Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, Bingers. Welcome back to Binged. Now, I have some exciting news for you. Our bi-weekly podcast is now a weekly podcast. That's right. You spoke and we listened. Instead of multiple drops every other week, Binged will now be dropping one episode once a week every
But in keeping with a common theme, which will change every two or three weeks. So far, we've done series on internet killers, poisoners, solved cases that may actually still be unsolved, and unidentified serial killers. We will return to these themes from time to time while always introducing new ones. But in this week's episode, we turn our attention to bombings and we wind the clock back.
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Among them was a 31-year-old financial consultant named Steve Christensen, who rode the elevator as usual up to the sixth floor and walked towards his office with a box of donuts and a carton of Diet Tab Cola. Outside the door of his suite, Steve observed a brown package on the floor addressed to him.
He picked it up and as he tilted it onto its side to tuck it under his arm, the package exploded in a violent boom that shook the building. Shrapnel flew in all directions and if the blast itself had somewhat failed to kill him, the arsenal of nails that lined the bomb inside became projectiles that guaranteed its victim wouldn't survive.
As Steve Christiansen lay dying with a hole torn into his chest with donut bits and cans of cola mixed in with the debris all around him, his security, who was also injured, managed to make her way to the phone and call for help. Now, a little over an hour later, at a residence in the suburb of Holiday, a woman named Kathy Sheets found a package sitting on a wooden block outside of her garage.
She noticed that the package was addressed to her husband, so she picked it up to take it inside. And again, as she tucked the package under her arm, it suddenly exploded, sending nails tearing into her body, disemboweling her and killing her almost instantly. The bomb was clearly intended not for her, but for her husband, Gary Sheets, who was the business partner of Steve Christensen.
These bombs were both examined by Jerry Taylor with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and he found that the device, which was a pipe bomb, had used a galvanized iron pipe filled with smokeless black powder with a detonating circuit consisting of flashlight batteries.
Included was a mercury switch, which was a three-inch glass tube with a drop of mercury inside of it and electrical contacts at either end. Now, the purpose of this switch was to detonate the bomb as soon as the box was tilted, and the objective behind the bombs themselves was clear. They were designed to kill.
Nails had been taped around the bombs to make sure it was lethal. Both pipe bombs were nearly identical in construction, which confirmed that the same person or people was most likely behind both of them. So it looked as though someone was targeting this financial consulting business, the Coordinated Financial Services Company.
A company which had in recent months been under fire because it had sustained some enormous losses, leaving many investors feeling burned and demanding accountability. In fact, there had been a mass exodus of employees in the months leading up to the bombings.
Salt Lake City Police Chief Bud Willoughby assured the news media that these bombings were not the random work of a serial bomber, but rather the work of assassins who were, quote, brought in to kill these people.
The newly widowed Gary Sheets, who was the second bomb's intended target, believed it was a disgruntled investor who was responsible for the bombings, possibly by way of a hired killer. Just a few hours after his wife's death, Sheets told a newspaper reporter, quote,
We've had some troubles, a negative financial statement, and we've lost some money in dumb investments. There's been stupidity, bad judgment, too fast growth, and some poor management, but not fraud. Overall, we've been a good company and it's sad to see this dream end.
Now, some thought the bombings may in fact be connected to the mafia. But then another possibility was also considered. And that was the Mormon church and something that had come to be known as the White Salamander Letter.
The White Salamander Letter was a recently discovered historical document that, if proven to be authentic, would completely upend the origin narrative of the Mormon Church and rock the church's foundations.
And though its authenticity was questioned by some, ironically, it was dismissed as a forgery by critics of the Mormon church. The salamander letter was deemed genuine by the church's document experts, though. And the Mormon church had been trying to find a way to deal with the controversy and wanted to obtain the letter for its private collection, presumably to lock it away in its vaults.
And Steve Christensen, who was a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who worked with the church, had been the one sent to purchase the letter. Gary Sheets, his partner at Coordinated Financial, consulted on the sale, which had taken place the year prior. So now others who had a link to the Salamander letter began fearing for their lives. And one such person who appeared to be fearing for his life and his family's lives was
was Mark Hoffman, a rare documents dealer who had been the man who discovered the Salamander letter and sold it to Steve Christensen.
