The morning of July 19, 2004, broke over Salt Lake City in that deceptively peaceful way mountain summers often do—clear skies, the faint smell of pine and asphalt warming in the sun, the city humming softly awake beneath the Wasatch Range. It was a day built for routine: coffee brewing, doors unlocking, sneakers hitting pavement.

Inside a small apartment north of downtown, Mark Hacking, twenty-eight, stirred awake to the quiet rustle of an empty room. The sheets beside him were cold. His wife, Lori Soares Hacking, was already gone.

She’d told him the night before that she planned to run early—five a.m., her usual route around Memory Grove Park. After that, she’d come home, shower, and let him drive her to work at Wells Fargo, where she was a stockbroker’s assistant. Then they’d continue packing for their move to North Carolina, where Mark was supposedly about to start medical school.

It was a new chapter they’d both been waiting for. Lori, twenty-seven and five weeks pregnant, had quit her job to support him. Their apartment was full of cardboard boxes and quiet dreams—white coat ceremonies, a new home, a baby. They’d even thrown a farewell party three days earlier at her boss’s mountain cabin, surrounded by friends who toasted the couple’s bright future.

When Mark finally rolled out of bed around 8 a.m., he wasn’t worried. Lori had probably gone straight to work. Her car wasn’t in the lot, so it made sense. He turned on the TV, played a few minutes of a video game, then decided to run an errand—they needed a mattress for the move.

He drove to a furniture store, paid cash for a new one, loaded it onto the car, and hauled it home. He didn’t call Lori. Didn’t check her office. Didn’t wonder why she hadn’t texted.

At least, not yet.

The Call That Started Everything

Around 10 a.m., Mark finally dialed Lori’s office. A coworker answered.
“Hey, is Lori there?” he asked casually.
The voice on the other end paused. “She hasn’t come in today.”

For a moment, everything stilled.

Mark looked around the apartment—the packed boxes, the new mattress on the bed, the outfit Lori had laid out for work the night before. The skirt and blouse were still folded neatly.

He told the coworker, almost as if realizing it himself:

“Oh my heck, here are her clothes. She never came back from running.”

His voice cracked. Then came the call to 911.

Within hours, Salt Lake City Police officers were on scene. Helicopters circled above Memory Grove, their shadows flickering through the trees. Search dogs sniffed along trails where early joggers had passed hours earlier. Flyers printed with Lori’s smiling photo appeared across the city: Missing woman, last seen near Memory Grove Park, 5’3”, 115 pounds.

For many in Salt Lake, it was déjà vu. Only two years earlier, the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping had dominated headlines—a 14-year-old girl snatched from her bedroom, later rescued after months of national coverage. Now, another young woman was missing, another family on television pleading for her safe return.

This time, the husband’s anguish seemed genuine.

The Devoted Husband

When police met Mark that morning, they found him distraught, shaking, barely able to speak. His shoes were soaked—he said he’d already run Lori’s route, even crossed the creek looking for her. At one point during questioning, he leaned against her parked car and slid down its side, gasping for breath, sobbing uncontrollably.

He told officers that Lori always parked in the same spot before jogging and that the car looked exactly as she’d left it. Her running shoes were gone. Her phone and purse were at home. There was no sign of struggle, no broken glass, no forced entry.

Mark’s grief was raw, visible, messy. He hugged officers, thanked volunteers, cried openly for news cameras. He said things that sounded like script lines for a grieving husband but felt too natural to doubt.

“My wife’s out there somewhere,” he told one reporter. “Please, help me find her.”

The city rallied. Volunteers lined the trails with flashlights that first night. Friends and family combed nearby woods. Mark’s parents—a respected local family—set up a command center for search efforts.

But small details began to nag at investigators.

A Timeline Full of Holes

A neighbor told police she’d seen Lori’s car parked outside the apartment at 7 a.m., and again at 8:30. She was certain. The car hadn’t moved.

How could that be, if Lori had driven to Memory Grove hours earlier?

When detectives asked Mark, he looked confused. “That’s impossible,” he said. “It was gone when I woke up.”

Another oddity: the new mattress.

