The impact of the Mark W. Hofmann murder and forgery cases will be felt in the LDS community for years to come. This is obviously true in the lives of the families he so brutally affected with his pipe bombs; it is not any less true in the lives of his own family whose love and support he betrayed so callously. But it is also true in the larger Mormon community where the shock of murder and the widespread deceit through forgeries seemingly touched the very core of Mormon history and tradition.
While it is early to fully assess the damage to either the public or the scholarly community, what follows is an attempt to provide readers of BYU Studies with a reasonably comprehensive guide to the literature and basic facts of the Hofmann case. First, we present a review essay on the three book-length studies of the Hofmann saga; next, a detailed chronology of the Hofmann case as a guide through the complexities of the various episodes and events; finally, a bibliography designed to lead readers to other source materials in addition to providing a guide to the main known Hofmann forgeries. While Hofmann’s forgery activities went far beyond Mormon manuscripts, the focus here is almost entirely on the Mormon-related materials.
For those seeking a guide to the labyrinth that is Mark Hofmann, there are now three volumes that promise a map of his complex life and crimes as well as to the society in which these occurred. Each offers the reader a detailed reconstruction of the stories of forgeries and murders and the subsequent investigation that became such a controversial topic of discussion after the first bombs exploded in Salt Lake City on 15 October 1985. All three volumes offer new and useful bits of information about the Hofmann case, but the discerning reader will sense that some of the maps are less reliable than others, and in some cases the cartography is simply not to be trusted. None of these volumes provides the reader with source citations, and all of them suffer from the problems inherent in writing contemporary history.
The first published study, Salamander, appeared in April 1988. Both Sillitoe and Roberts are familiar with the culture out of which Hofmann came, and they use this knowledge to good advantage in their detailed reconstruction of the Hofmann case. Bits and pieces of this work had surfaced before the volume appeared as the authors had given talks and published essays in such places as Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Utah Holiday. But for those who have followed these presentations, there are still surprises in this volume. The authors have chosen a biographical approach, focusing on key individuals and their families. By using this approach, the authors broaden the context and humanize the impact of Hofmann’s activities. The volume itself is divided into three parts with a technical “appendix” on some of the key forgeries by forensic specialist George Throckmorton at the end. The first part, chapters 1 through 6, details the critical events from the initial bombings to the attempts to unravel the crimes by the various individuals and agencies assigned to the case. The second section, chapters 7 through 14, takes the reader back in time into the lives of the key players as they entered and became part of the life and activities of Mark Hofmann. The third section, chapters 15 through 19, treats the preliminary hearing, the plea bargain, and the interviews with Hofmann after his imprisonment, and concludes with the parole hearing in January 1988.
The authors have structured the story like an historical novel. It generally reads well, flowing somewhat smoothly through a complex series of crimes and their partial solution. The reader is allowed to feel the fears and concerns of the people who were touched either directly or indirectly by the events discussed. One of the strengths of the book is that it never gets bogged down in the technical aspects of these crimes, for throughout the work we see and experience the human drama and pathos that this case created in Mormon country. But a close reading of the volume does reveal that two authors are at work; there are places where the prose is crisp and clear, and others where the details seem to impede the flow of the presentation.
Sillitoe and Roberts provide important information on the early life of Mark Hofmann, detail that is absent from the other two volumes. They tell of the early patterns of dishonesty and possible sociopathology (the authors argue against the report of the state-appointed psychologist on this issue). They probe Hofmann’s high school, college, and mission years to provide insight into his later criminal activities. We are introduced to a man who was fascinated with fire and explosives from a very young age; who was cheating and deceiving people during these same years; who had a cruel side to his personality, manifested by his treatment of both animals and people; and who learned very young to live two lives, one respectable and one amoral. The authors suggest at the end of the book that Hofmann was contemplating murder to obtain what he wanted (in this case a coin collection) as early as 1977.
Another strength of the Sillitoe-Roberts study is the human portraits of the two bombing victims, Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets. We feel the loss of these people even more because we are made aware of their human connections with families and friends. Their portraits are not cardboard ones, but the reader is invited into each of their lives to see a variety of activities and attitudes, and even their human frailties are discussed with sensitivity and tact.