In fact, Mark Hoffman had in the past five years found more than 40 Mormon historical documents and then sold them to the Mormon church. And the most recent discovery was an array of writings and papers that Hoffman called the McLellan Collection, which was expected to be even more explosive to the foundation of the LDS church than even the salamander letter.
And the Mormon church wanted that collection and they had scheduled to have it examined for authenticity just two hours before the first blast that day.
On the following afternoon, that would be October 16th, Mark Hoffman's fears for his safety would apparently be validated when this string of bombings would continue. It was at 1240 p.m. on a quiet suburban street, though windows of houses rattled and roofs shook as a sudden blast rocked the block. The bomb had gone off inside a Toyota MR2 sports car. This was Montecito.
Mark Hoffman's Toyota sports car. And he was inside the vehicle when it exploded. Now, miraculously, Hoffman was still conscious when passerbys began rushing to his aid. He was pulled from the street onto the curb while an ambulance sped to the scene. One passerby, who was a fellow member of the church, noticed the LDS garments that Mark was wearing beneath his clothes.
This passerby pulled out a vial of consecrated oil and gave Mark a blessing and commanded him to live. And Mark Hoffman did. He ended up surviving the blast minus a finger and with severe injuries that would require emergency surgery and hospitalization. The day after that third blast, detectives interviewed Mark in his hospital room at the LDS hospital to get an account of what had happened.
Marks said he wasn't quite sure how it all went down. His memory was hazy. He only remembered returning to his car following a meeting at the church office building, opening the driver's side door and immediately noticing an object on the seat begin to fall onto the floor. He said that as he went to reach for the box, it exploded.
He also said that he remembered before the bomb exploded that he felt like he was being followed. He noticed he was being tailed by a tan pickup truck with a dented front fender and a license plate number containing the letters TW and the number three. Mark also told one of the police officers to contact his friend, Brent Ashworth, and advise him to get out of town immediately.
But Brent was already a step ahead. Having heard of these bombings, Brent Ashworth had been scheduled to meet with Mark that afternoon, but he decided against it the last minute. He told his wife, quote, some group decided to take care of a few people. Let's get the kids and get out of here.
The group that Brent was referring to was a militant fundamentalist subset of Mormons, a secret society known as the Danites that some suspected was targeting those connected to the Salamander letter.
This was the suspicion that was forming, at least in the minds of the people in the orbit of that letter and involved in these bombings. And then there was the issue of the McLellan collection. Now, reportedly, Gordon B. Hinckley, this was the president of the Mormon church, had agreed to buy the McLellan collection for $300,000. But then Hinckley denied that there was any record of a meeting with Mark Hoffman to buy these.
And the LDS church was not cooperating with the investigation into this. They seemed to want to impede it.
There were a lot of people connected with the church who did not want this collection to ever see the light of day. To be frank, they were trying to sweep it under the rug. The Salamander letter had already done enough damage to the church's credibility, and the McLellan collection was poised to potentially subvert the whole religion. So it was theorized that this was why Mark Hoffman had been targeted.
And everyone in the small community of rare Mormon document collecting and dealing immediately became a suspect to police. Like Mark Hoffman's close friend and associate, Shannon Flynn. Shannon had admitted to police that he owned an Uzi, which he'd gotten from Mark Hoffman, which the two of them had gone out shooting in the desert. So a search warrant was immediately executed on Flynn's home.
When they found the Uzi he had mentioned, Flynn was taken into custody and charged with possession of an unregistered firearm. And inside the home, detectives found a copy of the anarchist's cookbook.
which is a notorious publication containing recipes and instruction guides for building homemade bombs. Now, while he was in custody, Flynn was given a polygraph test and he passed and they really couldn't find any hard evidence tying Flynn to the bombings. So he was able to post bond on the weapons charges and he, at least for the moment, was not facing any additional charges.
As Detective Jim Bell entered the LDS trauma room where Mark Hoffman was being treated, he overheard a group of physicians looking at his x-rays, pointing out a piece of shrapnel that was lodged into his knee.
He approached Mark to interview him and was told by the medical staff to speak into his right ear as the blast had, at least temporarily, obliterated the hearing in his left ear. So he asked Mark where he was going or coming from at the time that the bomb exploded. And Mark explained that he'd been on his way to see a lawyer to broker the sale of rare documents, documents that were in the trunk of his car at the time the bomb went off. What about earlier in the day? The detective asked Mark, where were you then?
