Source: Mark Hofmann & "Murder Among the Mormons" Pt 1 - Mormon Stories 1405: Sandra Tanner Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast Published: March 10, 2021 | Archived: April 26, 2026
Video: Mark Hofmann & "Murder Among the Mormons" Pt 1 - Mormon Stories 1405: Sandra Tanner
Channel: Mormon Stories Podcast
Published: March 10, 2021
Duration: 4:37:58
Views: 99,347
Category: Education
Video ID: 42X-OD6Aprc
Description
This week Mormonism and the world (basically) have been captivated by the new Netflix Documentary "Murder Among the Mormons" - which covers the Salt Lake City bombings of 1985, and is currently #2 in the USA on Netflix. (SPOILER ALERT!!!)
While reactions to the documentary (produced & directed by friends Jared Hess and Tyler Measom) have been universally SUPER positive, many progressive and post-Mormons have expressed a wish that the documentary would have spent more time discussing the role of the Mormon church in: a) creating the environment that gave rise to the bombings, b) attempting to cover up/hide its problematic history, and c) obstruct or hinder the investigation of the bombings.
I this epic, 2-part, 6 hour interview with Mormon/Ex-Mormon legend Sandra Tanner, we cover many of the questions/topics/issues that progressive and post-Mormons have been wanting to know about the Mormon church, Mark Hofmann, the bombings, and the investigations, such as:
What do we know about Mark Hofmann's childhood? When and how did Hofmann loose his Mormon faith? What are the similarities between Joseph Smith and Hofmann? What can we ascertain about Mark Hofmann's possible motives for forgery? What role did the church play in hiding or covering up Hofmann's forgeries and contributing to the environment that led up to the bombings? Perhaps most importantly, Sandra recounts the inspiring story of her husband, Jerald Tanner, discovering that Hofmann's Salamander Letter was a forgery a FULL YEAR before the bombings. All this, and so much more.
Part 1 (4 hours) talks mostly about Sandra's memories during and after the bombings. Part 2 (2 hours) focuses more on Sandra's direct reactions to the documentary Murder Among the Mormons.
We hope you enjoy, and a HUGE thanks to Sandra (and Jerald) Tanner for sharing with us their historic insight. For me, this was a true honor. MORE TO COME!
P.S. If you value Sandra and her contributions to Mormon history, please support Sandra Tanner and Utah Lighthouse Ministry with your donations!!!
Timecodes: 00:00:00 - Summary of Sandra’s background 00:14:51 - Sandra’s understanding of Mark Hofmann’s early life & beliefs 00:19:39 - Hofmann’s exposure to treasure digging and LDS truth claims 00:32:02 - Parallels between Hofmann and Joseph Smith 00:36:12 - Theories surrounding the Golden Plates & Book of Mormon 00:45:30 - Speculations on Hofmann’s faith crisis 00:55:53 - Hofmann’s mission, & his research into Mormon history 00:57:03 - Salamander Letter 00:58:50 – Sandra on intentional deception by church leaders 01:00:58 – Hofmann first comes to the Tanners in 1978 to share first known forgery on the 2nd Anointing 01:09:07 – Hofmann’s lack of empathy 01:12:44 – Hofmann’s ego & desire to pull off the “ultimate deception” 01:14:23 – Hofmann’s desire to embarrass the church & expose the faults their “power of discernment” 01:18:50 – Comparisons of Joseph Smith and Hofmann - their “Ponzi schemes” unraveling into chaos and violence 01:20:56 – Discussion of Anthon transcript 01:28:34 – Jerald Tanner first uncovers forgery in 1960s – Oliver Cowdery pamphlet 01:31:21 – Jerald received pushback on forgery claims 01:39:08 – Hofmann’s Joseph Smith III Succession Forgery 01:54:11 - LDS church “front buyers” 01:57:09 – Hofmann’s claim to have the McLellin collection 02:05:19 – Lyn Jacobs 02:08:18 – Questions regarding Hofmann’s sexuality 02:14:09 - Hofmann’s 1825 Letter from Joseph Smith to Josiah Stowell 02:17:42 – What church leaders knew about Joseph Smith’s use of folk magic and treasure digging 02:21:15 – The Smith family merging of folk magic with Christianity 02:28:52 – LDS General Authorities sanitizing Mormon church history (Hinckley, Oaks, Turley) 02:32:50 – Wilford C. Wood “buying up” valuable church artifacts 02:36:29 – Smearing critics 02:44:40 – Top LDS Church leaders knowing problems with church truth claims, but continuing to mislead members 02:46:55 – “rule” that Joseph Smith can’t be known as an intentional deceiver 02:49:56 – General Authorities Hugh B. Brown & B.H. Roberts - questions in faith 02:59:51 – Integrity of Jerald Tanner. 03:05:53 - Martin Harris 03:07:26 - Potential motives and means for deception 03:12:39 - The Anthon Manuscript & photo of Hofmann with LDS General Authorities 03:32:13 - “Salamander or Moroni?” pamphlet for Sunstone Symposium 03:52:51 - Tanners disrespected by the Mormon history community & treatment of the Tanners by Dialogue and Sunstone 04:01:01 – Sandra’s sister was embarrassed by her work 04:03:05 – Sandra’s motivation to keep going. 04:07:41 – The McLellin papers & other Hofmann forgeries 04:09:11 – discussion of Richard Turley’s book on Hofmann & Mormon church’s obstruction of the murder investigation 04:13:47 – Hofmann’s motives for murder & conviction 04:19:27 - Discussion of first murder 04:23:13 - Brent Ashworth as potential target of Hofmann’s 3rd bomb 04:33:04 - Hofmann’s plan to forge the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon
Tags
lds mormon Mark Hofmann Murder Among the Mormons Sandra Tanner John Dehlin
Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)
0:00 hello everyone and welcome to this super exciting special mormon stories podcast interview where we kick off our exploration of the brand new netflix series murder among the mormons by jared hess and tyler me some dear friends of mine which is about the mark hoffman bombings um before we launch into this amazing interview with sandra tanner i just wanted to give you a few quick announcements and explanations about why uh this interview is so important first off um sanders amazing second off uh sandra and gerald tanner were observers of the mark hoffman scandal for the for the five years that it was going on it was actually seven years you'll find out in the interview um so they so sandra offers a really important perspective third is that gerald tanner played a really important role in discovering that the salamander letter mark hoffman's salamander letter was a forgery and he did that at least a full year
1:03 before the bombings and of course if the church and or the media had paid any attention to gerald tanner who had every incentive to simply accept the salamander letter but instead had integrity and discovered it to be a fraud a full year before the bombings so much pain and um and obviously two deaths would have been avoided uh so that's another reason why it's important and unfortunately tyler and jared weren't able to discuss mark gerald tanner's role in discovering the forgery because the film uh didn't have enough time so it's really important that that story get told here um and then finally uh because jared and tyler had to focus on the basic story of you know mark hoffman and the bombings and they only had three hours to do it they were not able to really get into the lds church or the mormon church's culpability in creating the environment that would lead to the bombings in um you know using steve christensen and others as human shields that made them vulnerable uh and exposed ultimately to the
2:20 bombings to creating the perception uh that the mormon church leaders had some sense of of discernment that would you know make people feel safe when really they were put in danger and of course how the mormon church was sort of obstructing the investigative process that could have made it a lot easier on the investigators to convict mark hoffman so those are all really important reasons why this interview is so interesting and so important plus it just gives more amazing background on sandra and gerald tanner in addition to mormon stories podcast episodes i believe 472 to 475 that we've already done on sandra tanner so it's all great stuff i do have one bummer to announce and that's that the camera was not operational for the first 45-ish minutes of this interview so those of you on youtube you're going to notice that there's just a still image for the first like 45 minutes of this interview but don't worry everything from then on
3:26 is fully uh videoed and we got over six hours of sandra tanner in total and it's amazing stuff so anyway uh enjoy this episode you're gonna love it and most importantly you're gonna love murder among the mormons um by by my dear friends uh jared hess and tyler meesum check it out on netflix and uh enjoy mormon stories podcast and just we love you sandra tanner and gerald tanner all right roll the tape hello everyone and welcome to another edition of mormon stories podcast i'm your host john dolin it is march 8th 2021 and we are kicking off this week the beginning of about a week and a half to two weeks of let's just say a mark hoffman focus of course uh march 3rd five days ago uh the the documentary murder among the mormons was released on netflix directed by my friends i consider them dear friends jared hess and tyler mesum the movie has gone viral as they say uh it's it's it's on netflix top 10 as i understand it
4:39 uh as of march 8 2021 it's in the top three in many many countries and of course within mormonism and progressive mormonism and post-mormonism it has has been widely viewed and there's a lot of buzz about it i have discussed the mark hoffman interview on mormon stories podcast at least four times if not more a little in depth uh my amazing interview with sandra tanner which is a top 10 interview of all time i also interviewed brett metcalf which is another top 10 mormon stories interview of all time and then dan witherspoon interviewed kurt bench along with somebody else and they talked for a couple hours about mark hoffman and i'm pretty sure in my interview with dan vogel we discussed mark hoffman at some point i'm gonna need to go back and pull those excerpts out and create shorts of them or at least provide time codes because i think there's some really important stuff there that have not been cold but what you're gonna hear over the next week i'm going to do my best to interview
5:48 several people to give their reactions uh to murder among the mormons and also just their reflections on you know their understanding of the mark hoffman story i'm not going to tell you now who all the people uh are that i'm going to interview but they're going to be good and then this is all going to culminate in um an interview a week from today with jared hess and tyler mesum where we're going to do an in-depth discussion about them their interest in mark hoffman all that they learned about mark hoffman and they're making the documentary and they've uh they've given me the indication this will be their longest and most in-depth interview that they probably will do so i'm excited about that but today uh we're kicking this off uh bringing back two mormon stories uh one of my top heroes if i can say that i don't know if she'll like it but sandra tanner welcome back to mormon stories podcast good morning
