It was snowing that night in the fall of 2001, a miserable and cold night, and Kara Cottle was waiting for the shuttle bus to get home after her night class.
From under her hood, she saw Mark Hacking in his SUV, the popular student she'd known as a kid in Orem and who'd re-introduced himself in their Evolution of Human Health and Anthropology class at the University of Utah. She wasn't too popular in the old days, wasn't close friends with Hacking, his family or with the kids higher up on the popularity totem pole.
"Hey, Kara, get in!" Hacking said as he rolled to a stop.
The two stayed acquainted through the term. Hacking was a workhorse, never missed class and gave Kara a lift home most nights.
They spent time in the car talking about their spouses, school and their plans for the future. Hacking was respectful and nice. He talked about how much he adored his wife, how he was majoring in psychology and planning on medical school.
The last time she saw him, at the end of that semester, he pulled to a stop in her parking lot.
"I wish you all the best with everything," Hacking told her. "With school and your family and everything."
The two shook hands. "I hope I see you again," Kara told him. "Maybe at a class reunion."
"I'll look for you," Hacking said.
Last week, Kara Cottle logged on to the Deseret Morning News Web site from an e-mail cafe in Kenya, Africa, where she is doing research on AIDS. There she saw her old friend's picture.
Today the perceived actions of a very different Mark Hacking have left friends, acquaintances and family members desperate for answers to questions that only weeks ago seemed inconceivable.
What kind of person would be able to deceive his spouse, friends and family for so long?
What on earth did he plan to do once he arrived in North Carolina?
And what triggered the 180-degree turn from loving husband to a man police believe killed his wife, Lori?
Accident-prone kid
Mark was a happy kid with big freckles, curly red hair and a personality to match.
He comes from Douglas and Janet Hacking's big, bustling family of seven children: Lance is the oldest, followed by Scott, Tiffany and Sarah. Mark is the fifth child, and Chad and Julie are the two youngest.
Douglas W. Hacking, a beloved Orem pediatrician at the Orem Cherry Tree Office of Utah Valley Pediatrics, went to Brigham Young University in the late 1960s, followed by medical school in Wisconsin and a residency at the Columbus Children's Hospital.
Many years ago, little Mark Hacking gave a talk at the Orem meetinghouse where his family attended services for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He forgot he was standing on a step stool to reach the microphone, and when he finished speaking, he swung around, stepped forward and tumbled unceremoniously off the dais.
"Then that little redhead poked up from behind the podium with a big grin on his face," longtime friend Brandon Wood remembered. "I still laugh when I think about that."
Wood grew up with Hacking. Their families still live across the street from one another on 60 North in Orem. They played football, went hiking, attended church and took Scouting trips together, while Mark's mother, Janet, shuttled his three sisters to various dance practices.
Mark wasn't a big athlete, but he played a variety of sports for a while. Mostly, his friends say, he liked to make people laugh.
He was interviewed for the school yearbook, and when asked why he chose soccer over other sports, Hacking, then a junior, said, "Because it's bad A."
Mark Hacking seemed to move through life like a lot of other children in the neighborhood, with a few periods of rebellion and a few disappointments, but not much else.
Mark narrowly missed achieving his Eagle Scout award, although he did a lot of the required project, which included painting the bleachers at his high school.
The boy was also humorously accident-prone.
He wore his older brothers' shoes, which were a little too big for him. He'd kick the ball and his shoe would come off, Wood said. People would laugh.
During a Scouting overnight trip once, Hacking rolled into the fire and woke up with soot on his face. The next night, he slept up on a wooden tripod the guys had built, but he still woke up with black soot on his face.
"We couldn't figure it out," Wood said. "Weird, goofy stuff happened to him."
He was accident-prone for sure, and now some people suspect that was an attention-getting pattern that followed him through life.
He burned his hand in the fire at an outing to Lake Powell, where Lori tended to him and nursed him through the night. He fell from a roof, suffering head and back injuries.
Turning point
And now, almost 10 years later, many people look back to an experience on his LDS mission that may have been a turning point for Mark Hacking — a time when he tasted freedom outside of his Orem neighborhood and lied to downplay the seriousness of what had happened.
Back then, people said the same thing they are saying today — that when they found out what happened, they were totally shocked by what they were learning of "Elder Hacking's" behavior.
By most accounts, Hacking had a relationship with a young woman on his mission and was sent home 11 months early from his mission to Winnipeg, Canada.
Hacking was Travis Webb's district leader in the mission field in 1995. "I was very surprised when he ended up being sent home, and when I found out later (what had happened), that was what blew me away."
Later there were rumors that Hacking and other missionaries had dated girls throughout their missions, staying at their apartment watching movies. One of the girls who another missionary dated became pregnant.
Although Hacking and Lori Soares had been dating on and off in high school, Webb said he never heard Hacking talk about a girl back home.
Now Webb is one of thousands wondering what happened to make Hacking "snap," as his family has said may have happened.
"I think he got a taste of freedom and did a little bit of lying with the girlfriend up there and maybe came home and had the pressure of going back and getting into regular life," Webb said.
"I think he had to make up some lies to tell his family as to why he came home early, and lying became easier and easier to him because he was getting out of things."
Despite all outward appearances of peace and harmony in the marriage, Mark's parents worried about how their fifth child held in his emotions. Janet Hacking told People magazine, "He was outgoing with other people, yet inward with his own feelings. It seemed easy for him to establish a pattern of not explaining himself or revealing where he was."
