“Utah is filled with 13,000 years of human history,” explains archaeologist and State Historic Preservation Officer, Chris Merritt. “Every single artifact tells us something about the people that came before us, from the first Native Americans entering what we now call Utah to the remains of the uranium mining industry. Each layer of the past tells more of the story of who we are as Utahns.”

On an ordinary October morning in 1985, downtown Salt Lake City was shattered by a blast that killed businessman and document collector Steve Christensen. Hours later, a second bomb tore through a quiet Holladay neighborhood, killing Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s former business partner. The next day saw a third explosion. This one was in a car near Temple Square that nearly killed rare-documents dealer Mark Hofmann. 

Rumors swirled instantly, tying the attacks to money, religion, and shadowy early-Mormon documents Christensen had recently acquired. For days, Utah held its breath. What unfolded was stranger and darker than fiction. The bombs weren’t the work of religious extremists or enemies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but instead, the doings of Mark Hofmann himself. Hofmann was a nerdy, soft-spoken dealer who had secretly become one of the most skilled document forgers in American history. 

His creations were so convincing that they reshaped historical narratives, fooling scholars, collectors, and church leaders. When the lies began to close in, the bombs became his final, desperate attempt to keep his world from collapsing.

Hofmann had been fabricating Mormon and American historical documents for years. He was a prodigy of deception, sourcing period paper, mixing inks that cracked just right, and mimicking handwriting with obsessive precision. Most of all, he knew how to read people. Utah in the 1970s and ’80s was a collector’s paradise. As bookseller Ken Sanders told Salt Lake Magazine, it was “a consciousness shift,” a recognition that rare Utah history was a treasure worth pursuing. It was also, he notes, fertile ground for affinity fraud.

Nothing captured that vulnerability more than the Salamander Letter, a supposed 1830s correspondence which claimed Joseph Smith encountered a magical white salamander rather than an angel. The document shook Latter-day Saint circles. Church leaders, worried about its implications, quietly purchased it along with other materials Hofmann dangled before them. Many reasoned that if the church was willing to buy it, then it must be authentic and true, and Hofmann understood that psychology perfectly.