna secure it.
"We're gonna stop our consensual search now
and we're gonna obtain a search warrant."
- Once we've taken control of the apartment,
I walk outside, and there's a communal dumpster
in the parking lot right to the rear
of the apartment building.
It looks like it's empty.
You can't see anything in it.
I walk over, look in there,
and at the bottom
you can see a package for new sheets.
Two pillows are in there
and the packing that covers a mattress
to protect it when you're transporting it.
Nothing else in the dumpster but that.
I say to Mark, "When did this get emptied?"
And he says, "This grid gets emptied on Monday morning."
"Grid."
How do you know what grid gets dumped when?
You know when your garbage day is and that's it.
You don't know what grid is emptied on what day.
How does he know this?
And I think to myself, "He threw her in the dumpster."
- Kelly had a theory
that maybe Mark had disposed of Lori in the trash.
And I remember her talking to me about it and me thinking,
"That's the craziest thing I've ever heard,
but you're probably right."
- And so I go outside and my sergeant...
Sergeant Ron Miller... Is outside.
So when I'm telling Sergeant Miller
that I think he's thrown her in the garbage...
And I told him, "We need to shut this dump."
He says, "It costs too much money.
"You're wrong. You're crazy.
"No, we're not going to do this.
You have no idea what this entails."
And Sergeant Ron Miller would smoke a cigar,
so he drives just about half a block down
and pulls behind the LDS ward.
And there's another dumpster there.
But this one's full, and there's a mattress in it.
The pillow top has been cut off
and it's in this dumpster.
He calls me on the phone and says...
"What does the box springs look like
from the apartment where Mark and Lori live?"
And I said, "It's taupe.
Has little embroidered flowers, but it's taupe."
And he says, "What the hell is 'taupe'?"
And I said, "Ron, it... it's beige."
'Cause a guy's gonna know beige.
And he says, "Oh, God, you're right.
"I have a mattress back here. It's beige.
Okay, we gotta shut down the dump."
- And so at that time I think he bought into...
"Hey, Mark has a propensity to use dumpsters.
here's a dumpster that he dumped a mattress in.
Perhaps Kelly's theory is a good theory."
And so we kind of ran with it from... from there.
- We found the mattress in the dumpster.
We're serving the search warrant.
Patrol's guarding the apartment.
Patrol is out still looking for her
and I get a phone call from their watch commander
that's on that night.
She says, "You're dealing with Mark Hacking, right?"
And I said, "Why?"
And she said, "He is over at one of the local motels
and he's running around naked."
- So a lieutenant responded to the scene of that call
once they heard who was involved in it, um,
and she was able to kind of see some things that...
Normal behavior indicative of mental illness
or a manic episode
wasn't exactly what Mark was doing.
He was naked but he was wearing flip flops or sandals still,
so he had the wherewithal to protect his feet
but run around nude outside.
He ended up wanting us to commit him
to a mental health evaluation.
- They contact one of Mark's brothers,
who comes up to the hotel,
gathers Mark up, and takes him up
to the University of Utah
so he can be treated for his psychoses.
And he's seeking sanctuary somewhere.
- He knew that we would be very hard-pressed
to have the ability to interview him
or serve search warrants for blood or saliva on him
if he were in a locked-down mental health facility.
- The next day...
Taylor and I go up to talk to Mark.
We had been contacted by Chapel Hill...
The med school back there.
They had seen on the national news
that he was supposed to be connected to this school.
He was not registered there. They had never heard of him.
I looked at Taylor and I said,
"Taylor, he killed her."
We have him purchasing a mattress
when he's supposed to be looking for his wife.
We have an empty dumpster
with the mattress cover and packaging.
He knew what grid was emptied that day,
and he's lied about everything.
That's all adding up to what I'm seeing.
It's making sense now.
And Taylor looked at me and said, "You know,
if you're wrong, it's our ass."
And I said, "I know, but I'm not wrong."