Particularly valuable are the insights Sillitoe and Roberts give to the teams of investigators assigned to the case. Their professionalism as well as the office politics are discussed along with other aspects of the Hofmann case. Occasionally the reader might rightly wonder just how the authors learned what the judge who presided over the preliminary hearing was thinking as he heard evidence presented; or further, how they managed to learn just what the conversation was between prosecutor Stott and defense attorney Yengich as they drove around town together on the eve of the plea bargaining. Clearly they gleaned information from the individuals themselves, but we must seriously ask if the various actors are to be trusted fully when, as this volume clearly shows, their public reputations were at stake from the beginning of the case. Indeed we should be especially suspicious, since there has been no end of scapegoating among those who have held the public stage for this matter.
This study also manages to recreate the world of document dealers and the money men behind the big deals, as well as the historical community that was ultimately trying to make sense of the new “finds” and relate them to what was already known about Mormon origins. It was within this matrix that Hofmann managed to play his most dangerous games, and Sillitoe and Roberts have brought to their study a good knowledge of the inner workings of this world.
The critical reader will be disappointed by the lack of source citations. While the authors claim in the Preface that their research was extensive, we are simply asked to trust the accuracy of that research. But with a case this important, centering as it does on an individual who refused to provide his sources, this is asking a good deal. In addition to the lack of documentation, two of the major actors in the story, and hence major sources of information for the authors, are given false identities; one of them is even absent from the index. “Kate Reid,” Hofmann’s first fiancée (see 116, 217–24, 226–28, 231–32, 234, 244–45, 337–39), and “Gene Taylor,” the financier for many of Hofmann’s Americana documents (see 305–11, 336–37, 339–40, 346, 423), are both important sources of information about Hofmann’s character and activities. “Kate,” no doubt still carrying deep scars, is a particularly crucial source for the early Hofmann; and “Gene” (identified by Robert Lindsey as Kenneth Woolley, a cousin of Dori Hofmann) should know something of the whereabouts of some of Hofmann’s documents, most of which are still unidentified and presumably still on the open market. Hofmann admitted in January 1988 that he had forged “hundreds of items with at least 86 different signatures.” Even allowing for the hyperbole of the con artist, it would appear that many items are still not known and presumably are in public and private collections throughout the country. While Sillitoe and Roberts undoubtedly made promises of anonymity and argue that these individuals’ identities are not essential to the story, they are a central part of the still unfolding drama.
There remain unanswered questions, some of which the authors themselves acknowledge. For example, they argue that the public is still not fully informed as to the level of LDS church involvement with Hofmann. They even imply that President Gordon B. Hinckley did not tell the full truth to investigators regarding either the records he allegedly kept detailing his dealings with Hofmann, or his personal relationship with Steven Christensen. They also suggest that it has never been made clear just what promises were made to Steve Christensen by Elder Hugh Pinnock regarding future document acquisitions by the Church. In all of this, Sillitoe and Roberts suggest that the omnipresence of the Church was an important factor in the minds of both the investigators and the prosecutors of the case. But given the demography and history of Utah, it is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise.
There are other problems with this study, some of which relate to either unanswered or unasked questions by the authors themselves. For example, by centering their study on the life and motivations of Mark Hofmann, they ignore the actual or potential involvement of others. Hofmann’s network of “friends” surely must bear some of the responsibility for his activities. Those who fronted for his document deals, those who fed him his history, and those who helped create the paper trails for his “finds” were accomplices. One wonders why certain individuals are dismissed from this study when they had been critical partners in a number of manuscript and rare book deals. And we must seriously wonder how Hofmann could forge documents of such quality without some help.
