Reviews -- Salamander: The Mormon Fogery Murders (Mark Hofmann)



	Salamander The Mormon Fogery Murders

Utah Humanities Newsletter, Kathryn Mackay
Observers have often noted that Mormons are hard working, respectable, dull people, with little of the stuff of high drama or low comedy. Bernard DeVoto once lamented that after the turn of the century truce between the Mormons and Gentiles (non-Mormons), Utah became a stolid, even stifling place of the pliant, if productive people. Lately, however, Utah has been rocked by a number of bizarre events—sacrifices of children thrown off buildings, ritualistic killing among warring polygamous groups, murders committed by children under their mother's guidance. Public officials have been wringing their hands—distraught that such events mark Utah as a place to be avoided by tourists and new businesses.

Of these events, none has been more grim than the 1985 bombings of Steven F. Christensen and Kathleen W. Sheets by Mark W. Hofmann in an effort to prevent discovery that his highly lucrative trade in Mormonia and Americana was built on forgeries. It has been all the more horrifying because these were not people on the festering fringes of Mormon culture—these were people within its center. These were people connected to the pinnacle of the pyramiding Mormon church power base. Hofmann, himself, seemed the very epitome of the "good" Mormon-ordinary, earnestly naive, complacent. But he spun a web of greed and deceit which caught up his supportive family, his eager colleagues, and his community leaders—and left them dangling, slowly turning.

Linda Sillitoe and Allen D. Roberts have done a masterful job of untangling the web for all of us to see its many strands. They have even provided planks for the dangling to rest on, as they help us come to terms with the nagging question: Why did Hofmann do it? How could he have fooled so many, so long? Has justice been done? How does one recognize evil? Sillitoe and Roberts trace out each of the many strands of Hofmann's web—his own contradictions between appearance and reality, the willingness of friends and associates to suspend their disbelief in his amazing discoveries of "long-lost" evidence regarding the church's founder Joseph Smith and his family.

The amount of material that makes up the web is staggering. The authors have worked through personal journals and appointment calendars, oral interviews, newspaper and television reports, police evidence, public documents, court records, and Hofmann's own deposition, although some non-Mormon sources such as The Salt Lake Tribune are conspicuous by their absence. The reader would be overwhelmed by the details if not for Sillitoe and Roberts' determined and clear purpose to expose and explain the "clever and defiant trickster" salamander, Hofmann himself.

There are few heroes in this story. There are few who act honestly, independently, fearlessly; few who take responsibility for their own actions, their own mistakes. Truth and justice seem ill served. Public officials cannot get on with the business of protecting the public because they are busy protecting their own turfs. The Mormon intellectual community cannot accept the reality of the fraud because they are incestuously feeding on it. And the Mormon hierarchy cannot salve its embarrassment over the exposure of its raw power by any means other than to close ranks and close even tighter the access to its records.

Hofmann's victims, Steve Christensen and Kathy Webb Sheets, are two of the few heroes—honest, good people in a world in which good people are the exceptions. These good people, who gave themselves to their families and communities, were brutally blown apart. Sillitoe and Roberts have taken time and care to portray them for us so that we may be the more outraged at their senseless deaths.

The members of the Board of Pardons are also heroes—doing what others refused or feared to do, making Hofmann accountable. The Board looked beyond Hofmann's appearance as a white, middle-class, son, husband, father, businessman and saw his reality as a ruthless, amoral con-artist who committed murders "so callous that some still doubted he committed them."

The web that Hofmann spun fascinates us because we have all been gullible, because we have all been shown up for not being as smart as we think we are. We are mesmerized by Hofmann because we are all awed by evil, especially when it is disguised as one of us.

Sillitoe and Roberts have done an excellent job of following all the trails of evidence and explaining the actions of the many people involved. It does take them more than 500 pages to do so which is a bit daunting. And there is the frustration with all journalistic approaches to such subject, especially in the fact that there are no notes by which we can trace the strands ourselves. A welcome addition to the text is George Throckmorton's description of the Hofmann forgeries and the tests done on them.

This account unravels the story of the Mormon forgery murders from the inside out. In fact, the Mormon network is exposed with an intimacy that is almost painful. But we can be grateful that the authors persisted in their efforts to throw light into the dark corners where Hofmann spun his web. This is investigative journalism at its best—compelling, provocative, and poignant.