- His father had asked him,
"Mark, did you have anything to do with this?"
- She doesn't know who to believe.
Does she believe her son-in-law,
who is a perfect husband?
- The two brothers come over.
"You really think that he's hurt her?"
And I said, "Yes."
- The primary person of interest, Mark Hacking,
remains at a local medical facility
and has not been in the custody of the police.
- We now have found out
that he was not attending the University of Utah
like he had told his whole family,
that he was not enrolled in Chapel Hill.
We went back up to the hospital
to talk to Mark.
You look in the door... Well, here he is.
His poor wife is missing
and he's watching cartoons and he's eating pizza.
We go in briefly, speak with him.
He, again, just lies
and says that, uh, his wife went jogging.
And he's just too stressed and he's sad
and now he's going to kill himself
and all of the normal...
Trying to keep his sanctuary up in the hospital.
And so we leave.
- It didn't cross my mind at all
that Mark had anything to do with this.
I don't think it had crossed anybody's minds
except the... the detective.
After all this, then his family, I think,
maybe got a little... Maybe suspicious.
His father had asked him right outright,
"Mark, did you have anything to do with this?"
- I looked him in the eye and I said,
"I need you to tell me if you had anything
to do with Lori's disappearance."
He looked me in the eye and he said, "No."
- And he said, "Thelma, I don't think Mark would lie to me.
He's never lied to me before."
- So up... up Main Street over to Hillside.
- All the way...
- And they're still searching for her.
We searched for her that whole week.
You know, I was so distraught.
I just hoped they'd find her
because there were hundreds of people.
- I was talking to Lori's mom and I told her,
"Mark never graduated from the U."
And she said, "Absolutely he did.
I was at his commencement."
And I said, "Holy cow.
You went to his commencement?"
- When I went up there the day of his graduation
he wasn't in the room with Lori and me,
and so Lori was talking with me and she said,
"Mom, he's been throwing up all night."
She said, "I don't know what's wrong with him,
but I don't think he can go to his graduation today."
He was sick, so he didn't go up to campus.
He'd given himself something to make him throw up
and he was throwing up.
I could hear him when I went in the front door.
Lori and I went to lunch and, you know...
And when we got back in the afternoon
he said he was feeling better.
And I asked Mark if he still had his cap and gown,
'cause he'd showed me his cap and gown.
And he said, "Yeah, I do."
And I said, "Well, quick, let's go out
"and I'll take your picture in it.
Because we didn't get any pictures, you know,
on your graduation day."
Just a series of lies, and so...
- She doesn't know who to believe.
Does she believe her son-in-law...
Who for all intents and purposes in her life
has been a blessing to her and her daughter
and has been a perfect husband and has taken care of them?
And he's going to medical school.
And to tell her that all that's a lie
also caused her world to crash down a little bit,
so she... she was very adamant that Mark wasn't involved
in the lies that he was involved in.
- And when we start hearing about the lies...
He never went to college... And I thought,
"Well, how could he not have?"
I remember calling him many times and...
"Oh, I'm at school. I'm in the library studying."
I remember getting the graduation announcement
that he was graduating.
He was going to med school. Interviews, he'd been accepted.
And I couldn't comprehend it. How could that all be lies?
- We were contacted by the clerk in the store
half a block away from Mark and Lori's apartment
and they said they had video of Mark,
who had been in earlier in the evening
the day before Lori had been reported missing.
- I was working a Sunday night
when Mark Hacking came in with his wife.
This was between, I think, 9:00 and 10:00.
Him and his wife came in and bought a soda.
Before they were finished he turned around and told me,
"Don't tell my wife I smoke."
'Cause he's been in the store in the past buying cigarettes
and he didn't want her to know.
- She is wearing green scrubs
and a little tan t-shirt.
The t-shirt's important
later on in the story.
- Mark's tower of lies was slowly crumbling.
And so piece by piece
we were chopping at his lie tree,
and it was about to fall.
