They couple married in the local Mormon Temple in 1999, vowing that the marriage would be for eternity, and Mark re-enrolled at university. He was the ideal husband, often preparing candlelit dinners for his wife, writing her love letters and doing DIY chores for her many friends. He told everyone that she was the love of his life and her parents were delighted that she had such a thoughtful spouse.
But, by 2002 Mark had dropped out of university again. As before, he didn’t tell anyone. Indeed, he would come home from his job at the laboratory and spread out his medical books and write lengthy essays. He also spent hours at home wearing his medical scrubs. He and Lori were regular churchgoers and he convinced all of their fellow Mormons that he was going to be a doctor and that he knew a great deal about psychology. But the lies took their toll, and he had bad panic attacks and suffered from insomnia. He was also very accident prone.
In 2004, it was time for his supposed class to graduate and Mark duly sent out all of the invitations. He kept up the deception, hiring a cap and gown and having photos taken of himself holding his diploma. On the day of the ceremony he pretended that he’d come down with a vomiting bug and was too ill to attend his big day. Lori and her parents were sympathetic, not suspecting for a moment that he hadn’t finished his pre-med course.
Still continuing his deception, Hacking got his wife to help him fill in applications for medical schools, applications he never posted. He pretended that he’d been granted interviews, and travelled around the country, supposedly impressing his interviewers. After much travel, he told her that he’d been accepted at the University of North Carolina’s Medical School in Chapel Hill and she joyfully visited the city with him and picked out an apartment. She told everyone that they were moving away.
In June 2004, 27-year-old Lori, who had stopped taking the pill, missed a period and happily confided in Mark and her friends that she was pregnant. It meant that she’d be giving up work but she didn’t realise that her earnings were crucial to their survival – after all, 28-year-old Mark had told her that he’d been given a sizeable loan to fund his studies and that he’d eventually be a doctor, earning a considerable salary.
On 17 July 2004, she phoned the financial aid office of North Carolina’s medical school with a query about her husband’s loan and was horrified to hear that he wasn’t enrolled there. She confronted him, and he said that his admission papers must have got lost in the post or within the university’s internal mailing system. But it was one lie too many, and Lori shouted at him, saying that he was a liar and that they couldn’t go on like this. It was a natural reaction, but it enraged Mark Hacking, who had been raised to see the Mormon man as head of his household and his wife as the submissive follower.
Mark knew that he was on borrowed time. Lori, and all of their friends and family, expected him to become a mature breadwinner, supporting all three of them. In truth, he had the maturity of a small boy and could only earn a lab assistant’s modest wage. But, if Lori disappeared he could move to a new area alone and be a different person without disappointing everyone who believed in him…
MURDER
Early on the morning of 19 July, he loaded his rifle and shot five-weeks-pregnant Lori through the head whilst she slept. (Her cat was so traumatised by what it saw and heard that it hid in a space beneath the floorboards for several days.) She was wearing her sacred garments, which Mormons believe will protect the wearer from harm. Mark re-dressed her in her running clothes, so that it would look as if she had gone for her usual early morning jog, and stripped the bed of her pillow which was saturated in her blood. He then enjoyed a cigarette, the first that he’d ever been able to smoke in his own home.
Soon after the murder, Hacking drove Lori’s car to Memory Grove Car Park and left it there. When he returned to their apartment, he wrapped her body in a blanket and hid her and the blood-soaked mattress and pillows in a nearby skip, knowing that the contents would be sent to a landfill site later that day. At 10am he phoned Lori’s work and said that she hadn’t returned from her run in the park and that he feared for her safety. He told her friends the same thing and they immediately went out to look for her.
But, instead of joining in the search, Mark drove to a nearby bed store and bought a mattress and pillows. He remade the bed before phoning the police.
Within hours, it was clear that the police didn’t believe his version of events. They found out that he wasn’t enrolled at a North Carolina medical school, despite the fact that he and Lori had packed most of their belongings and were ready to move there. They also discovered the receipt for the mattress and pillows, and found that he’d bought them after phoning Lori’s friends to report her missing. It was only a matter of time before he was arrested and charged.
FAKED INSANITY
Hoping that he could put forward an insanity defence, Mark Hacking drank several pints of beer and went to a hotel car park where he took an overdose of barbiturates. He stripped naked, put his sandals back on, and began running around the park, screaming inanities. His alarmed family booked him into the psychiatric unit of the hospital where he’d worked for the past few years. There, he claimed to have forgotten his name.
Mark’s family visited him and promised that they would love him no matter what he had done. Relieved, he told his brothers that he had shot his pregnant wife during an argument and put her corpse in a Dumpster, that it was presumably now buried at the landfill site.
Religious communities often close ranks when one of their members commits a heinous crime, but Mark’s brothers did the right thing and went to the authorities. Mark was duly arrested and kept on suicide watch in prison.