6:50 you made the joke coming in that you you uh you said you weren't sure who was more infamous me or you right i'm not sure about that but i think you deserve to be much more infamous in a good way than i do what do you think about that well i don't well i've been at it a lot longer a lot longer yeah well thanks for coming in thanks for joining us good so um we won't we won't be going into detail on sandra tanner's story i'll just give a quick highlight and and sandra you can fill in the blanks but basically as i understand it uh sandra sanders husband was gerald tanner and sandra and gerald uh were raised mormon and lost their faith i would say in the early 1960s is that right sandra yes yeah well 1950 right 1959.
7:46 yeah and basically they dedicated the rest of their lives to educating to researching mormon history and educating the world about factual mormon history uh gerald passed away um several years ago and and sandra's still at it so so much i i really can't think of anybody who's done more work on uh investigating the truth about mormon history and then sharing it with the world i can't think of anyone who's done more than gerald and sandra tanner and that includes dan vogel that includes michael quinn like fon brodie think of the basic biggest names i don't know anyone who has spent more decades published more pages of writing and uh done more research and and had as big of an impact as gerald and sandra tanner do you want to correct me on any of that well we've certainly been at it the longest has been over 60 years at this point i hate to even admit that my word well they're organizations called utah lighthouse ministry you can find them in salt lake city
9:00 today you can find sandra in salt lake city today she has a house right next door to the the office for utah lighthouse ministry and they they have an amazing website utlm.org is that right and to this day you can purchase pamphlets and writings and books and documents but one of the amazing things is um they've published all of that for free on the internet is there anything you haven't made free on the internet that you sell yes we have a lot of our research that is just sold but we have a lot of it also posted free on the internet and when i retire my thought is to put everything that we've been able to put in a pdf file on the internet for free at that point we aren't there yet but so like in preparing for this interview today uh i was immediately through google brought to your website and you've got several you've got mark hoffman's confessions um you've got uh at least one book that talks in detail several chapters about mark hoffman
10:09 about all his forgeries about gerald's analysis of the forgeries right yeah try our gerald's book tracking the white salamander is uh on posted on our website in full plus all our old newsletters and if you go back and look at the newsletters in the 1980s you can see the development of the story of his documents as we follow through and find out about them and put them in our newsletters yeah and as i was doing research just this morning like as an example in multiple chapters gerald goes through and discusses each one of hoffman's major forgeries the history behind it if if there were attempts by the church to purchase it to conceal it it's discussed there and gerald even shares his analysis not just after but even before some you know it was known that hoffman was a fraud and this is a really valuable source of information right yeah yeah real quick how do you decide how have you decided what to share on the internet and what to sell but not share on the
11:20 internet is there a rhyme or reason to it uh partly it's a matter of retyping it all all our books were originally done on a typewriter and so we have to retype them all to put them in a pdf format and it just takes time so we're gradually getting books into pdf and then we usually sell them to try to recoup a little of the money invested to try to get them ready for the internet but i guess the ones that we put up free were ones we thought were like the salamander one we put that book up online because we didn't think very many people would pay for it and we wanted the public to be able to know the information okay well it's it's super valuable stuff and um so anyway thank you so much for coming today to talk about mark hoffman uh we're gonna we're gonna dig into some really important stuff um i'll ask you guys to refer to sandra's original interview for her life story and a lot of those details but we may cover some of the same territory we covered when we talked
12:31 about hoffman today uh that we talked about with sander before but let's begin at some point i want to ask about your reactions to the documentary but if it's okay i think i want to just ask you some contextual questions first sure and then ask you about the documentary is that okay okay and and a lot of these questions you may not be prepared to answer and you know there i just i just want to get your perspective on what what you remember is that okay sure okay so the first thing i wanted to talk about was mark hoffman's early your your understanding or impressions about mark hoffman's early life um and one of the big questions that people want to know is was this guy mentally ill and and if i if i had a way that i would want to ask the question having a phd in psychology a bit of a background in the field there's this type of diagnosis called a personality disorder and you know the it's it's a separate thing from like depression or anxiety when you're talking about personality
13:35 disorders you're not talking about sort of like mental illness as a disease that you can acquire and then cure so like depression or anxiety a lot of times if it's situational something happens you get depressed then you get a treatment and then ultimately you get better over time and that's kind of you know a certain class of disorders and that's not quite accurate because you can have sort of genetically informed lifelong chronic depression or anxiety and again but but um but personality disorders are a whole other uh category altogether things like narcissistic personality disorder and the one that i think might be most applicable to mark hoffman which is called anti-social personality disorder which is a weird name because it you would think anti-social that just means you're kind of clumsy with people but what my understanding of the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder is you have no conscience
14:31 that you you you know you kill cats when you're four because you just don't care and when you hurt people um you just don't feel it and so not all people with antisocial personality disorder become murderers of course but um some do and so understanding what you know or read about mark hoffman's childhood do you have a sense that he had a conscience as a boy and as a teenager and even as a missionary do you know anything about that or have any thoughts or reflections on that well i don't know that much about his childhood but obviously when he went on his mission he was living a lie so at some point in his teen years obviously he had come to a a way of rationalizing behavior with what he knew and of course what i've read about him he's supposedly lost his faith in god when he was able to fake that dime with a mint mark on it and it got authenticated and so it was sort of like well uh anyone can fool anyone and god
15:48 doesn't do anything about it so okay so what age was was he was that when he was like 12 or 13 or 14. early teens and tell us the story of what he did there that you uh he was studying coins and saw that there were certain coins that had mint marks on them that made them more collectible and i believe it was a dime of a certain year i don't remember what year it was i mean like 1941 or something i don't remember what the year was but that if it had a certain mint mark on it it was worth a lot more money and so he sets out to try to duplicate that mark on a dime and then he sends it in um i don't remember did he send it to the government yeah yeah to have it authenticated and they wrote back said yeah you got the real thing and which increases its value yes which now makes it a valuable coin instead of just a 10 cent piece so i suppose that must have been the launching of his fortunery career once he realized he could fool the experts and he must have had the ego
17:01 at that point to say i can do this whatever i want to do i can create forgeries into the question of like mental illness i i would guess that he had to have been precocious because most 14 year olds are like comic books and playing soccer so like he must have been precocious so there's a high intelligence factor there but the fact that he would maybe lie or tell a fib i guess lots of teenage boys and girls would have done that throughout their oh we all have had our episodes in our teen years that we didn't tell our family about and it's a wonder we all lived through it but uh but mark obviously has was at a different different level than the rest of us i mean i never ever thought about anything that um involved yeah so what makes you tie that experience with the dime to his loss of faith was it something you read or something from his no just my own my own study of what he ended up doing and then looking back on his life trying to think at what point does this crystallize in your mind
18:22 and i think that was an important factor i know when he found out that his wasn't his grandparents had practiced polygamy and it had been the big family secret um and he found that everyone had been lying to him about that that there were obviously things that came into his teen life that put him in a position of uh who gets to lie and how much do we believe people if even the good people get to lie so at some point he decides that there isn't a god and all the stuff about mormonism is not true but he's in this evidently very very strong lds family and a very strong father and evidently feels he has to go on a mission and i'm sure there are many people that will be watching this that will sympathize with him yes that a lot of people went on missions because of family pressure yeah yeah but he evidently had already decided that mormonism wasn't true and i assume also that there wasn't a god
19:39 yeah there's this clip in the documentary that shows him as a boy burying a jar of coins and then going out and convincing his friends to go on a treasure hunt with him and then of course he discovers the coins in front of his friends and of course that reminds me of joseph smith like once you read about joseph smith's you know let's say years from like 1823 to 18 27 that's like what joseph smith was doing so that i mean that that gives me the impression that he was reading about folk magic and treasure digging in the 70s i'm guessing because that that i mean during the leonard harrington years like if i'm trying to match up the dates when was he 14 or you know when would that treasure digging thing with hoffman have happened and then what books or resources would he have had exposure to where he would have learned about the treasure digging because as i understand it the church was denying that all through the 60s and 70s