AB Bookman's Weekly
The pipe bomb murders of Steven Christensen, a well-known but financially embattled Mormon businessman, and Kathleen Sheets, the wife of Christensen's business partner, in two separate incidents on October 15, 1985, appeared at first to be related to the troubled business.

On October 16 a third bomb exploded, badly wounding Mark Hofmann, a dealer in rare documents and manuscripts who, two years earlier, sold Christensen the White Salamander Letter for $40,000, an 1830 document signed by a close friend of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church. The letter became an immediate source of controversy—it told how a white salamander guarded the gold plates that Smith claimed he found with the help of an angel and translated into The Book of Mormon. The newly-revealed letter indicated that the salamander "transformed itself into an'old spirit,' struck Smith three times, and forbade him to take the ancient treasure," according to Sillitoe and Roberts.

Within 24 hours of the third bombing and even as he lay severely wounded in a Salt Lake City hospital, suspicion pointed to Hofmann as the bomber. Phone lines between Salt Lake City and major east coast cities were kept busy as investigators and concerned collectors sought answers to questions about Hofmann, his documents business and the motivation behind the bombings. Prominent dealers in the world of autographs and manuscripts were among those most concerned with what was being revealed in the investigations, as were well-known Mormon historians and Church leaders.

Salamander is a dramatic and spell-binding account of murder, forgery and fraud, with familiar names in the manuscripts and documents world mentioned on nearly every page. It is also a fascinating account of the persistence of George J. Throckmorton who, at the time of the bombings, was working for the Utah attorney general's office. Throckmorton and William J. Flynn of Phoenix, Arizona, developed new ink and paper tests that exposed the Hofmann forgeries. The forensic analysis included with the account of the investigation, trail and Hofmann's eventual confession is a fascinating reading, indicating what one man's persistence and questioning mind can produce.

The book is illustrated with 45 photographs of key figures in the case, photocopies of the forged documents and maps.

The Western Historical Quarterly, Patricia N. Limerick
Any number of people have remarked on the similarities between the enterprise of the historian and the enterprise of the detective. When three bombs exploded in Salt Lake City in October of 1985, the trail of evidence led toward an enigmatic dealer in historical documents, Mark Hofmann. Suddenly, historians and detectives shared a common interest; the familiar analogy between their profession became a literal and concrete one. And, at least according to this book, when it came to the following hints and reading clues, the detectives came in first, with the historians trailing behind.

In Salamander, Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts take an enormously complex story and render it—more or less—manageable. No doubt the cause of manageability would have been advanced by the addition of a list of the cast of characters to help the reader deal with the swirl of amateur history enthusiasts, professional historians, dealer in documents and rare books, officials of various law enforcement agencies, and LDS church officials, not to mention bystanders in the form of relatives and friends. Similarly, the use of recreated dialogue can be unsettling, keeping the reader in a chronic state of low level doubt, wondering how anyone could possibly know the content and style of all those conversations. While the authors have clearly mastered an enormous amount of evidence, the book does seem to have been put together in a hurry with occasional awkward phrases or uneven explications.

The story, however, is riveting. From all available evidence, and indeed from his own confession, Mark Hofmann left a trail of forged documents (including the famed "salamander letter" recording Joseph Smith's involvement with magic). He also fraudulently handled funds in a way that would be utterly beyond belief, if it were not, at the same time, real and provable. Set in the context of busy church activity, the behavior of Hofmann toward his various victims acquires a particularly chilling air. The notion of a church-going father of four working late into the night to forge documents and assemble bombs stands in stark defiance of anyone's notion of probability.

For readers with an overlapping enthusiasm for western history and for murder mysteries, this book should be irresistible on its own terms. For professional historians inclined to bring a little more perspective to their reading Salamander could be a valuable reminder of the passions and conflict that the supposedly dead and distant past can still arouse. For those inclined to think that the United States in the late twentieth century is a homogeneous unit with all regional variations averaged out, this book is a valuable corrective. And finally, the Hofmann story reacquainted historians with the precarious and fragile basis of our belief in the accuracy and authenticity of our sources. The "historian as detective" analogy can carry more serious meaning than we usually realize.

New Mexico Historical Review, Ferenc M. Szasz
The six million members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints form a distinct subculture—the Mormon historical community. These approximately three thousand people—professional historians, trained archivists, and dedicated amateurs—devote their lives to uncovering and analyzing the historical documents pertaining to the history of the church. This is no mere academic exercise. Since the Mormons have no "theology," as such, the realm of history has assumed for them a semi-theological role. Indeed, the history of the early church—from 1820 to Joseph Smith Jr.'s death in 1844—has become a virtual battleground for those who seek to "prove" or "disprove" Smith's story of visitations from angels, buried in plates of gold, and new revelations from the Lord.

