HACKING CASE Attorney to address mentality

Mark Hacking confessed in a psychiatric ward, his lawyer said.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The attorney for Mark Hacking said he will raise the issue of mental illness and challenge his client's confession to relatives that he killed his wife, Lori, and dumped her body in a garbage bin.
Hacking, 28, reportedly made the statement to his brothers when he was a psychiatric patient in the hospital, said defense lawyer Gil Athay.
"To me that creates a substantial issue," Athay told Salt Lake television station KUTV Thursday. "Mental illness, mental deficiency certainly will be an issue in this case."
Hacking reported his wife missing July 19, a Monday. He said she had gone jogging and never showed up for work. That night police found him naked outside a hotel, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward.
Scott and Lance Hacking talked with their younger brother at the hospital July 24. They said he told them he had killed his wife while she was sleeping.
The brothers said they passed the information along to police through an intermediary.
History
For years, Mark Hacking reportedly lied to his wife, family and friends about his education and career plans. Not only wasn't he enrolled at medical school, he hadn't even graduated from the University of Utah. Yet, he and his wife were packing for the move to Chapel Hill, N.C., where she had presumed he was beginning at the medical program.
The Friday before she was reported missing, Lori Hacking, 27, left work stunned and sobbing. Her co-workers told The Associated Press she had been making some arrangements at the North Carolina medical school, and they believe an administrator was calling back to say Mark Hacking wasn't enrolled there.
"I think it's clear that this whole house of cards he had built, all this deception, had come to an end," the man's father, Douglas Hacking, told the AP. "He had been found out. His wife discovered his deception and confronted him with it, and I just think he just saw his whole world collapsing and broke down."