The Perfect Lie

Mark Hacking and his wife Lori lived in Salt Lake City and were days from moving to North Carolina, where he had told her he would start medical school. None of it was true. He had not finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Utah, had never applied to a medical school, and had kept the story going for nearly two years. On July 16, 2004 Lori called the school herself and found out.

On the night of July 18, 2004, Hacking shot her in the head with a .22-caliber rifle while she slept. She was about five weeks pregnant. He cut the bloodied pillow top from their mattress, wrapped her in it, and put her in a dumpster, then called police the next morning to report that she had not come home from a run in Memory Grove park. More than a thousand volunteers turned out to search for her.

Blood in the apartment and in the couple’s car pointed investigators back at him, and on July 24 he confessed to two of his brothers, who passed it to his lawyer. Crews sifted landfill garbage for weeks and recovered Lori’s body on October 1, 2004. Hacking pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in April 2005 and was sentenced in June to six years to life. Utah’s parole board set his first hearing for 2035.