Now, Mark couldn't account for exactly where he was other than to say, quote, he just drove around. The detective was like, okay, but where? He said, just around. After a pause, he added that he had spent the morning in Immigration Canyon just thinking.
The detective is like, okay, what, why were you driving? What were you thinking about? He said again, just thinking. Now Mark was pretty sparse with the details. Detective Bell asked Mark to be more specific about what happened leading up to the explosion. And Mark reiterated that he just returned to his car, opened the door and an item on the seat began to fall over. And that's when it exploded. The problem was Mark's injuries and the damage to the car.
painted a picture that differed from Mark's story. The evidence suggested that the bomb had either been on the driver's seat or right next to it when it went off, not on the floor like Mark was claiming.
And then witnesses who were at the judge building the morning of the bombing in the hour before the bomb exploded and killed Steve Christensen told police that they had seen a strange man at the building that morning. One witness saw the man riding the elevator up to the sixth floor carrying a brown package addressed to Steve Christensen. Another witness saw the same man walking through the hallway on the sixth floor.
Both witnesses described the man as having dark eyes, rounded cheeks, short hair, and wearing a green letterman's jacket. You know, the kind of jacket that high school athletes wear. But this jacket didn't have any actual lettering on it. It was just in that style. So a composite sketch was made and released to the media.
Brent Ashworth, this is Mark Hoffman's friend who had skipped town, heard the report about the Green Letterman jacket and realized he thought he knew who the strange man who delivered the bomb was. He immediately thought of his friend, Mark Hoffman. Mark had a jacket just like that. And other friends of Mark had the same realization, but different.
Mark himself had been bombed. So Salt Lake City investigators got several calls as soon as that piece of evidence was released, reporting that Mark Hoffman owned the similar jacket.
And when Hoffman's face was broadcast on local TV, a jeweler who had an office inside the judge building called in a report that Mark Hoffman resembled the man that he'd seen in the elevator that morning carrying a package. Now, as this investigation is unraveling, Hoffman is released from the hospital the same day that Kathy Sheets and Steve Christensen, the first two victims of the bombings, were laid to rest.
He was taken in because of the suspicions about the jacket and given a polygraph test and he passed with the highest passing score the polygraph examiner had ever seen, in fact.
But still, investigators decided to obtain a search warrant on Hoffman's bomb-blasted car and his home. Now, inside of the trunk of his burned-out Toyota, searchers found piles of charred paper that appeared to be antique books and ancient documents, and a piece of galvanized pipe similar to the one used in the bombs.
That evening, another search team showed up at Hoffman's home while he was out, surprising his four children and his wife by asking her for the keys to the house and the code to the alarm. Now, searching the house, police found a green letterman's jacket, just like the one witnesses reported at the judge building the morning of the bombings.
And in the basement of the house, they found a door that was locked. When they forced it open, they discovered a room full of rare books and documents and other curious items. Investigators were quickly beginning to believe that Mark Hoffman himself was the bomber and he had accidentally blown himself up that day with one of his own bombs that he was delivering for someone else. But then...
What's the motive here? And who was Mark Hoffman? I mean, he's the one who stood to make tons of money from this cell. So why kill the people executing it?
Now, Mark Hoffman was born in Utah in 1954 into a devout Mormon family. His father, William, and mother, Lucille, created a very strict, controlled religious environment. And it's safe to say that Mormonism informed everything they did. When he was 14, Mark discovered that his grandparents had continued practicing polygamy even after it had been banned by the Mormon church. And this led to a crisis of faith for the teenager Mark Hoffman.
who from that point forward became an atheist, but secretly. He did not share this belief with anyone else. So was not to displease his family. Mark was good at keeping secrets and Mark was also good at deceiving people. He saw how rule breaking and deception was practiced by seemingly everyone everywhere and this helped shape his worldview and his patterns. When he was 14, Mark went on a treasure hunt with some friends in the woods.
They dug holes in the dirt all afternoon without finding anything. But then, as they were getting ready to leave, Mark suddenly pulled a jar of coins out of the ground. He'd found treasure. His friends were all impressed. But little did they know, Mark had been out to these woods the day earlier and he buried the jar of coins himself.
