Hoax: Hitler’s Diaries, Lincoln’s Assassins, and Other Famous Frauds

1. Oath of a Freeman

1 oath of a Freeman The King of Forgers Mark Hofmann was unquestionably the most skilled forger this country has ever seen . . . he perpetrated by far the largest monetary frauds through forgery that this country has ever had. He fooled me—he fooled everybody. —Charles Hamilton, document dealer and handwriting expert On October 16, 1985, a neatly dressed man in his mid-thirties clutched the handle on the door of his blue Toyota. As he innocently opened the door a brown paper package resting on the console slipped between the two front seats and fell to the floor. It happened in less than a second. The inside of the car erupted in a violent fireball, blowing the roof off of the car and lifting the man several feet into the air and hurtling him backward as if he had been suddenly pulled by a giant hand and thrown on the ground. Pieces of the car flew through the air, landing on the parking lot’s black macadam surface as much as a hundred feet away. The air was filled with swirling shreds of paper, fabric, and glass shards that rained down around the burning vehicle. The man lay on his back with his knees drawn up, giving the appearance of someone resting in the warm autumn sun. His right knee was torn apart, with blood spurting from a gaping wound. The flesh from a finger on his right hand had been blown off, leaving the bone exposed. His clothes were in tatters. It was the third bomb explosion to take place in the peaceful city of 6 HOAX Salt Lake within the past thirty hours. The previous morning a bomb had exploded on the fourth floor of the Judge Building in downtown Salt Lake, killing Steve Christensen as he showed up for work. A few hours later, Kathy Sheets, a suburban housewife, picked up a package left by the garage door and became the second victim that morning. Now a third bomb had exploded, seriously injuring its victim. It appeared that a serial bomber was on the loose. Frightened residents became panicky, wondering who would be next. There were plenty of motives suggesting why the people were being attacked. The question bothering most people, however, was who would be next? Steve Christensen, the first victim, had been a partner of J. Gary Sheets in an investment company. It was Sheets’s wife who was the second victim . The third victim was Mark Hofmann, a thirty-one-year-old former pre-med student at Utah State University who dropped out of college and became a highly successful rare documents dealer. It wasn’t long before Christensen, Sheets, and Hofmann became intimately linked, along with several other people, through Hofmann’s amazing discoveries of rare church-related documents. The trail that wound its way through the heady fields of investment and rare documents, ending in murder, is one of the more fascinating stories in the area of historical fraud to occur in American history. It all began with Hofmann’s fortuitous discovery of a document known to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (commonly known as Mormons) as the “Anthon Transcript,” and ended with his discovery of America’s holy grail, a diminutive document known as “The Oath of a Freeman.” The Anthon manuscript that Mark Hofmann allegedly found is a small piece of paper containing several strange looking characters. Church lore says that Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism, created it as his key to translating the strange Egyptian hieroglyphic characters from the golden plates the angel Moroni had shown him buried in the woods near his farm in upstate New York. At the time of his “discovery” of the Anthon Transcript, Hofmann was a twenty-six-year-old-student at Utah State University. He had been interested in history and collecting ever since he was a young boy. Hofmann’s love of books and history were at the core of his personality. Like many young boys, Hofmann’s interest had been in coins, but as he grew older he became fascinated with historical documents. He soon developed an uncanny knack for finding rare documents that were of great historical significance, especially to the Mormon Church. He attributed his unusual Oath of a Freeman 7 success to his methodology of discovery. Tracing the descendants of famous people, or people closely associated with famous...