Mark Hofmann

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Mark William Hofmann (born 7 December 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger and murderer. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history, Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement.[1] When Hofmann's schemes began to unravel, he used bombs to murder two people in Salt Lake City, Utah. As of 2008, he is serving a life sentence at the Utah State Prison in Draper.

Contents

[edit] Early life

As a sixth-generation Mormon, Hofmann was reared in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by two devoutly religious parents.[2] Hofmann was a below-average high school student, but he had many hobbies including magic, electronics, chemistry, and stamp and coin collecting.[3] According to Hofmann, while still a teenage coin collector, he forged a rare mint mark on a dime and was told by an organization for coin collectors that it was genuine.[4]

As was expected of Mormon young men, Hofmann volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary, and in 1973 the Church sent him to the England Southwest Mission, where he was based in Bristol. Hofmann boasted to his parents that he had baptized several converts; he did not tell them that he had also perused Fawn Brodie's skeptical biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. While in England Hofmann also enjoyed investigating bookshops and buying old Mormon and anti-Mormon books.[5] A former girlfriend whom Hofmann came within a few days of marrying later stated that she believed he had lost his faith long before he performed his mission and that he went to England only because of social pressure and the desire not to disappoint his parents.[6]

After Hofmann returned from his mission, he enrolled as a premed major at Utah State University. In 1979, he married Doralee Olds, and the couple eventually had four children.[7]

[edit] Forgeries

[edit] Anthon transcript

Hofmann forgery of "Reformed Egyptian" document, LDS archives. Note the columnar arrangement and the "Mexican Calender" described by Anthon.
Hofmann forgery of "Reformed Egyptian" document, LDS archives. Note the columnar arrangement and the "Mexican Calender" described by Anthon.

In 1980, Hofmann "found" a seventeenth-century King James Bible with a folded paper gummed inside. [8] The document seemed to be the transcript that Joseph Smith's scribe Martin Harris had presented to Charles Anthon, a Columbia classics professor, in 1828. According to the Mormon scripture Joseph Smith—History, the transcript and its unusual “reformed Egyptian” characters were copied by Smith from the Golden Plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon.

Hofmann constructed his version to fit Anthon's description of the document, and its "discovery" made Hofmann's reputation. Dean Jessee, an editor of Joseph Smith's papers and the best-known expert on handwriting and old documents in the Historical Department of the LDS Church, concluded that the document was a Joseph Smith holograph. The LDS Church announced the discovery of the Anthon Transcript in April and purchased it from Hofmann for more than $20,000.[9] Assuming the document to be genuine, prominent Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley predicted that the discovery promised "as good a test as we'll ever get of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon" because he thought the document might be translated.[10]

Hofmann promptly dropped out of school and went into business as a dealer in rare books. He soon fabricated other historically significant documents and became noted among LDS Church history buffs for his "discoveries" of previously unknown materials pertaining to the Latter Day Saint movement. These fooled not only members of the First Presidency—notably Gordon B. Hinckley—but also document experts and distinguished historians.[11] As Richard and Joan Ostling have written, Hofmann was by this time a "closet apostate" motivated not only by greed but also by "the desire to embarrass the church by undermining church history."[12]

[edit] Joseph Smith III Blessing

During the early 1980s, a boomlet of new Mormon documents came into the marketplace. Sometimes the Church received these as donations, and others it purchased. "The church publicized some of the acquisitions; it orchestrated public relations for some that were known to be sensitive; others it acquired secretly and suppressed."[13]

In 1981, Hofmann arrived at the headquarters of the Utah church with a document which supposedly provided evidence that Joseph Smith the Prophet had designated his son Joseph Smith III, rather than Brigham Young, as his successor.[14] Hofmann expected the church to "buy the blessing on the spot and bury it." When the church archivist balked at the price, Hofmann offered it to the Missouri Church, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which had always claimed that the line of succession had been bestowed on Joseph Smith's line but had never had written proof. A scramble to acquire the Blessing then occurred, and Hofmann, posing as a faithful Utah Mormon, presented it to his church in exchange for items worth more than $20,000.[15] Nevertheless, Hofmann engineered the situation so as to ensure that the document would be made public. The next day a New York Times headline read, "Mormon Document Raises Doubts on Succession of Church's Leaders," and the LDS Church was forced to confirm the discovery and publicly present the document to the RLDS Church.[16]

During the race by the Utah and Missouri churches to acquire the Blessing of Joseph Smith III, Hofman discovered "a lever to exercise enormous power over his church," a power to "menace and manipulate its leaders with nothing more sinister than a sheet of paper."[17] Salt Lake County District Attorney's investigator Michael George believed that after Hofmann had successfully forged the Blessing, his ultimate goal was to create the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, which he could have filled with inconsistencies and errors, sell them "to the church to be hidden away and then—as he had done often with embarrassing documents"—make "sure its contents were made public."[18]

