Lori Hacking

Case background and investigation

Lori Hacking, 27, worked for Wells Fargo in Salt Lake City and had been married to Mark Hacking for five years. According to the Deseret News, she was about five weeks pregnant in July 2004. Mark Hacking had told those around him that he had been accepted to a medical programme at the University of North Carolina, according to Oxygen's account of the case.

On the morning of July 19, 2004, Mark Hacking called 911 and reported that his wife had not returned from a jog in the Memory Grove area. Hundreds of volunteers joined a search that drew national attention, KSL reported. The Deseret News later reported that on the day he made the report he had bought a new mattress, and that in the early hours of July 20 police found him unclothed outside a hotel, after which he was admitted to a psychiatric unit.

Investigators established that his account of his own life was false. According to the Deseret News, he had never graduated from the University of Utah and had not been admitted to any medical school. On July 24, 2004 he told his brothers that he had killed Lori and put her body in a trash bin, and the family passed this on through his attorney. Wikipedia's account of the case gives the date of his arrest as August 2, 2004, with a first-degree murder charge filed a week later.

Police searched the Salt Lake County landfill for weeks. Lori Hacking's remains were found there on October 1, 2004. Mark Hacking initially pleaded not guilty. On April 15, 2005 he pleaded guilty to first-degree felony murder, and, as reported at the time, admitted in court that he had intentionally shot his wife in the head with a .22 rifle on July 19, 2004. Obstruction of justice counts were dismissed as part of the plea.

On June 6, 2005, Third District Judge Denise Lindberg sentenced him to six years to life in prison, which was then the maximum term available under Utah law for the offence, and said he should serve a very long time. In Utah the Board of Pardons and Parole decides how long an inmate is actually held; in July 2005 the board said it would not consider him for parole until 2035.

The length of the minimum term prompted a change in state law. Utah legislators raised the minimum sentence for murder to 15 years to life in a measure known as Lori's Law, the Deseret News reported in a ten-year retrospective in which Lori's mother spoke about her daughter.