Stop the Press

by James W. Ure

  The documents he created included the “Joseph Smith III Blessing.” Ostensibly written by Joseph Smith, the forged document called for the leadership of the church to go to Joseph's descendants. This was what the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (now known as the Community of Christ) had been claiming since Brigham's takeover of the leadership in the 1840s. It struck at the heart of the legitimacy of succession, therefore the very foundation on which the Utah church had been built.19

  There was also the “Salamander Letter,” supposedly written by Martin Harris, the secretary to Joseph's translations, which offered a version of the recovery of the golden plates in marked contrast to the official version of the church.20

  Hofmann realized that through his counterfeits he wielded enormous power to manipulate the church. To make this sudden flood of important Mormon documents seem plausible, Hofmann explained that he relied on a network of tipsters. He said he had methodically tracked down modern descendants of early Mormons and had mined collections of nineteenth-century letters that had been saved by collectors for their postmarks rather than for their contents.21

  In 1983, Hofmann sold directly to Apostle Gordon B. Hinckley an 1825 Joseph Smith holograph purporting to confirm that Smith had been treasure hunting and practicing black magic five years after his first vision. Hofmann had the signature authenticated by Charles Hamilton, the contemporary “dean of American autograph dealers.” The sale price was $15,000. He also gave his word that no one else had a copy.22

  Then Hofmann leaked its existence to the press, after which the church was virtually forced to release the letter to scholars for study, despite previously denying it had it in its possession. Hofmann also sold forged signatures unrelated to Mormonism: George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Miles Standish, and Button Gwinnit, the rarest signature on the Declaration of Independence. He forged a “previously unknown poem” by Emily Dickenson.23 His tour de force was a forgery of “The Oath of a Freeman.” The “Oath” was the first document printed in the United States in 1639 and is probably the most famous missing document in US history. Hofmann expected to get $1 million for it.24

  No one knows exactly how many documents he created in the 1980s or how many were purchased by the church. Some may still be in the hands of unwitting buyers. In spite of all the money rolling in, Hofmann was spending lavishly, including buying genuine first edition books. He was deeply in debt.

  Desperate, he attempted to broker a sale of the “McLellin Collection,” supposedly a cluster of documents written by William E. McLellin, an early Mormon apostle who left the church. Hofmann hinted that the McLellin collection would provide revelations unfavorable to the LDS Church.25

  Hofmann had no time to forge a suitably large group of documents. Those to whom Hofmann had promised documents or repayments of debts began to hound him.

  Meanwhile, questions arose about the authenticity of his “Oath of a Freeman.” In a desperate effort to buy more time, Hofmann began constructing bombs. On October 15, 1985, his first bomb killed document collector Steven Christensen, the son of a locally prominent clothier, Mac Christensen, known for the missionary wear he sold at his chain of stores, Mr. Mac. The nail bomb killed Christensen in his office in downtown Salt Lake City. Later the same day, a second bomb exploded at the home of J. Gary Sheets, killing his wife, Kathy.26

  As Hofmann had intended, police initially suspected that the bombings were related to the impending collapse of an investment business of which Sheets was the principal and Christensen his protégé.27

  The following day, Hofmann himself was severely injured when one of his bombs exploded while he sat in his car, which was parked near the Salt Lake Temple. In a letter written to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole in 1988, Hofmann wrote he was trying to kill himself with the third bomb.28

  Said Jim Woolf, a Tribune reporter at the time, “I ran up the street from the Tribune as soon as I heard it on the police radio. Hofmann's car was still smoking, debris were all over the road. They had Hofmann in the ambulance.”29

  As law officers knitted the parts together, the story began to take shape in the pages of the Tribune.

  For readers of both the Tribune and the Deseret News, the welter of information on the various documents, as well as the church's public statements, seemed to create a chaotic, disjointed narrative of events.

  Woolf said, “I was totally confused by all of the revelations.” However, Tribune reporters Mike Carter and Dawn House methodically researched and unraveled the mysteries and intrigue for Tribune readers, to the embarrassment of the LDS Church leadership.30

  Several books would be published on Hofmann, his murders, and the LDS Church, before the details came into focus: the Mormon Church had been complicit in a scheme to hide documents detrimental to the faith.

  Hofmann was tried and convicted under a plea bargain that sealed specifics of the court records, thus sparing the church more embarrassment. He got five years to life at the Utah State Penitentiary, where, after a suicide attempt, he still remains.31

  In a speech on August 6, 1987, Dallin Oaks of the Quorum of Apostles blamed the media for the church's loss of face and credibility:

  According to investigators, the church leaders purchased from Mr. Hofmann and then hid in a vault a number of nineteenth-century letters and other documents that cast doubt on the church's official version of its history.