Mark had bought it between 9 and 10 a.m., before calling 911—before even confirming Lori was missing. When investigators asked why he’d gone mattress shopping during what should have been a frantic morning, he had an answer ready. “We’d been looking for one,” he said. “I finally found it.”

It was the kind of lie that sounded logical until you thought about it.

The police didn’t push—yet. But they took note.

The Interview

Later that afternoon, Mark was brought to the station for an interview. The footage, later released to the public, is haunting.

He sits slouched in a chair, face pale, eyes red. The officer explains the process for a computer voice stress analysis test, a modern alternative to the old polygraph. Mark nods, polite, agreeable—but as the instructions continue, his composure slips.

“I do feel coerced into taking this,” he mutters.
“No one’s forcing you,” the investigator assures him. “You can walk out right now.”
“If I refuse, then I look guilty,” Mark replies.

The officer explains that the test isn’t admissible in court—it’s just another tool. But Mark keeps circling back, voicing fear that “the circumstances already look bad.”

Finally, he declines the test.

It’s a small decision that will soon matter enormously.

Cracks in the Facade

That evening, police officers searched the couple’s apartment complex. Out by the dumpsters, Mark’s brother Scott watched as investigators lifted trash bags and looked inside.

“What are they doing?” he asked.
Mark’s reply was oddly detached.

“Apparently they’re nervous that I bought a new mattress.”

Then he added, almost to himself:

“I just need to get away.”

They didn’t find anything in that dumpster. But they found something much stranger in Lori’s car—a blood transfer stain on the back seat and adjustments to the mirrors and seat position consistent with a much taller driver.

Still, without a body, without proof of foul play, police had to tread carefully. Publicly, Mark was still the grieving husband. Privately, he was the center of a widening storm.

The Breakdown

At 2 a.m. on July 20, less than twenty-four hours after Lori’s disappearance, hotel staff at the Chase Suite Inn, just half a mile from the couple’s apartment, called police about a disturbance.

When officers arrived, they found Mark Hacking, naked except for a pair of sandals, sprinting through the halls. His brother was called to the scene and found a message on Mark’s PDA:

“To everyone from Mark: this is justice. I’m so sorry.”

It looked like a breakdown, but FBI profiler Candice DeLong wasn’t convinced. “He kept his shoes on,” she later observed. “That’s not what a psychotic person does. That’s what someone pretending does.”

Mark was checked into a psychiatric facility under observation.

Lies Begin to Unravel

While Mark sat in the ward, investigators pulled on a thread that refused to stop unraveling.

He’d told everyone—family, friends, Lori’s coworkers—that he’d graduated from the University of Utah with a master’s degree in psychology and had been accepted to medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he planned to study oncology. His father, a pediatrician, had proudly told colleagues that both his sons were doctors.

But when detectives contacted UNC, the response was immediate:

“We have no record of any Mark Hacking.”

In fact, he’d never even applied.

Further checks revealed he hadn’t graduated at all. He’d dropped out in 2002, quietly vanishing from the university’s rolls. Every term paper, every textbook, every late-night study session he described to Lori and her mother was part of an elaborate illusion.

When he said he was attending lectures, he was actually sitting at a neighborhood convenience store—drinking soda, eating hot dogs, and smoking cigarettes, something his Mormon faith forbade. He’d told the clerks he was a therapist and begged them not to tell his wife about the smoking.

Even his job at the hospital’s neuropsychiatric institute was a lie. He wasn’t running therapy sessions; he was a hospital orderly, responsible for laundry and group activities. His name tag read “Hans,” a nickname borrowed from a Saturday Night Live skit about narcissistic bodybuilders.

The truth was grotesque in its simplicity: for years, Mark had been living a double life so convincing that even those closest to him believed every word.

The Apartment Search

When detectives returned to the Hackings’ apartment with a warrant, the performance was over. Lori’s purse, keys, and wallet were still there. In the bedroom, they found small spots of blood on the headboard and nightstand. Inside the nightstand drawer was a sheath knife.

An officer noticed a dark speck on the blade—blood, perhaps—and a faint fingerprint.

Mark laughed nervously.
“I’ve had that since I was a scout,” he said.

Then they found the missing piece of his mattress story.

