Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (22 page)

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‘‘accident.’’ The jurors did not believe that Pam, who was fearful

of the dark and could barely get around due to her recent foot

surgery, would have ventured out on her own in a yard that dark.

‘‘This was, in my estimation, a heinous crime in that you took

advantage of someone who trusted and apparently loved you,’’ the

judge said in sentencing Mead to five years to life for murder and an

additional one to fifteen years for solicitation of murder. ‘‘She was

indeed a vulnerable victim and in a calculated fashion you planned

her demise and carried out this murder knowingly and intentionally

and you have shown, since the first day of trial, a total lack of remorse

and . . . acceptance of responsibility.’’

With those impassioned words he captured the essence of an

eraser killing: the utter vulnerability of the victim, the unconscionable

betrayal of her trust, the remorselessness and deviousness of carrying

out a personal execution.

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

Pregnant and Vulnerable

When a Child Is Seen

as a Threat

Q Alargepercentageoferaserkillingsaremotivated,

in whole or in part, by the fact that the victim is pregnant with her

killer’s child— a child he does not want and has no intention of

raising or supporting.

According to Robert Hare, ‘‘psychopaths see children as an incon-venience,’’ an inconvenience some are not willing to tolerate. Because

they lack empathy and compassion, psychopaths cannot become care-givers in any real sense or sublimate their needs and desires to those

of a child— who by its very helplessness and dependency must come

first in the family hierarchy.

However, it is the added presence of the other personality traits

of the Dark Triad that really puts the lives of these men’s partners

and children at risk. For the pathological narcissist, who is used to

and relishes being the center of his world, and the high Mach, who

needs to feel in control of everyone around him, a child may be

seen as a direct threat to his dominion. In the same vein, he sees the

woman attempting to bring that child into the world as betraying

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him, usurping his power and control, and irrevocably altering the

balance of their relationship.

A woman’s emotional center of gravity shifts dramatically with the

discovery that she is pregnant, and continues to change and develop

through term as the physical and psychological reality of the child

grows inside her. As the woman becomes more preoccupied with the

baby and less emotionally available to her partner, the unborn baby

may be perceived as a direct threat and as a rival, according to British

forensic psychiatrist Gillian Mezey. For men who feel no sense of

attachment to their child and, at best, a fragile and purely narcissistic

bond to their intimate partner, erasing both mother and child seems

like the ideal way out of an untenable situation.

The emotional and economic demands of child rearing are

especially disconcerting to Machiavellians, narcissists, and even

lower-level psychopaths whose entire focus is on their own grossly

inflated sense of self. Although many of these men are able to continue

their bachelor lifestyle of affairs and irresponsibility after marriage,

pregnancy and children make it much more difficult to live out their

fantasies.

The threat of prematurely ended bachelorhood was clearly a major

factor in Chester Gillette’s decision to murder his lover instead of fac-ing the responsibility of fatherhood. Theodore Dreiser, a progressive

free thinker, believed that the reason there were so many murders like

the Gillette case in the late 1800s and early 1900s was society’s strict

social and sexual mores, and the extreme difficulty and costliness of

divorce at the time. (Dreiser wrote for the journal of Margaret Sanger,

the early birth control advocate, and argued for the widespread avail-ability of contraceptives and sex education.) He also believed that the

social stigma against unwed mothers added to the tendency of young

men to eliminate the women they had made pregnant.

Yet a century later—with birth control, divorce, and even abortion

available on demand, and single motherhood ubiquitous and socially

acceptable— men like Chester Gillette are still turning to murder to

avoid the responsibilities of parenthood. Even in 1906, Gillette could

have merely left town and abandoned his pregnant girlfriend without

any severe repercussions, or he could have married her and stayed on

at his uncle’s factory, as his relatives had no objection to the pairing.

But for Gillette, like so many other men over the last century, erasing

his pregnant partner not only seemed simpler but also enhanced his

sense of control over his destiny.

Pregnant and Vulnerable

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Recent research indicates that between 20 and 35 percent of men

who kill their pregnant partners had no previous history of violence.

They attack when their victims are most vulnerable, most in need of

caring, and least physically able to fight back. Their youngest victims

have no ability whatsoever to defend themselves.

Q

On July 19, 2004, nineteen months after the disappearance of Laci

Peterson made national news, twenty-eight-year-old Mark Hacking

called police to report that his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Lori, had

not returned from her regular morning run in a Salt Lake City park.

Like Scott and Laci Peterson, the Utah couple had seemed to be

embarking on an exciting future. They were days away from moving

to North Carolina, where Mark was supposed to be starting medical

school. They also found out that week that Lori was pregnant, news

they were supposed to share with their parents over the coming

weekend.