Mark was a collector of coins, and by the age of 14, he had developed a way to alter coins to increase their value. Using a forgery technique he developed himself. And this isn't only 14 years old. It's safe to say that Mark was not only smart, but he was talented. He sent one of these coins off to the U.S. Treasury for authentication just to see how he did. And they deemed his forged coin authentic.
So this was validating for a young Mark. He had successfully fooled the US Treasury into believing one of his forged coins was the real deal.
And by his own belief system, if something is believed to be genuine, then that itself makes it genuine. The truth doesn't matter, according to Mark. All that matters is what is perceived and what is believed. And for Mark, fooling people gave him a sense of power and authority. And him getting away with it at such a young age really shaped the path he was going to go down.
In 1974, despite privately being an atheist, he moved to Manchester, England to begin doing missionary work for the LDS Church. And in Manchester, they had bookshops where they stocked books that were hundreds of years old, antiques, if you will, rare books of a kind that one couldn't find back in Utah or honestly anywhere else in the United States.
These rare books became an obsession for Mark, and he seemed to possess this exceptional gift for finding rare, one-of-a-kind historical documents tucked away inside of these old books on the shelves of these bookstores that dealt in this kind of material. He was special in this regard, like a pig sniffing out truffles. In 1979, he returned to America and married his wife, Dora Lee, and they would go on to have four children,
But Mark Hoffman was looking for a way to make his mark, no pun intended. And it was in 1980 that he made his first major discovery, the discovery that put him on the map, so to speak, the map where he wanted to be.
One afternoon, Mark had returned home with an old Bible, which he told his wife he had purchased from a man in Salt Lake City. A man who claimed he had gotten this Bible from the granddaughter of Joseph Smith's sister. Now, if you don't know, Joseph Smith is the founder of the LDS Church. So this Bible was, from what Mark was saying, directly connected to him. And in this religious culture, antiques or originals that came about from the beginning of the church are...
collectors items. They are priceless to some people. So Mark invited his wife to look through the Bible while he stepped into another room. And while she was alone with the book, she found two pages stuck together, forming a sort of pouch. And when she placed her finger inside the pouch, she could fill a piece of paper folded and gummed inside of it. It was a document, a secret document. She worked this item out of the book and then called Mark back to show it to him.
He examined it and told her that he believed it to be a lost historical document known as the Anthon Transcript, a piece of paper dating back to 1828 with Mormon church founder Joseph Smith's handwriting on it.
with characters reportedly copied from the golden plates of the Book of Mormon. Now, this is huge. So Mark Hoffman approached the LDS church and they had a documents expert examine what Mark had found. And that expert determined the Anthon transcript to be genuine. And the church bought it from Mark for $25,000.
This acquisition was big news and it instantly catapulted Mark Hoffman into credibility and importance as a rare documents collector and dealer of notes. Mark then told his wife, Dora Lee, that the document she discovered in the book was in fact a forgery. I made this, he told her, and they bought it. Dora Lee was shocked and then she became very upset. At which point Mark then told her, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding.
And she accepted it. A year later, Mark Hoffman discovered another one of a kind document. The Joseph Smith, the third blessing dated 1844, which the Mormon church also bought for a substantial amount of money. So these document deals were keeping Mark afloat. They were his career. Now, all he had to do was go find these documents that had never been discovered and then turn them in.
But it was really the white salamander letter, the one we talked about at the beginning of the story, that generated the most attention and the most controversy. It was a letter that Mark Hoffman first presented to his friend and fellow document collector, Brent Ashworth, in December 1983. Mark claimed to have a network of document scouts who would search for and obtain rare documents for him, and that was how he was stumbling upon all of these documents.
And one of those scouts had come upon this letter in New York. The letter, which was dated October 23rd, 1830, was reportedly written by Martin Harris, who is a significant figure in the beginning history of the Mormon church.
And he was one of the three witnesses who testified that he'd seen the golden plates that Joseph Smith claimed that he translated into the Book of Mormon. Now, the traditional Mormon belief and this part of the fundamental origin story on which the religion is based is that an angel directed Joseph Smith to the golden plates that he uncovered and then were the basis of the Book of Mormon. Now, this is Joseph Smith's own account of what happened.