In a dumpster behind his church, investigators discovered a discarded mattress with the top layer cut away. Mark claimed Lori had “bled on it during her period.” But Lori was pregnant. And no one believed him anymore.

The Crumbling Illusion

Five days after Lori disappeared, the walls of Mark’s fantasy finally closed in.

On July 24, his father and brothers gathered him at the family home. They asked him directly what had happened to Lori. There was a long silence.

Then Mark broke down.

“I killed her,” he said quietly.

The words landed like stone.

He confessed that Lori had confronted him the night before she disappeared, after discovering his lies. She’d called UNC and learned there was no record of his acceptance, no application, no future in medicine. She’d been humiliated, heartbroken. She cried at work that Friday, her coworkers said, but went to their going-away party anyway, smiling through it all.

That night, after midnight, neighbors heard shouting. Then nothing.

Mark told his family he’d stayed up playing video games while Lori slept—until he went through their packed boxes, found his .22 rifle, and walked into the bedroom.

He shot her once in the head.

When Mark Hacking finally spoke the truth, the room went still. His father stared at him in disbelief. His brothers, who’d defended him for days against whispers and suspicion, sat frozen. The words came quietly, but they would echo through every life in that room.

“I killed her.”

It was July 24th, five days after Lori vanished. Police had found nothing but fragments — blood in the car, a mattress cut apart, a husband unraveling. The media had begun to shift from sympathy to doubt. And now, the story that had consumed Salt Lake City had reached its horrific center.

Mark didn’t cry. He didn’t collapse. He simply began to explain, as if the confession were a long overdue chore.

The Night Before

It began on Sunday, July 18th, three days after the couple’s farewell party. Their apartment was half-packed; boxes labeled “Kitchen,” “Clothes,” “Baby.” Lori had spent the evening quietly folding laundry, her movements slow and deliberate, as if she were keeping her thoughts from spilling out.

She had learned the truth two days earlier.

On Friday, she’d called the University of North Carolina to arrange financial aid for her husband’s supposed medical school enrollment. The administrator had paused, checked the records, and come back confused:

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We have no student by that name.”

The administrator even double-checked with the American Medical College Application Service — Mark hadn’t applied anywhere.

Lori left work in tears. A coworker saw her clutching the phone, her face pale, before she hurried out early.

That night, she still showed up at their going-away party in the mountains. She smiled for photos, clinking glasses with friends who toasted to “the future Dr. Hacking.” In every picture, she’s holding Mark’s arm. In every picture, he’s smiling.

But under the surface, something was breaking.

The Confrontation

Lori didn’t want to humiliate him publicly. That wasn’t who she was. Instead, she tried to reason with him. Over the next two days, she called UNC again, leaving a polite voicemail:

“My husband said everything’s been cleared up, but could you please call me back, just for my peace of mind?”

It was the voice of a woman still hoping to believe the best.

On Sunday night, she couldn’t keep pretending. Neighbors later recalled hearing raised voices around midnight — a woman crying, a man shouting. One remembered the words clearly:

“That’s it! It’s all over!”

According to Mark’s confession, Lori went to bed after the argument. He stayed up for an hour, pacing, playing video games, rummaging through boxes. He opened one labeled “Office,” where he’d packed his .22 rifle.

He told police he didn’t plan it — that it was impulsive, the act of a man cornered by his own lies. But the details suggest otherwise. He waited until she was asleep. He approached the bed quietly. And then, in the dim light of their half-packed bedroom, he raised the rifle and shot her once in the head.

The Aftermath

There was no panic. No second thoughts.

Mark wrapped Lori’s body in a garbage bag, cleaned what he could, and dragged her to his car. The mattress was soaked, so he cut away the bloodied portion and stuffed it into a separate bag.

Around 1:30 a.m., he stopped at a convenience store, buying cigarettes. Surveillance footage showed him glancing at his hands, then his reflection in the window, inspecting his nails — as if checking for blood.

He dumped Lori’s body in a trash bin, the rifle in another, and drove home to shower.

By sunrise, he was rehearsing a new story. He’d bought a new mattress. He’d gone jogging in her place to look for her. He’d made the phone calls.

By 10 a.m., he was the grieving husband on the phone with police, the man Salt Lake City would cry for on the evening news.