It wasn’t a planned pregnancy, but Lori was thrilled nonetheless.

Evidently Mark was not so happy. Fatherhood may not have been

part of the life he envisioned for himself. For beneath the surface,

little if anything about Mark Hacking was as it appeared to be.

Three days before she disappeared—the day after her positive

home pregnancy test— Lori called the University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill to inquire about financial aid, an issue she was even

more concerned about now that she knew she was pregnant. A puzzled

administrator told her that her husband had not even applied to the

medical school, much less been admitted. Mark had actually never

graduated from college, although it is doubtful that Lori ever knew

that fact. He had secretly dropped out of the University of Utah two

years before, but had all the while pretended to go to class, bringing

books home and even appearing to work on papers, while his wife

largely supported them as an assistant securities trader.

Hacking claimed to have graduated with honors with a degree

in psychology, dummied up a diploma, even went as far as to

send out commencement invitations to his family, but at the last

minute feigned illness and told relatives he would be unable to attend

the ceremony. His wife helped him fill out applications for eleven

different medical schools, which he apparently had no intention

of mailing. He flew around the country pretending to interview at

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several top schools and insisted on his ‘‘first choice,’’ North Carolina,

over his wife’s wish to relocate to Washington, D.C. She put her own

plans to get an MBA on hold so that Mark could pursue his purported

dream.

Lori was at work when she was blindsided by the news from

Chapel Hill. It was a Friday, and she was so upset that she went home

early. At some point over the ensuing weekend Hacking managed

to convince her that it was all some kind of misunderstanding. On

Monday morning, the UNC administrator retrieved a voice mail

message from Lori stating that her husband explained to her that

there had been a computer snafu and that he had worked everything

out. It was the last time anyone would hear from Lori.

Hacking may have been able temporarily to appease his wife, but

he knew he could not keep up the charade much longer. The clock

was ticking, and the house of cards he had delicately built around

himself was about to come down.

At ten on Monday morning, Hacking called his wife’s office. When

told she had never showed up he expressed panic, claiming his wife

had not returned home from her regular predawn run. He said he had

assumed that she had gone to straight to work, but now he noticed

that her work clothes were still at home.

‘‘You need to call police immediately,’’ her supervisor told Hack-ing. ‘‘Get off the phone and call right now.’’

But Hacking didn’t, and he may not even have been at home when

he claimed to be looking in his wife’s closet. A few minutes later,

a good twenty minutes before calling police, he visited a store and

purchased a new mattress for their bed. By the time he called 911,

Lori’s coworkers had already reported her missing.

Several of her office mates also beat Hacking to the site where he

claimed his wife had gone to run. Her car was there, but no Lori.

Q

Just as bank robbers and other types of criminals learn from the

mistakes and successes of others, I believe that Mark Hacking used

Scott Peterson’s basic template for how to get away with murder, but

tweaked it in an effort to avoid mistakes that Scott had made.

An entire branch of research into what is called the social learning

theory of crime has demonstrated the many ways in which people

learn and perfect their practical knowledge of how to commit crimes

Pregnant and Vulnerable

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and minimize their chances of getting caught. I believe that the

striking similarities between the Peterson and Hacking cases illustrate

this kind of social learning. Even relatively isolated criminals like

eraser killers become aware of the modus operandi in cases that offer

a solution to their needs, such as the elimination of a problem wife

or girlfriend. Either by living in the same community where these

crimes occur or by hearing about them through the media, eraser

killers consciously or unconsciously absorb the relevant details and

strategies that fit their own Machiavellian needs.

As was well known at the time Lori Hacking disappeared, Scott

Peterson had tried to convince the police that his wife had been

abducted while walking their golden retriever, McKenzie, in the park

at the end of their block. To make this scenario credible, he left the

backyard gate open and let their dog out on his leash; he told police

that Laci planned to walk McKenzie that morning and gave them the

usual route she took through the park. (This scenario was drawn into

question after friends and relatives reported that Laci had stopped

walking on doctor’s orders after she became sick and nearly fainted

on two recent occasions while walking in the park.)

Another problem with Scott’s cover story was the size and prox-imity of the park. It was small enough to be thoroughly searched

within twenty-four hours by officers on foot and horseback, by divers

in the river running through the park, and by helicopters equipped

with body heat sensors. Search dogs also indicated that Laci did not

go for a walk in the park. Instead, they detected her scent trail leaving

home in a vehicle in the opposite direction of the park— a scenario

that fit with the theory that Peterson had driven her corpse away with

him on his trip to the bay.

Mark Hacking was clever enough to move the search location well

away from his home by ‘‘placing’’ Lori, via the presence of her car,

in a slice of urban wilderness with trails and roads leading up into

remote canyons, where it was far more believable that something bad

but undetectable could have happened to her.