But in this letter that Mark Hoffman discovered in 1983, Martin Harris talks about Joseph Smith looking into a seer stone, like more or less a crystal ball and having clairvoyant visions and then being trickled by a spirit who assumed the form of a white salamander, like an actual salamander. And it was that spirit that ultimately led him to the gold plates.
So the account in this letter was one that challenged and threatened to completely capsize the Mormon church's foundational narrative about its own history. I mean, this had never been talked about.
In a way, this undermined the religion by reframing the Mormon church's founder as a man who had visions of magical creatures. Now, when Mark Hoffman first shared the Salamander letter with his friend Brent Ashworth, Brent wanted no part of it. This challenged his religion. He told Hoffman to just bury it, that it was probably a forgery anyways, but
But Mark Hoffman had in fact already brought the letter to the LDS church, the church that he had already sold multiple documents to.
And not only did they authenticate it, but they wanted to buy it. So the church sent Steve Christensen, one of the victims of the bombings, acting as their representative to buy the letter. And he negotiated with Mark Hoffman a purchase price of $40,000 to be paid out in multiple installments over the following 18 months.
The Salamander letter became a news item at this point. It was discussed publicly by Gordon B. Hinckley, who was then the leader of the church. But Christensen announced that the letter would not be released until its historical authenticity could be proven. Meanwhile, Mark Hoffman was spending extravagantly and living beyond his means. All of these documents he had sold to the Mormon church seemed to be paying off.
And while he had a wife and four children to support, his money often actually went to personal travel and material items. Like the time he went vehicle shopping to buy a van for his family and actually ended up driving home with a sports car for himself.
By 1985, his debts were mounting. He was nearly half a million dollars in the hole and he had needed to find another document fast. He was now seeking high stake items such as the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith had loaned to Martin Harris in 1828, never to be seen again. So they were lost scripture according to the LDS religion and he was trying to find them.
Mark Hoffman regarded this item as the Holy Grail of Mormonism and stood to make potentially tens of millions of dollars if he ever found it. Mark Hoffman was also seeking an elusive compilation of documents he referred to as the McLellan Collection, which was a rumored collection of documents that a man named William McLellan, who defected from the Mormon Church, had taken with him after he broke with the church.
These documents supposedly were explosive and incriminating and would reflect even more poorly on the Mormon church than the newly discovered salamander letter. Because you have to remember, Mark Hoffman is going to church every week.
but he secretly does not like the church. So finding these letters that looked bad for the church and then selling them to the church so that they could bury them kind of makes sense. And his luck would seemingly have it after finding the salamander letter and being on the lookout for the McLellan collection while in hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,
Mark Hoffman reportedly found the McLellan collection and he was negotiating to buy it from a source in New York. And that's when he approached a man named Alvin Rust for an investment loan. Alvin was a coin and document collector who had invested in previous deals that Hoffman had made and had walked away with profits in each of those cases. Hoffman told Alvin Rust that the sellers of the McLellan collection wanted $185,000 for it.
Well, I have $35,000, he told Russ, persuading him to invest the remaining $150,000, promising a total sell price of upwards of $300,000 to the church. He told Alvin that this collection was 20 times more important than anything that they'd ever dealt in before. So Alvin Russ took out a bank loan and gave Mark the $150,000, believing that this was a good investment based on his past business history with Hoffman.
Now around this time, Mark had seemingly made another major discovery, like huge. It was a long lost document that was thought to be the first printed document printed on a printing press in the New World. Not to do with the Mormon church, it was the Oath of a Freeman. The Oath of a Freeman was a short document, 222 words, that was drafted by colonists in New England, giving them citizenship and voting rights provided they agree to support the Massachusetts Bay Colony government.
It had been printed on October 10th, 1638, and yet no copies earlier than 1646 had ever been found. It was a document whose only known existence was in its many reprints. Collectors had been seeking this original for decades.
And Mark told his friends that he'd gone into a bookshop in New York and bought a few random sheets of paper. And one of them happened to be the original Oath of a Freeman. And some preliminary examinations by document experts concluded that the document appeared to be authentic. And Mark was planning on selling it for somewhere north of $1 million. I mean, they've moved out of the church now.