20:42 and even 80s um so do you have a sense for how he would have been learning about treasure digging in the 60s or 70s and then if if that might have contributed to his loss of faith sort of studying hit controversial forbidden banned mormon history um as a teenage boy in the late 60s uh our friend wes walters presbyterian minister was doing research on mormonism because he had pastored in several areas where the mormons had been new york and illinois and he was in new york on a vacation doing research looking for documents relating to joseph smith's 1826 money-digging trial and it was known at that time that there was claims of such an event but evidence for it was very sparse and wes was doing all kind of research on the um revivals in the 1820 time frame in looking at joseph smith's first vision and so wes was just foundational for a lot of the research that helped us in our studies as well was his last name again walters and he lived where in marissa illinois okay oh you mentioned that in our interview yes and
22:14 he co-authored with mike marquart the book inventing mormonism that signature books printed but years before that book came out wes had done all of this primary research and he had gone to new york to look for documents relating to the trial he found the docket uh papers for the judge and um another county official i can't remember what his position was but he found these documents of these papers and so here was justice neely giving his costs to the county for what he needed to be uh reimbursed for for this hearing with mark with anthony mark often with joseph smith and when that came out this was a big announcement this was a big find also his research on the 1824 revival in new york that was obviously the one joseph smith went to that didn't happen in 1820 and those got written up in different uh newspapers and articles and things around what years would those have been written up 68 to 70. okay and those would have shown up in salt lake newspapers maybe like yeah there would be things about
23:45 this well uh dialogue byu studies there were different articles on this and this wes's research really forced the church historian's office to go back to new york and do more digging i mean from my point of view i see it as the church telling their historians we don't want any more surprises you guys get back there and make sure that there's no other things coming out that are going to shock us and uh they went so funny and so they went through all of this so in the 70s there was a lot of talk and articles published on the magic on the early 26 trial because that was the glass looker thing and on the lack of the revival in 1820 so historical journals at that time were running articles on this and going into the magic and money digging so it's not like it suddenly appeared on the scene when mike quinn did his book his book comes at the end of years of everybody doing research on magic and
25:02 money digging now he expanded all and he has a lot of information in his book but he didn't start this he was building on research have been done before that i have to ask you how did this not how did this alone not take the church down in the late 60s early 70s like like i'm thinking about you know i mean the way that it's thought about now it's like oh someone stumbles on mormon stories or the ces letter learns about things like the the seer stone on the hat and then they lose their faith but but if this stuff's coming out in newspapers in utah and in salt lake city how did this not back then cause the equivalent of this crisis of faith that we're now only seeing thanks to things like the ces letter or mormon stories or other things well because the mormon church itself didn't talk about it everything went on as usual in the enzyme while the improvement era back at the beginning of all this and i mean even like when they found the papyri
26:15 in um what was that 67 or so i mean the improvement era ran articles by hugh nibley trying to smooth everything over for the saints that uh don't worry don't fear we got it all under control uh abraham's good it all checks out we're fine these aren't the droids you're looking for and uh and life moved on and so if the church doesn't publicly talk about issues the saints at that time didn't know there wasn't any internet there wasn't any podcasts and so if it wasn't in the ensign it wasn't true but what but if it's in the newspapers i mean they read the newspapers and and there's and there would have been also like word of mouth right faithful saints didn't talk about these kinds of things you brought it up to anyone and they just shut you down as a troublemaker a liar you just got that from anti-mormon people if i talk to anyone about this it was i was just lying i'd tell them about david whitmer's statement or martin harris statement
27:25 on this and all that's just wise and besides david whitmer left the church so you can't trust him on anything it's all just lies nuts and i'm thinking well no all the documents seem to show this everything we have from that time period shows this oh no no you guys are all lying you can't trust anyone that's left the church what about the so with the what about the newspapers though because well you do one story and then it's gone i mean they aren't talking about it every week and so you cover it once and gone and it's out of public memory but the magazine the scholarly publications like byu studies and dialogue would have an article at different times on these things but their readership was so small at that time that the average person would never know about it and dialogue was suspect always was you know we aren't really sure you know how how much to believe these guys but even with byu studies but how many
28:23 people read them and then what what their and so i'm trying to think about like what made the ces letter or mormon story successful we tried to orient um to the extent they've been successful i want to say they're like summarily successful but what we tried to do was target just the average person right and to do it with the right tone and the right approach where people won't discount it from the start as a non-starter but instead go okay these guys are trying to be fair they're just trying to tell the truth and the only other thing that i can think of back then that wasn't super scholarly was your newsletter right because your newsletter was just trying to publicly share to the general public right the basic facts right yes but we were apostates yeah not only we were apostates we were two dummies with no education or credentials and so all you i mean wow through the years all you had to do was say yes but they were excommunicated and that's like oh my word they were running the drugs you know it
29:36 just it it just had such a bad connotation and people would come into the store and ask me is it true you were excommunicated i said yes because i resigned i quit and so they fired me but it was for history stuff it was yeah and gerald too oh yeah we both resigned and so but they had we wanted our names removed and the only way you could get your name renewed removed in 1960 was uh murder adultery or apostasy yeah my friends all kidded me we picked the most boring of the three and so we our great sin was we told him we wanted to quit okay so you're saying if i'm hearing you right that because of this work from wes walters and others that mark hoffman in the 70s could have could could have learned go ahead yes well could have learned about this stuff yes but all he had to do was read font brody i mean you really got the groundwork and fun brody she gives you the money digging the magic the seer stone all of those things i mean it was a starting point for us we started with fawn brodie yeah so if
31:02 if hoffman was just some studious precocious kid if he had gotten a hold of fon brodie's book yes in his early teens that's where he would have learned about all the problems right he has the blueprint yeah he has a blueprint so some have said that like everything uncovered since snowman knows my history is just kind of like after log or pro you know epilogue like she basically did it all she gave us the outline and one friend said to me after reading our mormonism shadow a reality he says i read brody and that gave me the general overview but then i read your book and that gave me all the details behind the overview yeah yeah yeah but she got a lot right right oh yes absolutely yeah it was amazing the job that she did and i think her biography still stands up today as probably the best on joseph smith yeah i agree okay so so you what did you think of when you saw this clip in the documentary about mark hoffman burying the jar and fooling his friends did you know that he had done that i don't remember the story so i don't
32:14 know if it's told in one of the books or something but but you saw that on the documentary yes i saw it but what'd you think when you saw that well it looked just like joseph smith yeah that was first thing came to my mind and and mark's life has a lot of similarities and parallels to joseph smith yes very odd that you do get that same the 14 year old boy oh right 14 yeah going on to fool everyone what other parallels are coming into your mind well the money digging stuff and then the uh ability to sell yourself to people that even when critics like us come out against him he can still rise above it all and when he reneges on paying people for their documents and he has all these business problems he still can smooth over and promise him oh it'll be next week let me give you another check or whatever so it's that same sort of salesmanship that's able to keep it going even when there's questions and problems about what he's doing
33:27 yeah and and also for hoffman and joseph smith that the jig was up at some point and well unraveled and he he all caught up with them in the end right that's right yeah and if joseph hadn't have been killed i think that the trials that would have come up at that time would have seriously challenged the future of mormonism because joseph was up on charge of bigamy and mishandling was a partridge girls estate uh had messed up on some bankruptcy stuff there would have been a indictment on counterfeiting because there was one later on brigham young and john taylor and different early church leaders for counterfeiting only reason joseph isn't listed in there is because he was dead but there would have been things like this that would have come up so that there would have been a day of reckoning for joseph smith it just got cut short by him being murdered right some some would say that the the ties between hoffman and joseph smith are even more obvious that joseph smith was a forger now i don't know if forger
34:39 is or isn't the right word but joseph if you don't believe he was translating by the gift and power of god then he was creating documents through a scribe because he couldn't really write that weren't that were fraudulent that weren't that weren't what they claimed to be do you think there's fair parallels there yes i do what are the parallels for you well uh like when he claims to be translating a parchment of john that he claims john really wrote this document i don't have it it doesn't currently exist on paper but god showed me in a vision that this actual writing of john is what i'm giving to you so you have that same sort of manufacturing of uh historical documents that have no basis what about the book of mormon well the book of mormon all of his scriptures fall into that same thing to take the book of abraham where you have scrolls that he could show the public that see i've got these real documents and this is abraham's signature and over here's joseph's signature