Sillitoe and Roberts never really address the public scenario of the Hofmann case. They do not discuss the implications of how the public press used this case to punish the LDS church time and time again. Is it any wonder that some of the Church leaders became reticent after a while when the media seemed to always present the worst interpretation of events to the public? In many respects the authors end up writing more as newspaper reporters than historians. Why, for example, should we trust the letter Hofmann was supposed to have written to his mother (but never sent)? (Lindsey suggests it was not a letter but a student paper.) How do we know for sure when or why it was created? Given Hofmann’s apparent inability to tell the truth, how can we trust this item? And since he clearly lied about his access to items in the private vault of the First Presidency and about the existence of an Oliver Cowdery history, why should we take seriously his claims of intimate association with President Hinckley? We are asked to take a lot of information on the authors’ word but are given no way to judge either the accuracy of their work or the thoroughness of their methodology.
The second volume, The Mormon Murders, was released in August 1988. Of the three volumes here under consideration, it is clearly the most disappointing. The narrative follows a chronological format, but even a superficial reading reveals it to be more of a novel than a serious work of history. In reading it I was reminded of Peter Bart’s Thy Kingdom Come (1981), a novel that applied almost all of the anti-Semitic stereotypes to the Mormons. Bart presented a portrait of the Church that transformed a supposed Jewish banking conspiracy as presented in the forged nineteenth-century Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the operations of the LDS church hierarchy in Salt Lake City. The Protocols were used by Hitler and others to rationalize much of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. Bart presented a picture of the Mormon church as concerned only with money and power, with nothing else really mattering. In his novel, truth was a convenient commodity treasured more by the publisher of an anti-Mormon newsletter than by the leaders of the Church. Image, power, and money dictated Church policy in Bart’s novel, but that was a work of fiction. Naifeh and Smith’s book, which assumes the same perspective, claims to be a “true story.”
The Mormon Murders is an attack on the Church in the guise of a serious study of the Hofmann case, but its authors are grossly uninformed about the Mormon church and its history. They call the Church “a giant conglomerate” freed by its religious status from reporting and paying taxes. Its great wealth (they are not sure if it is fifteen or fifty billion dollars!) assures members of its truthfulness. Its leaders lie and deceive regularly because lying for the Lord is all right. And since the Church is continuing to grow in wealth (all that really matters), in a few hundred years the “Church wouldn’t need to convert the world, it would own the world” (22, italics in original). Armed with this perspective, the authors then weave their story of the Hofmann case around it. The money, power, and image of the Mormon church are used to explain just about every angle of the case. And, like the Protocols, this volume leaves the reader with a sense that the leviathan of Mormonism is even stronger after the story is told. It is a book that anti-Mormons will like. But if people care about the truth and have a sense of the real meaning of the impact of the Nuremberg trials and their implications for the illegalities of religious persecution, it is not likely The Mormon Murders will be necessary reading.
Naifeh and Smith manage to work into their narrative most of the traditional anti-Mormon themes, including the legend of the Danites, the Kirtland Bank problems, polygamy, and, of course, even an account of the LDS temple ceremony. To so insensitively include such a sacred part of Mormon group life, a dimension that has no relationship to the Hofmann murder and forgery cases, can only be understood as further paralleling anti-Semitic literature, which sought to demonstrate the ties Jews supposedly had to the rites of Free Masonry. However, the authors’ knowledge of LDS history is so woefully inadequate, and their understanding of even basic Mormon beliefs and practices so absurdly inaccurate, that it is hard to see how anyone could take their work seriously. Their exaggerations are even comic, as when, for example they describe Mormon missionaries as “a pack of young lions tracking a herd” and preying “on the old, the sick, and the lame” (67). Their demeaning descriptions of Church leaders are caricatures rather than true-life portraits. President Hinckley is presented as the quintessential “bureaucrat,” who is “notoriously shrewd about people” (113). His office is compared to a funeral parlor (306) and Mormon culture is described as a “vast landscape of mashed potatoes” (109, compare 67). They portray most Church leaders as “businessmen at heart” and suggest that “any talk of religion made them uncomfortable” (118). The absurd comedy grows as they describe a certain leader as “clawing his way up through the dense, sanctimonious jungle of the Church hierarchy” (119), and reaches a peak in their portrayal of a plot by members of the First Quorum of the Seventy to oust President Hinckley! (305–6). It would seem that the authors have spent too much time reading Machiavelli’s The Prince and apparently none reading the Doctrine and Covenants.