So the letter was sent off to the University of California for something called a cyclotron test. And the results of the test did not disprove the letter's authenticity. Hoffman then offered another document examiner a 50% cut of the expected $1.5 million sell price if he could authenticate the document.
which sounds awfully like a bribe to me. And this was all going down at the time that the bombings occurred. So this is where Mark is in his life at this point.
Mark was hoping to use some of that oath of a Freeman money to mount a legal defense because it was looking like he was going to be charged in the bombings. It seemed like the net was closing in on him and he had now been publicly named as a suspect because of the green jacket, because of the inconsistencies in his story. But investigators were still lacking that smoking gun, something that would establish a motive because it still doesn't make sense here.
Until they revisited the items collected from Mark's house during the search warrant and took notice of something that they had previously overlooked. It was a pair of service orders for some engraving shops and both were made out to someone named Mike Hansen. Now this was a name that police had not yet heard. Who was Mike Hansen and what was his connection to Mark Hoffman?
They were soon about to find out. They called one of the engraving shops. The detective on the call told them his name was Mike Hansen and he wanted a receipt for the order for his financial records. So they lied. They sent out the receipt and when they got it, they saw that it was for an engraving plate for the oath of a freeman. And because the buyer seemed to be short a couple of dollars when paying cash, he paid the rest with a personal check.
with the names of Mark and Doralee Hoffman, and Mark's signature in the bottom right corner.
Detectives decided at this point to go pay a visit to the engraving shop. They showed the staff the work order and receipt and they were like, oh yeah, that's the guy who wanted the engraving plates made for the oath of a Freeman. They showed them the plates and it was a perfect match to what was now clearly a forgery. They had just found proof that Mark Hoffman forged
forged the oath of a Freeman discovery that he was about to sell for $1.5 million. In the forgery, they found a tell an anomaly in the letter M that would have been the result of modern photographic techniques. They couldn't have existed if the document were original. Now this took a lot of time. They had to send it off to other people who then re-examined after feeling like there was proof that it was fake.
So now they needed to also prove that the salamander letter was also a forgery because remember everyone involved in the bombings had to do with this letter. If they could prove that it was a forgery, this would be the smoking gun they were seeking. If these men had found out that the salamander letter was forged, Mark Hoffman was about to be in trouble.
This would clearly establish motive. And it was looking like Mark's motive was he felt he was about to be exposed as one of the world's most prolific forgerers. And he needed to buy himself some time and create a diversion.
The FBI, which was now investigating the case, had examined the Salamander letter themselves and they concluded that it was genuine. But they nevertheless sought a second opinion and hired one of the world's most skilled forensic document examiners to examine the letter. And that man was George Throckmorton, who himself was a Mormon. So being a man of integrity, he sought out a secondary document examiner named William Flynn, who wasn't Mormon, so there'd be no room to accuse him of bias.
Since you know, some people initially suspected someone or some group associated with the Mormon church was behind the bombings. These two men spent over a hundred hours examining the salamander letter and other documents that were sold to the church by Mark Hoffman. They looked for anything that would betray them as forgeries, something anachronistic that didn't make sense or couldn't have existed in an authentic document.
And finally they found it. Throckmorton began noticing a certain cracking pattern in the ink, which he called alligatoring. And this was a pattern that he kept seeing again and again, and only in the documents that Mark Hoffman had handled or discovered. None of the control documents, which had been stored for years in a vault, exhibited the same alligatoring pattern. But Throckmorton had to figure out what was causing it, and he felt that if he could, he could prove that they were forgeries.
And one thing among many that document examiners look for when they're inspecting a historical document for its authenticity is how the ink has aged over time. Over a long period of time, the ink that was used in centuries past would bleed through to the other side of the paper, which is something that modern documents, including forgeries, don't generally exhibit.
and the Hoffman documents all exhibited this bleed through. But Throckmorton wondered if Hoffman wasn't using some kind of suction to pull the ink through to the other side, and perhaps using a solution to age the paper, making it look as if it had undergone years of environmental damage.
Throckmorton decided to experiment by creating his own ink to mimic the kind of ink that was used in centuries past and then spraying an ammonia solution onto the document to age it. Now, once he did that, he hung the document up to dry and the end result was this. The ink bore the same alligator skin pattern as the Mark Hoffman documents. This proved that they were all forgeries.
