Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (2 page)

E R A S E D

if in the end Scott was capable of the consummate act of domestic

violence. Something else was going on here, but what?

After a number of other incidences of mysteriously disappear-ing women broke into the headlines, I began to see a connection.

At first the similarities between these new stories and the Peter-son case just seemed like strange coincidences. Nineteen months

after Laci’s disappearance, Lori Hacking—another young pregnant

woman in what had appeared to be a loving relationship— went

missing in Utah. Lori’s husband, who everyone believed to be an

honest, hard-working, religious man, seemed almost to have taken

notes from Scott Peterson’s playbook in an effort to pull off a perfect

murder. Hacking had set the scene so that it appeared his wife had

gone jogging in a quiet park on the mouth of a canyon, thus putting

her well outside the home and into an area where, conceivably,

something bad but unknown could easily have happened to her.

Although Mark Hacking stuck to his very simple and straightfor-ward story, police quickly uncovered a series of lies not directly linked

to Lori’s disappearance, but which cast grave doubt on the young

man’s honesty. Mark Hacking had been leading a double life—not

the kind of stylish and seductive double life one sees so often in fic-tional portrayals of spies or sophisticated con artists, but a strangely

sad double life in which he spent all his time and effort pretending

that he was a nose-to-the-grindstone premed student when he was

nothing of the sort.

Learning the details of the Hacking case sent me back to my files

and detailed notes covering some seemingly minor facts about Scott

Peterson. In addition to the obvious lies Scott had told to cover up

his murder, and the whopper he had told his girlfriend and others

in claiming not to be married, there was an eerie parallel here. I

knew through a series of sources how Scott would ‘‘innocently’’ but

frequently introduce lies about himself whenever he had the chance to

inflate his own image. Rather than being a married fertilizer salesman

who worked for a subsidiary of a European corporation, he portrayed

himself as an international business owner and globetrotting playboy.

When he was away from anyone who actually knew him, his wealth,

accomplishments, and prowess all increased dramatically.

This tendency toward extravagantly embroidered mendacity

seemed to reflect two distinct but interrelated psychological char-acteristics. Peterson and Hacking appeared to be compulsive

liars—although they both had the ability to modulate their lies

Introduction

5

in situations where they knew they might get caught. But even

more interesting was the complex pattern of their lying, especially to

their wives—lies told, maintained, and elaborated over long periods

of time—in order to cover the fact that they were leading secret

lives.

Scott Peterson’s other, more glamorous life was that of a randy

bachelor; he was able to take advantage of a surprising number of

nights ‘‘away on business’’ to pursue his compulsive need to romance

other women. Mark Hacking’s secret life was far less exciting. His

studious fac¸ade masked a kind of aimless slacking, like that of a boy

who didn’t want to grow up.

Then one day when I was researching the legal issue at the

very center of the Peterson case—whether murder can be proved

by purely circumstantial evidence—I stumbled unexpectedly on

details of another case that led me to believe that some of the key

psychological factors being exhibited by these unusual killers were

more than a coincidence and might, in fact, provide essential clues to

the real motivation and makeup of these men.

That third case involved an urbane lothario named L. Ewing

Scott, who killed his wife more than fifty years ago. Although no

trace of Evelyn Scott was ever found, her husband was found guilty of

killing her— the first time in U.S. history that someone was convicted

of murder without a corpse or without any physical proof of death

whatsoever. The case established clear legal precedent— not only that

murder can be proven without a body but also that circumstantial

evidence can be given just as much weight as eyewitness testimony or

other forms of evidence.

However, for reasons that will be explored in this book, bodiless

murder convictions remain relatively rare. The odds of getting away

with murder by erasing the victim are astonishingly good a full

half-century after the L. Ewing Scott decision.

As I looked into more and more of these ‘‘missing wife’’ cases, it

became clear to me that ‘‘getting away with murder’’ was an essential

force, but not the only force, driving these killers. One might assume

that every killer, every criminal of any sort, wants to get away with his

crime. But most domestic homicides are not planned, not carefully

calculated and covered up. In fact, most intimate partner killers make

no attempt to hide their identity.

Then a case broke into the news that seemed like a variation

on this type of hidden domestic homicide, involving an even more

6

E R A S E D

audacious ruse than a faked missing person scenario. Dr. Barton

Corbin, a successful dentist who lived in a suburb of Atlanta, was

indicted in December 2004 for the death of his one-time girlfriend

fourteen years earlier, and two weeks later he was indicted for the

murder of his current wife.

Both women had been found dead under nearly identical circum-stances: looking as though they had committed suicide, a gun by their

side, their bodies both in very similar postures. Although friends of

the first dead woman were highly suspicious of the coroner’s finding

of suicide, Corbin had not been charged with anything and had

simply gone on to build a flourishing dental practice and find a new

woman to love him . . . until he was through with her, too. Although

Corbin used a different strategy to rid himself of a partner for whom

he no longer had any use, he seemed a close cousin to the Scott

Peterson type of killer. Corbin’s crimes were just as carefully planned

and premeditated as Peterson’s, but instead of disappearing his

victims and leaving what happened to them an open-ended mystery,

he created a staged crime scene to account for each woman’s death

in a way that seemed to clear him of any involvement—in fact, made

the victims appear not to have been murdered at all. And he did such

a convincing job of it that he only tipped his hand when he had the

temerity to try it a second time.

