Bombings Expose Tangled Web of High-Stakes Dealing : Mormon Chronicles: Mosaic of Mystery

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in a monumental pillar of concrete and steel. The 28-story structure dominates the downtown skyline and serves plain notice that this is the absolute center of the Mormon world, the promised land foretold by their prophet Joseph Smith.

The building’s top floors afford spectacular views of the city below, where seven out of 10 of the 500,000 inhabitants are Mormon. Those who occupy offices on the upper floors can gaze down on everything, even the Mormon Temple itself.

Last week, a church functionary stood at his window on the 25th floor and pointed down to a section of blackened curb-side one block north of Temple Square. At that spot, on the afternoon of Oct. 16, a 30-year-old artifacts dealer named Mark Hofmann lowered himself into his blue sports car and, in a manner as yet unclear, a bomb was triggered.

“It was heard by everyone on the floor,” Jerry Cahill recalled. He didn’t move to his window, however, until he heard the sirens, and it was then that he looked down and saw Hofmann’s car engulfed in flames.

The explosion, which Hofmann amazingly survived, came one day after two deadly bombings elsewhere in Salt Lake. It instantly transformed what seemed a straightforward double murder case into an extraordinary mystery. The intrigue turns on a long-lost collection of documents rumored to sully the reputation of church founder Smith and has enveloped some of the highest officials of the Mormon Church.

Before the Hofmann explosion, investigators believed that the Oct. 15 killings of Steve Christensen, 31, and Katherine Sheets, 50, had been arranged by disgruntled investors in a financially troubled firm founded by Mrs. Sheets’ husband, J. Gary Sheets, and managed by Christensen.

With the third explosion, the investigation shifted to what Salt Lake City City Police Capt. Oran Peck characterizes as the “so-called artifacts theory.” It is a theory in which the third victim, Hofmann, emerges as the prime suspect.

Hofmann had been attempting to peddle what he said were the papers of William E. McLellin, an early convert to the church who in the mid-1830s fell out with Smith and spent the remainder of his life trying to establish Mormon splinter groups. Long-rumored to exist, the papers are believed to contain evidence of Smith’s early polygamy, alterations in some of what Mormons believe were Smith’s divine revelations, and even an account of a drunken party by a number of early church officials.

Since the bombings, a high-ranking Mormon official has admitted that he arranged an unsecured loan to Hofmann of $185,000 to buy the papers. Other ranking officials, including Gordon B. Hinckley, the man in charge of the church’s day-to-day operations, also revealed longstanding relationships with Hofmann. Church President Spencer W. Kimball, who died at the age of 90 on Tuesday, apparently was not involved in the transactions.

Police detectives theorize that Hofmann never actually possessed the McLellin collection and was attempting a fraud. They believe he killed Christensen to keep his deception from being exposed. Hofmann, the theory goes, was on his way to plant a bomb intended for another principal in the transaction when he fell victim to one of his own devices.

The trouble with their theory is that the county attorney so far does not appear to believe it is supported by the evidence at hand. The county attorney has declined to charge Hofmann with murder, and so far the only official accusation levied in the case involves possession of an illegal weapon.

“We are at an impasse,” Capt. Peck admitted.

Hofmann’s negotiations with the church in the final weeks before the bombings were only part of a series of such deals that may have been intertwined financially. With one group of city investors Hofmann was attempting to purchase and resell an original manuscript of the Charles Dickens novel “The Haunted Man.”

He also was shopping for customers interested in samples of ancient Egyptian papyri and, most spectacular of all, attempting to arrange the sale of what is believed to be the oldest printed document in this country, a 17th-Century leaflet known as “The Oath of a Free Man.”

“There were many, many deals,” said Alvin Rust, a Salt Lake coin collector who often financed Hofmann’s purchases. “It started with early Mormon documents, but that wasn’t all. There were Abraham Lincoln deals, there were Charles Dickens deals, there were Van Gogh deals.”

The truth is, Hofmann’s activities were something of a phenomenon in this city. The prospect of big profits attracted some of Salt Lake’s most prosperous business leaders and the excitement of his document discoveries stirred the intellectual community.

For example, a group of Salt Lake investors sank $280,000 into the purchase of “The Haunted Man” and were promised a return of $380,000 after its resale in less than a year. Rust said his deals with Hofmann often turned over in a month or less and produced profits as high as 50%.

It was, for Salt Lake, a subterranean economy that bustled with continuous deals but remained largely out of public view. The man who created the economy was himself elusive, appearing at his associates’ doorsteps at odd hours and then disappearing for days. In a 1982 interview, Hofmann said the real attraction was not the possession of precious documents but the hunt itself.

