Salt Lake Tribune: Update: Hacking family calls off search volunteers

Article last updated: 07/27/2004 12:34:57 PM
SALT LAKE CITY—The search by volunteers looking for missing jogger Lori Hacking was temporarily called off today, but will resume later with specialized teams, a family spokesman said.

Scott Dunaway said the decision was not related to any change in the direction of the police investigation into Hacking's disappearance. Hacking, 27, has been missing since July 19, when her husband Mark Hacking reported she had not returned from a morning jog in City Creek Canyon.

Lori Hacking, a Wells Fargo employee who was five weeks pregnant, is now feared dead, and her husband has become the focus of the police investigation. Hundreds of Utahns have volunteers to help search for her in the week since she vanished.

Dunaway said this morning the length of time Lori Hacking has been missing has dampened the family's hopes of finding her alive. "They understand the reality of eight days," he said.

Meanwhile, police returned with night lights and cadaver dogs Monday night to search the Salt Lake County landfill, which already had been searched before.

At the time of Lori's 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. 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.

Three days before she disappeared, Lori Hacking may have uncovered her husband's deceptions.

She received a phone call at her work, started crying and went home early, said a colleague at Wells Fargo Institutional Brokerage and Sales.

"I could hear her say things such as, 'But he's already been accepted. He's already applied. This can't be correct,' said Darren Openshaw, a Wells Fargo employee who overheard the phone call about 2:15 p.m. on July 16.

Openshaw said he believes the caller was from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.