32 years ago this month, Mark Hofmann killed Steven Christensen & Kathy Sheets with 2 separate pipe bombs. Shannon Flynn, one of our newest permabloggers here at Wheat & Tares, described Mark’s forgeries, his prison life, and other aspects of these awful murders over my next few posts. When did Mark Hofmann begin doing forgeries? (Listen here.)
Shannon: His first coin forgery was when he was 12 years old. I believe the first time he ever uttered a forgery, in other words other than something for doing himself was when he was 14 years old. He had learned through a process of trial and error how to add mint marks to legitimate coins. He would buy a legitimate coin, maybe a penny or something that had no mint mark on it, and then was able to put a mint mark on it that would significantly increase its value. The penny was real and legitimate. The only thing that wasn’t was just that little mint mark.
Shannon goes on to describe his dealings with Mark Hofmann,
I would travel with him sometimes. Sometimes he would carry cash, so I was actually the one that would carry the cash. I went to New York with $15,000 wadded up in my pocket. It was one dealer, Schiller and Wapner who we dealt with all the time. They were very friendly with him.
While the Salamander Letter is Mark’s most well-known Mormon forgery, it wasn’t his most audacious forgery. Shannon also describes Mark’s million-dollar con: Oath of A Freeman.
It is the first known printed document in what is now the United States of America. A printing press was brought from England over to America, and it was operated by a guy named Stephen Crane. He was the first professional printing press printer in the United States. The first item that he printed was a single sheet of paper called the Oath of a Freeman….The Oath of a Freeman is very interesting because what it does is it was printed for the Massachusetts Bay Colony…. So it turns out in a strange way, it is the first seed of revolution.
It was the most expensive document of the day. (Of course it has been eclipsed now by the Printer’s Manuscript, purchased last week by the LDS Church from the Community of Christ for $35 million.) But this has to be one of the coldest things Mark told prosecutors.
“I cheat people. That’s what I do for a living. I’m good at it. I’m a good forger.”
What are your memories of the Hofmann bombings and forgeries? What are your thoughts regarding Mark Hofmann, Kathy Sheets, and Steve Christensen?
Wheat & Tares 
The general membership of the RLDS first became aware of Hoffman with his “Joseph Smith 3rd Blessing” document. The church was thrilled to now have proof of lineal succession of the presidency. The next conference ordered the document’s inclusion in the appendix of the Doctrine & Covenants. The LDS leadership had “a much cooler reaction” and we called them stubborn.
But then Hoffman’s later productions got more weird and people got suspicious. The bombings occurred just as more sophisticated forensics determined the blessing document to be a forgery. The RLDS 1st Presidency ordered its removal from the D&C.
Very interesting Markag. I didn’t know the JS3 patriarchal blessing was published in the D&C. My understanding is that very few of Hofmann’s forgeries were detected prior to the bombings, and it was only because they wanted to prove Hofmann was a forger and was the motive for murder that real forensic document examiners came in. Prior to that, historians were consulted and they don’t have the background or expense of document examinations. I interviewed George Throckmorton. He is the police officer that was trained in document examinations and discovered how Hofmann was forging documents. Unfortunately the testing required is extremely expensive, which is why few documents are examined forensically. I’ll be posting that interview in the future. But my understanding is that forensic examination occurred only after the bombings, not before.
Mark Hoffman was in my chemistry class at Utah State. Didn’t say much , didn’t show up all the time. Rather dull and unmemorable. (Nothing compared to my assigned lab partner from Bolivia who was only interested in certain reaction which I realized at some point were useful in making illicit drugs).
The Salamander letter was huge. I was in the military and recall when the radio announcers pretty much told us Mormons the game was over, the LDS church was a proven fraud. Might as well start looking for another church. (It was kind of like realizing BYU doesn’t have a top ten football team this year, except football doesn’t really matter in the same way church matters).
The bombings were shocking. Salt Lake was called little Beruit where at the time a war was going on (about like the one in Syria now). When Hoffman accidently bombed himself and it was unclear who was making the bombs and that Hoffman might be another innocent victim, many of the most outspoken critics of the church headed for the airport. The rumor was that the LDS church (“Mormon mafia”) was going to terminate many of them because they were behind the bombings and the Mormon mafia was fed up with the new honest Mormon history.