  This kind of character assassination attributed to anonymous “investigators” has been all too common throughout the media coverage of this whole event. One wonders why the New York Times would not mention in its long article that almost a year earlier the Church had published a detailed list of its Hofmann acquisitions? Is the Times’ motto still “All the news that's fit to print,” or has it become “All the news that fits a particular perspective?”32

  A historian for the church, Richard E. Turley, would write a book with the title Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case.33

  According to Richard and Joan Ostling, the Hofmann forgeries could only have been perpetrated “in connection with the curious mixture of paranoia and obsessiveness with which Mormons approach church history.”34 Persecution is proof of the righteousness of the church's position.

  After Hofmann's exposure, the LDS Church tried to correct the record, but the “public relations damage as well as the forgery losses meant the church was also a Hofmann victim.”35 Robert Lindsay, author of A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money, Murder and Deceit, suggested that Hofmann “stimulated a burst of historical inquiry regarding Joseph Smith's youthful enthusiasm for magic [that] did not wither after his conviction.” Richard Lyman Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling includes a continuation of the exploration of magic.36

  Hofmann had found the most vulnerable part of the LDS Church: the incongruities of its nineteenth-century beginnings and history.

  The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living.

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Jerry O'Brien was publisher of the Tribune when Jay Shelledy arrived. O'Brien, in the tradition of Tribune publishers, was a Catholic and was a veteran newsman. Unlike Jack Gallivan, he was also somewhat shy. He had come to the Tribune after serving as an Associated Press bureau chief. O'Brien gave Shelledy a free hand, and the Tribune began reporting aggressively on the church.

  In 2000, Chris Smith, one of his reporters, discovered a story that led from the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857 directly to the door of the modern Mormon Church. It started with an archeological dig at the site of the massacre. It opened old wounds and infuriated officials of the church. Shelledy directed that the story run in three installments (see the appendix to read the full articles). Before publishing, Shelledy invited a representative of the LDS Church to read a sample of the series. The church representative arrived, “saw the thrust and went away.”1 The first installment hit Salt Lake City doorsteps and newsstands early on Sunday, March 12, 2000. The
headline read the following:2

  Bones of Contention:

  Unearthing Mountain Meadow Secrets: Backhoe at S. Utah Killing Field Rips Open 142-year-old Wound

  Smith's first installment told of the desire in 1999 of the LDS Church president Gordon Hinckley, and descendants of the victims of the Mountain Meadows slaughter, to build a new monument to the 120 Arkansans who died at Mountain Meadows. The dedication would occur on September 11, 1999.

  On August 3, 1999, a backhoe operator from Brigham Young University was excavating for the monument when he unearthed the remains of twenty-nine of the 120 Fancher party emigrants killed in 1857.

  The Tribune article also reported that, initially, the LDS Church and Ron Loving, president of the Mountain Meadows Association (MMA), hoped to prevent the public from knowing anything about what was found. However, a faction of the descendants of the victims, led by Burr Fancher, suspected Loving was working with the church to “sanitize a foul deed.”

  There was a third group, the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation, headed by Scott Fancher, who said, “What we understood in every correspondence, and we thought we had made perfectly clear to the church, was that under no circumstances would the remains be disturbed.” Meanwhile, Brigham Young University's staff archeologist, Shane Baker, explained that in spite of ground-reading radar and other tests, the site where the thirty pounds of bones were excavated was somehow overlooked. The man on the backhoe felt he had no choice but to bring the bones to the attention of authorities.

  The Utah State archeologist, Kevin Jones, hearing of the find, informed BYU that Utah law required a basic scientific analysis when human remains are discovered on private property. Failure to comply was a felony.

  Tribune reporter Chris Smith wrote that BYU's Baker transferred the remains to the University of Utah's forensic anthropology lab in Salt Lake City, “which BYU had subcontracted to do the required ‘osteological’ analysis.”

  Loving, vowing to keep things quiet, managed to get Governor Mike Leavitt to order the bones transferred—over the objections of the state archeologist—back to Baker at BYU.

  The governor “did not feel that it was appropriate for the bones to be dissected and studied in a manner that would prolong the discomfort,” said Leavitt's press secretary later. Asked if he was aware that this was against the law, she replied, “I don't think he was knowledgeable of all the details.”

  Utah Division of History director, Max Evans, got an email from Governor Leavitt and, over the objections of Jones, personally rewrote BYU's state archaeological permit to require immediate reburial of the bones. Jones raised numerous questions over the political power play, including a concern that it was “ethnocentric and racist” to rebury the bones of white emigrants without basic scientific study when similar Native American remains are routinely subjected to such analysis before repatriation.

  It was clear that a complete analysis of the bones could not be finished by the September 10 deadline. After a tense meeting with Loving, Jones agreed to a compromise. Long bones and skulls would be examined, but all would be turned over for reburial.

  During this time, other relatives of the dead had heard about the find. The factions within the Fancher descendants were mad as hornets, threatening suits, saying the bones should have been tested for DNA and returned to the families of origin, and castigating the LDS Church and Ron Loving for trying to cover up the find.

  Resentment over the discovery and of the remains caused a schism in the descendants’ families, with at least one group asking why civil or criminal penalties were not brought against the LDS Church or the MMA for desecrating the grave.