35:51 and you pay his mom a quarter you can come look at the mummies and so then he invents this book of scripture that he claims came from the scrolls in front of him so that would be another type of forgery that he's carrying on yeah and one thing that was different or maybe not so different between him and hoffman this is just my theory that from the treasure digging exploits of 1823-1827 he learned that he could convince people that he had special power right to find so there's the there's the element of claiming to have special power but then by 1827 he's realizing that he's gonna end up in jail for life if he keeps doing this so how does he parlay he but he knows that this is that even when he wasn't able to find the treasure people would continue believing in him so in my mind whether consciously or unconsciously he says dang how do i continue on with this skill that i've developed that clearly
37:05 is effective and so somehow he comes up with the idea to write a book and and you know for dan vogel it might have been piously fraudulent for others it's just plain out fraudulent but then he says if i can create this document that people will believe as a divine origin they'll also this will also continue the perception that i have special powers and then once you've created a scripture-like book and everybody around you thinks you did it by the gift and power of god well that becomes the the foundation of a religion or a church how do you see it yes and i think it's very similar to mark's statement about if everyone accepts it as authentic it is authentic and that's joseph smith i think he convinced himself that well the book of mormon's what would have been written if the indians had kept a record so it's true do you think he really thought he was channeling i think by the time he gets to the end of his life he's believing his own lies at the beginning he has to be aware that
38:15 he's fabricating it but he may come to really believe he's a prophet kind of like elmer gantry did i really do miracles i guess i did right so so do you just just to be clear there's this theory and i'm sure we talked about this in our interview there's this theory that i think maxine hank shared with me that like he believed that that there were plates written at some point but he didn't have them in his possession so to say so to speak so he created fake plates but when he was actually translating i'm saying that in air quotes he believed that he was channeling real stories from real prophets through the gift and power of god such that when he was manufacturing the book of mormon he himself didn't think i'm creating this fraudulent book he thought i am channeling a legitimate history through legitimate prophets through the gift and power of god it's just coming through my my brain and through the spirit and
39:19 through revelation and i have to create these plates so that people will believe me but the rest of the story is true what do you think about that i think that gives him too much credit for uh thinking and it really came from outside of himself i think he has to know what he's creating when you see the loss of the 116 pages i think it shows that it isn't just you can't just explain the book of mormon as a channeled book because when he recreates the first part of the book of mormon it shows deliberate thought to cover his tracts in case those pages are found so to me that shows a deliberate fraud by someone who understands what he's doing so when he goes back to redo the front of the book of mormon he comes up with nephi having two sets of plates and it gets into a very convoluted story why in the world anyone would make two sets of plates i mean it's not like you just went to the store and bought a ream of paper you gotta hand make all these plates they're out in the wilderness
40:40 it just doesn't make sense historically you couldn't do that so i think there's in the reconstructing of the 116 page replacement to me shows someone who is very aware of the problem he faced at the moment with his followers of trying to convince them that he had the power of god to bring forth this record even though he had lost those pages he could duplicate them but he can't duplicate them exactly so he has to come up with some crazy story why as well it's sort of like the same thing again only this is bigger and better i mean yeah now god's going to have me use the plates that got the spiritual stuff in why did god have you start with the ones that didn't i mean it doesn't make god look very smart but but to me it's all an excuse to cover himself as so to me that shows a knowing cunning mind to set up a scenario to make his followers all believe that it was still the work of god even though the whole story got messed up yeah have you read william davis's book
41:52 uh about joseph's ability to sort of dictate orally and that methodist tradition well sure i think pastors use that kind of stuff today an outline i mean don't most speakers i think any of us that go out and speak publicly get an outline in our mind of what we're going to say and if you speak a lot on the same subject pretty soon you have that outline down in your mind so i think he had been rehearsing his joseph had been rehearsing his story to his family for several years before he ever started the literal dictating of the book of mormon so i see him practicing that outline for a long time now granted i couldn't sit down and dictate a 500 page book to you on even my own well maybe on my own life i could but but not about some other subject but that doesn't mean someone else couldn't we have all sorts of books that were written in very short periods of time authors that just say that oh the story came to me and i sat down and just wrote it out
43:02 right yeah yeah okay so uh so in your mind the book of mormon was a premeditated act of of deception like like mark hoffman yes right right i think that joseph was an extremely gifted creative mind and he could retain trivia that he picked up i think you see that in so much of joseph's writings the ability to maintain trivia and it always reminded me of people on game shows that jim jennings yeah that just remember the craziest little things and it's hard to explain but like nephi comes from the apocrypha and lehi comes from the old testament moroni is the capital of uh group islands the comoros islands off the coast of africa so how does he know about these things he just stumbles across stuff and different names stick in his mind and i think that you would have this trouble with a lot of books if you analyze them to try to figure out where did every single idea for this book come from uh and i'm sure this happens in a lot of writings where people name characters in their books after just some
44:23 random name they came across sometime and you see that in the book of mormon we've been able to find a lot of those things to where i mean i can't prove that he saw a map with the comoros islands on it but we do have a geography book of joseph smith's day that has the comoros islands in them which was used in schools can't prove he read it but it's a little suspicious and it has the moroni city with the yeah the comoros islands with moroni as the capital yeah yeah do we know where nephi came from nephi came from the apoca king james apocrypha not the catholic apocrypha and he had a bible with the apocrypha in it right okay yeah so if we're talking parallels between joseph smith and mark hoffman that's something that is said in the documentary that that mark hoffman clearly had this ability to remember everything there's that trivial this is a celestial pursuit little sequence where where the guy says that joseph never got one answer
45:24 wrong right right right yeah so those are important parallels right okay so if we're going with this theory that that he stumbled onto maybe brody's book or or these other articles or dialogue or whatever it was and as a very precocious young kid lost his faith around age 14 then he then you're saying that along with the dime story causes him to lose his faith but he stays in the church well i think it also the i think the thing with the parents hiding the polygamy from him i think was another disillusioning moment for him that his godly parents what do you know about that story i believe it's in silito's book salamander okay i think that's and what's the general well that there was post-manifest or polygamy in his family and his family immediate family line and that it was the big family secret and when you find out that the church has been lying to you about polygamy ended in 1890 and you find out in your own family they kept living polygamy
46:38 way after the manifesto then you wonder well what else did they lie to me about yeah so one question that i wrote that i don't think you can know and i wonder if anyone knows this if he ever talked about this in any of his depositions or confessions or any of his writings or if he ever told his his wife this but is there ever any indication that he expressed sadness or anger or disappointment at the church deceiving him and at the church deceiving others because that that speaks to motive i you know one of the things that i think is really important is to try and figure out motive and some people want to say oh he just loved he was just broken in the head and had no conscience and just loved to deceive people i think what i want i'm sure some of that's true at some point but what i also want to know is did he ever you know because so many of us what drives you what drives me it's it's jeremy reynolds like so many people brett metcalf everyone it's just like
47:48 oh my gosh i put my trust in this church i gave it everything i trusted it like more than my own parents i loved it i sacrificed for it and then it deceived me like isn't that all of us and so and so i want to believe that at least at some point hoffman had those similar feelings and maybe he just went in the wrong direction do you have any sense is there any indication that you're aware of that he felt any of those similar feelings i don't know enough about his story in his early life so no i don't know of any time when he expressed that to anyone he wouldn't have told dory his wife that he had lost his faith right no because he's living a lie for all of his mormon community yeah so i don't see him being able to share anything that way with anyone i mean i assume if he did with anyone it would have been maybe shannon flynn but i don't know that flynn's ever talked about him showing anger about mormonism being false they may not have
48:57 had that kind of a conversation was shannon flynn a believer at the time he was working with hoffman do you know do you have any idea i don't know i would suspect not but i i don't really know you're not sure okay yeah like and so one of the things when i'm trying to like make sense of all this that i think of is if this if you live it like i was growing up in texas but anyway i lost my faith in seattle like far from the church when i was working for microsoft what would it be like to lose your faith in the 60s and 70s in holiday or mill creek everyone around you believes you feel totally trapped like you can't tell anyone it's not like now you've got all these podcasts and blogs and facebook communities to give you support other family members that have left too he must have felt super isolated super alone super trapped super powerless and super disappointed that this church held itself up to be the one true great church and yet it was deceiving everyone and joseph was deceiving everyone i wonder what that can do to your mind