“I’m not the ultimate collector; I’m just buying to sell,” he said in an interview published in The Sunstone Review, a Mormon magazine published independently of the church. “My strategy isn’t necessarily to get top dollar for every item but just to sell it so I have more money to keep looking. It gives me a kick to know that this is original stuff, that no one else on Earth has pieced together or knows what this says. So there’s the pleasure.”

Often it was a lonely hunt but that also seemed to fit Hofmann. “Mark has few social graces,” one acquaintance said. “He is quiet, with an elusive quality. I remember when I was talking to him, he would never look at me in the eye. He is a little on the nerdy side.” Nonetheless, Hofmann managed to establish great trust between himself and his many business partners. “I trusted him implicitly,” Rust said. “Mark did what he said he would do.”

The suddenly burgeoning business in historical documents created problems for Mormon historians. Documents were being snapped up by collectors as investments rather than finding their way into libraries and archives. And people who formerly donated their family documents were hoarding them until the highest bidder came along.

“It was a market that Mark created, and then he manipulated it, playing buyers off each other,” said Allen Roberts, one of the founders of the Sunstone Foundation, a liberal Mormon group. “First the deals were in the hundreds of dollars, then the thousands, then the hundreds of thousands. People were getting greedy.”

In the last year, Hofmann seemed to become more withdrawn, secretive. He told one would-be interviewer he no longer wanted publicity; it was bad for business.

Shannon Flynn, a 28-year-old associate of Hofmann, said the dealer was security-conscious. He had once changed his telephone number, suspecting the line was tapped.

“What we were subject to,” Flynn said, “was nothing different than corporate spying.”

Brent Metcalf, who went to work as a researcher for Hofmann in mid-August, said the dealer claimed to have received a death threat about a week before the bombings. “It was a phone message,” Metcalf recounted. “A short message, very emphatic and coherent, a deep voice. It first asked, ‘Is this Mark Hofmann?’ Hofmann said yes. The voice said, ‘You are going to die.’ ”

A business associate who asked not to be identified told of happening upon Hofmann in a church parking lot. Hofmann was hunched down in his car.

“He was there all alone. He was clearly surprised . . . and his face was white as a ghost. I was worried. I said, ‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know . . . if this (the paycheck) is too much for you, I could get another job.’

“His reaction was, ‘Coming up with the money to pay you is nothing compared to my problems.’

“I looked down at his lap. He was working on his will in the car.”

There are reasons why Salt Lake City proved especially vulnerable to the document mania, and most of them can be found in the 155-year-old Mormon Church. It has long displayed an institutional fascination with the historical detail of its past. The church operates one of the largest genealogical libraries in the world and exhorts every member to maintain a personal journal of his life.

Indeed, the very founding of Mormonism was based on the discovery of a document of sorts. Church doctrine holds that on Sept. 22, 1827, Joseph Smith was led by an angel named Moroni to a set of golden plates that were buried on a hillside in New York state. Smith, the Mormons believe, translated a “reformed Egyptian” text on the plates into the Book of Mormon, which supposedly corrects the errors of other Christian religions.

In recent years, the Mormon emphasis on history has led to several agonizing episodes; church leaders have been forced to confront the fruits of modern research. That scrutiny, based on new documentation, has challenged the traditional accounts of Mormonism’s early years.

Subsequently, some researchers who believe it is proper to reveal quirks of the founders have complained of church officials attempting, as one put it, “to intimidate legitimate scholarship.” Mormon leadership countered that it was not against scholarship depicting the church “warts and all,” but against that which showed only the warts.

Almost inevitably, this conflict has brought Mormon leaders into close contact with Hofmann, the man who seemed to own the franchise on the document business. Hofmann traded or sold so many documents to the church that he regularly bypassed the archives department and dealt directly with the highest of the General Authorities, the inner circle of men who watch over the church and its 5.8 million members.

Since 1980, Hofmann sold or traded more than 40 historical documents with Hinckley, the church’s chief operating officer. Some made their way into the public domain; most did not.

Of all of Hofmann’s discoveries, the one that created the greatest stir was an 1830 letter written by Martin Harris, the first convert to Mormonism outside the Joseph Smith family. This letter would become known as the white salamander letter.

The letter describes an account by Joseph Smith of his discovery of the golden plates that differs from Smith’s version in the Book of Mormon. Most notably, Smith, in the Harris letter, mentions a “white salamander,” rather than the Angel Moroni, directing him to his seminal discovery.