Such is the background for Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts' superb narrative of the 1985 Mormon forgery murders. The book focuses on the life of a young man named Mark Hofmann. Reared in a conventional LDS home in the Salt Lake Valley, Hofmann went on a two-year mission to England at age nineteen, where he apparently lost his faith. Upon return, he attended Utah State University with medical school in mind but he was sidetracked by the study of history. Instead of pursuing a Masters or Ph.D., Hofmann became a dealer in historical documents. Soon however, he began forging many of these documents, and he was so skillful that he fooled the top national experts.

Hofmann gained his chief fame from his "discovery" of numerous documents pertaining to the early history of Mormonism. The most famous of these was an 1830 letter that spoke of a "white salamander" that guarded the golden plates and forbade Smith from taking them. This letter firmly linked Smith with the world of New England/upstate New York folk magic and directly contravened the established church position on the finding of the golden plates.

Professional church historians, such as the respected Leonard J. Arrington, were not especially dismayed by such discoveries, for they had a framework of analysis to place them into. But the non-historically trained high church officials (most of them former businessmen) were petrified. When Hofmann claimed to have unearthed a yet more damaging "McLellin collection," church leader Hugh Pinnock arranged an unsecured $185,000 loan so he could purchase it and keep it from "enemy" hands. Ironically, the pressure to repay this loan pushed the insolvent Hofmann into two murders as a means of diversion; a third bomb (most likely intended for another victim) destroyed his own car and left him severely wounded. After a plea bargain, Hofmann confessed his guilt, and he is currently serving a life sentence in a Utah prison.

Sillitoe and Roberts have written a gripping account of the most complex and tawdry event in modern Mormon history. Their analysis is evenhanded and exceptionally well written. In fact, Salamander reads like a murder mystery. Fortunately, it is one.

Grand Rapids Press, Herbert L. Carson
A poet once wrote, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." These lines apply accurately to Mark W. Hofmann.

Hofmann has been described as a "nondescript young man in his early thirties, of average height and weight, with medium brown hair and glasses." Bookish in appearance, he was convicted of brutally murdering two people to conceal his own duplicity in peddling forged documents.

Most of the forged documents dealt with the Mormon religion and the Church of Latter-day Saints.

The authors have attempted to tell their tale "accurately, fairly, and sensitively. . . " They have succeeded. Their book is a scholarly work, dispassionate but absorbing.

On Oct. 15, 1985, witnesses saw a man leave a package outside the office door of Steven F. Christensen. The man was wearing a green varsity jacket. Apparently Christensen picked up the package when he arrived at his office. A motion-sensitive device caused a bomb to explode.

A similar package was left at the house of Gary Sheets, a former employer of Christensen. Sheets' wife Kathy apparently picked up the package. She was killed by the force of the explosion.

The next day a man was seriously injured when a bomb in his car exploded. His name was Mark Hofmann.

Hofmann was associated with Steve Christensen as a dealer in rare manuscripts, especially those manuscripts related to the early history of the Mormon Church. Steven Christensen was arranging a sale of documents discovered by Hofmann.

The investigators began looking seriously at the possibility that Hofmann had been accidentally injured by one of his own bombs.

At this point, the book becomes like a police procedural novel. We get the development of information, evidence, clues and intelligent investigative theories.

Finally, a document examiner for the State Attorney General's office began noting some problems in various documents discovered and sold by Hofmann. The investigator was George Throckmorton whose forensic analyses are appended to this book.

One immediate problem of the documents was that—despite the different locations of the material, the supposedly different writers involved, and other differences—the handwriting and style of all the documents showed similar characteristics.

Other experts noted that certain documents had characteristics in common, despite their apparent differences. All were written in the same ink, one found frequently in documents from earlier times. Throckmorton had examined 688 documents using this special ink. He invariably could tell investigators which documents had been discovered and sold by Hofmann.

The authors pause in this breathtaking account to insert a fascinating biographical sketch about Hofmann. This sketch leads to the preliminary court hearing, and the incriminating testimony of many witnesses, not only about Hofmann's forgeries but also about his reasons for murder.

Mark Hofmann pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder as well as to second-degree theft and second-degree fraud.