50:06 as a young boy when you have to when you have to suppress all that and then you learn to lie from the guy held up as a prophet and from the church held up as the one true church by everyone around you what would that do to your psychology to kind of be stewing in that well it obviously messed up his mind but it didn't do that to you right uh no we had not had the years of investment that someone like yourself would have had in the church and i think the longer you've invested in it the more you struggle with that anger that way so leaving earlier in our lives kept us from having as much of that bottled up inside of us you didn't serve a mission no did you gerald remind me oh gerald didn't either no no because that's what sent him on his quest was when the bishop challenged him to quit drinking beer and go on a mission and so he thought well gee do i but do i believe this enough to go on a mission yeah and that launched him into his research
51:21 and i did not voluntarily set out to search for truth in mormonism it was forced on me by a mother who was questioning her faith so uh but we both had to deal with the disappointing of our families we both had to deal with standing up to loved ones and defending ourselves that uh the emperor doesn't have any clothes on and we were just two dumb kids and no one paid attention to us you know look at all the phds that believe the emperor's got new clothes on who are you to say he doesn't oh well i got i got the proof there was something that must have made hoffman feel trapped like he couldn't be open and honest about that that somehow you guys felt able to be open and honest i wonder what the difference might be maybe his personality i don't know do you have a do you have a i don't know gerald is unusual in that at such an early age he that it mattered to him so much once it was presented to him whether it was true or not
52:35 and he seriously looked at it i mean most 19 year olds aren't driving out to missouri in their old beat up car to try to find answers and launching into a publishing career to detail all his research as he went through the years so so yeah the question with gerald comes up too why i don't i don't know he he just had a driven personality but it drove him in a search for truth mark switched and was driven to play the same game and to try to be a greater khan than joseph smith was and i actually thought about the parallel between you and gerald and mark hoffman it's almost like you guys had some similarities including the amazing ability to remember lots of details you both have that yeah and the passion for the subject matter you guys went on a path of truth at all costs he went into a path of deception but there's even parallels between hoffman and you guys does that make you feel sad or i don't know i'm not sure whatever
53:50 it would depend on i'd have to see your list but just the uncanny interest in and ability to remember church details right yes gerald and mark would share a lot of similarities in that sense of the ability to recall detail to hold things in their mind and i guess joseph smith too to be able to just hold all that information in your mind and then uh put it to different uses but uh and mark turned to a way of manipulating people and dishonesty for gerald it was truly a quest for truth and gerald was about the most honest guy i've ever known i'm he just was for whatever reasons he was driven for the honest story of mormonism yeah and part of me feels like you're kind of selling yourself short a little bit there because your memory of details also seems very extensive yes but not like gerald gerald just he didn't have photographic memory but it was close i could ask him about contents of books that he had read 30 years before
55:18 and he could just tell you right oh yeah it's in the middle of that book and go over and get it and and find it and i'm thinking how could you do that how can you remember that after that i mean i don't remember books like that i have to make notes i underline and everything to remember gerald just had it hmm if you had to compare what you know of mark hoffman's memory and gerald's would you i'd say they probably were pretty equal they were pretty equal yeah okay fascinating okay so um so hoffman do you know anything else interesting about hoffman before he goes on his mission that you remember no not before he goes on his mission and then anything interesting about his mission that you want to say that you think well uh even the documentary brought out that on his mission he was buying rare books and shipping them home so he had already started an idea of doing something more with mormon church
56:29 history and he may not have formulated much of a plan yet but you see the growing interest in being informed and having all the books he can that cover the topic also the idea of making money off of it that he's going to sell these to book dealers so you have the seeds of his future life when he gets back from his mission of the trajectory he plans on taking yeah so when he's investigating things on his mission buying books i think i read that he buys this bible that he ends up using for his first real forgery yeah he doesn't he buy that on his mission i don't i don't remember the details on that but uh i mean all he has to do is buy edie howe's mormonism unveiled and if he has brody's book he's got everything he needs for that early period of joseph's life for the money-digging claims uh the salamander idea why the edie how book because e.d howe's mormonism unveiled printed in 1834 has statements by the
57:52 neighbors of the smiths and that all tell about the early smith's money digging and magic involvement so this this gives mark the foundational ideas for making up documents from that time period what they're likely to cover which was why the church leaders didn't immediately say oh your documents have to be a fraud because they knew if you found something from that time period it probably would sound like this it would probably would have magic material that would be embarrassing yeah in fact when the salamander first letter was first publicly talked about and the church news comes out with defenses of it i thought to myself excuse me if you had taken this to my fanatic mormon grandfather and showed him this salamander letter what would his response have been his response i'm sure would have been that's a big lie that never could have happened we know joseph's story and it would have just been a full stop denunciation because i had
59:16 enough of those myself with him i had a pretty good idea what his response would be okay that's the response of a true believer why don't you get that kind of response from the church leaders because they already know if you found something from that time period it very likely could revolve around magic and money digging hinkley would have known this he did enough church history to know these things and dal and oaks too interesting so that's not necessarily a claim that the that the first presidency in the quorum of the 12 in the 70s and 80s didn't believe the church was true oh no go ahead they probably believed it i'm not saying that it shows the church leaders didn't believe mormonism i'm saying they knew the early church history was problematic which also implies that they were hiding it they were hiding it because they were afraid you wouldn't be able to keep believing they've been able to rationalize to themselves that these things don't matter that it's all true but if you showed them to the
1:00:21 public they might not be able to bridge that problem yeah okay so do you do you see any indication that hoffman was planning forgeries and you know mapping kind of this all out on his mission that would be hard to know but he's certainly getting informed because as he buys these different old exposes of mormonism he would be certainly building a picture of early mormon and mormonism in his own mind now when we know in um what would the time frame been sitting in 1978 that's when he came to our bookstore i didn't know it was him but he came with this um second anointing document this one page uh handwritten document that he claimed for was from the 1900 time frame from the salt lake temple and shows it to me that this is this big find from his grandfather's attic and he can't tell me who the family was couldn't tell me his name well i didn't know it was mark it was about what again the documents about the second anointing ritual in the temple
1:01:44 he comes to you at the document about that yes in 78 and i think it's maybe the start of his business of trying to float documents out to the public why don't you remember that because he met with gerald or i don't remember that being i didn't know mark mark had been in the store before he'd bought our mormonism shadow our reality uh because he uh tells that in something it might be in the silito book but he said he had read our shadow and but i don't remember meeting him but when after the hoffman murders and the detectives start putting all the pieces together they find this mark hoffman document in the utah state university collection that jeff simmons their curator had bought from mark the salt lake temple document on the second anointing well then putting it all together we backtrack it all to my files i have this document he came to me first with this document and i said well that's interesting but i don't know anything about second anointing stuff and he gave me a photocopy of it and i just put it in my file well then he took
1:03:07 it up to jeff simmons and told jeff simmons is he trying to sell it to you well he never well he knew we were poor as church mice so he never mentioned a price he just floated by me i think to see if i would find a discrepancy and also to get people talking about it one of the things you see in mark's documents is that he always started rumors about the documents going around in the mormon underground oh did you hear the buzz there's talk of a new document that's out there you know and it helps to build credibility for your document if more people talk about it then it must be authentic everybody's accepting that this document exists so i think he was trying to start a rumor through me about the second anointing document well we didn't do anything with it he took it up to jeff simmons and simmons bought it did you get a photocopy of it yeah i have my files you have it right now not with me is that published in one of your books it's in the salomon in the tracking and white salamander book the photo of it
1:04:19 yeah so but we didn't know it was a marked document until after the murders i didn't put the two together i didn't know that that was even fascinating mark but we know in 78 and we know the date because of when he went to jeff simmons and he tells jeff simmons that oh i showed this to the tanners you know but after he showed it to me and left me with a copy i started getting calls from different people oh i hear you've got a copy of a second anointing document well where would they hear this they had to hear it from mark because i wasn't telling anyone out of the blue someone say oh can i get a copy of the second anointing letter and i'd have to tell them i don't know anything about it i just know this guy brought it in and claimed it was in his grandpa's papers so uh then we'd later find out that it was marx but see that's in 78.
