It was a perfect autumn day in Salt Lake City—cool and crisp, with a cerulean October sky above a workaday Wednesday.
At that point, there had never been a deadly bombing in Utah. But in 1985, bombs were on everyone’s mind—an Air India 747, a restaurant in Madrid, the Frankfurt airport, a Paris cinema, all had been bombed. That fall, it seemed the chaos of the world was finally coming home.
The first explosion had killed Steve Christensen, a businessman and historic documents collector, at his office. The second was meant for Gary Sheets, Christensen’s erstwhile business partner, killing his wife, Kathy, instead. The third had injured Mark Hofmann, a rare documents dealer who had pressing business with Christensen and the highest leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Rumors swirled about the bombings: were they ordered by disgruntled investors in Gary Sheets’ financial services company, or part of a wave of extremist political violence that had broken out across the West? Did they have anything to do with the shocking historic documents that Hofmann had been brokering to the LDS church?
Within hours, suspicion fell on Hofmann when a bomb expert declared that the story he had recounted from his hospital bed was incompatible with the evidence. He was lying. But why?
The real story, that would become clear before the eyes of a captivated city, would reveal Hofmann as one of the country’s most notorious document forgers, a conman caught in a financial house of cards under intense pressure he hoped to relieve with the deadly explosions.
The Doubter
The key context to Hofmann and his crime spree is the mania for historic documents that arose in the 1970s and ’80s, especially in Utah.
The Bicentennial was reminding Americans of their founding; Indiana Jones was in the theaters, stirring imaginations with tales of lost treasure. New discoveries were rewriting history, and parallel to this, the ambitions of talented forgers reached new heights. A German magazine spent a fortune on the forged Hitler diaries. In Paris, you could unknowingly buy a fake Rodin, in New York a fake Pollack, in Mexico City a fake Aztec artifact. In Utah, you could buy a fake letter from Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, forged by Mark Hofmann.
Ken Sanders knows all about it. He has dealt in old books and documents in Utah for 50 years. He had a front row seat to the frenzy that gripped the collector community.
“There was something in all fields of collecting,” Ken says from the basement of his used bookstore, a treasure chest of Utah memorabilia. “People have always collected books, but now we’re talking about ephemera. There just became this consciousness—there are other people, weird people like me, who are into antique Utah whiskey jugs, letters, photographs, etc.”
Sanders knew Hofmann, who had approached him with items he was peddling. He would like to be able to say he was onto him from the jump, but hindsight is easy.
“I met Mark Hofmann one time,” he recounts. “We were oil and water. We didn’t get along. I believe he gave up on me because…I wasn’t so smart or anything, but I wasn’t a believer.”
In the collecting community, Sanders says, fraudsters often pass off forgeries with a subtle psychological technique called affinity fraud, which uses relationships based on, say, a shared membership in a church to build trust.
“I’m not saying that affinity fraud is unique to Mormonism, but boy howdy does it work well here,” Ken explains. “We are the pyramid scheme capital of the known universe. There’s something about Mormonism that creates this gullible nature… there’s a suspension of disbelief. Mark Hofmann exploited that. Was he a master forger? Not in my book. He forged to the level he needed to fool you, and not one penny harder.”
Ken points out that it was the LDS collector community itself that guided Hofmann to ideas for what to forge. He became adept at figuring out what people wanted and giving it to them. “What I’ll never understand is that none of us, none of us, myself included, questioned him,” he says, shaking his head. “This is crazy, because he accelerated. What he was finding… those of us legitimately in the trade, it’s a find of a lifetime, of your career. All of a sudden, he goes from every few months to every few weeks to every other day. No one could do that. None of us should have believed him.”
The Cleaner
Richard Turley was a newly minted lawyer when the bombs went off. Then a phone call.
“I was sitting in my office in downtown Salt Lake City when I got a random call,” Turley says. “The person on the phone said he was calling on behalf of an undisclosed principal. He started saying, ‘I understand you’re interested in church history.’ I said ‘yes.’ He started asking me questions. At the end of the conversation, he hung up. Since everybody in the city at the time was talking about Hofmann and the bombings and church history, I wondered, does this have any type of connection? I was working for the church by January 20th, 1986. The first day of work (at the LDS Church Archives), I entered a crime scene.”