Under Utah law, the actual sentence was to be determined by the Utah Board of Pardons. His family and friends hoped for no more than seven years in prison.

Questions were put to Mark by Victoria Palacios of the Board of Pardons. She wondered about the bomb that had accidentally killed Kathy Sheets. Mark replied, "It was a game at that point. . .At the time I made that bomb my thoughts were that it didn't matter if it was Mr. Sheets, a child, a dog."

After a recess, Palacios gave the board's decision, which noted Mark's "callous disregard for human life and that the killings were done to cover other criminal activities." Mark was sentenced to life.

The tangled web that Hofmann wove is well documented and explained in this gripping work.

Deseret News, Carma Wadley
There is something disconcerting about being in a hotel room far from Utah and turning on the local news to scenes of crime on Salt Lake streets. Somehow you know that any story big enough to make the news in Virginia or Texas is going to be around for awhile.

Little did I realize, however, as I saw reports of the Salt Lake pipe bombs from my hotel room in Reston, Va., just how involved the story would be or just how long it would be with us.

Few people did. Even those investigating the crimes. But what appeared at first glance to be the result of a financial company gone bad turned out to be much more complex, much more devious. It was one of those stories so high profile that everyone remembered where they were when the bombs went off, that everyone had an opinion as to what had happened, that everyone was talking about it for weeks and months after. And yet the story was so complex and convoluted that not even those closest to it knew everything involved.

Using a narrative approach and with meticulous detail, Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts trace the Mark Hofmann case from the bombings, through the investigation to the preliminary hearing, the plea bargain and the probation hearing, back-tracking to pull together the threads of Hofmann's background.

There are times when you have a hard time keeping track of all the players without a score card. There are times when you wonder if this isn't really more detail than you want. But it is compelling reading, and you are sucked in—both through the skill of the authors and by the power of the story. There are times when even though you already know what happens, you can hardly wait to find out how it all comes together in a broader context.

It is not a nice story. There's no question that Mark Hofmann was a skillful forger and consummate con man, able to fool not only his friends and neighbors but the nation's leading document experts as well. And it is no wonder that those friends and neighbors were confused and bewildered as events began to unfold around them.

"Salamander" answers the lingering questions of how: how Hofmann stole paper from old books and used doctored ink to create his documents, how he played his clients against each other, how he conceived and carried out his deadly bombings, and how, eventually, it all came apart.

Even more intriguing, the book addresses the question of why. Money was involved, of course, but greed seems not to have been the primary motivating factor. Sillitoe and Roberts peel back the layers to reveal a man living on two separate levels—not a split personality so much as a man whose public persona differed greatly from his private being.

All the time Hofmann was fulfilling the outward requirements of his religion—a mission, a temple marriage, an active ward life—he had no inner convictions of truth or rightness about it all. Inside, he had given up Mormonism at age 14. Outside, he continued to live as though he believed.

The subject matter of many of his forged documents addressed this dichotomy. It was his intention, he later said, to show people they believed in a fairy tale. He started out with favorable notions, then moved ever so slowly and deviously toward blatant falsehoods.

(The forensic analysis by George Throckmorton at the back of the book is a nice extra, taking a close look at some of these documents and providing insight into just how the forgeries were discovered.)

In addition to Mormon documents, Hofmann also dabbled in other areas of Americana. It was the highly publicized Oath of a Freeman, for example, that finally brought things tumbling down. When the Library of Congress did not buy the oath (not because they thought it a forgery, but because the price was too high), Hofmann's financial situation reached crisis proportions, and he turned to desperate measures.

There are some questions that the book does not answer. Just what did the nurse at the hospital overhear when Hofmann was brought in? (The courts ruled she could not be required to testify.) Just when did the defense become interested in plea bargaining. (Like many others, the attorneys seemed to be convinced of his innocence at first.) Who was the third bomb really for? (At the end, Hofmann said it was a suicide attempt, but his story changed from time to time. The authors present a credible case for the intended victim being one of the other document collectors.) There are some questions that may never be answered.

But this book probably comes as close to getting inside Hofmann's head and to putting the whole complex story together as completely as it is possible.

And in the end, you come away from the book with a deep sympathy for the victims and their families (including Hofmann's); with a great deal of respect for the investigations who pieced the complex case together, often breaking new ground in their forensic work; with admiration for the authors who have told the story so well; with nothing but contempt for the man who perpetrated the crimes; and with a satisfying feeling that in the end justice was served, that good in fact still does triumph over evil.