The Crime Resource Room

It appears that the husband of missing Utah woman Lori Hacking is now a person of extreme interest, upgraded from just "person of interest":

SALT LAKE CITY  — Bloodstains have been found all over the apartment of Mark and Lori Hacking (search), family and investigative sources told Fox News...

investigators detected a substantial amount of blood and blood drippings using the forensic chemical luminol (search), which can make traces of blood glow blue-green in the dark even if it has been cleaned up, sources say...

“We think he’s lying and we hope to prove it soon,” an investigative official told Fox News [referring to Mark Hacking].

Not surprising. My speculation is that somehow she found out about his deception over his education (or lack thereof), perhaps he even told her, and the ensuing fight escalated as he decompensated from the strain of lying for so long. To have lived a lie like that for many years would require a lot of work, not to mention the deep-seated insecurities and jealousy of his older, very successful brothers that must have given rise to his lies. I only wish that the cataclysm such revelations always cause had not washed away Lori's life.

A pregnant 27-year-old woman, Lori Hacking, is missing in Utah, and her husband is behaving bizarrely. The case is eerily reminescent of the Laci Peterson case, although the origin of the husband's behavior is markedly different.

The last person who supposedly saw Hacking alive was a woman claiming she saw Hacking stretching at a nearby park, where Hacking normally jogged each morning. Her testimony is crucial because police will focus most intensely on events following the last confirmed sighting. If the woman is incorrect, then the last sighting, save for Hacking's husband, would be the previous afternoon. It opens up the situation considerably.

And it appears the woman is backing down:

Also Friday, the only reported witness to see Lori Hacking on the morning she disappeared backtracked, telling KSL NewsRadio she no longer thinks the woman she saw stretching at a city park was the missing jogger.

My interest here is on the intersection of the media and the witness. Is this the first time she's spoken to the media? Had police asked her not to talk to media? Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unstable, especially when you're dealing with people or contexts that you are not familiar with. This woman (as far as we know) did not personally know Hacking. It's quite possible she saw someone else entirely. But it's also possible she saw Lori. If the media has extensively interviewed her, if she's been bombarded with attention, it would be normal for her to begin to waver or question herself, even to develop false "memories" about it. In this situation, both a false positive and a false negative can have a major impact on the case.

It's a good example of why we should be aware of the impact of media coverage on police investigations.

Some attorneys are charging that the US court system is shutting out the media in too many aspects of celebrity trials.

 
"The idea that you have justice and then you have celebrity justice is really offensive," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Does the public understand what preferential treatment these people are receiving from the system?"

"If they decide celebrities are entitled to a different kind of justice," Dalglish said, "we have lost press oversight of the system. Without that, we will never know if the rich and famous are getting the same justice as the rest of us."

What isn't acknowledged in the article is that many of the restrictions by judges have been placed as a direct result of media coverage in either that specific criminal situation or in others. That isn't to say they're the right direction to take, but it does show some lack of honesty and integrity on the part of the press.