The Harris letter was interpreted by some religious scholars and journalists as calling into question the founding event of Mormonism. The official church position is that, excluding some unusual word choices, Harris accurately reflected Smith’s version.

Whatever, the white salamander letter was a very valuable document and one that the church wanted under its control. It gained that control last year when Hofmann sold the letter to a local businessman with an interest in early Mormon history.

The businessman paid $40,000 for the letter and, after hiring researchers to authenticate it, donated the document to the church.

The businessman’s name was Steven Christensen.

He had a more-or-less silent partner who helped him raise money for the venture.

His name was J. Gary Sheets.

Not all Mormons, including many of Christensen’s closest friends, suspect he was killed by Mark Hofmann. Some who knew the principals believe it more likely the bombings were the work of a fanatic who thought a sale of the McLellin Collection would drag the church into devastating controversy.

Others subscribe to the so-called “apostate theory.” They suspect that the bombs were planted by people radically opposed to the teachings of the Mormon Church, that the explosions were in fact a modern echo of violence directed against the church in its earliest days. Joseph Smith himself was gunned down by an anti-Mormon mob, and it was in part a flight from persecution that took his followers, led by Brigham Young, across the Wasatch Mountains to the Great Salt Lake.

“There is nothing as dangerous and as hostile as a Mormon who used to be,” said Tom Moore, a friend and former business associate of Christensen. “I have seen so many times, throughout the history of the Mormon people, groups which have done their best to try and destroy the Mormon Church. They would want to make sure that if there were damaging documents to be purchased and given to the church, that they be exposed.”

Christensen was known in high places in the church. His donation of the salamander letter had earned him praise. “They embraced Steve Christensen,” an acquaintance said. “They thanked him. They called him a hero.”

A hard worker, Christensen would be at the office many days by 5 a.m. He was a tenacious amateur historian and had gathered a personal library of thousands of books. A family man, he was the father of three young children, with a fourth due early next year. A devout Mormon, he served as a lay bishop of a ward outside Salt Lake City. He was in the midst of an overwhelming financial crisis, but he did not appear overly concerned.

In June, Hofmann told associates he had found the McLellin Collection in Texas. Christensen was contacted.

“Hofmann told him,” a Christensen associate said, “that he had an understanding with the present owner, that he could only sell the document to a Gentile.” Gentile is the generic term Mormons use to describe all non-Mormons. “The reason was simple,” the associate went on. “The owner wanted to ensure that the documents would not end up in the church and be suppressed.”

According to Flynn, who often worked with Hofmann on deals, church officials and Hofmann had heard that anti-Mormon groups were “hot on the trail” of the McLellin Collection. Flynn said Hofmann told him the papers were being held by a Texas bank as loan collateral.

“I was told by Mark that President Hinckley was anxious to get this stuff,” Flynn said in an interview. “Evidently, they had caught wind the ‘antis’ were after it, and they were anxious to get it here to Salt Lake as soon as possible.”

On June 28, according to church officials, Christensen took Hofmann to see Hugh W. Pinnock, one of the General Authorities. They told Pinnock that Hofmann needed money to complete the transaction, and Hofmann promised to donate the papers to the church.

Pinnock listened carefully and conferred with another Mormon leader, Dallin Oaks. Then Pinnock placed a call to the First Interstate Bank of Utah, where he is a director. A loan was arranged, without benefit of an application form or collateral. Hofmann drove downtown and picked up a check for $185,000.

Hofmann told the Salt Lake City Tribune in July that he actually had purchased the papers. Church officials said they were told by Hofmann that the documents were locked in a safe-deposit box.

But in September, the transaction began to unravel.

Hofmann informed church elders that his fortunes had taken a dramatic turn downward. The Library of Congress had refused an opportunity to buy Hofmann’s spectacular discovery of the first printed document in the United States, “The Oath of a Free Man,” for $1.5 million. The document whiz kid said he was no longer in a position to donate the McLellin collection.

The bank, meanwhile, was asking questions about repayment of the loan, and it would develop that Hofmann also had received $150,000 from Rust, ostensibly to pay for the McLellin papers. Rust said later he was unaware when he entered into the venture that Hofmann had received the bank loan arranged by the church.

In danger of losing the collection, the church hastily came up with a solution. Recalled Elder Dallin Oaks: “Elder Pinnock mentioned he . . . knew of at least two individuals who might be interested in purchasing the collection. Was there any harm in calling its availability to their attention, he asked me. I said no. . . .”