Doug Hacking told police on the day Lori first went missing that he was not aware of any marital problems, but "he also indicated that if there were any, he doubted Mark would tell him," according to a Salt Lake police report.
A darker side
In recent years, Mark developed some increasingly worrisome habits. Smoking for one — behavior in direct opposition to his beliefs as a member of the LDS Church. Partying. Lying.
His appearance changed, too.
He shaved his head in the past couple of years and grew a goatee popular with twentysomething college students. When police searched Lori and Mark Hacking's apartment on July 19, they took for evidence a shirt that read: "West Seattle Acid Party."
He had some other peculiarities that now seem questionable.
He told clerks at a convenience store where he hung out that he was a therapist.
And although staffers at the University of Utah's Neuropsychiatric Institute said privately Mark was a great employee, they acknowledged he and a colleague were known by the names of two "Saturday Night Live" characters, Hans and Franz, a pair of narcissistic bodybuilders.
"I referred to him as Franz since the first week," said Ginger Phillips, a patient at the psychiatric center under Hacking. "It was some little joke he had."
Phillips said the other half of the Hans and Franz combo was the male head nurse. She said getting Hacking to tell anyone his real name was very difficult.
For five years, Hacking worked at the hospital, most recently as a psychiatric technician, a position similar to a nurse's aide, with starting pay about $8 an hour.
He interacted regularly with patients and even supervised some activities.
But mostly, people remember Mark as a fun-loving, good person.
He was an LDS Church nursery leader, where he chased kids around the church, making faces and tickling them.
He would help anyone who needed it. Friends joked he couldn't pass by a stranded motorist without offering to help.
'Emotions and questions'
Another one of the Orem neighborhood boys was Ross Williams, Mark's best friend since they were young.
They did everything together. Mark's dad was a Boy Scout leader. Williams said he is closer to Mark than he is to his own family. It was Williams, now a probation officer for the state's Adult Parole and Probation Department, who introduced Mark and Lori on that trip to Lake Powell in high school.
Now he's faced with the possibility of visiting his friend in prison.
"Most definitely he's still my best friend," he said. But now he's the best friend who is in jail because police believe he killed his wife. "There are most definitively a whole lot of emotions and questions for me now."
Mark Hacking never sought counseling from his LDS bishop for anything, including mental problems, marital problems or drugs, said Barry Packer, the Hackings' bishop since September.
Before Mark Hacking was arrested, Packer said he was surprised by revelations that Hacking didn't graduate from the University of Utah or ever apply to medical school. Mark, in fact, dropped out of the U. in 2002. But Packer refused to pass judgment on Mark Hacking.
"My role is to support and love him and just wait to see what unfolds," Packer said. "I'm not in a position to speculate."
Packer said the couple attended worship services the Sunday afternoon before Lori disappeared. The pair seemed happy and in love, and nothing seemed suspicious, he said.
The Hackings attended a University of Utah married student LDS ward. Packer said other members of the ward helped in the search for Lori, passing out fliers and praying for the safe return of their friend.
"They were just a wonderful couple," Packer said. "There was just no indication about anything in their relationship that was of any unusual or negative nature at all."
A violent reaction?
No one knows what Mark Hacking was thinking the night his wife was allegedly murdered. But for a man backed into a corner, possibly crumbling under the discovery of his lies, such a reaction, if true, was extreme, says Lou Bertram, who spent years with the FBI as a psychological profile coordinator.
"Some people turn to alcohol, drugs. . . . Unfortunately, in this case," as police believe, he may have "turned to violence."
Leave your wife. Disappear. Run away. "That would be more the norm," Bertram said. "That's why it surprises me that Mark just did not leave."
Instead, investigators believe he left what they are calling a "disorganized crime scene," with much evidence in the car and apartment where the couple lived at 127 S. Lincoln Street, No. 7.
"He snapped, that's what he did," Bertram said. "Sunday night or Monday morning . . . , we don't know what the conversation was between him and Lori, but things had been building up and he snapped. That's why it was so chaotic. He tried to cover his tracks , but he was disorganized."
The Mark Hacking who met police July 19, the morning he reported his wife missing, was a very different person from the gregarious, helpful, warm person his friends describe.
Just a few hours after Hacking reported his wife missing, Salt Lake City police officer Sonny Ricks was assigned to watch the couple's apartment.
"As I walked toward Apt. #7, Mark exited," Ricks wrote in his police report from that day. Mark was holding two cell phones, a lighter and some kind of tin container. The officer asked Mark to stay with him until detectives arrived, and while Mark was waiting, his brother walked up and asked what was happening.
"Apparently, they're nervous that I bought a mattress," Mark told his brother, according to the police report. He then said, "I just need to get away," according to the report.
"Hi Laynie, How are you? I'm sorry you won't be at the reunion, although in light of the recent news of Mark Hacking, I doubt it's going to be a very exciting reunion." — On the Class of 1994 Web site, Cori (Green) Graham, Orem High Class of '94.
Saturday, Aug. 14, the day of Lori's memorial service, dozens of graduates from Orem High School's Class of 1994 also will meet at the school on South Tiger Way for their 10-year class reunion. Kara Cottle will be there, as she said several years ago that she might. Mark Hacking will not.
Contributing: Jennifer Dobner and Leigh Dethman
E-mail: lucy@desnews.com