Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case

Description

pp. viii, (1), 519, “Richard Turley, managing director of the LDS Church Historical Department has pieced together as no one else has (or possibly could) events leading up to the senseless Salt Lake City bombing deaths of Steven Christensen and Kathleen Sheets in 1985. Mark Hofmann, master forger, document dealer (and document thief) was behind the murders and was apprehended only after he accidentally set off a third bomb intended for someone else, nearly killing himself in the process. Besides providing full documentation of the involvement of LDS church authorities in document deals with Mark Hofmann, Turley renders an invaluable service to historians, document dealers and genealogy buffs by listing (pp. 346-394) all materials–from a bogus 1844 Presidential Campaign token for Joseph Smith, to affidavits, letters, journals, legal documents, and printed banknotes–known to have been handled by Hofmann during his short-lived career. Some of the legal documents have been returned to their original repositories (such as the Hancock County courthouse in Carthage, IL) from which they were stolen by Hofmann and his associates during the 1970s. Even a cursory reading of the entries will send chills down the spine of any student of early Mormonism. And now it appears that Hofmann’s forgeries are becoming collectibles.”