[edit] Salamander letter

Perhaps the most notorious of Hofmann's LDS forgeries, the Salamander letter, appeared in 1984. Supposedly written by Martin Harris to William Wines Phelps, the letter presented a version of the recovery of the gold plates that contrasted markedly with the church-sanctioned version of events. Not only did the forgery make it clear that Joseph Smith had been practicing "money digging" through magical practices, but instead of an angel, "a white salamander" had appeared to Smith.[19]

After the letter had been purchased for the church and became public knowledge, Apostle Dallin Oaks asserted to Mormon educators that the words "white salamander" could be reconciled with Joseph Smith's Angel Moroni because in the 1820s, a the word salamander might also refer to a mythical being thought to be able to live in fire, and a "being that is able to live in fire is a good approximation of the description Joseph Smith gave of the Angel Moroni." [20]

In 1984, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, noted critics of the LDS church, became the first to declare the letter a forgery despite the fact that it, as well as other Hofmann's discoveries, would have strengthened the Tanners' arguments against the veracity of official Mormon history.[21]

[edit] Other Mormon forgeries

No one is certain how many forged documents Hofmann created during the early 1980s. But they included a letter from Joseph Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, describing the origin of the Book of Mormon;[22] a letter each from Martin Harris and David Whitmer, two of the Three Witnesses, each giving a personal account of their visions;[23] a contract between Smith and Egbert Bratt Grandin for the printing of the first edition of the Book of Mormon; and two pages of the original Book of Mormon manuscript taken in dictation from Joseph Smith by Oliver Cowdery.[24]

In 1983, Hofmann sold the Church, through its then defacto head Gordon B. Hinckley, an 1825 Joseph Smith holograph letter confirming that Smith had been treasure hunting and practicing black magic five years following his First Vision. Hofmann had the signature confirmed by Charles Hamilton, the contemporary "dean of American autograph dealers," sold it to the Church for $15,000 and gave his word that no one else had a copy of the letter.[25] Then Hofmann leaked its existence to the press, after which the church was virtually forced to release the letter to scholars for study, despite previously denying it had it in its possession.[26]

To make this sudden flood of important Mormon documents seem plausible, Hofmann explained that he relied on a network of tipsters, had methodically tracked down modern descendants of early Mormons, and had mined collections of nineteenth-century letters that had been saved by collectors for their postmarks rather than for their contents.[27]

[edit] Oath of a Freeman

In addition to documents from Mormon history, Hofmann also forged and sold signatures of many famous non-Mormons[28] and even a previously unknown poem in the hand of Emily Dickinson.[29] But Hofmann's grandest scheme was to forge what was perhaps the most famous missing document in American colonial history, the Oath of a Freeman. The one-page Oath had been printed in 1639, the first document to be printed in the American colonies; but only about fifty copies had been made, and none of these was extant. A genuine example was probably worth over a million dollars in 1985, and Hofmann's agents began to negotiate a sale to the Library of Congress.[30]

[edit] Murders

Despite the considerable amounts of money Hofmann had made from document sales, he was deeply in debt, in part because of his increasingly lavish lifestyle and his purchases of genuine first-edition books.[31] In an effort to clear his debts, he attempted to broker a sale of the "McLellin collection”—a supposedly extensive group of documents written by William E. M'Lellin, an early Mormon apostle who eventually broke with the LDS church. Hofmann hinted that the McLellin collection would provide specular revelations unfavorable to the LDS church. Unfortunately for Hofmann, he had no idea where the McLellin collection was, nor did he have the time to forge a suitably large group of documents.[32] Those to whom Hofmann had promised documents or repayments of debts began to hound him, and the sale of the "Oath of a Freeman" was delayed by questions about its authenticity.[33]

In a desperate effort to buy more time, Hofmann began constructing bombs. On October 15, 1985, the first killed document collector Steven Christensen, the son of a locally prominent clothier.[34] Later the same day, a second bomb killed Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen's former employer. As Hofmann had intended, police initially suspected that the bombings were related to the impending collapse of an investment business of which Kathy Sheets' husband, J. Gary Sheets, was the principal and Christensen his protégé.[35] The following day, Hofmann himself was severely injured when a bomb exploded in his car. Although police quickly focused on Hofmann as the suspect in the bombings, some of Hofmann's business associates went into hiding, fearing they might also become victims.[36]

[edit] Trial and sentencing

During the bombing investigation, police discovered evidence of the forgeries in Hofmann's basement, and they found the engraving plant where the forged plate for the Oath of a Freeman had been made. (Through inexperience, Hofmann also made two significant errors in his Oath, creating a version impossible to have been set in type.)[37]

Hofmann was arrested for murder and forgery in February 1986. In January 1987, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and theft-by-deception to avoid the death penalty, confessing his forgeries in open court. In January 1988, he was sentenced to life in prison.