- By Wednesday, we were literally having hundreds
and hundreds of people show up to search, uh,
because it had been three days since anyone had seen her.
- Because my baby is still out there somewhere.
Help us search.
- They're searching up the hillsides
in the July heat in Utah.
- The temperature is usually at, uh,
near 100 degrees or over.
- The Hacking brothers... The two brothers come over
and say to me, "You really think that he's hurt her?
He's done something. He's killed her."
And I said, "Yes, and let me tell you why."
I told them that we had found blood in the apartment.
That he purchased a mattress the morning she went missing.
We now have found out
that he was not attending the University of Utah
like he had told his whole family.
I knew that they're nice LDS people,
that they're going to want
to do the moral and right thing.
I knew that they would go up and talk to him.
- Yeah, they were non-law enforcement
and there was no requirement that, uh, he be given any sort
of Miranda warning or no, uh, requirement
that, uh, he be aware that he was confessing
and that could be used against him,
so the confessions to the brothers
were very admissible.
- He confessed to them.
He said, "Lori is dead and I killed her."
- She can't stay with him any longer.
She can't live this way, and she's done.
- "So Mark knows where she is?" And they said yes.
- Most people would think, "Well, just divorce them."
You know? Live different lives.
But, in fact, he didn't want to do that.
- I guess it was Sunday afternoon.
The police called all of the family members...
Mine and... And the Hackings together...
And they took us into a small room up there.
The police said that Mark had actually told Lance
and Scott that Lori was dead and that he'd killed her.
I thought, "That... That can't possibly be right.
"Mark killed her?
That can't be right." You know?
So then I talked to the Hackings.
They were just out of their minds, you know,
with sorrow and surprise
that Mark had done such a thing.
- By the time Mark confessed to his brothers,
we already felt, without any proof,
that he was involved
and he had done something to Lori.
- Yeah, we were getting reports
that people that had spent time with him over the weekend
realized that there was something amiss
with her and her behavior.
She seemed distant
and a little distraught.
- When the search warrant in the apartment...
Mark's apartment... Was being served,
there was a note
that had Mark's name on it.
It was from Lori
saying that she had found out
that he's been lying about everything.
She can't stay with him any longer.
- Lori was so saddened when she learned
his entire life was a made-up story.
Most people would think, "Well, just divorce
and, you know, live different lives."
But, in fact, he didn't want to do that.
He decided that he was going to somehow get rid of her
and not have to worry about
whatever that life was gonna be.
- He told his brothers that he had put her
in the dumpster,
that she was at the landfill.
We were looking in the right place.
- It's just a question of if we could find the body
and then prove that, uh... The cause of death
and that, uh, actually she was dead.
- But Sunday morning the media was all alerted
that we didn't need any more volunteers
for a search.
We appreciated their help, but, in fact,
we had developed information
that no longer would require them to... to be out searching.
We had about three dozen police officers
that went out there as volunteers
to start searching that landfill.
Well, what we learned is that the landfill
is a very scientific way to remove waste
from an urban area.
[suspenseful music]
- We got a call
from the Salt Lake City Homicide Division,
and they ask us if we'd ever used our dogs
in a landfill.
You know, to a human this would be
a very difficult place to detect a specific odor.
We kind of smell the landfill in its entirety.
But if you understand the way the dog's nose works
and the physiology of a dog,
to them, it's... it's nothing.
It's easy.
The area where they wanted to search
had been sealed over with clay.
It was... it was no longer an active dumping site,
and so we had to scrape off
the layer of dirt.
A lot of people don't realize
that garbage is compacted by 50%,
and when you uncover it, it explodes back out
to its normal size.
So it doubled in enormity. It doubled in size.
- We'd go down,
Wally would run the cadaver dogs through,
and then we'd hand-search all of the trash.
Nothing there.
They'd sweep it away with an earth mover
and the process starts over.
- At 8:20 this morning, remains were found
that we believe to be human at this point in time.
- I get a phone call
that they have found what they believe to be
Lori's remains.