The Search

When the truth came out, search teams turned their focus to the Salt Lake City landfill, a sprawling, sun-baked wasteland of trash and machinery stretching across hundreds of acres.

Detective Kelly Kent described the search as “sifting through mountains of grief.” Dozens of officers and volunteers worked in protective suits for weeks, using cadaver dogs and GPS mapping to trace every possible garbage route.

The heat was unbearable. The smell, indescribable.

Every shovelful was a prayer.

Months passed with nothing. Then, on October 1st, 2004, a cadaver dog barked and refused to move. In the waste before them, investigators found what was left of Lori — decomposed beyond recognition, still wrapped in the plastic Mark had described.

Her wedding ring was fused to her finger.

Because of the decomposition, the medical examiner couldn’t confirm her pregnancy. But her family didn’t need confirmation. They already knew.

The Courtroom

Mark Hacking was arrested on August 2nd, 2004, and charged with aggravated murder. At his arraignment, he looked small — a thin, pale man in an orange jumpsuit, blinking under the fluorescent lights. Gone was the weeping husband who’d clutched missing posters.

He told the court he was sorry. That he’d lied. That he couldn’t explain why.

The courtroom was silent. Lori’s parents sat in the front row, holding hands. Her father, Herald Soares, said later:

“He didn’t just take her life. He took our peace, our trust, our belief that love means safety.”

The judge sentenced Mark to six years to life, the maximum allowed under Utah law at the time. The public erupted. Talk shows and newspapers decried the leniency — “Six years? For killing your pregnant wife?”

The Utah Board of Pardons intervened, extending his minimum parole eligibility to 2035. Lawmakers soon passed an amendment increasing the minimum for aggravated murder to 15 years to life — legislation unofficially dubbed “Lori’s Law.”

The Psychology of a Killer

To understand how it came to this, investigators turned to psychologists. What they found wasn’t a sudden fit of rage — it was a lifetime of fabrication.

Mark wasn’t just a liar. He was a pathological liar, exhibiting traits of pseudologia fantastica — a compulsion to invent complex, self-serving stories and live inside them.

Unlike simple deceit, pseudologia fantastica isn’t about money or gain. It’s about identity. The liar builds an entire universe where they are the hero — admired, successful, worthy of love. They don’t lie to people; they lie for themselves.

For Mark, the fantasy had started years earlier. His father was a pediatrician. His brothers were high achievers — one a doctor, one an engineer. Mark had enrolled in college but drifted, struggled, and eventually dropped out. Rather than face failure, he began constructing a new version of himself — one who never stumbled, one who was destined for greatness.

He told Lori he’d graduated, told her he was applying to medical schools, told her he’d been accepted. He even traveled to fake interviews, collecting brochures to prove it.

Every lie built another wall around the truth. And Lori, in her kindness, helped him maintain it — proofreading his “term papers,” encouraging his “study nights,” believing in the man he wanted to be.

The Breaking Point

When Lori finally discovered the truth, she didn’t scream or leave. She tried to fix it. That, psychologists say, may have been the final blow to Mark’s ego.

Dr. Kathy Yates, a forensic psychologist, later explained:

“He grew up watching others succeed. He felt he deserved the same success — but without the effort. When his wife discovered the lie, it wasn’t just embarrassment. It was annihilation of his identity.”

This is called narcissistic injury — when a narcissist’s fragile self-image is threatened by exposure. For most, it results in shame. For some, it ignites what experts call narcissistic rage — a blinding fury to reclaim control, to destroy the threat.

In that sense, Lori didn’t die because she confronted him.
She died because she saw him too clearly.

The Letter

In the couple’s spare bedroom, investigators later found a note, typed but unsigned, believed to have been written by Lori.

“I want to grow old with you, but I can’t do it under these conditions.
I can’t imagine life with you if things don’t change.”

The letter wasn’t angry. It read like a plea — a woman trying to salvage love from the wreckage of deception.

That note may have been the last thing she ever wrote.

The Families

For Lori’s parents, the loss was indescribable. Her mother, Thelma, told reporters she had once called Mark “the perfect son-in-law.” She’d helped him write his supposed college papers, bragged about his acceptance to medical school. The betrayal cut deeper than grief.

