Hacking retains lawyer

The husband of missing jogger Lori Hacking has retained a prominent local criminal defense attorney, and reports surfaced Monday of co-workers seeing a tearful Lori Hacking leave work early three days before she disappeared.

Mark Hacking has hired D. Gilbert Athay, who has represented many high-profile criminal defendants from death-row inmates to public officials and college athletes.

"We have no comment," Athay said as he left his downtown office during the noon hour Monday. "Yes, I am his attorney."

Athay declined to state how long he had been speaking with the Hacking family or if he had already met with Mark Hacking. Hacking family spokesman Scott Dunaway said he had been retained within the past week. When asked how they were led to Athay, Dunaway said it was simply name recognition.

"Anyone here locally will know that name," he said.

Admitted to the state bar in 1967, Athay joined two other high-profile Utah defense attorneys in 1989 and launched the Rocky Mountain Defense Fund, a nonprofit coalition dedicated to putting an end to the death penalty in Utah.

Through his work with the fund, Athay has represented notable killers Pierre Dale Selby, Elroy Tillman and John Albert Taylor. All three men served time on Utah's death row — Selby for the 1974 torture and slaying of three people at Ogden's Hi Fi Shop; Tillman for the 1982 murder of Mark Schoenfeld; and Taylor for the 1989 rape and strangulation of an 11-year-old Washington Terrace girl.

Selby was executed in 1987 after Athay spent 14 years representing him on appeal. Taylor was executed by firing squad in 1996; Tillman's death sentence was vacated in January 2003.

Athay was last in the news in October for his representation of University of Utah running back Marty Johnson, who was charged with misdemeanor driving under the influence.

Lori Hacking was reported missing July 19. Her husband Mark has been considered a "person of interest" by police almost since she disappeared because of the way he deceived his family about his schooling for two years.

Both Mark and Lori Hacking's families believed Mark graduated in May from the University of Utah with a degree in psychology and was planning on moving soon to North Carolina to attend medical school. In reality, Mark dropped out of college in 2002 and never applied to medical school.

Several of Lori Hacking's co-workers told the Associated Press she had been arranging for on-campus housing at the University of North Carolina medical school and that they believe the school was returning a call to her Friday to say her husband, Mark Hacking, wasn't enrolled there.