Mark Hoffman was arrested in January 1986 and charged with multiple counts that included first degree murder, bomb related charges and fraud. He pleaded not guilty and maintained his innocence until he and his attorneys realized that the degree of evidence that was mounting against him was large and the likelihood was he was going to face the death penalty because he killed two people.
Because of this, Mark Hoffman decided to accept a plea deal with one of the conditions being that Hoffman had to provide full disclosure, giving a complete account of all of his crimes and answering every question truthfully. What the interview revealed was that Hoffman was almost certainly a psychopath, a guy whose every document find had in fact been a forgery since the beginning.
and he knew his house of cards was about to topple over before the bombings. He was deeply in debt, and that McLellan collection he was brokering the sell of
It didn't exist. He hadn't made it yet. He needed the money immediately and began the transaction with the church with Alvin Russ money before he had time to forge the entire collection, which turned out to be an undertaking far bigger than he had anticipated. He'd bitten off more than he could chew and he knew he wouldn't be able to deliver it in time. And
And on the very day he was killed, Steve Christensen had plans to meet with Mark Hoffman to accompany him to a safe deposit box and retrieve the so-called McClellan collection to go have it authenticated. It was time to turn it over. But Mark knew the documents weren't there. So he blew up Steve Christensen purely to buy himself some time. And the bomb that was intended for Gary Sheets, which ended up killing the man's wife instead, that was planted purely as a diversion.
And Mark claimed it was constructed in such a way that there was a 50% chance it wouldn't even go off. When the psychiatrist interviewing Mark asked him why he didn't just make the diversionary bomb non-operational so that no one had to die. And keep in mind, Kathy and Gary Sheets also had a toddler who could have easily been the one to pick up the box. In response to this, Mark just sort of shrugged and went, well, that's life. People die in car accidents all the time. What's the difference?
Mark claimed that the bomb that exploded on him and his car was a suicide attempt, but no one really bought it. Mark had been scheduled to meet Brent Ashworth that afternoon, but Brent Ashworth ended up getting a weird feeling and canceling, remember, which may have saved his life. Hoffman admitted using vacuum suction to pull the ink through the other side of the paper and using various sophisticated processes to age the documents.
He had learned and developed all of these techniques himself over time, spending those many hours alone behind that locked door in his home that no one was allowed to enter. And truly, his wife had no idea. She was shocked to learn that her husband was a total fraud, a forger, and a killer. And Mark admitted having used his wife to discover the first major document find, the Anthem transcript, when he left her alone with the antique Bible in which he had hidden it for her to find.
Ultimately, Mark Hoffman met before the parole board and it was decided that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. And that's when he tried to put out a hit on the parole board members. He was approaching his fellow inmates, inquiring as to how he might go about having them all killed. And when his wife divorced him, he banned her and the kids from ever visiting again.
He would actually go on to attempt suicide by swallowing a cache of sleeping pills he had collected from other inmates and had been hoarding, but he survived the attempt. And because he had been unconscious for an extended period of time, lying on top of his right arm in a way that it cut off the circulation, he suffered permanent muscle atrophy in that arm, guaranteeing he would never be able to forge another document with it again. And if that is not poetic justice, I don't know what is.
Now the Mark Hoffman case is such a wild story and at least four books were written about it simultaneously and in 2021 an excellent Netflix docuseries dropped covering the Mark Hoffman story. It's called "Murder Among the Mormons" and if you found this story interesting I would highly recommend it for a much deeper dive. The thing about Mark Hoffman is he made so many people look stupid.
I mean, the FBI said it was authentic. This extremely wealthy church said they were authentic. He had sold documents to the US government. I mean, how many people had he fooled? And I can't help but ask the question, are there any other documents out there that are also forgeries, but we still haven't discovered it yet?
On next week's episode, we'll cover not one, but multiple cases, bombings and explosions that remain unsolved to this day, including a fairly novel bomb that killed a man in Canada in 1996 and a mysterious explosion in the sky that took place over 60 years ago. But remember, that's not until next week because we heard you and you guys wanted these weekly. So we'll see you then where you can continue to binge this series.