For week after week, police officers searched the disease-ridden landfill site, a disgusting task for which they deserve much credit. Then, on the 30th day, they found the 27-year-old’s decomposing remains. In life, she had weighed 110lbs, but in death only 30lbs remained. A detective recognised her luxurious brown hair but she was formally identified through dental records.
The find sent shock waves through the Mormon community as the faithful believe that men and women choose their marriage partners during a previous pre-earthly life, and that marriage is sealed ‘for time and eternity.’ They also believed that Mark, when he died, would go to the lowest level of everlasting life, the Mormon Terrestrial Kingdom. What, then, would happen to Lori, who, as a good married Mormon, would normally enter the higher level, the Celestial Kingdom, but could only do so with her husband, unmarried women being unable to enter this Paradise?
FURTHER CONTROVERSY
There was further confusion as prosecutors had hoped to charge Hacking for a double homicide, as Utah’s governing body believes that a foetus suffers in the same way as its mother during her murder. But pro-choice groups pointed out that a five-week foetus has no nervous system and cannot feel pain. The point became moot after Lori’s body was found as her womb and its contents had been crushed by bulldozers so it was impossible to confirm the pregnancy.
On 14 April 2005, Mark Hacking wept as he pleaded guilty to murdering his wife, saying that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. On 6 June 2005, he was sentenced to six years to life, with the judge stating that he was likely to serve a long sentence for such a coldblooded crime. He soon started writing his version of the murder, which he planned to send to his family and Lori’s. He also wrote to his mother-in-law admitting that he’d known that Lori was pregnant when he shot her dead.
CHARLES STUART
To casual observers, Charles (who urged his friends to call him Chuck) and Carol Stuart had an enviable marriage. She was attractive and extroverted, a tax attorney for a publishing company. He was more introverted, the manager of a respected Boston department store which specialised in selling fur coats to wealthy Bostonians. His salary was more than double Carol’s and together they earned $175,000 a year, an impressive sum in the mid-1980s. In his spare time, Charles taught baseball and basketball to children and raised money for charity, just
as his father had before him. He was comfortable around young people, but being a local sports hero is completely different to having a child of your own.
Carol was well educated whilst Charles had never been to college, though he sometimes lied and said that he’d enjoyed a football scholarship. The former altar boy tried to compensate for his lack of qualifications by buying designer clothes and jewellery and getting top-of-the-range haircuts. But he didn’t spend all of his money on himself, giving his parents $200 a month as they were in failing health.
Carol had been Charles’s first serious girlfriend – they met in 1979 and married in 1985 – and by 1988 he felt that he’d missed out by not playing the field when he was younger. He began to flirt with a female colleague and bought her jewellery. He also talked about using his superior cooking skills to open his own restaurant. The Stuarts sometimes argued in the evenings about domestic trivia, and Charles always played the role of peacemaker by sending flowers to Carol’s workplace the following day.
By the time that Carol Stuart approached 30, her biological clock was ticking and in spring 1989 she announced gleefully that she was pregnant. Charles later told a friend that he’d asked her to have an abortion, but that she refused as she really wanted a baby. The new arrival was due on Charles’s 30th birthday and, when friends and family congratulated him, he pretended to be pleased.
But inwardly he was terrified. He was tiring of the marriage, and the fact that Carol would be giving up work would make it difficult for him to become a restaurateur. Yet their religion, Catholicism, frowned on divorce. And, if he left his pregnant wife he’d be seen as the bad guy, whereas if she died…
THE HIT
The couple grew further apart as the weeks passed and she understandably became more and more focused on the impending baby, giving up alcohol and caffeine and kitting out the nursery. Brooding, Charles spent more time at the pub with his friends.
In September 1989, he asked his brother Michael if he knew anyone who would be willing to take a life. Michael thought that he was just talking nonsense and rebuffed him. The following month he was more specific, asking an old friend to kill Carol. The friend thought he was joking and also refused. But later that month Charles persuaded another of his brothers, Matthew, to help him in what he said was an insurance scam.
On 23 October, Charles was driving Carol back from a birthing class at a Boston hospital when he pulled over. He either shot his heavily-pregnant wife or had someone else shoot her. It’s unlikely that his own bullet wound was self-inflicted as it was in a hard-to-reach place, low on his right side.
His brother Matthew drew up as prearranged and Charles handed him a parcel to get rid of. Matthew drove away and opened it to find that it contained Carol’s jewellery, her purse and a gun. He threw the parcel into the Pines River after taking the engagement ring.
Charles had planned that he would just have a minor wound to his foot whereas Carol’s injuries would be fatal, but it seems that his hand – or the gunman’s hand – twitched before he pulled the trigger, so when paramedics arrived he was gravely wounded and Carol was still alive.
The couple were rushed to hospital where surgeons performed an emergency Caesarean on a dying Carol, at that point seven months pregnant. The baby – whom she had planned to call Christopher – was alive but weighed only 3lbs and had been starved of oxygen for 30 minutes. A priest was called in to baptise him.