Turley sets the scene: An archive full of detectives, forensic experts and lawyers combing through boxes usually only explored by historians, seeking a motive for murder. Among Utah’s scholarly experts there was a divide, but they mostly sided with Hofmann. How could this goofy guy fool them? Eventually, two document experts, George Throckmorton and Bill Flynn, noticed some microscopic cracking on the ink in many of the fakes produced by Hofmann. They had their smoking gun.
“The first day of work (at the LDS Church Archives), I entered a crime scene.”
—RICHARD TURLEY
Turley was the guy the church brought in to clean up the mess and examine the errors that led to it all. He impressed Ken Sanders with his reforms. “The church learned a lot from it,” Ken says. “They’re much more sophisticated now. We all are.” Turley and his team eventually identified about four dozen suspect documents from Hofmann, who had had almost unlimited access to the archives. That loophole was closed.
Richard Turley later wrote a book about the case (Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case, University of Illinois Press, 1992) and has thought long and hard about Hofmann’s motives.
“I think he loved to push back against any kind of authority,” he says. “It gave him a sense of power. And I think he had this sort of perverse desire to twist history.
“Mark Hofmann was a good forger. But he was a great conman.”
The Collector
The Japanese Shinto concept of tsukumogami holds that historic objects can develop a unique kami, or spirit. Today, Brent Ashworth, sitting in his collectibles shop in Provo amongst his many, many possessions, looks like a man communing with the spirits. Amongst Butch Cassidy’s gun, Ava Gardner’s dress, and a bible from the Mayflower, Ashworth sits in Brigham Young’s rocking chair and pulls out pieces from his most unusual collection: evidence from the Hofmann saga.
Ashworth was, with the possible exception of the LDS church, the largest purchaser of Hofmann’s forgeries. Maybe it’s his way of dealing with what happened, but Brent has spent years collecting further evidence from Mark’s life. Many of these items are deeply personal—Hofmann’s LDS missionary diary, an angry letter he once wrote to God, the plastic bracelet he wore in the hospital under the alias of Michael Sullivan. Hofmann’s passport. His LDS temple recommend. A printed list of items from a deal between the two men, singed from the flames of the third bomb. He has even kept cashed checks he had written to Hoffman.
Mark’s seduction of Brent started with an expressed desire. “I was collecting for 20 years, and all of a sudden I heard about this Hofmann guy.” He told Mark that he hoped to acquire a letter in Joseph Smith’s hand. “Oh, I happen to have one,” Mark replied. Their relationship began.
“I loved LDS history,” Brent explains. “I’ve always felt like there is a duty to hand it to future generations. I’ve donated thousands of items to the church.” Brent estimates that he spent about a half million dollars with Mark. He was a successful lawyer at the time, but it was a lot of money. He took out loans and strained his family budget.
He was all in.
In Brent, the conman found his ideal victim. The forged letter from Joseph Smith’s mother that he sold to Brent was “faith-affirming,” an early piece of evidence of Smith’s prophetic role. Brent went on the road, appearing at LDS congregations, where he would show the letter. Mark had given him a powerful tool he could use to share his beliefs in the divine origins of Mormonism—he could bear witness to how these documents strengthened his faith. What Brent wanted, Hofmann “found.”
Later, Hofmann would lie about many things. He would, in a bid for sympathy, claim he’d meant to kill himself with the third bomb, but the evidence points to Brent as the target.
That morning when the first two bombs went off, Mark called the Ashworth house. He spoke to Charlene, Brent’s wife. Brent wasn’t home, but he would habitually meet with Hofmann on Wednesdays at the Waldenbooks store downtown. Hofmann, after missing Brent’s return call, had gone to their normal spot, but Brent didn’t show up. His wife had expressed misgiving about his traveling into the city where bombs were exploding. So he blew off their meeting and ate pizza with Charlene.
Sometimes, Mark would have something to show Brent in his car, and they would climb in together to view it. The theory is that Mark was going to have Brent pick up the bomb, set with a motion trigger, killing him and providing an excuse for not delivering the McClellin collection, a trove of (nonexistent) documents that Hofmann was expected to deliver at LDS church headquarters that afternoon. Hofmann could then claim they were destroyed. When Brent didn’t show, somehow, Mark triggered the device himself.