In 1988, before the Utah Board of Pardons, Hofmann confessed that he thought planting the bomb that killed Kathy Sheets was "almost a game...at the time I made the bomb, my thoughts were that it didn't matter if it was Mrs. Sheets, a child, a dog...whoever" was killed. Within the hour the parole board, impressed by Hofmann's "callous disregard for human life" decided that he would indeed serve his "natural life in prison."[38]

[edit] Legacy

Although Mark Hofmann accidentally destroyed the use of his forging hand during a 1987 suicide attempt,[39] the master forger fooled a number of renowned document experts during his short career, and an unknown number of his forgeries may still be circulating in the market. But it is Hofmann's forgeries of Mormon documents that have had the greatest historical consequence. In August 1987, the sensationalist aspects of the case led Apostle Dallin Oaks to complain that church members had witnessed "some of the most intense LDS Church-bashing since the turn of the century." Student of Mormonism Jan Shipps agreed that press reports "contained an astonishing amount of innuendo associating Hofmann's plagiarism with Mormon beginnings. Myriad reports alleged secrecy and cover-up on the part of LDS general authorities, and not a few writers referred to the way in which a culture that rests on a found scripture is particularly vulnerable to the offerings of con-artists."[40]

According to the Ostlings, the Hofmann forgeries could only have been perpetrated "in connection with the curious mixture of paranoia and obsessiveness with which Mormons approach church history."[41] After Hofmann's exposure, the Church tried to correct the record, but the "public relations damage as well as the forgery losses meant the church was also a Hofmann victim."[42] Robert Lindsey has also suggested that Hofmann "stimulated a burst of historical inquiry regarding Joseph Smith's youthful enthusiasm for magic and it did not wither after his conviction" despite "even harsher barriers to scholars' access to its archives....The Mark Hofmann affair had emboldened many scholars to penetrate deeper and deeper into recesses of the Mormon past that its most conservative leaders wanted left unexplored, and it was unlikely that those in the Church Administration Building would ever be able to contain fully the fires of intellectual curiosity that Hofmann had helped fan."[43]