I remember the news conference when Apostles Hinckley and Oaks tried to explain and do damage control. Hugh Pinnock had been able to borrow huge sums of money to buy these documents from banks with no collateral which he (or the church?) immediately paid back. It was astonishing that the LDS church would be behind shady deals with that much money on the table to buy for documents and then hide them away. It raised questions about whether the highest leaders sincerely believed the church was true. Their integrity was called into question, far more than the usual critics who don’t believe.
I remember the plea bargain that seemed too lenient ; 1-15 years for killing a Mormon bishop and 15 -life for killing the wife of a Stake President and the evidence in her case was so dependent on the first that it seemed doubtful it could stand on its own. I expected Hoffman would only serve maybe less than 5 of the 15 year sentence, then get a retrial for the other and WALK FREE. The parole board effectively made it a life sentence. Strange Utah justice.
This is a total rumor but I heard Hoffman was cellmates with one of the Lafferty brothers. Hoffman the ultimate cynic who wanted to rewrite church history in a way that destroyed it and the Lafferty brothers who were so fanatical in their belief that they killed a sister(?) and her child because God ordered them to do it. One of them thinks he is Elijah and is patiently waiting for the prison walls to crumble so he can walk out in glory and power. I tried to imagine being a fly on the wall in their cell and listening to their conversations about Mormonism.
One of the most interesting chapters in our colorful history.
“Hugh Pinnock had been able to borrow huge sums of money to buy these documents from banks with no collateral which he (or the church?) immediately paid back. ”
You misstated that. Hugh was on the Board of Directors for First Interstate Bank and approved the unsecured loan for Hofmann, which Hofmann defaulted on, and Hugh paid back. Shannon talks about that in detail in the podcast. Please listen–it’s a pretty interesting topic. Shannon drove Hofmann to and from the bank for that loan.
“I remember the plea bargain that seemed too lenient ”
Nearly everyone involved agrees with you, except the County Attorney (Stott?) who approved it.. I interviewed George Throckmorton and Sandra Tanner; both had a big problem with Hofmann’s sentence. Those interviews will come in the future.
“This is a total rumor but I heard Hoffman was cellmates with one of the Lafferty brothers.”
Not a rumor–that’s true. Will Bagley referred to them as “the prophet and his scribe.” 😉
My brother has worked at various banks in Utah approving loans, mostly commercial but also home and personal loans. It is a highly regulated process. The Board of Directors of a bank can’t just approve a loan of that size. There has to be pages of information collected and evaluated by layers of the bank officers who specialize in it. Hugh Pinnock either went around the process or pressured those under his supervision to make a bad loan like that. Hugh Pinnock did not come up through the ranks of banking officers; he was a remarkable leader of many organizations but he was not a loan expert. About as close as he got was when he was an agent for a life insurance company but that is not banking. Read his obituary here https://www.deseretnews.com/article/804830/Obituary-Hugh-Wallace-Pinnock.html .
That loan was at best really stretching the rules. To his credit he immediately rectified the situation. But that also tells you the situation needed to be corrected ie it was not a conventional or wise loan. Otherwise they would have let it default and collected the collateral and made money. Banking properly done makes money when you pay the loan and when you don’t pay the loan. Do you think these people are stupid?
It is not stretching banking rules that was the problem. The bigger problem; why in the heck were the church leaders buying documents for that kind money? It created a niche that Hoffman filled, until he killed two people.
A humorous story that I never let my brother forget: Many years ago I got his idea that llamas would be a cool animal to raise. Not that I know anything about raising livestock. Everyone thought I was crazy including my cousins who are in the ranching business. A few years later there was a llama craze and a bubble. The cost of a llama went from a few hundred dollars (if that) to tens of thousands of dollars. Then my ranching cousins wondered how I knew llamas would become so popular. (Lucky guess). A bank officer secured a sizeable real estate loan using as collateral several acres of sagebrush and a herd of about 40 llamas that he was able to have assessed to be worth over a million dollars. By the time the loan went into default the llamas were hardly worth anything. My brother got stuck trying to sell the llamas and eventually gave them to the rancher who was boarding them since it was costing more to feed them than they were worth. The loan Hugh Pinnock secured is in a worse category than the llama deal.
*****
In the end Hoffman will never leave prison alive. Aside from the question of when if ever should capital punishment be invoked, he received about the worst sentence he could get. His life sucks and he has no hope. At least Lafferty has hope.
It warms my heart , the prophet and his scribe. The Lord really can do marvelous works with ordinary people. Can you image Joseph Smith acting like Lafferty and Martin Harris acting like Hoffman during a restoration? Now that would be a church with some serious history problems.