Like all good conmen, Hofmann understood motivation. He understood Brent’s desire to hold close the talismans of his heroes. He understood the fear of the brethren, the leaders of the LDS church. Hofmann’s forgeries cast doubt on official church history: a patriarchal blessing in which Joseph Smith set aside his son, not Brigham Young, as the church’s future leader, a contract hiring Smith to dig for treasure, and, most famously, the Salamander Letter, an account of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. The letter spoke of a white salamander emerging from a fire, a far cry from the church’s narrative of an earnestly praying Joseph visited by the glorious angel Moroni, whose image is cast in gold and sits on the top of today’s LDS temples.
Hofmann spoke to Gordon B. Hinckley, the church’s de facto head, about the possibility of these documents falling into the hands of “the enemy.” He would convince the church to buy them, sometimes directly, sometimes through a proxy. He would then leak the existence of the document, thus forcing the church to release it to the public, both embarrassing the church and authenticating the forgery. If the Prophet was willing to acquire it, it must be legit, right?
For a while, it was a hell of a racket.
The Witness
When Brent speaks about Mark, it’s still with the disoriented shock of betrayal. He wonders that he stayed hooked—his wife, who had grown wary of Hofmann, tried repeatedly to warn him. Even in those late October days, with the whole scheme collapsing around Mark’s ears, Brent’s tattered faith remained. The Sunday before the bombings, Mark stood on Ashworth’s porch and handed him a check. Brent asked if the check, this check, after so many others, was finally good. Mark looked him in the eye and told him it was.
The check bounced.
It was a mundane detail that finally convinced Brent of Mark’s guilt. He was with the Salt Lake police, looking at the papers recovered from Mark’s car. Like all collectors, Brent relied on sales guides. When a new guide landed, it was Christmas morning—you tore the wrapper off immediately. Mark had several such guides in the trunk of his car, still in their packaging.
That’s when Brent knew.
“Gee, he’s not who I thought he was.” Brent realized. “The first thing we do is open our catalogs and mark them up. This guy was not a collector.”
Ashworth speaks with hard-earned wisdom about himself these days. There’s a lot of guilt, not about being fooled by Hofmann, but about how his choices inadvertently hurt other people. Most of all, about his son, Samuel.
In the aftermath of the bombings, Brent and Charlene took a weekend out of town to escape from the stressful situation. They left their kids with family. It was a rule that you didn’t ride your bikes on Sunday, but with their parents gone, the boys went out, and 6-year-old Sammy was struck by a car. He would later die of his injuries.
“I was supposed to protect him. I’m the one who’s always felt guilty. As we were sitting by him one night in the hospital, I was praying, ‘Why don’t you take me?’ But that’s not how it works.”
Five days after his son’s death, Brent would testify at Hofmann’s preliminary hearing. Hofmann’s attorney said that, due to the tragic circumstances, he wouldn’t cross-examine Ashworth, but reserved the right to recall him to the stand. The lead prosecutor confidently predicted that the defense wouldn’t call him back. “You were throwing javelins at their client for two solid hours,” he said..
“I was just telling the truth about our dealings. By then, I knew he was a forger and a killer. Yeah, I probably took a little of my anger out on him. But I spoke very freely about the crap I put up with.”
The testimony of Hofmann’s frauds, forgeries, and deceit laid out a clear case for motive. That winter, Mark Hofmann would negotiate a deal, confessing to his forgeries and bombings. He was sentenced to life, with no parole.
The Prisoner
Today, Mark Hofmann sits at the Central Utah Correctional Facility down in Gunnison, prisoner number 41235. He’s rumored to enjoy playing chess. He’s taken religion classes. Brent Ashworth hasn’t seen him since he testified in court.
At the heart of the Hofmann case was the very human desire to possess, to collect, to own. Now, approaching the end of his journey, he wonders what’s next for his treasures. He wonders especially about the Hofmann material that he’s gathered around him. Will the state want it? The church? A university? A private collector?
Mark Hofmann, dealer in collectibles, forger, conman and mad bomber, will likely never leave prison. He will never touch again these items that the witness against him still owns. Hofmann’s shadow is there, though, 40 years after he assembled his bombs, after he wrapped the one meant for Steve Christensen in nails, after he waited on the bench at Crossroads Mall for Brent Ashworth, after he eventually gave up and blew himself up in a car parked one block from Temple Square.
Learn more: The book, Show & Tell: A Unique Journey Through History by Traci McFarland Fieldsted (Eborn Books, 2024) is a biography includes chapters on Ashworth’s dealings with Hofmann. It is available at ebornbooks.com.
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