Both Peterson and Corbin were confident, intelligent, educated

men who appeared to be unblinking in the face of enormous pressure

from the police, the media, and the families of their loved ones. In

both cases there was almost no physical evidence linking the killer

to the crime. In fact, both men had gone to an unusual amount of

effort to eliminate any sign that their victims had struggled for their

lives, to time their crimes such that there would not be eyewitnesses,

and to erase forensic evidence that might betray their actions. And

both men concocted scenarios that, if believed, would leave them

in the clear. Whereas Scott Peterson made his wife’s pregnant body

disappear, Barton Corbin left his wife’s dead body in plain view but

made his own actions and involvement ‘‘disappear.’’

Yet unlike Scott Peterson, Corbin gave no media interviews,

refused to speak even to police, and, to use cop terminology,

‘‘lawyered up’’ within hours of his wife’s death, even though he

was maintaining that it was just a tragic suicide. I suspected at the

time that Corbin— who committed his second murder in the waning

days of the Peterson trial— was learning from the Peterson case and

Introduction

7

was trying to avoid the mistakes that Scott had made by not saying

anything that could possibly be used against him.

In her book on the Corbin case,
Too Late to Say Goodbye
, crime

writer Ann Rule confirmed the fact that Corbin had followed the

Peterson trial avidly. His sister-in-law remembered Barton remarking

one day that Peterson got caught ‘‘because he couldn’t keep his mouth

shut.’’

Around this same time, a thirty-seven-year-old Alabama man

named Thomas Lane broke into the home where his estranged wife

was staying and drowned her while she was taking a bath, holding

her down under the water with his foot until she stopped breathing.

He then took some money and jewelry to make it appear that his wife

had been killed when surprised by a burglar.

Lane murdered his wife of eight years, Teresa, a ‘‘mail-order bride’’

from the Philippines, not because she was attempting to leave him.

It was Thomas who wanted out of the marriage, telling friends and

neighbors even before he killed Teresa that he was planning to replace

her with a younger model he had already ‘‘bought and paid for.’’ He

even showed them pictures of his new bride-to-be, a woman he met

on the Internet, bragging that she was just thirteen or fourteen years

old.

Like Scott Peterson and so many of the other killers I was beginning

to research, Lane seemed to have no emotional attachment to his wife

whatsoever. In his mind, she was nothing more than a commodity

he had purchased, and he had the right to an upgrade whenever he

saw fit. Tragically, he believed that once she was of no further use to

him, she had no right to go on living.

At trial his father revealed how Lane was directly inspired by

Peterson, whom he saw as offering a solution to his own marital

woes.

‘‘If I could do what Peterson did and get away with it, I’d kill her,’’

Thomas Lane told his father three weeks before the murder.

It was chilling to see that the killers themselves were making the

connection between these crimes, regardless of the specific modus

operandi employed. Whether they chose to disappear the victim

or the crime itself by staging the death as a suicide or some other

event, it was clear that these were simply two sides of the same coin.

The meticulous planning and supreme self-control exhibited both

before and after the crimes I was investigating and beginning to link

together seemed to be a significant aspect of these men’s characters,

8

E R A S E D

far beyond the murderous aspect of their personalities. The expertise

at lying and manipulation that is needed to successfully lead a double

life is indicative of a high degree of Machiavellian thinking and

behavior. Whereas political scientists and others sometimes use the

term
Machiavellian
, psychologists have developed a formal category

and accompanying tests and measures for people whose psychological

makeup ranks high in such traits.

Other malignant personality characteristics seemed to be involved

as well, from cold-blooded psychopathic tendencies to extreme

degrees of narcissism. But there was something else curious about

these men’s characters. Erasing their victims appeared to be not

just a means to an end but an end in itself. Once they made the

decision to kill, they began purging all traces of the victim’s existence

in their lives. Many began getting rid of the woman’s possessions

within days of her disappearance, pulling up stakes, changing their

lifestyles dramatically. Some immediately replaced their missing

wives or girlfriends with other women—sometimes with look-alikes

for the disappeared. And, most shockingly, some later attempted

to get away with murder again, erasing another wife or girlfriend,

sometimes, as in Corbin’s case, in exactly the same manner as their

first crime.

Many put an extraordinary amount of thought into their crimes,

researching methods of killing and means of body disposal, and

boning up on investigatory and forensic techniques. They also seemed

to look to and learn from each other as models, noting what worked

for other killers and what pitfalls to avoid.

For example, I believe that Scott Peterson based his plan on a

number of highly publicized prior disappearances, most notably of

several coeds during his college years in San Luis Obispo. One of

these young women, Kristin Smart, remains missing more than a

decade later. Even though police believe they know who killed her,

no one has ever been charged.

The Smart case is an almost textbook example of how easy it can

be to get away with murder. I believe Scott learned from this case how

oversights and inaction in the crucial first days of a disappearance may

prevent a killer from ever being charged, much less convicted. I think

he relied on assumptions about police investigation that he drew from

this case in conceiving his own murder plan— for example, choosing

to carry out the crime and report his wife missing on Christmas Eve.

He assumed, wrongly, that no experienced detectives would even