[edit] In popular culture

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Dealer In Mormon Fraud Called A Master Forger" from The New York Times; Mark Hofmann from Everything2; Forging a Collection from University of Delaware Library
  2. ^ Robert Lindsey, A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money Murder and Deceit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 41. That his grandmother "was the product of a polygamous Mormon union sixteen years after the 1890 church manifesto abolishing polygamy...was a secret that members of Mark's family seldom discussed."
  3. ^ Lindsey, 55. Hofmann graduated 573 in a class of 700.
  4. ^ Lindsey, 370. Hofmann decided that if experts said the coin was genuine, then it was genuine, and he was cheating no one to whom he sold it.
  5. ^ Lindsey, 56.
  6. ^ Lindsey, 243.
  7. ^ Lindsey, 58. Hofmann was "hands-on father...who pushed strollers, changed diapers, and attended local ward meetings with a baby on his arm." Worrall, 233. Dorie Olds Hoffman filed for divorce in 1987 and became co-founder of a holistic healing company. Despite her denials, there has been speculation that Olds knew more about the forgeries than she admitted. Worrall, 235.
  8. ^ Robert Lindsey, A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money Murder and Deceit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 65-66.
  9. ^ Lindsay, 68-69. Appraised by the LDS church for $25,000, it was purchased on 13 October in exchange for several artifacts the church owned in duplicate, including a $5 gold Mormon coin, Deseret banknotes, and a first edition of the Book of Mormon.
  10. ^ Lindsey, 66-69. Indeed, a gifted but eccentric academic, Barry Fell, shortly claimed to have decoded the text. (70-71).
  11. ^ "Early in the investigation friends of Mark Hofmann and Steven Christensen repeatedly told the detectives that they had been present when Hofmann and Christensen received telephone calls from Gordon Hinckley. Toll records showed Hofmann placed several calls to Hinckley's office from his car telephone during the week before the bombings....But Hinckley spoke of Hofmann as if he barely recognized his name. Repeatedly when he was asked about the document, Hinckley answered: "I can't remember." Lindsey, 267.
  12. ^ Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 253.
  13. ^ Ostling, 252-53. "Gordon B. Hinckley, the second counselor in the First Presidency, largely handled policy in these matters and directed the public relations responses of the church."
  14. ^ In a forged cover letter, purportedly written by Thomas Bullock and dated 27 January 1865, Bullock chastises Brigham Young for having all copies of the blessing destroyed. Bullock writes that although he believes Young to be the legitimate leader of the LDS church, he would keep his copy of the blessing. Such a letter, if true, would portray Young and, by extension, the LDS church in an unfavorable light. In September 1981, Hofmann gave the letter to Hinckley as a “faithful Mormon.” According to Hofmann, Hinckley filed the letter away in a safe in the First Presidency's offices. The letter was also later given to the RLDS Church.
  15. ^ Lindsey, 81.
  16. ^ Lindsey, 80-81.
  17. ^ Lindsey, 298
  18. ^ Robert Lindsey, A Gathering of Saints (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 300. "It was possible, George thought, that Hofmann could have destroyed Mormonism. Perhaps that is what he wanted to do—and to get rich at the same time."
  19. ^ Lindsey, 118-19.
  20. ^ "1985 CES Doctrine and Covenants Symposium" (August 16, 1985), 22-23) at Utah Lighthouse Ministry website.
  21. ^ Utah Lighthouse Ministry website. A visibly shaken Hofmann paid the Tanners a personal visit. "Why you of all people?" he asked. (Lindsey, 136.)
  22. ^ The Church publicized this Hofmann creation through a press conference on August 23, 1982. The forgery was a letter complete with an 1828 Palmyra, New York, postmark At the press conference, Dean Jessee asserted that a Hofmann forgery seemed authentic not only for Lucy Smith's handwriting but also for the period postmark and correct postage. Lindsey, 95-97.
  23. ^ Lindsey, 95, 97.
  24. ^ Ensign, October 1987.
  25. ^ Lindsey, 100-06.
  26. ^ Allan D. Roberts, "The Truth is the Most Important Thing: A Look at Mark W. Hofmann, the Mormon Salamander Man".
  27. ^ Lindsey, 95, 98.
  28. ^ These included George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton, Paul Revere, Myles Standish—and Button Gwinnett, whose signature was the rarest, and therefore the most valuable, of any signer of the Declaration of Independence. Lindsey, 377.
  29. ^ A book has been written about the forged poem, which was sold by Sotheby's in 1997, long after Hofmann had been committed to prison. Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer ((New York: Dutton, 2002).
  30. ^ Brian Innes, Fakes & Forgeries: The True Crime Stories of History's Greatest Deceptions (Pleasantville, New York: Reader's Digest, 2005), 132-34
  31. ^ Lindsey, 147. For instance, Hofmann paid $22,500 for a first edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to add to a collection he was building for his wife.
  32. ^ There actually were two surviving collections of McLellin papers, neither of which Hofmann knew of. One was discovered by a Salt Lake City reporter shortly after Hofmann was injured by his own bomb. The documents were interesting—McLellin described Joseph Smith "as a corrupt, even murderous dictator who seduced young girls under the guise of divine revelation"—but the documents were not as spectacularly anti-Mormon as Hofmann had implied. Robert Lindsey, A Gathering of Saints: A true Story of Money Murder and Deceit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 254-56; Introduction to the Signature Books edition of the McLellin Papers Church archives also held McLellin journals, which had been institutionally forgotten and were not revealed to exist until after Hofmann's trial. "Mormon Leaders Suppress 'Key" Item In Murder Case", from the Utah Lighthouse Ministry website
  33. ^ Lindsey, 249-54.
  34. ^ Mac Christensen was founder of the Utah-area Mr. Mac clothing stores.
  35. ^ Lindsey, 179-82. On the afternoon following the bombings, Hofmann met with LDS Apostle Dallin Oaks about the McLellin collection, a meeting which fellow document collector Brent Metcalfe believed had religious significance to Hofmann. "He's just killed two people. And what does he do? He goes down to the church office building and meets with Dallin Oaks. I can't even imagine the rush, given Hofmann's frame of reference, that this would have given him. To be standing there in front of one of God's appointed apostles, after murdering two people, and this person doesn't hear any words from God, doesn't intuit a thing. For Hofmann that must have been an absolute rush. He had pulled off the ultimate spoof against God." Simon Worrall, The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Literary Crime and the Art of Forgery (New York: Dutton, 2002), 232.
  36. ^ Lindsey, 21.
  37. ^ Innes, 134-37.
  38. ^ Lindsey, 373-74. Hofmann also told Investigator Michael George that he was bewildered by the attention paid to his murder victims: "I don't feel anything for them. My philosophy is that they're dead. They're not suffering. I think life is basically worthless. They could have died just as easily in a car accident. I don't believe in God. I don't believe in an afterlife. They don't know they're dead." (378)
  39. ^ Worrall, 248.
  40. ^ Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 107-08. See also John Brooke, Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  41. ^ Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 252.
  42. ^ Ostling, 254.
  43. ^ Lindsey, 372-73.

[edit] References

[edit] External links