Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (23 page)

E R A S E D

were in mortal danger. After she was killed, police found a note Lori

had written to her husband threatening to end the marriage unless

‘‘things changed,’’ although when she wrote the note and exactly

what those problems were remain a mystery.

‘‘I want to grow old with you,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but I can’t do it under

these conditions.’’

Mark Hacking long seemed to be at odds with himself, his

professed feelings contradicted by his actions. He and Lori were

high school sweethearts, and he told friends he planned to marry

her, yet he cheated on her while away in Canada on the mission

to spread the faith that all young Mormon men are expected to

undertake for two years after high school graduation. Mark was sent

home less than a year into his mission for having an inappropriate

relationship with a recent convert he was supposed to be counseling.

He lied to Lori about that, claiming he was wrongfully blamed for

the misbehavior of others. He aspired to be a doctor like his father

and older brother, yet would not do what it takes to become one.

He defied the tenets of his faith by drinking, smoking, lying, and

cheating, yet attended Sunday services with his wife the afternoon

before he killed her.

Most of his friends and coworkers saw Hacking as warm and

generous. But after the murder, his mother acknowledged that it

‘‘seemed easy for him to establish a pattern of not explaining himself

or revealing where he was.’’ He volunteered in the church nursery

and appeared to enjoy kids, yet was capable of murdering his unborn

child just days after learning his wife was pregnant.

In the years he claimed to be finishing his bachelor’s degree and

preparing for medical school, he retreated into adolescent fantasy:

playing endless hours of Nintendo, hanging out at a convenience

store near his apartment eating hot dogs and candy when he was

supposed to be in class, shaving his head and growing a goatee to

look hipper. He even began calling himself ‘‘Franz’’ at work, after a

narcissistic bodybuilder in a
Saturday Night Live
skit. While Lori was

ready to embrace the responsibilities of their life together, Mark was

running from them.

One of the last places Lori Hacking was seen alive was at her hus-band’s favorite mini-mart. As with his other recalcitrant behaviors,

Hacking hid his smoking habit from his wife like a naughty child. At

9:19 that Sunday night when Mark and Lori came in to buy sodas,

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Mark motioned to the clerk (to whom he had claimed to be a

therapist) not to reveal to his wife that he normally bought cigarettes

there.

The images captured on the store’s surveillance tape provide a

telling look at the real Mark Hacking. Four hours later at 1:18 A.M.,

Mark returned to the store alone. By that point, according to the time

line he gave his brothers, he had already killed his wife and was on his

way to dispose of her corpse. Showing no signs of stress or despair,

Hacking walked up to the clerk and ordered a pack of smokes. While

waiting, he casually studies his fingers as if looking for any blood

he might have missed. This was no haunted Macbeth, begging ‘‘all

great Neptune’s ocean’’ to wash the guilt from his hands. It was just a

cursory examination. The cigarettes were his reward, his declaration

of independence. He could smoke all he wanted now. He no longer

had to hide his true nature.

Was it some vestige of his religious faith, or pressure from his

family, that caused Mark Hacking to admit his crime? And was his

willingness to plead guilty a sign of true remorse? It is interesting that

two of the very few eraser killers to plead guilty, Mark Hacking and

Don Weber, did not have families that bought into their lies after

their crimes, but instead expected them to take responsibility and do

the right thing. Although Hacking did ultimately admit his crime, it

took him a while to get there. Three months after he confessed the

crime in private to his brothers, he had stood in court and entered

a ‘‘not guilty’’ plea despite the anguished lament of Lori’s brother,

who begged Hacking not to put his wife’s family through the painful

experience of a trial.

His actions since going to prison may belie his claims of remorse.

Hacking has gotten a jailhouse tattoo of a bulldozer on his chest.

Is that the image he has of himself, powerful and strong, or as

someone capable of ‘‘bulldozing’’ everyone around him with his

special prowess? Or was he mocking the effort it took authorities to

find his wife amid all that garbage?

Q

Many eraser killings of pregnant women are brutally enforced

abortions, with the added plus, from the killer’s point of view, of

excising from his life the baby’s mother, who wants something from

him that he is not willing to give.