For Mark’s family, it was its own kind of death. His father, Dr. Douglas Hacking, told the press:

“We didn’t see it coming. We were completely blindsided.”

His brother Scott, who’d been with him the night he confessed, later said:

“I’ve never seen him hurt so much. When all was said and done, he said, ‘I’ve never felt so relieved and so miserable at the same time.’”

Even after prison, Mark continued to shock the public. He was caught signing autographs for a website that sold murder memorabilia. Later, he wrote a life history manuscript no publisher has dared release.

In the months after the trial, the story of Lori and Mark Hacking refused to fade from Salt Lake City’s consciousness. It wasn’t just another domestic tragedy—it was a study in the quiet horror of deception. Every time a new neighbor smiled too wide, every time a husband seemed a little too perfect, people remembered the couple whose life had looked flawless until it fell apart in a single gunshot.

For Lori’s family, the grief was relentless but strangely public. They were surrounded by cameras, reporters, true-crime enthusiasts. Every question—Did you ever suspect? What was he really like?—was a knife twisting deeper. The house where Lori grew up became a shrine of framed photos, candles, and letters from strangers across the country who saw their own daughters and sisters in her story.

Her father, Herald Soares, had her headstone changed to remove the name Hacking. Now it read simply:

LORI KAY SOARES — BELOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER, FRIEND.

It was more than a correction; it was an act of reclamation. “He took enough from her,” he said quietly. “He doesn’t get to take her name.”

The Aftermath

After Mark’s conviction, the Utah Department of Corrections transferred him to a medium-security prison in Gunnison, a small town three hours south of Salt Lake City. There, he began what he called his “redemption plan.” He spent his days reading, writing, and corresponding with strangers who wrote to him about guilt, forgiveness, and faith.

At first, some found his letters remorseful—softly worded apologies that painted him as a broken man trying to make sense of the unthinkable. But over time, a different pattern emerged. His tone grew detached, self-referential. He spoke about his crime as though it were a tragic event that had happened to him, rather than something he’d done.

Then came the scandal.

Investigators discovered that Mark had been signing autographs and selling them through a website that specialized in murder memorabilia—items from infamous killers. Each autograph sold for twenty dollars. His parents, horrified, begged him to stop.

He promised he would. Instead, he started writing a life history, a manuscript he described as “the full truth.” It remains unpublished, sealed away somewhere in his family’s storage.

To this day, Mark has never granted a televised interview, never faced the media, never publicly explained why. In court, he said, “I loved her.” But his actions afterward—his performances, his letters, his need to be seen—suggested he still loved only himself.

The Legacy of Lori’s Law

Public outrage over Mark’s sentence sparked an unprecedented movement in Utah. Families of murder victims rallied with Lori’s parents, arguing that a minimum term of six years for aggravated murder was an insult to every life taken.

Within a year, lawmakers introduced and passed what would become known informally as Lori’s Law—raising the minimum prison term for first-degree murder to fifteen years to life.

It was a small comfort for a family that had lost everything, but it mattered. “Lori’s Law isn’t about punishment,” her mother said. “It’s about value. It says that her life—and every victim’s life—meant more than six years.”

The Psychology of a Double Life

Experts continued to study the case long after the courtroom closed. In academic journals and forensic psychology classrooms, Mark Hacking became a reference point for pseudologia fantastica—pathological lying so elaborate it becomes a lifestyle.

Dr. Kathy Yates, who had analyzed Mark’s behavioral patterns, described him as “a narcissist who mistook fantasy for achievement.” She explained that people like Mark don’t just lie to manipulate others—they lie to survive emotionally. Their self-worth is so fragile that truth itself feels lethal.

“When the illusion cracks,” she said, “they don’t see the lie dying. They see themselves dying.”

Psychologists traced a familiar pattern: a child raised in high expectations, learning early that love is performance. A young man discovering that admiration comes easier than effort. A husband who builds a world of illusions—until the woman who loves him most begins to see through it.

In Lori’s final days, she was pregnant, hopeful, and standing at the edge of a truth she could no longer ignore. She’d loved Mark for the man he could have been. But she was married to the one he invented.

