Mark Hofmann’s Deep Dive into Deviousness

A Dealer of Bogus Mormon Documents Just Might Be the Devil
(‘Murder Among the Mormons,’ Netflix, and ‘Postal Mortem,’ Forensic Files)

When Mark Hofmann delivered the bombs that killed two people and rattled all of Salt Lake City, he didn’t bother to disguise himself.

Instead, he wore his own green varsity jacket and rode the elevator with two strangers — who remembered him — in the Judge Building, where he placed a box outside of Steve Christensen’s office. Although Hofmann used darkness as a cover when he left a similar parcel at the home of the Sheets family, he drove his tan minivan, which a neighbor recalled seeing there.

Full-time faker. The oversights were a departure from the deviousness Hofmann had been honing since adolescence, according to the 2021 Netflix miniseries Murder Among the Mormons. (Forensic Files covered the case in 1997.)

At 14, he began altering collectible coins to make them more valuable. By his 20s, he was earning five-figure sums for documents he attributed to Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Jack London. And Hofmann, who grew up in a strict Mormon family, acquired a reputation as the “Indiana Jones” of discovering antique writings important to his church, which has its headquarters in Salt Lake City.

But nearly everything that Hoffman sold was forged or faked. He used ancient ink recipes and oxidation-hastening methods to fool authenticators. He concocted imaginative stories to surprise and alarm those faithful to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.

Foundation shaker. According to the three-part Netflix offering, Hofmann resented the restrictions of his upbringing and delighted in challenging his religion’s most sacred narrative — that in 1823, an angel named Moroni led Joseph Smith to buried golden plates that would form the basis of the Book of Mormon.

Perhaps in an effort to catch and kill, Mormon collector Steve Christensen paid $40,000 for an instrument that Hofmann called the White Salamander Letter, which said that a talking amphibian, not a winged messenger from God, led Smith to the plates. 

For the church, the story was as devastating as “Moses saying, ‘I got the 10 Commandments from the ghost of Elvis Presley,’” according to Murder Among the Mormons, which was co-produced by Joe Berlinger (Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich).

Bid to throw off cops. Hofmann went even bigger with his next phony offering, a set of diaries and papers titled the McLellin Collection. They included a claim that Smith’s brother was actually the one who discovered the gold plates.

Worried that Christensen was catching on to his deceptions, Hofmann murdered him with the exploding package. To throw off investigators, he planted the bomb that killed schoolteacher Kathy Sheets. Her husband, Gary, and Christensen operated a troubled financial company, and Hofmann hoped investigators would suspect a disgruntled investor as the culprit for both homicides.

Hofmann’s plan was working out nicely until he accidentally set off a bomb in his own sports car and police scrutiny uncovered evidence of his scams. 

Youthful laddie. With interviews of Mormon historians from the 1980s interspersed with interviews of the same people today — minus their aviator frames and fluffy hair — Murder Among the Mormons portrays the shattered innocence Hofmann inflicted with his duplicity.

The series also includes audio from the boyish-voiced earnest-sounding killer‘s full confession to police in 1987. But even then, Hofmann wasn’t done with his scheming. 

Here’s that story preceded by three other examples of his deviousness:

1. He made his wife into an inadvertent accomplice.
Hofmann planted a phony version of the Anthon Document — which contained characters that Joseph Smith transcribed from the gold plates — in a bible he gave to his wife, so she would “discover” it, thus adding heart-warming allure to the backstory he gave investors. He also turned the family home into a crime scene by keeping a locked laboratory with all the tools of his forgery trade. “He fooled me every day,” said Doralee “Dorie” Hofmann, a former teacher who gave up her career to raise her kids. Although Dorie considered her husband a good provider, it’s not clear whether she knew Hofmann spent a bundle on fancy dinners with associates and enjoyed a binge-drinking session during a business trip. — or whether or not he let Dorie drive the blue Toyota MR2 he enjoyed showboating around town.

2. He fooled the FBI and the Library of Congress
Hofmann summoned all his tricks to create a forged copy of a real document bearing the Oath of the Freeman, a pledge taken by new members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1600s. To imitate ink seepage that takes place over centuries, he used a vacuum cleaner to suck the pigment to the back side of the paper. Because of the Oath of the Freeman’s significance as the first printed document in the Colonies, the FBI and Library of Congress examined Hofmann’s copy. They declared it genuine. He planned to sell it for $1.5 million but never got a chance.

3. By the time the police gave him his first lie detector test, he was a pro
Apparently, even as a child Hofmann had an inkling he’d face off with a polygraph someday. In his teens, he began practicing methods for beating the machine. When the Salt Lake City police gave him a lie detector test in the wake of the bombings, Hofmann scored +13. (A negative score suggests deception and anything greater than zero indicates truthfulness.)

4. Just because Hofmann ultimately confessed and said he deserved incarceration didn’t mean he felt remorse
He admitted to investigators that not only did he enjoy the power trip of fooling collectors and Mormon officials but also that he felt zero sympathy for his homicide victims because dead people don’t suffer. And once in prison, Hofmann began secretly plotting the homicides of members of the pardons boards as well as George Throckmorton, the forensic document expert who figured out Hofmann’s Oath of a Freeman was a fake. Fortunately, Hofmann never carried out those murders, and the mild-mannered but unrelenting Throckmorton is alive and included in the Netflix series. (The 67-year-old Hofmann, better known today as No. 41235 at the Central Utah Correctional Facility, declined to appear.)

Along with his deviousness, Hoffman did display some humility, albeit in a back-handed way. He told an interviewer that his forgeries seemed ingenious only because document experts inflated his talents to save face for failing to put him out of business sooner.

That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR

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See Murder Among the Mormons on Netflix

Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime

P.S. If you watch the Forensic Files version of Mark Hofmann’s story on YouTube (link above), you’ll bump up against an “inappropriate or offensive to some audiences” warning — probably because the episode includes a graphic black & white photo of the murder scene.