The Mark Hofmann Case — Forger Turned Salt Lake City Bomber

The Case

The Mark Hofmann case is one of the most unusual American murder cases of the 20th century: a double bombing in Salt Lake City, Utah, in October 1985, carried out by a respected rare-document dealer who turned out to be a prolific forger of Mormon historical documents. Hofmann used homemade bombs to kill two people connected to his fraud schemes, before a third device exploded in his own car and unraveled the entire operation. The case is documented in detail by Wikipedia's overview of Mark Hofmann and in the Utah History Encyclopedia entry on Hofmann.

The Crime

On the morning of October 15, 1985, a pipe bomb left in a package detonated at the downtown Salt Lake City office of document collector and businessman Steven F. Christensen, killing him instantly. Only hours later, a second bomb exploded at the suburban home of Gary Sheets, a business associate of Christensen; it killed Gary's wife, Kathy Sheets, when she picked up the package.

The next day, October 16, 1985, a third bomb went off inside a car parked near Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City. The vehicle belonged to Mark Hofmann, who was seriously injured in the blast. Investigators initially considered him a potential fourth target, but the forensic picture quickly shifted: the pattern of the bombings and the contents of his car suggested he had been transporting, not receiving, the device.

The Victims

Steven F. Christensen was a Salt Lake City businessman and document collector deeply involved in authenticating and brokering early Latter-day Saint historical materials, including documents Hofmann had sold. Kathy Sheets was the wife of Christensen's business partner Gary Sheets and had no direct role in the document deals; investigators concluded the second bomb was likely intended to make the killings look like a business-related attack on the Sheets-Christensen financial firm rather than a targeted strike on Christensen alone.

Hofmann himself was injured by the third bomb and later admitted he had been the one carrying it. In that narrow sense, he was both perpetrator and victim of his own device.

Investigation

Salt Lake City police, federal agents and document experts spent roughly three months piecing the case together. They examined the bomb components, Hofmann's movements, and — crucially — the documents he had been selling to collectors and to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specialists found that Hofmann had artificially aged ink and paper to manufacture supposedly historic items such as the so-called "Salamander Letter" and a purported collection of papers tied to early apostle William E. McLellin.

As the forgery evidence piled up, the motive for the bombings came into focus. Christensen had been pressing Hofmann about overdue deliveries and authentication problems, and Hofmann had taken large sums of money for documents — including the McLellin collection — that did not exist or were fakes. The bombings, prosecutors concluded, were meant to buy time and deflect suspicion. Hofmann was arrested in January 1986 and ultimately faced 27 counts, including murder, bomb-related offenses, theft by deception and communication fraud.

Trial and Verdict

Rather than go to trial, Hofmann reached a plea agreement. In January 1987, in a Utah state court, he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Christensen and Sheets, one count of theft by deception related to the Salamander Letter, and one count of fraud related to the bogus sale of the McLellin collection. The court sentenced him to five years to life at the Utah State Penitentiary, with the judge recommending that he never be released.

As part of the plea, Hofmann admitted in detail how he had built his forgeries and why he had turned to murder, providing investigators and historians with a rare inside account of one of the largest document-fraud schemes ever uncovered, as outlined by Utah State University's retrospective on the case.

Today

Mark Hofmann remains incarcerated in Utah. The Utah Board of Pardons has repeatedly declined to release him, citing both the murders and the scope of his fraud. His forgeries forced historians and the LDS Church to re-examine numerous documents he had sold or donated, and the case continues to shape how archives authenticate 19th-century American religious materials.

The story has been retold in books, academic studies, podcasts and documentaries, most prominently the Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons, as well as in long-form video features such as this case retrospective and this documentary segment. More than four decades after the bombings, the Hofmann case is still cited as a benchmark example of how forgery, greed and violence can intersect.