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Missing pregnant Utah woman received upsetting phone call
Missing pregnant Utah woman received upsetting phone call before disappearance, colleagues say
The last day her co-workers saw her, Lori Hacking was heading home for the weekend after getting a phone call that left her stunned and sobbing.
Several colleagues said Hacking had been arranging for campus housing at the University of North Carolina medical school and that they believe the school was returning a call to say her husband, Mark Hacking, was not enrolled there, as he had told her.
“She was visibly upset. She started to cry and got up to walk away,” her supervisor, Randy Church, told The Associated Press on Monday. He said that when co-workers asked her what was wrong, she replied: “It’s no big deal; I’m OK. But I think I will go home.”
At the time of her disappearance, the couple were packing to move to North Carolina. But after she vanished, police and family members learned that besides lying about being accepted to medical school, Mark Hacking had not even graduated from college.
Lori Hacking left work early after receiving the call Friday afternoon, July 16. Mark Hacking reported his wife’s disappearance the following Monday. She is now feared dead, and her husband has become the focus of the police investigation.
Police returned with cadaver dogs during the night to search a landfill which already had been searched before.
On Tuesday, Hacking family spokesman Scott Dunaway said a search by volunteers would be called off for now but would resume later with specialized teams. He said the decision was not related to the police decision to concentrate on the landfill.
Mark Hacking, a 28-year-old nightshift hospital orderly, has been at a psychiatric hospital since police found him running around naked in sandals the night after the search for his wife began. Police refused to say whether he was being held involuntarily.
His family has hired defense attorney D. Gilbert Athay, who said Monday he has spoken to Hacking many times since being hired Thursday. He refused to characterize the conversations.
Hacking’s wife, a 27-year-old trading assistant who just learned she was five weeks pregnant, was a private woman who did not share personal troubles, making her breakdown in the office all the more unusual, said colleagues at Wells Fargo Securities Services.
Lori Hacking’s co-workers gave accounts of the phone call to homicide detectives after she was reported missing.
Officials at the University of North Carolina were trying to determine whether one of their administrators made the call, but would not give details. “In deference to the ongoing investigation in Salt Lake City, we will have no further comment on Lori or Mark Hacking,” school spokeswoman Lisa Katz said Tuesday.
“We wouldn’t have any reason to doubt” the Wells Fargo employee accounts, Detective Dwayne Baird said Monday. He would not comment further, but later dismissed suggestions an arrest was imminent. “Our most important focus in this case is the fact we have a missing person and, coupled with that, it’s under very, very suspicious circumstances,” he said.
Church said detectives showed up at Wells Fargo the day after Hacking’s disappearance and inspected her e-mail and computer files. Results on some of other evidence collected by police, including a mattress found in a trash bin and a box spring taken from the couple’s apartment, are pending.
Mark Hacking said his wife did not wake him up after coming home from an early morning jog July 19 and never showed up to work. Police later said he was at a furniture store buying a new mattress just before reporting that Lori was missing.
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