Mark Hofmann

Mark William Hofmann (born December 7, 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger, and convicted murderer. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history, Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of fake documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. When his schemes began to unravel, he constructed bombs to murder three people in Salt Lake City, Utah. The first two bombs killed two people on October 15, 1985. On the following day, a third bomb exploded in Hofmann's car. He was arrested for the bombings three months later, and in 1987 pled guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, one count of theft by deception, and one count of fraud.

Early life Mark Hofmann was born in 1954 in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Lucille (née Sears) and William Hofmann (1928–1993). He was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). According to Richard and Joan Ostling, Hofmann was by this time a "closet apostate" motivated not only by greed but also by "the desire to embarrass the church by undermining church history". and the LDS Church was forced to confirm the discovery and publicly present the document to the RLDS Church.

In 1984, longtime critics of Mormonism Jerald and Sandra Tanner became the first to declare the Salamander letter a forgery, despite the fact that it, as well as others of Hofmann's purported discoveries, would have strengthened the Tanners' arguments against the veracity of official Mormon history. (A visibly shaken Hofmann paid the Tanners a personal visit.) "Why you of all people?" he asked.

Other Mormon forgeries No one is certain how many forged documents Hofmann created during the early 1980s, but they included a letter from Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, describing the origin of the Book of Mormon; (The LDS Church publicized this Hofmann creation through a press conference on August 23, 1982.) The forgery was a letter complete with an 1828 Palmyra, New York, postmark. At the press conference, Dean Jessee asserted that a Hofmann forgery seemed authentic not only for Lucy Smith's handwriting but also for the period postmark and correct postage.

In 1983, Hofmann bypassed the LDS Church's historical department and sold to Hinckley an 1825 Smith holograph purporting to confirm that Smith had been treasure hunting and practicing magic five years after his First Vision. 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.

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. Hofmann also traded in many legitimate historical documents acquired from rare book sellers and collectors. The forgeries were thus intermingled with many legitimate historical documents, which bolstered Hofmann's credibility.

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. The one-page Oath had been printed in 1639, the first document to be printed in Britain's American colonies, but only about fifty copies had been made, and none of them were extant. A genuine example was probably worth over US$1 million in 1985, and Hofmann's agents began to negotiate a sale to the Library of Congress.

Bombings

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. (For instance, Hofmann paid US$22,500 for a first edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to add to a collection he was building for his wife.)

However, Hofmann had no idea where the McLellin collection was, nor did he have the time to forge a suitably large group of documents. Later the same day, a second bomb killed Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen's former employer. (On the afternoon following the bombings, Hofmann met with LDS Church apostle Dallin H.) Oaks about the McLellin collection, a meeting which fellow document collector Brent Metcalfe believed had religious significance to Hofmann. "He's just killed two people. And what does he do? He goes down to the church office building and meets with Dallin Oaks. I can't even imagine the rush, given Hofmann's frame of reference, that this would have given him. To be standing there in front of one of God's appointed apostles, after murdering two people, and this person doesn't hear any words from God, doesn't intuit a thing. For Hofmann that must have been an absolute rush. He had pulled off the ultimate spoof against God."

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. Hofmann initially maintained his innocence. However, at a preliminary hearing, prosecutors produced voluminous evidence of his forgeries and debts, as well as evidence linking him to the bombs. During the investigations, many of the prosecution team became convinced that they were being stonewalled by leaders of the LDS Church. Chief investigator Jim Bell said, "They're hiding something; the church is doing everything it can to make this as difficult as possible. I've never seen anything like this in a homicide investigation."

Influence As a master forger, Hofmann deceived a number of renowned document experts during his short career. Some of his forgeries were accepted by scholars for years, and an unknown number of them may still be in circulation. But it is Hofmann's forgeries of Mormon documents that have had the greatest historical significance. 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."

A student of Mormonism, Jan Shipps, agreed that press reports "contained an astonishing amount of innuendo associating Hofmann's plagiarism with Mormon beginnings. 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."

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."

The murders were also covered by a 1997 episode of Forensic Files, "Postal Mortem", and a 2010 episode of Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?, "An Explosive Love".

Hofmann's crimes are fictionalized in the 2000 The X-Files episode "Hollywood A.D." and in the episode "The Saint", Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2004), where the forger is portrayed by Stephen Colbert.

A 2003 BBC documentary about Hofmann is entitled The Man Who Forged America.

The Canadian TV series Masterminds covered Hofmann's crimes in its debut episode.

A three-part documentary series about Hofmann's illegal activities, entitled Murder Among the Mormons, premiered on Netflix on March 3, 2021. The limited series debuted for the week ending March 7, 2021, as the third most streamed video on demand original-content program, according to Nielsen streaming ratings with 587 million viewer minutes.