Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
At 10:49 on the morning of Monday, July 19, 2004, Mark Hacking called the Salt Lake City police.
His wife, Lori, had gone out early for a run, he said. She liked to jog in Memory Grove, a leafy park at the mouth of City Creek Canyon, just above downtown. She had never come back. She hadn’t shown up at work.
Lori was 27. Mark was 28. They had been married for five years, and Lori had just found out she was pregnant.
Within hours, the whole city was looking for her.
The couple who were leaving
Lori Soares grew up in Fullerton, California, and moved to Orem, Utah, with her mother when she was a girl. She and Mark both went to Orem High School. By 2004 she was a trading assistant at Wells Fargo in Salt Lake City, smart and well liked.
Mark was the son of a doctor. One of his brothers was a doctor too. Everyone believed Mark was about to become one. He had told his family and Lori’s family that he had graduated from the University of Utah and had been accepted to four medical schools. He had chosen the University of North Carolina.
The couple had signed a lease on a place in North Carolina. They had both quit their jobs. On Thursday, July 15, Lori’s co-workers threw her a going-away party.
The next day, Friday, Lori took a phone call at her desk. Co-workers said she was upset and in tears, and she went home early. Later, they came to believe the call had been from the medical school in North Carolina.
The search
On Monday, Mark helped searchers comb Memory Grove and the trails up City Creek Canyon. Lori’s car was found parked near the entrance to the park. That afternoon, Mark spoke in front of the TV cameras and thanked everyone who was helping.
The next day, more than 1,200 volunteers showed up. By Sunday there were more than 3,000. They handed out flyers with Lori’s smiling face and the words “MISSING FROM CITY CREEK CANYON OR MEMORY GROVE AREA.” Her face went up on billboards along the highway.
A woman told police she had seen someone who looked like Lori stretching at the park entrance around six that morning. It seemed to back up Mark’s story. But she had only seen the runner from behind, and she later withdrew her claim.
The man in the motel parking lot
In the early hours of Tuesday, while volunteers were still planning the day’s search, police got a call about a man acting strangely at a motel a few blocks from the Hackings’ apartment. He was running around outside, naked except for a pair of sandals.
It was Mark.
He was taken to the psychiatric unit at the University of Utah hospital. He hired one of the best-known defense lawyers in the state.
On Wednesday, the story about his life fell apart. The University of Utah confirmed that Mark had never graduated. He had dropped out two years earlier and had kept pretending to go to class. The medical school in North Carolina said it had no record of him. He had never even applied.
His father told reporters that Mark had lied because of the pressure to match his successful older brothers. When the family confronted him, Mark denied having anything to do with Lori’s disappearance.
The volunteers kept searching. But on that same Wednesday, investigators carried bags, boxes and a box spring out of the Hackings’ apartment. They impounded a large trash bin. A week later, police said publicly that Lori may never have gone jogging at all.
Detectives already knew something Mark had told no one. It was right there on his credit card records, stamped 10:23 a.m. on the morning his wife went missing.
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