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E R A S E D

Football star Rae Carruth staged a drive-by shooting to kill

his twenty-four-year-old girlfriend, Cherica Adams, who was seven

months pregnant with his baby. He believed that a young black

woman dying in a hail of gunfire, whether she was viewed by police

to be an innocent casualty or the apparent target, would raise neither

eyebrows nor much inquiry. Sadly for our society, that might have

been true; in this case, however, the victim survived long enough to

expose her boyfriend’s involvement.

Carruth was already supporting a child he fathered in college,

after losing a paternity suit, and evidently had no intention of

supporting another— even though he was earning more than half

a million dollars a year as a first-round draft pick for the Carolina

Panthers.

After he failed to convince Cherica to get an abortion, Carruth

hired a career criminal who had performed odd jobs for him to kill

her. To Cherica, however, Rae suddenly seemed to have changed

his tune about the baby, claiming he wanted to do the right thing

and even attending a Lamaze class with her. On November 15, 1999,

Carruth invited Cherica to a late movie in south Charlotte (eerily,

a movie about the hunt for a killer). They each had their own cars

with them, and after the movie he told her to follow him back to

her place, which surprised Cherica, as he rarely came over. En route,

he abruptly stopped his car in front of hers, boxing her in as the

hit man he had hired pulled up alongside Cherica and shot her four

times. Carruth and his coconspirators then sped away from the scene,

assuming she was dead and that police would believe she had been

the victim of a street crime.

Q

Unfortunately for Rae Carruth, Cherica Adams was severely

wounded but not dead. Despite her injuries, Adams managed to

call 911 on her cell phone and describe what had happened to her.

She was rushed to a nearby hospital, where the son she had already

named Chancellor was delivered ten weeks premature. He survived,

but due to oxygen deprivation suffered severe brain damage. Cherica

lived for thirty days before succumbing to multiple organ failure.

Before her death, she was able to scrawl down a few notes describing

the attack and how Carruth prevented her escape.

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As prosecutor Gentry Caudill put it so memorably at trial, ‘‘Cherica

Adams was not supposed to be an eyewitness to what the defendant

had done to her and her son.’’

Q

A week after the shooting, Carruth was charged with attempted

murder and released on bail with the agreement that he was to turn

himself in if either Cherica or the baby died. Within an hour of

learning of Cherica’s death, however, he attempted to flee. He was

captured the next day five hundred miles away in Tennessee, hiding

in the trunk of a friend’s car with a cache of candy bars to sustain

him and two bottles holding his urine.

Carruth was charged with first-degree murder. At trial, the defense

argued that the shooting was vengeance for Carruth’s reneging on

a drug deal. But two of Carruth’s coconspirators testified against

him, as did an ex-girlfriend who said he admitted his involvement in

the murder—telling her that he didn’t believe he would get in any

trouble ‘‘because I didn’t actually pull the trigger.’’ Phone records

also showed that Carruth and the wheelman of the other car called

each other right around the time of the shooting.

The triggerman, Van Brett Watkins, said that Carruth initially

hired him to beat Adams so severely that she would suffer a miscar-riage, but then changed his mind, asking him to kill both Cherica and

her baby. Carruth suggested shooting her outside a restaurant—a

nearly identical plan to the one conceived by Robert Blake, accord-ing to prosecutors in that case. When Watkins balked at that idea,

Carruth settled on a drive-by.

In fact, it was not the first time Rae Carruth wanted to erase

a woman or child from his life. Amber Turner, another former

girlfriend who had become pregnant by Carruth, testified that he had

threatened to kill her if she did not abort their child. Turner, just

eighteen years old at the time, complied.

‘‘Don’t make me send somebody out there to kill you,’’ she recalled

him telling her, stating that he had no intention of having a child

with someone he didn’t plan to be with long term. ‘‘You know I’ll

do it.’’

She also testified that he had ‘‘joked’’ about killing the woman he

got pregnant while in college and the son she named Rae Jr.