However, Hacking was not as smart, tough, or meticulous as

Peterson when it came to the actual killing or its aftermath. He tried

to take advantage of the hysteria surrounding the disappearance of

Laci Peterson, exploit the perception that women, like children, can

be snatched by strangers in public parks and never be seen again. As

in the Peterson case, there were false sightings by people who believed

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they saw Lori that morning in the park, and two who claimed to have

seen a woman being abducted near the couple’s apartment.

Hacking apparently overlooked the glaring fact that by the time he

tried to stage Lori’s disappearance, his ‘‘mentor’’ had been arrested

and was on trial for his wife’s murder. Perhaps he thought he would

be luckier than Peterson, that he had been clever enough in disposing

of Lori’s body that she would never be found, unlike Laci.

What he was planning to do after getting away with murder

remains unclear. Did he think that he could just move on, wifeless

and childless, to North Carolina, perhaps keeping the rest of his

family believing that he was a doctor in training? Or was he hoping

that the ‘‘tragedy’’ of losing his wife would give him an excuse to

walk away from his purported dream and fashion a new life more in

accord with his fantasies, not to mention his true abilities?

Like Peterson, Hacking grossly underestimated public compas-sion—especially in this tight-knit community of Latter-day Saints,

the church to which Mark and his wife both belonged. As thousands

of volunteers working out of a makeshift command post at an LDS

meetinghouse assisted police in the search for Lori, Hacking’s story

began to unravel with the discovery that he had been out purchasing

a new mattress when he claimed to be frantically looking for his

missing wife. He would try to claim that he had to throw away

their old mattress because his wife had bled on it when she got her

period— which sounded even more ludicrous when police found out

from friends that Lori was pregnant.

On the morning Lori went missing, surveillance cameras at the

University of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, where Mark worked

as a night-shift orderly, captured footage of a man who looked like

Hacking throwing something into a dumpster. During a search of

the couple’s apartment, a knife with traces of Lori’s blood and hair

was found in a bedside drawer; Hacking had used the knife to cut

the blood-soaked upper layer off the mattress. Lori’s blood was also

found in her car, which Mark had left at the entrance to the park. If

Lori had been attacked or kidnapped while she was running, there

was no reason for blood to be in her car. He also made silly mistakes,

such as leaving Lori’s car keys at home and forgetting to readjust the

driver’s seat and mirrors to the position his much smaller wife would

have had them in if she had been the last person to drive the car.

As the weight of suspicion grew, Mark suddenly began to behave

bizarrely. He checked into a motel four blocks from his home, where

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police, responding to a call of a disturbance at two in the morning,

found him running around outside wearing nothing but a pair of

sandals. Seeking refuge from questions he could not answer, he

committed himself into the psychiatric ward.

After five days passed with no sign of Lori but more and more

doubt being cast on Hacking’s story, his own brothers— one a doctor,

the other an electronics engineer—took the course that precious few

families of eraser killers are willing to take. They applied as much

pressure as they could to pry the truth from their brother and got

Mark to confess to them that he had killed his wife. Hacking told his

brothers that he shot Lori in the head with a .22-caliber rifle early

that Monday morning as she slept, disposed of her body, the gun,

and bloody mattress in three separate trash bins, then drove her car

to the park to set up an abduction scenario.

Rather than keep his secret or cover up for him, as the family and

friends of many an eraser killer have done, Hacking’s family passed

that information on to police. Now there was a good chance, in

theory at least, of finding Lori’s body and allowing her the dignity of

burial in a marked grave. By the time authorities learned the truth,

however, Lori’s body was buried under thousands of tons of rotting

compacted trash in the county landfill. When police, working with

teams of cadaver dogs, finally found her remains seventy-five days

later, they were so mangled and decomposed that all they could give

her parents to bury were fifteen pounds of bone fragments and teeth.

It was impossible at that point to confirm that Lori was pregnant,

so Hacking was never charged with a second killing and spared the

death penalty. But after pleading guilty to avoid a trial, he admitted

in open court that his wife was indeed pregnant.

‘‘She was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,’’ Hacking

said in a halting voice, just before a Utah judge imposed a sentence

of six years to life in prison. ‘‘But I killed her and took the life of my

unborn child and put them in the garbage, and I can’t explain why I

did it.’’

Third District Judge Denise Lindberg said she would urge the

state Board of Pardons to keep Hacking imprisoned for a ‘‘very, very

long time,’’ calling him ‘‘the poster child for dishonesty in its most

extreme form.’’

Like Laci, Lori Hacking never shared her marital problems with

friends or family. She did know something was seriously wrong with

the relationship, but I doubt she had any idea that she and her baby

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