Mark Hofmann
Mark William Hofmann (born December 7, 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger, and convicted murderer.
[1][2][3][4] When his schemes began to unravel, he constructed bombs to murder three people in Salt Lake City, Utah.
[a][5]: 41 [6] He was a below-average student at Olympus High School, but had many hobbies including stage magic, electronics, chemistry, and stamp and coin collecting.
Hofmann told his parents that he had baptized several converts; he did not tell them that he had also perused Fawn M. Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History.
[11] In 1980, Hofmann claimed that he had found a 17th-century King James Bible with a folded paper gummed inside.
[5]: 65–66 The document seemed to be the transcript that Smith's scribe Martin Harris had presented to Charles Anthon, a Columbia classics professor, in 1828.
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.
A scramble to acquire the document occurred, and Hofmann, posing as a faithful Mormon, presented it to his church in exchange for items worth more than $20,000.
[5]: 298 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.
[5]: 118–19 After the letter had been purchased for the church and became public knowledge, LDS Church apostle Dallin H. Oaks asserted to Mormon educators that the words "white salamander" could be reconciled with Smith's Angel Moroni because, in the 1820s, 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.
Hofmann had the signature authenticated by Charles Hamilton, the contemporary "dean of American autograph dealers", sold the letter to the church for $15,000, and gave his word that no one else had a copy.
[5]: 100–06 Hofmann then 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.
[21] 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 19th-century letters that had been saved by collectors for their postmarks rather than for their contents.
[l][22] 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.
[23]: 132–34 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.
[n] 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.
Although police quickly focused on Hofmann as the suspect in the bombings, some of his business associates went into hiding, fearing they might also become victims.
[5]: 260, 270–71, 274–75 Investigators also found that a poem used to authenticate the handwriting in the Salamander Letter had been forged by Hofmann and inserted in a Book of Common Prayer once owned by Martin Harris.
"[5]: 236 Hofmann not only faced the prospect of the death penalty in Utah but was indicted on federal charges of possession of an unregistered Uzi machine pistol.
"[9]: 514 Hofmann agreed to confess his forgeries in open court, in return for which prosecutors in Utah and New York dropped additional charges against him.
[5]: 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.
He was revived, but not before spending twelve hours lying on his right arm and blocking its circulation, thus causing muscle atrophy.
In August 1987, the sensationalist aspects of the Hofmann case led apostle Dallin H. Oaks to believe that church members had witnessed "some of the most intense LDS Church-bashing since the turn of the [20th] century.
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.
"[38][39] 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.
"[14]: 254 Robert Lindsey has also suggested that Hofmann "stimulated a burst of historical inquiry regarding Joseph Smith's youthful enthusiasm for magic [that] did not wither after his conviction".
[u] A three-part documentary series about Hofmann's illegal activities, entitled Murder Among the Mormons, premiered on Netflix on March 3, 2021.