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E R A S E D

Carruth could have received the death penalty if convicted of

first-degree murder under either of two legal rationales: that the

murder was committed with premeditation and deliberation (which

it certainly was, according to the testimony of his coconspirators)

or that it was committed during the commission of another serious

crime, the latter known as the felony murder rule. Applying the felony

murder rule was questionable, as the underlying felony charged,

shooting into an occupied car, was the action that caused her death,

not really an underlying crime.

Nevertheless, the jury spared him the death penalty, convicting him

only of the lesser charges of conspiracy to commit murder, shooting

into an occupied vehicle, and using an instrument to destroy an

unborn child. He was sentenced to nineteen to twenty-four years in

prison.

Even Carruth’s defense attorney admitted that the verdict was

logically inconsistent, as the jurors had found Carruth guilty of the

underlying felonies leading to Cherica Adams’s death, yet acquitted

him of murder. One juror, acknowledging that the verdict was

‘‘illogical,’’ described it as a compromise. The jurors all believed

Carruth was involved in the crime, but because he didn’t commit every

element of it himself, they didn’t see it as first-degree murder—an

erroneous view of the law. Like the jury in the Robert Blake case, they

were troubled because they couldn’t put the gun in the killer’s hand.

Q

As Rae Carruth learned, an eraser killer’s best-laid plans can go

awry in unanticipated ways. Stephen Poaches might well have gotten

away with killing his pregnant girlfriend if he hadn’t enlisted the help

of someone after the fact to help him cover his tracks.

LaToyia Figueroa, a twenty-four-year-old Philadelphia waitress,

was five months pregnant with her second child when she disap-peared on July 8, 2005. She never made it home from a prenatal

appointment she attended that day with her unborn baby’s father,

twenty-five-year-old Poaches. She didn’t show up for her shift that

night at a local T.G.I. Friday’s and never picked up her seven-year-old

daughter from day care.

An aunt, who helped raise Figueroa after the girl’s mother was

murdered as the result of a love triangle when LaToyia was just

four years old, immediately suspected that Poaches had harmed her

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niece. Poaches told her that LaToyia left on foot from his apartment

after the prenatal appointment, but he changed his story several

times. He also lived with a woman whom LaToyia thought was an

ex-girlfriend—a woman who had just given birth to Poaches’s baby

and who had attacked LaToyia outside her home shortly before she

disappeared.

The case received national attention largely through the efforts of a

distant relative, who happened to be a Philadelphia city councilman,

and Net bloggers who wrote an open letter to talk-show host Nancy

Grace challenging her to devote airtime to a missing woman who

wasn’t white. (LaToyia was of mixed race, black and Latina.)

Friends, family, and hundreds of strangers aided police in an

exhaustive search, but Poaches declined to participate, saying he

preferring sticking to his regular routine—going to his job at an oil

company and spending time with his other ‘‘babymomma.’’

Poaches hired an attorney, Michael Coard, who went on national

TV insisting that his client was innocent and fully cooperating with

police. Poaches did some of his own public relations work as well,

repeatedly calling in to a late-night sex and relationship talk show

on a Philadelphia hip-hop radio station where the case was being

discussed incessantly. He didn’t aid his cause, however, by showing

no concern for LaToyia, repeatedly referring to her not by her name

but as ‘‘the female.’’ The radio host, who was so disturbed by Poaches

demeanor that she turned all the tapes of their conversations over

to police, asked Poaches to at least call LaToyia ‘‘Babymomma,’’ a

quasi-affectionate term in hip-hop circles, but he refused to show his

missing girlfriend even that much respect.

‘‘When I see her I am going to make sure she is OK, then I

don’t want to see her anymore,’’ Poaches said dismissively of LaToyia

during one of the on-air calls.

Without a body, without a crime scene to work from, police

admitted that their investigation was floundering. Then they got

lucky. Poaches had buried LaToyia in a grassy lot near the railroad

tracks thirteen miles outside the city. Worried that her body might

be discovered, he decided to move it. Because the police had already

impounded his car, he asked a buddy to help him. The friend,

however, quickly called police, who provided him with the van and

body-size bag Poaches requested he bring. Then they followed the

pair to LaToyia’s makeshift grave.

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