- We had a memorial service for her in... in August
with the real assumption that we would never find her body,
and I never thought we would.
I honestly never, um, thought.
So when I got the call on October 1st, um,
I broke down and just cried.
I couldn't believe it.
- They had located a jaw bone
that had teeth in it
that matched dental work that Lori had.
- We knew that when she went missing,
she weighed about 105, 110 pounds,
and all they found of her remains that day
was 15 pounds.
- The clothing she's wearing in the surveillance video
matches the clothing that was located with her body
in the landfill.
- So these lies that, uh, were one after another
as far as the build-up
to the... the time that he killed his wife.
- You know, it's clich
but he started with such small lies
that turned into such big lies and ended in a murder,
all to cover up perceptions
and lies about perceptions that people had of Mark.
[pensive instrumental music]
- After we found out that Lori had died...
That Mark had been lying...
It really was difficult to put all the pieces
of the jigsaw puzzle together
because you didn't have pieces that fit.
- He reminds me of someone that fakes having a disease
or an illness, but he faked having success.
So Mark was... I think he's the youngest in the family.
If not, he's second to the youngest.
And he had very high standards to be met.
Now, I don't know that those standards
were mandated for him or if they were perceived.
I think he portrayed a fa
but his dad was a successful pediatrician.
His mom was a nurse.
- His oldest brother has a master's degree
in electrical engineering
and Scott is a... An interventional cardiologist.
And his younger brother,
he works for the Department of Defense
right now in Washington, D.C.
Those kids are all just as smart as they could be.
I don't... it wasn't that Mark didn't have the intellect.
It was that he was sick.
- As I looked back on this case and reflected
on what Mark Hacking had told me that day,
I thought to myself, "This guy's been lying
all of his life."
Because now those facts have come out.
He has been lying all of his life.
- But it turns out that he was, uh, nothing
but a cold-blooded killer, uh,
that, uh, shot his wife in cold blood
while she was sleeping.
shot her in the head with a rifle
and then disposed of her body.
- He has written to me.
He has said, you know,
"I... I don't know how I could have done that, Thelma."
He said, you know, "I'm just... There aren't words enough
"that express how I... How badly...
How bad I feel about this whole thing."
- This case... when I realized that he had lived
such a life of lying to people,
I realized that he got away
with a lot of this sort of thing
and the sociopathic, behavior.
- If Mark had just come out and openly said,
"Here's where I'm at and here's what's going on
and here's what's happened."
And, to me, I really do wonder
if she would have tried to work it out.
And if they could have figured it out
and worked on it and fixed it,
I don't... I don't see her as in one flat second going,
"I'm out, I'm done."
Lori's birthday is December 31st,
and, um, so her mom goes to the cemetery.
And she was born at 12:00 noon,
so we go and light a candle at noon to celebrate her life.
And we just... we go... Her mom and her brother
and other friend... And just be there together.
- It's been 15 years since she died
and we still think about Lori every day.
It's something that never will go away.
You know, they say that time heals all wounds.
I think that's true, but you don't forget about it.
You just come to accept it.
- If I could talk to Lori today,
I would tell her how much I have missed her
all these years.
I would tell her how proud I am of her
for what she accomplished in this short life.
She was 27 when she died.
And I would tell her also that I was sure
that Mark loved her when they got married.
And I was pretty sure that he still loved her
when he killed her.
- What you can learn from this
is when people seem to be too good to be true...
Maybe you need to look a little further
and verify.
- People in America say that, oh, all the time.
"Oh, it was just a little white lie, you know."
But there's no such thing as a little white lie.
You know, when I think of him killing Lori,
it makes me angry.
But then...
when I think about him being as sick as he was...
Then I think... well, I'm gonna quote a scripture,
if you don't mind.
We read, "I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will.
But of you, it is required to forgive all men."
He doesn't put any "excepts" in there.
"But of you, it is required
to forgive all men."
Even Mark.