1:05:16 that's two years before he really breaks on the scene yes and so i think he's you know how old he was in 80 i'm trying to ah i don't remember okay so he's just but he's very shortly off his mission in 78. okay okay so it would have been better yeah 23 something like that yeah and so he's already started the idea of a forgery business and he's trying his hand at things but see that's a late document 1900 but it is handwritten and uh has a rubber stamp on it salt lake temple i don't know where he got been easy to have just bought a stamp made up to say that but i don't know what other documents he made in between that time and when he went public on his fines that he took to the church so he had a couple of years there to perfect his skills on doing things yeah it is really odd though when you look at mark's handwriting it's just terrible it is juvenile and it makes a real question of how can he write
1:06:34 those documents in those smooth hands when he prints in such terrible printing so i don't is he does he have a dual personality does does somebody else show up and write documents i don't know but it is curious that the fellow that has chicken scratch printing is able to do all this 19th century handwriting yeah yeah that is interesting okay so um so let's just say he's planning this sometime between his mission and 1980 which is when he kind of breaks on the scenes that's i i either forgot about her didn't know that about the second anointing this gets to my again my question that i'm most curious about is motive i was listening to an interview of richard turley that he gave recently and he gives some motives for mark hoffman he wanted money he hated authority he just wanted to stick it to the man and then i think the third thing he says is he wanted to rewrite history and i i have a fourth motive that i think is most interesting
1:07:51 to me which is this he was hurt and or sad or angry about the church deceiving people or he felt like the church was hypocritical and he wanted to do a long game of exposing you know my big two questions are did he want to hurt the church or get back at the church for being so deceitful and dishonest and did he want to take people out of the church because he would have known that they were under the church's influence and power not from informed consent but but through deception do you have any thoughts about that any reactions thoughts feelings about that i don't think he had enough emotional interest in people that he would have been concerned about other people being deceived or the future of harming people through deception uh by the church so i don't but i think he wanted to force the church to own up to its problematic history so yes i think he was trying to get back at the church
1:08:59 not necessarily to rewrite church history but to make them face what he felt their real history was but i don't think he cared about whether the church was deceiving other people i think he was why not because i don't know that he had that kind of empathy for future believers i think his anger at the church for his own family and his own life um but i don't know how much he would worry about other people being sucked in when you when you read about like and i'm kind of sketchy on all this when you read about like jeffrey dahmer you know you you find out these tales of him i and i could have this wrong but like dissecting live animals as a kid or just with with kids in the neighborhood super troubling kind of behaviors that with hoffman do we have any accounts from anyone that would say a that he just didn't care about other people all growing up teen adult young adult or b that he did show the capacity to care i mean because clearly his wife loved him his family loved him
1:10:16 all his ward members thought he was great so do we do you have any reason to believe that prior to 1980 he didn't care about people no i would say my feeling on that comes more from the fact that he could so callously kill his friend steve and lace the bomb with nails which deliberately was intended to shred the man's insides and that he could so callously put a bomb at the sheets home that killed kathy sheets and then he could dismiss it so easily by saying well anyone could have picked up the bomb i mean he just showed a total callousness at least after the murders when he was asked by the parole board i think about kathy sheets death it's like well she could have gone across the street and got hit by a car so i mean a total uh disrespect for life or for people yeah and i that was a really that was in part three of the documentary and that was it was margie's most mario is most interested in part three i think it was the most fascinating part what i'm trying to tease out is is that
1:11:33 the sort of justification desperation kind of like twisted motivated reasoning that he acquires once he gets too far into the con and too far at personal risk in jeopardy where he just starts to throw caring concerned about others out the window is that something that develops between 80 and 85 or do you do we have any reason to believe that that's how he always was oh i don't know you're basing on the 85 not on anything else i'm basing it on the end of his life or the end of his career yeah who would know this question i'm asking about his show of empathy or caring or remorse prior to his forgeries i i as i it's been a long time since i've looked at the silito book uh called salamander but as i recall i think they had a little more background on his early life yeah so that would be if i were looking for that that's first place i would go check okay okay so what i hear you saying is you don't know about him care
1:12:48 as far as a motive him caring about other people in the church broadly being deceived but you hold open the possibility that he could have been angry at having been deceived right or that maybe some of his immediate family members were just right and then i think he also had the ego to think i can pull off the ultimate deception i can deceive the guys that perpetrate the deception so some ego there yeah because if i'm thinking and what i want to do now is kind of jump into his forgeries but even the one i didn't have here is the is the second anointing one yeah but as you as as we start looking at the forgeries that he picked and by the way i learned from gerald's book not all of them were faith destroying right he he created some forgeries that would have been very faith-promoting right but um but when i think about the topics he's generally addressing in the forgeries that i'm aware of which which starts now with the with the
1:14:00 second anointing document but then when you think about the joseph smith the third blessing the letter to josiah stole the 1825 letter to josiah stoll the the salamander letter um you know and then if you think about him ultimately shooting for the mcclellan papers documents and 116 pages he seems to be picking the some of the most volatile issues that would strike most at the heart of the church's truth claims now part of the motivation could have been just uh because these are documents the church would have been motivated to care about and want to buy but another possibility is it's like no once these documents get out there and i and by the way he made sure that they got out there it's gonna be it's gonna be a way to wake people up about troubling church history when they were asleep about it or unwilling to face it by by scholarly means or otherwise were asleep to or just didn't care does that make sense
1:15:10 yes but i don't know how much of that had been because he wanted to do something to help people as much as to embarrass the church i think it was more a matter of getting back at the brethren to expose them as deceivers that they don't really have the powers of discernment they claim they can't even tell a forgery so how can they have all this great knowledge about god and joseph's visions and everything when i can make up documents that are just as good as joseph's and they accept him as authentic so i see it all as really getting back at the brethren do you think he was motivated by that yeah i think he he wanted to embarrass them do you think you wanted to take people out of the church bring the church down well i don't know if bringing the church down is the same as trying to take people out of it because i think that implies more care for people that i give him credit i but i think he would have uh been happy to have um been the cause of mormonism's
1:16:16 collapse do you think he did want that yeah that's he wanted to i think he wanted to show the world that the whole thing was a fraud from day one and he could do it as good as joseph smith yeah cause if if we're trying to pursue this theory that he had some type of conscience at least originally and had his own emotional profile of sadness or anger or frustration then if he's trying to take the church down for being deceivers you have to answer the question how could he justify being a deceiver to expose the church as deceivers it would show hypocrisy either hypocrisy and or cleverness thinking that he's being clever like i'll beat them at their own game yes what do you do i think it's trying to beat them at their own game yeah you think so i didn't mean to plant that statement no i think that's true that he was trying to yes he was going to one-upmanship on joseph smith he could do it better than he did yeah yeah that if joseph was deceitful
1:17:31 and if the church has been deceitful what better way to expose them as deceitful than by being even better than them do you think that well i don't think he wanted to be known as a deceiver at the beginning i mean i once the he went to prison then he's glad to be known as the greatest forger in history but i don't know that he early on was aiming for that reputation i don't know if he wanted to be found out i guess one could speculate that subconsciously maybe he wanted to be found out uh but he seems to be just trying to keep a con going of uh i don't know what he'd planned to do after the 116 pages but obviously all the martin harris documents were trying to establish martin's handwriting so that when he finally came up with something that as a part of the 116 pages of the book of mormon that they would test it against the handwriting samples that mark had given them earlier that he had written uh so who knows what he would have tried after 116 page
