Mark Hofmann

Mark Hofmann: The Master Forger Who Killed to Bury His Fakes

For five years Mark Hofmann supplied the past on demand. A Salt Lake City documents dealer who started at 25, he "discovered" papers that shook the founding story of the Latter-day Saints, sold many of them to the church itself, and fooled experts at the FBI, the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society. When his debts outran his inventions in October 1985, he turned to bombs. Steven Christensen, 31, and Kathleen Sheets, 50, were killed. A third bomb, in Hofmann's own car, gave him away. He pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, and the judge told him he should stay in prison "for the rest of your natural life." At 71, he still is.

The Model Son

Mark William Hofmann was born in Salt Lake City on 7 December 1954, Pearl Harbor Day, the only son among the three children of William and Lucille Hofmann. His parents were devout Latter-day Saints and hoped he would become a doctor, a scientist or a church leader. He earned his Eagle Scout award, and in late 1973 he was called to a church mission in England.

In 1976 he enrolled at Utah State University in Logan and studied pre-medicine, but spent long hours in the library's special collections reading early church history. Friends later told the writer Linda Sillitoe that as a teenager he had already sold at least one coin with an altered mint mark. In 1979 he married Doralee Olds in the Salt Lake Temple; they had four children.

A Bible With Stuck Pages

On 17 April 1980, with the university's archivist, Hofmann separated the stuck pages of a 1688 Bible and produced the "Anthon Transcript," a paper tied to the earliest days of the Book of Mormon. The church accepted it within five days. In October he traded it to the church for coins, a Book of Mormon and pioneer currency worth about $20,000. He was 25.

The finds kept coming. In 1981 a blessing supposedly given by Joseph Smith to his son, implying that the son, not Brigham Young, was meant to lead the church, brought about $20,000 more in trade. Each document was rarer and more pointed than the last.

The White Salamander

In January 1984 Hofmann sold Steven Christensen and Gary Sheets an 1830 letter supposedly written by Martin Harris, one of the church's early founders, for $40,000. In it, a white salamander, not an angel, guided Joseph Smith to the plates. The letter fooled two forgery experts, was widely published and caused a crisis of faith for many members. In April 1985 Christensen donated it to the church.

Forging the First Page of America

That spring Hofmann reached for something larger than Mormon history. The Oath of a Freeman, the loyalty pledge of the Massachusetts Bay Colony printed around 1638 or 1639, was said to be the oldest printed document in English North America. No copy was thought to survive. Hofmann claimed he had bought one at New York's Argosy Book Store for $25.

It was offered to the Library of Congress for $1.5 million. The library's conservation tests found nothing to contradict a 17th-century date; it declined in June 1985 over price, provenance and title. In September the American Antiquarian Society offered $250,000. Hofmann was also producing letters attributed to Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Boone and Betsy Ross, and an Emily Dickinson poem. Sillitoe would later judge him the most versatile and skilled forger ever caught.

The Collection That Did Not Exist

The money ran faster than the forgeries. He owed the dealer handling the Oath more than $300,000. In April 1985 the collector Alvin Rust advanced him $150,000 to buy the papers of early apostle William McLellin, a collection that did not exist as Hofmann described it. In October the church arranged a $185,000 purchase for the middle of the month. Christensen was due to inspect the papers.

The Fifteenth of October

On the morning of 15 October 1985 a package waited outside Christensen's office in the Judge Building in downtown Salt Lake City. He picked it up and was killed. Steven F. Christensen was 31, a businessman and a bishop in the church, a collector who had trusted Hofmann's work enough to buy it. He died two hours before he was due to examine the McLellin papers.

Hours later a second package exploded at the Holladay home of Gary Sheets, Christensen's former business partner. It killed his wife, Kathleen Webb Sheets, 50. Their daughter Gretchen was 19. Prosecutors said the Sheets bomb was a diversion, meant to point police toward a business dispute.

The next day a bomb went off in Hofmann's own car and critically injured him. Investigators found that his wounds did not fit his account, and he became the prime suspect.

The Bargain

In February 1986 prosecutors charged him with two murders and 23 counts of theft by deception and communications fraud. Document examiners George Throckmorton and William Flynn found a distinctive cracking pattern in the ink common to the papers Hofmann had "found." On 23 January 1987 he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of theft by deception. The deal spared him a possible death sentence and required him to explain his schemes. Judge Kenneth A. Rigtrup sentenced him to five years to life. In January 1988 the Utah Board of Pardons refused to set a parole date and indicated he should spend the rest of his life in prison.

The Fakes That Outlived the Case

The forgeries kept surfacing. In 1997, a decade after he went to prison, the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts, bought an Emily Dickinson poem at Sotheby's for $24,150; it was his. By 2002 the church had identified 446 Hofmann forgeries in its collections. That year Hofmann wrote from prison that a rare coin headed for auction, already examined and declared authentic by the Secret Service, was also his work, a claim the auction house doubted. In the same letter he wrote: "I never intended my forgeries to have money-losing victims." In 2021 the forged Oath of a Freeman sold at Heritage Auctions, as a forgery, for $52,500.

The church changed. It opened its archives, posted thousands of documents online, launched the Joseph Smith Papers and adopted strict testing and provenance checks.

Hofmann spent 28 years in maximum security at the Utah State Prison in Draper before a 2015 move to the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison. Reports from October 2025 and March 2026 place him there still, serving life.

On Screen and in Print

• Murder Among the Mormons (2021), Netflix three-part documentary series, directed by Jared Hess and Tyler Measom.
• Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders (1988), book by Linda Sillitoe and Allen D. Roberts.
• Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (1992), book by Richard E. Turley Jr.
• The Poet and the Murderer (2002), Dutton, by Simon Worrall, on the Emily Dickinson forgery.

Why Mark Hofmann Is Called a Genius

Because the deception worked at the highest level. Working out of Salt Lake City, he produced documents that satisfied conservators at the Library of Congress, experts at the FBI and the leaders of a worldwide church. That skill is why he appears on Geniuses.club, filed under Forgery. It is not admiration. His craft was theft from the start: of money, of trust and of a people's history. When exposure came close, he chose to kill. Steven Christensen, a young bishop who had bought his work and believed in it, and Kathleen Sheets, a mother whose only link to the deals was her husband's name, died so that a liar could buy time. The talent was real. It is the reason the crime was possible, never a reason to forgive it.

Achievements

• His forged "Oath of a Freeman" was offered to the Library of Congress for $1.5 million; the library's conservation tests found nothing to contradict a 17th-century date.
• By 2002 the Latter-day Saint church had identified 446 Hofmann forgeries in its own collections.
• Produced the "Anthon Transcript" in April 1980, aged 25; the church accepted it within five days.
• Sold the "Salamander Letter" for $40,000 in 1984; it shook the church's founding story until it was exposed.
• A forged Emily Dickinson poem sold at Sotheby's in 1997, a decade after he went to prison, for $24,150.
• Fooled experts at the FBI, the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society.
• On 23 January 1987 pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for killing Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets.
• His exposure pushed the church to open its archives and adopt strict testing and provenance checks.