The Final Image

Friends remember her not by the headlines, but by small things: how she’d hum while organizing files at work, how she kept a jar of jellybeans on her desk labeled “For Bad Days Only,” how she always sent thank-you notes, even for small kindnesses.

Those closest to her say the cruelest part of the story isn’t how she died—it’s that she never realized she was living inside someone else’s lie.

A former coworker said:

“She believed in him more than he believed in himself. And in the end, that’s what killed her.”

The City That Remembered

Each year since the murder, Salt Lake City has hosted a Memorial 5K Run in Lori’s name. Participants trace the same route she once ran through Memory Grove, following a path now lined with plaques honoring victims of domestic violence.

The event isn’t loud or televised. It’s quiet—families jogging together, survivors holding hands, a community remembering not the scandal, but the woman whose kindness outlived her killer’s lies.

The first year, her father spoke at the finish line. His voice was thin but steady.

“We can’t undo what happened. But we can make sure her name means something more than what he did.”

Lessons Left Behind

The Hacking case forced Utah—and much of the country—to confront uncomfortable truths. That sometimes, danger doesn’t knock down the door. It sits across from you at dinner. It kisses you goodnight. It tells you everything you want to hear.

It reminded people that domestic violence isn’t always bruises or shouting—it can be silence, manipulation, a gradual erosion of trust until reality itself belongs to someone else.

For psychologists, the case became a cautionary tale of how narcissism and deceit can metastasize when unchecked. For ordinary couples, it was a whisper of warning: when something feels off, when stories don’t add up, when questioning feels like betrayal—listen anyway.

Because sometimes, doubt is the only thing standing between love and tragedy.

The Prisoner

Now in his forties, Mark Hacking remains behind bars, serving his sentence. His earliest possible release date is August 2035. By then, he’ll have spent more than thirty years in prison—long enough for memories to fade, but not for guilt to dissolve.

In a 2019 parole report, officials noted that Mark “demonstrates limited insight into his crime” and “continues to externalize blame.” In other words, he still doesn’t fully accept responsibility.

Psychiatrists describe him as polite, articulate, occasionally charming—the same traits that once made his lies believable.

To the public, he’s become a symbol of the dangerous calm that can hide behind ordinary smiles.

The Epilogue

If there’s one thing the case left behind, it’s a question—how many people are living double lives right now, carefully curated, perfectly rehearsed, waiting for the moment truth catches up?

Lori’s story is not only a warning but a mirror. It shows what happens when empathy meets deception, when love becomes a weapon, when trust is used as camouflage.

The last line of her obituary read simply:

“She believed in the goodness of people.”

Perhaps that’s what makes her story endure. In a world where truth is negotiable, where appearances are currency, Lori Soares Hacking believed. And that belief—fragile, radiant, human—was both her strength and her undoing.

FAQs

1. What is Lori’s Law?
A Utah statute increasing the minimum sentence for aggravated murder from 6 to 15 years to life, created in response to Lori’s case.

2. How long will Mark Hacking serve?
He is not eligible for parole until 2035, and may serve life in prison depending on the Parole Board’s decision.

3. Was Lori’s pregnancy ever confirmed?
Due to decomposition, it couldn’t be medically verified, but her family confirmed she was five weeks pregnant.

4. What mental disorders did experts associate with Mark?
Narcissistic Personality Disorder combined with pseudologia fantastica—pathological lying used to construct a false self-image.

5. What was the key evidence against him?
Blood traces in Lori’s car, a mattress with missing sections, and Mark’s own confession to family members.

6. How did the public respond?
With outrage at the lenient sentence and empathy for Lori’s family, leading to widespread reform and awareness about emotional abuse and deception.

7. How is Lori remembered today?
Through the annual memorial run, community outreach programs, and domestic-violence education campaigns inspired by her story.

8. Why is the case still studied?
Because it reveals how narcissism, lying, and emotional dependency can intertwine to create tragedy hidden in plain sight.

Disclaimer:
This story is based on verified court records, police reports, and public psychological analyses of the 2004 Hacking case. Certain scenes have been dramatized for narrative clarity and cinematic flow, but all factual elements align with real events. This article is intended for educational and storytelling purposes, promoting awareness about domestic deception and emotional abuse.