A Latter-Day Forger

By Amy Wilentz

The weapons were brutal: pipe bombs set inside harmless-looking packages that exploded when moved. The first victim, Steven Christensen, 31, a Salt Lake City businessman and Mormon bishop, was killed outside his office on Oct. 15, 1985. A few hours later in a nearby suburb, a second bomb took the life of Kathleen Sheets, 50, the wife of J. Gary Sheets, a former partner of Christensen.

The next day a third pipe bomb exploded in downtown Salt Lake City. This time, however, the victim survived -- and eventually became the prime suspect in the two murders. Authorities believed Mark Hofmann, a dealer in rare documents, many on early Mormon history, had been injured while setting a bomb in his own car, possibly to direct suspicion away from himself. Last week the 15-month investigation against Hofmann came to a close when he pleaded guilty to reduced charges of second-degree murder in the bombings and to two counts of theft by deception for selling forged or nonexistent documents. The plea bargain allowed Hofmann, 32, to avoid the death penalty, but he was given a sentence of five years to life in prison, and Judge Kenneth A. Rigtrup recommended that Hofmann remain incarcerated "for the rest of your natural life."

The severity of the sentence was in part a measure of the social harm Hofmann had caused. Salt Lake City had been thrown into a panic by the seemingly random nature of the bombings, and the Mormon Church had been rocked to its foundations by Hofmann's faked documents. Hofmann's most notorious forgery had been the so-called White Salamander letter, which he sold to Christensen and Gary Sheets in 1984 for $40,000. It alleged that Church Founder Joseph Smith had been led to the Mormon scriptures not by an angel, as Smith had maintained, but by a white salamander, a familiar icon of superstitious folk magic and divining. The letter was purportedly written in 1830 by Martin Harris, an early convert to Mormonism and an associate of Smith's. The document, which fooled two experts on forgeries, was widely published despite church efforts to keep it secret, and caused consternation among the church faithful.

/ Altogether, Hofmann sold 48 documents, some of them bogus, to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. At the time of the murders, Hofmann and Christensen were negotiating for Hofmann's greatest "find": a collection of documents once purportedly owned by Dr. William McLellin, an early church apostle who later turned apostate. McLellin's papers supposedly contained embarrassing stories about Smith.

Hofmann bargained with church members to obtain the McLellin collection for the church for $185,000, and he had already received $150,000 for the documents from another investor. But he could not deliver: the "discovery" was the product of Hofmann's fertile and lucrative imagination. Christensen may have begun to suspect this; two hours before he was to inspect the documents, he was killed. Gary Sheets, according to prosecutors, was targeted for murder as a diversion.

As part of his plea bargain, Hofmann is to provide a full explanation of his scams. Perhaps the confession will untangle the web of confusion that has plagued the Mormons since Hofmann first began peddling his forgeries. The church is not likely to recover quickly from this painful and discomfiting episode.

With reporting by Mike Carter/Salt Lake City