As we would expect, Naifeh and Smith see conspiracies everywhere, and like Peter Bart they are sure the Mormon church is behind all of them. Jerald Tanner (clearly a key source for the authors), like Hiram Cobb of Bart’s novel, is the real hero—he seeks and sees the truth, but the Church just wants to suppress it. As we might further expect, Naifeh and Smith fail to see any contradiction in their presenting Hofmann as a thoroughgoing liar except when he is telling his tales about his relationship to President Hinckley and the Church.
If Mormon Murders has any merit, it is the focus it gives to the case by seeing the whole affair through the eyes of Jim Bell and Ken Farnsworth, the investigators for the Salt Lake police department. Much of the detail regarding the case no doubt came from these two individuals, as well as from Gerry D’Elia, and their perspective is of value, even if they tend toward cynicism. Thus this volume does provide some insight into the inner workings of the police investigation, including the interdepartmental fighting, the hard work the case required, the strain on the lives of those men assigned to the case, and their perceptions of the society they worked in. Even the theories of the police psychologist would seem to have some merit for understanding Hofmann; where Salamander places more emphasis on Mark Hofmann’s relationship to his mother, The Mormon Murders gives more attention to his father and the possible transference of the problems of this relationship onto the Mormon church as a father-figure. There are insights in this volume, but the overt anti-Mormon bias of the authors, combined with their arrogance and stupidity, not to mention the crudity and coarseness of their language, must be seen as seriously distorting their perspective and judgment. One can’t help wondering if the authors cut class at Harvard Law School during the semester when the course on evidence was taught.
The third volume, Robert Lindsey’s A Gathering of Saints, appeared in September 1988. In many ways it is the best of the three books. As a story, it reads better than the others, and on balance it presents a more complete account of all the aspects of the case. Lacking the vituperative approach of The Mormon Murders, it moves deftly through the story with insight and compassion. And it is well organized. By providing several introductory chapters that survey early Mormon history, Lindsey responsibly prepares his readers to better understand the historical import of Hofmann’s “discoveries.” Thereafter the story proceeds chronologically. In general, this volume is much more evenhanded than the others in dealing with the role of the LDS church in the Hofmann story. Lindsey suggests in one place that the issues of separation of church and state could be one explanation for the hesitancy of Church leaders to readily turn over its files or the manuscripts in its possession to state investigators.
A key source for Lindsey was Michael George (see 283), an investigator for the Salt Lake County Attorney’s office. George was clearly the source for the interesting final interview with Hofmann presented at the end of the volume.
Of course there are problems: Lindsey just repeats the old, inaccurate stories of the Danites (see, for example, 204, 249–50), and no serious Mormon historian would agree with his claim that Jerald Tanner (following Fawn Brodie) gave birth to the “new Mormon history” (128). But these flaws can probably be ascribed to his status as an outsider to Mormon country and culture.
Lindsey’s volume has more detail on the documents Hofmann “found” and sold than do the other two books. Particularly valuable is his discussion of the “Oath of a Freeman,” in which he gives the full story of the one potential sale that might have solved Hofmann’s financial problems. Lindsey reprints the letters from the Library of Congress and from the American Antiquarian Society that reveal the behind-the-scenes developments. The other volumes do not present this dimension of the case as fully. Lindsey also peppers his study with ample quotes from the diaries and journals of many of the key participants in these events, material that is either summarized, hinted at, or entirely ignored in the other volumes. By using these primary sources he gives the reader a fuller picture of the thoughts and feelings of the main actors, even though we are never told where we can examine these documents.
Lindsey’s story is well told and presents realistic portraits of the key participants. Where Robert Stott, the chief prosecutor, is presented in very negative terms by Naifeh and Smith, Lindsey gives a more believable view of a man who tried to be very thorough and very cautious. Stott surely was not the political country bumpkin that comes across in The Mormon Murders. The same applies to Naifeh and Smith’s caricature of Brent Ward.