A week before the bombings, a Salt Lake City attorney was contacted by a would-be buyer who had been located by Pinnock and Christensen. The attorney said later that the buyer intended to donate the papers to the church. He would not disclose the buyer’s name, saying only that he was a Mormon.

At 8:10 a.m. on Oct. 15, Christensen picked up a package outside his downtown office. It exploded and he died instantly. He was to have met later that day with Hofmann, verify the authenticity of the McLellin Collection and close the deal.

About two hours later, Katherine Sheets was found dead outside her garage. Her death would pose a dilemma for murder theorists.

The police maintain that she was killed as a decoy to put them on the so-called “disgruntled investor” theory.

Those who promote the “religious fanatic” or “vengeful apostate” theories suggest that the bombers might have been under the mistaken impression that Mrs. Sheets’ husband once again was playing a behind-the-scenes role in the transaction, as he had with the white salamander letter. His wife, they suggest, was killed by a bomb intended for him.

That afternoon, Hofmann, anticipating a visit from police, met with Oaks.

“When he seemed to be questioning whether we should tell them about the McLellin Collection,” Oaks recounted in a statement to reporters, “I said, ‘Look. That’s been handled on a confidential basis, but there’s a murder investigation under way. You should tell the police everything you know and answer every question--and I intend to do the same.’ ”

Later, Flynn and Rust would arrive at church headquarters with essentially the same question.

On Oct. 16, Hofmann was to meet with the attorney representing the would-be buyer of the McLellin papers. Hofmann had told Oaks he wanted to go ahead with the transaction despite the bombings.

That afternoon, the attorney was waiting in his office with a documents expert when he heard there had been a third explosion.

The affair has taken this city through collective spasms of emotion. Initially, there was fear that a mad bomber was loose; secretaries refused to receive packages and parcel deliverymen reported being beaten. “It’s beginning to seem more like Lebanon than Salt Lake City,” one resident told the Deseret News.

The immediate shock and fear was replaced with a sense of wonder about the church’s admitted involvement in the transactions, and anticipation of where the investigation might lead next. Many people here believe the case could cause the church substantial embarrassment, especially when it comes time to call certain people to the witness stand.

Peggy Fletcher, who interviewed Hofmann for Sunstone and is the director of the foundation that publishes the magazine, said that perhaps some “positive things can come out of this, like the church leaders recognizing that they might as well open up the archives, or that they ultimately are not going to be hurt by any kinds of discovery--that church members can take in any kind of information and handle it just fine.

“I would hope for kind of an end of secrecy, the need for secret dealings by Hinckley and Hofmann.”

In the week after the bombings, Pinnock, Oaks and Hinckley held an extraordinary news conference to explain their actions, which they maintained were innocent and born of nothing more than a desire to add historical documents to the church’s archives. “A normal though confidential transaction has been made to appear sinister and underhanded,” Oaks said.

A few days later, Pinnock announced that he was repaying the $185,000 loan out of his “personal resources. No funds or other resources of the church have been or will be used, either directly or indirectly, to satisfy the loan,” he said in a press release. The banker who issued the loan has left First Interstate, a bank official said.

The Library of Congress released a statement on the “Oath of a Free Man,” calling the discovery “one of the most important and exciting finds of the century.” The statement only raised yet another question--why would a man with such a document in his possession, widely estimated to be worth at least $1 million, attempt to engage in a fraud with a lesser document?

Remnants of the bombs have been sent to a federal laboratory near San Francisco for testing. The tests have taken far longer than police first forecast. They hope the results will provide physical evidence linking their prime suspect to the bombs.

Last week, Hofmann went home from the hospital, his eardrums shattered and one kneecap shorn away. It was an unexpectedly early release, and within 24 hours he was charged with a federal firearms violation stemming from the discovery of an allegedly illegal automatic weapon in Flynn’s house. Flynn, according to a court document, said he and Hofmann had purchased the weapon eight months ago, converted it to fully automatic and test-fired it outside town.

According to the court document, the search also yielded the “Anarchist’s Cookbook”--said to be a manual for terrorist activities--several one-pound canisters of gunpowder, a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine and several magazines published for gun enthusiasts.

Hofmann’s attorney said his client did not want to be interviewed. He characterized the police investigation as too hasty, saying “the fix is in.”

The police have searched Hofmann’s residence three times, and have opened several safe-deposit boxes in the city.

The McLellin Collection, if it ever existed, has not surfaced.