1:18:44 that would have been a fascinating thing if he'd really done that yeah like and part of what gets this really mixed up is that he it becomes his livelihood at some point so he's got a wife he's got kids he's got to make a living he takes that leap of faith at some point where he tells dory i'm going to do this for a living and then once he's in this is his reputation this is his livelihood and that can really change you when your livelihood and the livelihood you're supposed to provide from your for your family is all wrapped up together and so i can see those five years as really being a lot of pressure on him to to pull this off and make this all succeed and it becomes a ponzi scheme at some point you know yes and that sounds very much like joseph smith why because once he realized he had to support his family he's got to keep coming up with something more to keep his church together to keep it going yeah you have to keep coming up with new scriptures new claims
1:19:50 to keep the following because along the way he gets a lot of people mad and they drop out but he finds himself in the same problem as mark you got to keep coming up with something exciting to keep the following and keep them to believe you when things don't work out just like mark can't come up with the documents to supply all his claims working himself into a financial hole you have joseph smith coming up with all kind of claims and getting the church into financial difficulty and then he's got to come up with more claims more discoveries to get people re-engaged and all excited we're going to go build zion well we're going to do it in independence well known that got scuttled so we're going to do it in kirtland scuttled we're going to do it in far west no well okay we're going to do it in nauvoo and then maybe texas right yeah texas or oregon somewhere yeah okay okay so if if it's okay let's talk about each of the the big forgeries that were mormon related because obviously there's both the free man and
1:21:06 what emily dickinson stuff and lots of things that he did outside of mormonism right yeah yeah let's talk about what just anything you want to share that you think is interesting about the actual forgeries that he did right is that okay yeah what are you thinking i don't know how well i can remember them all uh so the first one was the anthon transcript right yeah um did he break on the scene with with that one in the bible yeah and that was interesting the documentary that they said that uh his wife and him opened the bible pages at his house because i thought that it was done with jeff simmons up at the university uh in logan uh i hadn't heard before that it had been with dory first now it could be in one of the early books on hoffman and i've maybe forgotten it but i don't remember that as being told before that dory helped pry those pages open in her kitchen so if that's the case then mark glued it back together and took it back up to simmons
1:22:24 to make simmons feel like he was part of the big discovery of opening the pages and finding this document so the document itself is very clever one of the things mark did on some of his letters was try to recreate something that was mentioned at some time but wasn't preserved and then he claimed that he found it like the joseph smith the third blessing you know like something that historians knew supposedly happened but no evidence so he comes up with a document and so with the anthem transcript there was the question for years of whether the copy we have uh is actually the one that martin would have taken to professor anthon and uh we always knew that anthon gave a little different description of the anthem transcript than the one that's typically reproduced in the church's books so mark capitalizes on the fact that there is this other description of the anthem transcript and there is a question as whether the anthem script we always have
1:23:46 seen is the actual original one or is whitmer's copy a just a copy so he makes up his own that would fit what anthon says he remembers to make it in the long columns with a circular object at the end that look kind of like a maya calendar or something so did you say whitmer did you mean harris did you say whitmer well whitmer owned the anthem transcript and okay okay and so i was just distinguishing the anthem transcript from marx okay okay uh so mark makes his like the one that's described in uh edie howe's book where he has the letter from anthony got it and so mark's clever in that way to make it sound like something that anthem described so that everyone could say oh wow we got the original and so that would make it even worth more money that it was the original behind the one the church had always printed yeah and so the anton transcript as i as i researched it it's supposed to be in joseph's handwriting
1:25:07 and um it's supposed to be um let's see it's supposed to be the document that harris takes takes to anthen with the reformed egyptian characters on it for him to demonstrate it right right and the church the church acquires this right and they publish it am i right oh yeah i think it was a big color photo of it in the inside i believe so they didn't hide it and squirrel it away oh well no this is faith promoting isn't this wonderful isn't that interesting yes this is a very faith promoting document so we we can see we that's an example of where when the church finds something that's faith promoting they're super eager to publish it and share it with everybody right that's interesting right yeah yeah and i even i even read i think in gerald's research or yours that hugh nibbly said that it helped to prove the authenticity of the book of mormon so that also shows how apologists are willing to take anything even something that's fake yeah and use it to bolster their claims because they'll just
1:26:17 it's motivated reasoning it's confirmation bias right and i think that uh nibley and guys at the byu were hoping the whole thing could be translated and we're all excited about it and uh i know a guy by the name of barry phil fell another eccentric guy not mormon but he even claimed to be able to translate the first lines of this and right yeah that was a by professor right yeah so how do you uh translate a forgery of course that gets you back to kinderhook place but that's another story yeah it sure does do do you remember when the anthon transcript came out at first and and i don't remember the year no no no no no sorry do you do you remember you and gerald seeing it and reacting to it and what you thought about it oh we were all excited and yes we were oh well there were all of these stories that people trying to figure out what the writing was what kind of characters were on there and there were these stories that it was
1:27:28 some indian tribe in new york and i can't remember now which one it was that this was probably in their script or something and so i go up to the library and i'm researching these indian scripts and because you're trying to find out where we want to find out where this came from scratch characters basically is this an actual language is it copied from something if mark made it up uh if anyone made it up what were they using what could the characters be are they a real language and so there are all sorts of claims that it came from some early indian script or something or was it from uh a magic book or was it masonic writing script and i spent so many hours at the library looking up every kind of silly script that anyone even thought might have influenced it and was getting nowhere with uh the whole thing [Music] do you remember so was were you and gerald at in a in 1980 primed to ask is the first question is this authentic was forgery
1:28:49 even on your mind had you had enough experiences in rare documents in historical documents to always sort of ask that as the first question or did you guys just kind of say this must be true this must be valid this must be authentic well we had had a situation back in what was it the 60s um we had quoted oliver cowdery on a pamphlet he supposedly wrote a defense and a rehearsal of my grounds from separating myself from the latter-day saints or something some big long title like that and uh we had printed up a pamphlet that had statements by the three witnesses of course originally we when we left mormonism we still believed the book of mormon and so we'd printed up this thing the statements by the three witnesses uh with one uh the tiffany monthly article with martin harris and then david whitmer is an address all believers in christ and the country defense well professor richard anderson came up from byu to our little bookstore in our front room
1:30:01 and challenged us on that publication and said the country defense is not authentic you guys shouldn't be publishing that if you want to be really uh known for seeking out the truth then you should discard that because it isn't factual and we thought well that it never occurred to us that it wasn't because cadre's defense was quoted by b.h roberts it was quoted by font brody historians generally accepted it as real so gerald went on a big study trying to figure out if cadre's defense was authentic and also a supposed statement of cadres when he came back into the church in council bluffs so end result gerald had determined by studying the wording of caldery's defense with early writings of cowdery that someone had fabricated this around 1900 using cadre's earlier writings that were published in i don't know messenger and advocate or whatever and and invented this document so gerald had already been through this question of