  There was confusion over who was in charge of the MMA. Gene Sessions of Weber State University said he'd been elected president of the MMA. He avowed that Loving was voted out of office in November 1999, in the wake of the controversy. Loving said not so fast: “I wasn't voted out of a damn thing. I was moved up. It was my methods and my way of doing business that got that monument done.”

  The second installment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre series led the front page of the Tribune the next morning, Monday, March 13, 2000. It was headlined, “Voices of the Dead.”3

  Smith wrote, “The Tribune and archeologists believe the full truth has never been told” as new findings came to light.

  While the bones were at the University of Utah, forensic anthropologist Shannon Novak's findings were at variance with official church narratives. Written accounts generally claimed that the women and older children were beaten or bludgeoned to death by Native Americans using crude weapons. Novak looked at twenty different skulls of the newly found Mountain Meadows victims and found that at least five adults had gunshot exit wounds in the posterior of the cranium, clearly showing they'd been shot while facing their killers.

  The article would go on to report that women were also shot in the head at close range. And at least one youngster, believed to be ten to twelve years old, was killed by a gunshot to the top of the head. There was other forensic evidence that a three-year-old was killed by blunt-force trauma to the head—in contradiction to the church's claims that children under eight were spared.

  Smith wrote that bones “began to morph into individuals” as Novak studied the remains. Soon she could identify individuals, including a child's remains with a distinctive reddish tint. They called him “red boy.”

  When the Division of History Director, Max Evans, had overruled Jones, Novak had only a few more hours to examine the remains. “We worked through the night to get as much done as we could. This data had to be gathered,” said Novak.

  The official church history of the massacre, that John D. Lee and Native Americans killed the Fancher party, no longer held up. Gene Sessions, now claiming to be president of the MMA, said it didn't matter. Dead was dead.

  But David Bigler, author of Forgotten Kingdom and a former member of the Utah Board of State History, said, “People want to have the truth, they want it with a capital T and they don't like to have people upset that truth. True believers don't want to think the truth has changed.”

  The third installment of the series appeared on Tuesday, March 14, 2000.4

  Church president Gordon B. Hinckley delivered the dedicatory address at the new monument on September 11, 1999, adding a legal disclaimer on the advice of attorneys: “That which we have done here must never be construed as an acknowledgment of the part of the church of any complicity in the occurrences of this fateful day.”

  The Tribune article asked, if the church held no responsibility, then whom should history hold accountable?

  “[L]ocal people,” Hinckley responded. “I've never thought for one minute—and I've read the history of that tragic episode—that Brigham Young had anything to do with it.”

  For descendants of John D. Lee, the church's position added to many of their uncertainties from that autumn 150 years before. Now there was an unwanted reminder of the horror. The Tribune reported that those who believed an apology was forthcoming from the church had “come up short.” Scott Fancher of the Mountain Meadows Monument Foundation in Arkansas, a group of direct descendants of the victims, said that instead of an admission of guilt, they got “an acknowledgement of neglect and of intentional obscuring of the truth.”

  Apologies will never be forthcoming, said Gene Sessions, president of the Mountain Meadows Association, “one of which is that as soon as you say you're sorry, here come the wrongful death lawsuits.”

  Utah writer Levi Peterson explained another difficulty, especially about Brigham Young's ordering the murders: “If good Mormons committed the massacre, if prayerful leaders ordered it, if apostles and a prophet knew about and later sacrificed John D. Lee, then the sainthood of even the modern church seems tainted. Where is the moral superiority of Mormonism, where is the assurance that God has made Mormons his new chosen people?”

  Said Will Bagley, whose Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows was still unpublished
at the time the series was written, said the church “was on the horns of a dilemma. It can't acknowledge its historic involvement in a mass murder, and if it can't accept its accountability, it can't repent.”

  The Tribune story also brought up blood atonement again and said its shadow still reaches across Utah, the only state today that offers execution by firing squad. Blood atonement, say some historians, is central to understanding why faithful Mormons would conspire to commit mass murder. The article went on to recapitulate some of the reasons that Brigham Young ordered the massacre.

  But LDS Church president Hinckley said, “Let the book of the past be closed.”

  Dominic Welch, who became publisher of the Tribune at the death of Jerry O'Brien in 1994, was a Korean War veteran and a Catholic from Carbon County, Utah, notable for its mix of non-Mormons, descendants of Europeans who immigrated to Utah to work the coal mines. He also sat on the board of the Newspaper Agency Corporation, the company formed by the joint operating agreement. Dominic was considered a tough negotiator and had consistently turned down the church's request that the JOA pick up the costs of the News publishing mornings. Dominic dug in his heels. The Tribune was not going to pay out of its JOA profits to help the News get new presses required for its morning venture.5

  On March 15, 2000, just after Bones of Contention was published, Dominic got a call: LDS Church president Gordon B. Hinckley wanted Dominic in his office. Welch said,

  When I arrived there were three men: President Hinckley, James Faust [a lawyer before becoming second counselor to the First Presidency of the church], and Thomas H. Monson [first counselor to the First Presidency and at this writing president of the church].