Disappearance

Lori and Mark Hacking

Mark Douglas Hacking, 28, and Lori Kay Soares, 27, were inseparable from the moment they met while on a trip with some friends to Lake Powell, Utah in 1994, Debbie Howlett reported in a July 29, 2004 USA Today article. For the ten years they had been together, their friends and family were impressed with their strong, intimate relationship. They were young, deeply in love and preparing to move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Mark was going to attend medical school. Moreover, Mark and Lori recently learned that she was five weeks pregnant. They had everything to look forward to.

However, on July 19, 2004, Lori went out and didn't return. That morning around 10, Mark called Lori's office at Wells Fargo in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she worked as a trading assistant. During a brief conversation with Lori's colleague, Brandon Hodge, Mark inquired about Lori, Paul Foy reported in a July 27, 2004 AP Online article. Hodge told Mark that she never made it in to work, which was unusual since Lori was always known to be punctual. Foy wrote that the phone was then passed to Lori's supervisor, Randy Church, who recalled Mark saying that Lori went jogging at around 5:30 that morning at Memory Grove Park, but had not come home. Church urged Mark to immediately call the police.

Mark then called the Salt Lake City Police Dispatch at approximately 10:07 a.m. Around the same time the call was made, Mark also called some of Lori's friends asking if they knew of where she was. According to a July 27, 2004 article in The Salt Lake Tribune, the worried husband said that "he had run the jogging route 3 miles each way to search for his wife." Even though her car was parked at the entrance of the park, there was no sign of Lori. 

When Mark called the police a second time around 10:49 a.m., asking them for assistance in finding his wife, they told him that "they generally respond to missing person calls after 24 hours and suggested he call hospitals and the jail."