One thing that all of these volumes lack is a sense of historical perspective on forgery. Forgery is an ancient business, whether we talk about the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, the Donation of Constantine, the 1929 forgeries of Lincoln letters, the Horn diaries and papers of the 1940s and 1950s, the recent Hitler diary forgeries, or the numerous art forgeries that are periodically brought to our attention by the news media.1 Even in Mormon history, Hofmann is not the first forger. Consider the clear evidence that the Oliver Cowdery pamphlet Defense in a Rehersal of My Grounds for Separating Myself from the Latter Day Saints, allegedly printed in Ohio in 1839, and even considered authentic by B. H. Roberts, is in fact a forgery.2 Then too, some Mormons continue to use the fraudulent Archko Volume in their New Testament studies.3 And recent discoveries in the Texas rare book and manuscript market surely ought to help us place Hofmann’s activities in a broader context.4
Another problem stems from these volumes’ way of treating contemporary history. In telling their stories, these authors would have us believe they were in the Office of the First Presidency when Hofmann met with President Hinckley; or in the back seat of the car when Yengich and Stott drove around Salt Lake City initially discussing a possible plea bargain. Of course we know this was not the case, but by adopting a “you were there” writing style, the authors betray their work as journalism, not history. Can we really believe that all the players in the Hofmann drama spoke in publishable dialogue, as if every sentence were accompanied by quotation marks?5 Mormon Murders shows this tendency at its worst. Not only are dialogues invented out of whole cloth, but the authors also manage to climb into the minds of key players so they can tell us what each person was feeling and thinking. This fantasyland approach to reconstructing historical events eliminates all serious methodological roadblocks; the narrative can go wherever the authors wish because truth and evidence are never allowed to get in the way of a good story. And since no source citations are given, the reader has no way to check up on the sources the authors used. One suspects, in fact, at least for the Naifeh and Smith volume, that sources were not identified precisely because their fictions would be found out.
Most people, as these three volumes show, get their history, not from scholarly journals or monographs, but from journalists who control the public media. As Neil Postman has pointed out in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the very nature of modern news media has created the idea of context-free information, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve, but merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. But more than that, modern journalism is characterized by its capacity to move information, but not to collect it, explain it, or analyze it. “Knowing the facts” in the media has come to mean knowing of things, not knowing about them. Hence the stress on images, stereotypes, and headlines, on the sensational and on the push for quick answers and conclusions without study or evaluation. The bottom line is entertainment and marketing, not education; what results is triviality, not understanding.6 Without a doubt, a show-business atmosphere permeated most of the newspaper and television coverage of the Hofmann case, and this approach has helped to decontextualize and sensationalize the whole case. None of these books escapes this tendency, although Mormon Murders is again the most outrageous example.
Like Sampson Avard and John C. Bennett in early Mormon history, the “salamander” and Mark Hofmann are now permanently fixed in the experience and memory of the Latter-day Saints. Like these earlier individuals, Hofmann betrayed the fundamental values of the community he claimed membership in. But unlike the earlier defectors from the Church, who left little record of their lives, with Mark Hofmann we have a better opportunity to understand the whys and hows of his defection. At least these new books invite us to look deeper into the context of Hofmann’s activities, and provide an occasion for self-examination for those of us who hold to the values he rejected so violently.
Several elements of Mormon culture seem to have contributed to the direction Hofmann took. His domestic life was not able to deal fully and openly with its own history, which was, in turn, intermeshed with Mormon institutional history. The polygamous marriage of his maternal grandparents after the Manifesto (Mark’s mother was born in 1929 of this relationship) was treated as a deep family secret, and Mark’s questions about it only pushed the answers further into darkness. Some of his earliest research endeavors into Church history were attempts to find out the truth about his own family. And what Mark saw as institutional disingenuousness—allowing plural marriages but publicly denying them—was reinforced at home. In his experience, people just were not able to deal honestly with their past, and they covered this fear with an authoritarian silence. This alone made people and institutions potential victims of his schemes, and his documents could only make their worst nightmares come true.
