The pain of his family's loss is still fresh, as the trial date for Mark Hacking, 28, draws near. Charged with shooting his wife as she slept in their Salt Lake City apartment, then wrapping her body in garbage bags and throwing it in a Dumpster, Hacking is due in court on April 18, when jury selection for his trial is set to begin. But family members are hoping that at an April 15 pretrial hearing Hacking—who, according to prosecutors, admitted to his brothers that he killed Lori—will accept a plea deal, and with it a potential sentence of life in prison without parole. The failure of Hacking's lawyers to file any pretrial motions, say local legal experts, indicates he could be ready to accept a deal. For Lori's family, the alternative—an emotional, drawn-out trial at which they will have to relive her senseless murder—seems almost too much to bear. "I've spent so many nights thinking back," says Soares, 36, a customer service rep for a brokerage firm. Like most of his relatives Soares believed Lori's marriage was a happy one. "We all sit there and try to find an answer. But I don't think there is one." The lies and deceit that apparently led to Lori's murder may never be fully understood. Hacking, a psychiatric aide at the University Neuropsychiatric Institute in Salt Lake City, reportedly told his wife he had been accepted to medical school at the University of North Carolina. Just before their planned move, Lori discovered Hacking had neither graduated from college nor been accepted at UNC. The charges against him indicate Hacking shot Lori in the head with a .22 caliber rifle after they argued about his lies; her decomposed body was found in a Salt Lake landfill on Oct. 1. Today Hacking "really wants to do the right thing," says his sister-in-law Stephanie Hacking, who recently visited him at the Salt Lake County jail. "He is very willing to do anything he has to do." Hacking has spent his time in jail working on a book about his case (he has no deal), and has sent letters to pen pals as well as birthday cards to his nephew and niece.
So far the two families united first by marriage and then by tragedy are still on good terms, though sometimes the strain of their ordeal is apparent. On Dec. 31—a chilly day that would have been Lori's 28th birthday—her parents and friends gathered near her headstone in the Orem City Cemetery. "They met around noon to reminisce about Lori," says her brother Paul. At 4 p.m. that same afternoon, Mark Hacking's family met at the grave site for a commemoration of their own. Only Lori's mother, Thelma, stayed to meet with his relatives.
Not long before those gatherings, Lori's parents bought a new headstone without the name Hacking on it—it now reads Lori Kay Soares. "We just felt that Mark obviously didn't want her anymore," her mother said at the time. Her grave site has now become a place of peaceful retreat for her relatives. Lori's brother Paul often visits, sometimes with his wife and infant son Bradley and sometimes with his mother. "We go to her for comfort," he says. "I have conversations with her. I sit and talk. We just kind of chat."
The terrible ordeal of her murder, which on April 15 could reach some kind of closure, has robbed her family of so much but not of their memories of her, which somehow come alive in the rolling hills around her grave. "It is a very calming place," says Paul. "It's the closest we can be to her."
Alex Tresniowski. Carolyn Campbell and Cathy Free in Salt Lake City
- Contributors:
- Carolyn Campbell,
- Cathy Free.
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