Carol died the next day. Meanwhile Charles remained in intensive care, with bladder, liver, stomach and intestinal damage necessitating a temporary colostomy. He talked briefly to police, describing his assailant as a black man who had forced them, at gunpoint, to drive to a rough area of Boston. He had asked for Charles’s wallet, which contained a police badge: apparently thinking that they were undercover officers, the stranger had shot them and fled. An armed robber called Willie Bennett – who had an IQ of 62, in the mentally defective range – was arrested and police allegedly intimidated his cellmates into saying that he’d confessed.
Charles was too ill to attend his wife’s funeral on 28 October, but he scribbled a note that a friend read out at the ceremony, saying ‘God has called you to his hands… to bring you away from the cruelty and violence that fill this world.’
On 9 November, the Stuarts’ 17-day-old baby died. He was buried on the 20th, but Charles was still too ill to attend the private ceremony. Three weeks later he was released from hospital and collected $82,000 on an insurance policy which his wife’s employer had taken out on her. He also applied to collect on another policy worth $100,000. (Journalists would later suggest that Charles Stuart killed his wife for the insurance money but he was a high earner and the amount he was due to receive wasn’t even enough to pay off their mortgage. He killed to win his freedom, the opportunity to date like a single man, to start again.)
Only on 24 December, when Matthew Stuart’s girlfriend Janet went to the police and told them that Matthew and Charles were involved in Carol’s death, did police start to regard his story as unreliable. On 3 January, Matthew went to the District Attorney’s office and told them that Willie Bennett was innocent and that he, Matthew, was involved.
Charles Stuart knew that his arrest was imminent and that he’d be going to jail for a very long time. Aware that police were probably watching his house, he booked into a motel and asked for a 4.30am alarm call. When it arrived, he dressed casually in a parka and jeans, drove his car to the Tobin Bridge and jumped into the Mystic River. He left a note in his car saying that he couldn’t stand being a suspect any longer, though he did not admit to the murder. Conspiracy theorists immediately suggested that he’d been murdered, noting that he’d bought snacks in a store a few hours before his death and had been chatty and cheerful. But this is consistent with suicide, as the person knows that their worries will soon be over for good.
The family tragedy continued as Matthew Stuart pled guilty to conspiracy and possession of a firearm and was imprisoned from 1992 to 1995. In September 2011 he was found dead in a homeless shelter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of a drug overdose.
ANDREW HUNTER
This Scottish killer probably murdered his first wife and definitely killed his pregnant second wife. He may also have killed one or more prostitutes.
A DIFFICULT START
Andrew’s mother died three weeks after his birth and he was abandoned by his father. He was raised by an aunt in Paisley, Scotland in what was later described as an unremarkable childhood.
As a youth, he joined the Salvation Army and eventually became involved with another Salvationist, Christine, who was 11 years his senior. She mothered him and encouraged his ambition to become a social worker. They married in 1973.
But, by 1976, Hunter was looking for more excitement and had an affair with another man whom he picked up in a sauna. He would remain actively bisexual throughout his life.
In 1977, the Salvation Army sent the 26-year-old to do voluntary work at their citadel in Dundee. At first Christine remained in Glasgow, but, when her husband found employment as an unqualified social worker at a Dundee children’s home, she joined him. They later had a son.
Outwardly, their married life was highly respectable. Andrew continued to work in various orphanages during the day and studied for a social work degree at night. The couple remained committed Salvationists. But Hunter was seducing vulnerable young women whom he met through his work and was also a heavy user of prostitutes.
On 20 March 1979, a man answering Andrew Hunter’s description – in his late twenties, slim, pale, with sideburns and a moustache – picked up 18-year-old prostitute Carol Lannen, drove her to the Templeton Woods, stripped her and strangled her. Her body was found the following day, and her clothes were later discovered 80 miles away on the banks of the River Don. Hunter would later drive many miles to dispose of his second wife’s car…
In October 1984, the 33-year-old met a respectable young woman called Lynda Cairns, who lived with a doctor in the house across the road.
She, too, was a social worker and as her common law marriage to the doctor had faded to friendship, she and Andrew Hunter started an affair. When Christine found out, she insisted that he end the liaison, something which he reluctantly did.
But the couple soon resumed their affair and the following summer he left Christine and moved in with Lynda. He had ongoing access to his son, often taking the boy to the cinema. But Lynda wanted marriage and children and it would be five years before he could obtain a divorce…
THE FIRST DEATH
On 14 December 1984, Andrew went to Christine’s neighbour, saying that he was attempting to return their son after an access visit but that his wife wouldn’t open the door. He added that her car was in the driveway with the lights on and that he could hear music playing in the house, that he was very concerned. He phoned Christine from the neighbour’s house but she didn’t answer and he went and borrowed a spare key from a friend.
Andrew Hunter and his 11-year-old son let themselves into the house and found Christine swinging from the rafters, a television cable tightly knotted around her neck. She had been dead for several hours.
Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents Page 23