The Hofmann case also reveals another example of white-collar crime. As the authors of these volumes show, greed was a common denominator of many of the people who got involved with Hofmann: financial greed, political greed, historical greed. “To get gain” was one of the key motives of the actors in this case. Such “getting” has in recent decades created an active “underground” dealing with Mormon documents. One even suspects that this need to know, this lust for knowledge in the Mormon community, was the one card defense attorney Yengich had to play as his client’s guilt became more apparent. We must particularly wonder about the greed of collectors, some of whom essentially “ordered” manuscripts from Hofmann in their inordinate desire to possess a specific item. This quest for knowledge that is thought to give a certain power, and the lust for possession of the manuscripts that supposedly convey this knowledge, is another basis for the flim-flam that occasionally surfaces in our culture. We find ourselves “trafficking” in our heritage, reducing everything to a dollar price that invites crime into historical study, and error into our research.
In retrospect it is clear that our tools failed us in this instance. There is no doubt that some of the best minds in America were involved in authenticating the main Hofmann documents; thus historical responsibility was exercised. But what happens when the FBI labs, the experts at the Library of Congress, and some of the best documents people in the country are fooled? It is important to remember that traditional historical education does not include the kinds of technical training required for detecting forgeries. Yet in this case, with so many people with specialized training and experience involved, it appears that current levels of expertise are inadequate. Then too, the techniques used to detect some of the Hofmann forgeries still have not been tested as to their admissibility into a court of law.
In some ways, our culture’s very success helped create Hofmann. Consider our technical knowledge of inks, paper, writing, and printing, which is available in dozens of books and articles, not to mention vast libraries containing histories on all topics. These extensive resources were clearly used by Hofmann. Using equally available information, one could construct a pipe bomb or even (given access to the materials) an atomic bomb. Perhaps this is one price we pay for living in an open society.
The context of Hofmann’s activities must be examined more carefully than it is in any of these volumes if we are to fully understand why mistakes were made. Such an examination must take account of the history of Mormon historical scholarship for at least the last thirty years. For example, it is clear that for a number of years there have been tensions within the Mormon community between the two perspectives Owen Chadwick identifies in his perceptive study of the opening of the Vatican Archives:
(1) The Ecclesiastical Statesman, who holds, “We have enemies in the world. Bad things happened in the past. If we open our archives, we let in not only neutrals who want to understand, or friends who have that sympathy which enables men to understand better, but antagonists seeking to stir up dirt. Such hostile enquiry, especially if misused, hurts the institution; and in hurting the institution, hurts the world which the institution serves.”
(2) The Scholar/Historian, who argues, “The Church is committed to truth. The opening of archives is a necessary part of the quest for truth in an age of historical enquiry. Truth is an absolute good. No plea of political welfare can override the commitment. The Church wants to know what really happened. For the sake of that quest it must run the risk that fanatics misuse its documents. Misuse is of the moment, truth becomes a possession.”7
Both positions have truth and value, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they do help to clarify real positions. The volumes on Hofmann deal in various ways with the scholar-statesman tensions in Mormon culture. Each book deals with this differently, but it seems clear now that Hofmann got away with some of his activities because he took advantage of the tensions that had developed during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Hofmann might have appeared in any case, but a more open policy of access to archives would have made his impact less traumatic. As early as his own LDS mission, Hofmann had concluded, through a study of Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, that Joseph was the ultimate con man who forged his revelation and then pretended sincerity. In a perverse way, Hofmann was able in his own mind to twist the life of Joseph Smith into a model for his own activities. For example, after a missionary companion (according to Sillitoe and Roberts) called him to account for his theft of an anti-Mormon work from a library in England, Hofmann justified his actions (paraphrasing Nephi) by saying, “It is better that I steal this work than even one person lose his testimony by reading it.” The irony, not to mention the dishonesty, was that Hofmann had already concluded that the Church was not true!
It was Hannah Arendt who said that one of the purposes of the past is to haunt us. Even without Hofmann, we would seem to have enough history lurking in the underbrush to plague us as a people who care so much about truth, but who, at times, care so little about history. Thus it is possible for another Hofmann to appear in our culture, for as long as there are perceived secrets and we tend to distrust each other, someone will emerge to prey upon our worst fears and needs. We care about the work of people like Hofmann because our history matters to us. We anchor our faith in the concrete experiences of times past, both personally and collectively. It is a measure of that faith that we must assess our mistakes while we continue the study of our history even more intensively.