1:31:19 what's authentic and it turned out the cadre's defense wasn't authentic and we came out with a pamphlet stating that and telling why and we got pushback on that font brody and juanita brooks both wrote us and said they still believed it was authentic and they thought we were uh premature in declaring it a fraud and they were going to go on using it and wow so you guys knew better than fon brodie and juanita brooks that's not many people can make that claim that's amazing well yeah and gerald was convinced he was right well of course richard anderson was convinced he was right too because richard anderson a believing mormon didn't want to believe the documents but whittle liked them to be true but cheryl said no they aren't authentic i can't use them anymore wow so he'd already looked at things that way and there were some other things that came up after that and i don't remember now right off but yeah so the question of forgery of
1:32:29 fabricated writings uh false claims had been there not in a big way but we were aware that not everything is what it claims to be so so in 1980 yeah when when the anthon transcript comes out did you guys do do you remember trying to authenticate it or not i know gerald probably writes about this in his book uh well we we hoped that it was authentic but we were trying to figure out uh joseph smith had to make it up i mean we weren't thinking that mark made it up but joseph smith had to make it up because we didn't believe that it was represented in real language and so how did joseph smith make it up right so we're trying to figure out what he was looking at the mother had bought tea from china uh did she have a box sitting on the kitchen table that had chinese scratches on it that you know what could have influenced him to come up with these particular characters so we were trying to find out how joseph fraudulently produced this not how mark
1:33:46 did it interesting so this unlike the salamander letter that we'll talk about later that gerald famously detected as a fraud he you you were both sort of like is it okay city fooled by them yes we thought okay we accepted that as an authentic joseph smith production we did not accept it as representing something truly copied off the plates okay okay that's interesting anything else you want to say about the anthon transcript that's worth mentioning i don't know right off so there's nothing controversial about it to believing mormons it was considered well it would be controversial in the fact that any scholar looking at it would know it was not authentic indian writing so it would be critical it would be another way of for an outsider okay to see that the book of mormon couldn't be true because this is no real language right right right yeah okay and now do we know where hoffman got those
1:34:48 chicken scratches do we even know uh well he could have used stuff from magic books there were a lot of magic script in uh books of the day that wouldn't have necessarily been real popular but they were out there the the magus i don't remember the different names of things that he could have seen it could have been influenced by the masonic script um they had their own script so just to be clear we don't have any surviving uh documents that purport to show characters from the original golden plates that you're aware of am i right about that well the anthem transcript that the church has always owned goes back to joseph's day whether it's the whitmer made a copy of it or whether it's the original one one that went to anthon that is the script that the early church all accepted as the type of characters that would have been on the plates okay so uh there's not a question that that was what in for instance in navooth that was the script that they all would have believed whatever form they saw it in
1:36:09 the kind of letters writing script is what's on the anthem transcript okay i i'm going to ask my listeners to forgive me i just want to make sure i understand so there is an anthon transcript separate from the one that hoffman right and tell me one more time what that is it's a piece of paper that's oblong and has i don't know 14 lines or something on it of script and it's printed in like the encyclopedia of mormonism if you look up anthem transcript well i'm sure on the church's website if you just type in uh anthon transcript or the joseph smith papers uh website type in anthem transcript wikipedia would have it the anthem transcript and it's an oblong piece of writing as opposed to marx which is goes up and down in columns uh these are horizontal lines on the genuine anthem transcript but there is a question amongst historians whether the anthem transcript that the church has and publishes photos of whether that
1:37:24 literally is the piece of paper that was handed to anthon okay they think that do we know who wrote it who you mean originally or the one they have the one they have the one they have i think like i believe they think it's one of the whitmers okay uh a hand that writes it out and so they don't know for sure it's just it's just it's not a letter no it's just that chicken scratches across that page that they think the whitmers wrote and they're not sure if it was what was given to they believe what's written on the paper what was on the anthon transcript they just don't know if it is a copy of it got it i'm sorry thank you no no if you question that others would have the same question yeah uh so but the characters themselves are reproduced in uh some church documents i believe in the 1840s we just don't know what the piece of paper looked like that was literally taken to anthen but evidently people made copies of the script so we
1:38:36 know the what the letters supposedly look like so did hoffman just copy the characters from the anthon transcript that we do have a copy of to his his forgery uh are they basically mapped out parallel are they different no he's got well he's got i think some of them but he's got some other characters on it as well that we didn't know what to make out of okay so he added to it yeah it's like i'm posit interesting okay okay um so a second one that i have on my list is the joseph smith the third blessing um and obviously this is relevant because it challenges the validity of brigham young as a successor to joseph smith saying that joseph smith intended that to me shows that mark hoffman's trying to fool with orthodox mormon lds church members belief that the brigham young was the legitimate successor and it's it's basically pulling in the reorganized church of jesus christ to sort of lend weight to their claim
1:39:47 the joseph smith iii and there must have been and i'm certain there were at least perceptions that or a general folk knowledge that joseph had blessed his own son joseph iii to be a successor mark made up many of his documents on the basis of they could have been true because they're something that existed at one time yeah but weren't currently available and so we didn't have a an original document of joseph smith giving a blessing to his son however i think in such places as i think it's the temple lot case which would be in the 18 what 80s i'm reaching back here people uh that in the temple lot case which was over uh the reorganized church and the what was it the temple lot church of christ uh over who owned a piece of property uh but the mormon church got called in to uh give testimony on different points as well so in this uh template case came up the question of the joseph smith anointing or designating his son to be a
1:41:16 successor and so you have testimony of people saying yes the this blessing was given and that it should be his son but they didn't have an actual physical piece of paper that had this written on it so there were people who said they remembered such a blessing being given but they didn't have something where joseph smith wrote it down so mark fills the void ah here's the thought now that'd be a good document to make up uh everyone already knew that something like this event happened what we don't have is a piece of paper from the time period where it's really stated and if we had something like that that'd be worth a lot of money because that'd be really embarrassing to the mormon church and if they didn't want it the reorganized church probably would right so do you remember how mark chopped that around do you remember no but well i don't remember how he showed it to people but the the gossip was going around through the underground that oh wow there's this new document
1:42:26 coming out there's this blessing that's been found and we're all scurrying to try to figure out uh what's the historical background for the joseph smith the third blessing and we all had vague ideas that you thought something was coming down the pike yeah he had probably planted oh he always would leak stuff and that's so funny because mark could do it himself i mean we know now that he would make the leaks uh and then he would say oh dear things have been leaked you know well i wonder how that started you know uh but it's it's like a double whammy i guess at the church when they'd try to buy something to hide it up and that but then he'd leak it out so people would know about it yeah right well that do you so what i read just in my investigation preparing for this that he first of all that this joseph smith the third blessing letter um had a cover letter that was allegedly by thomas bullock in 1865 where he's chastising
1:43:39 brigham young um for having copies of the blessing destroyed now do you know who this thomas bullock character is thomas bullock was a secretary for brigham young okay okay and so what hoffman's doing is not only and the in the original joseph smith the third letter was supposed to be in whose hand according to hoffman when he forgets that do you remember i don't remember now is it joseph smith saying his own son should be the successor but yeah it it's supposed to be his wording but joseph very rarely wrote anything down so so the letter would have been joseph smith potentially with the scribe basically saying my dear son you you will be my successor is that right right okay and then hoffman it includes without a cover letter by this bullet guy chastising brigham young for destroying copies of of the original and this is significant because it's hoffman basically trying to signal to all of us that brigham young was destroying evidence and or keeping it from the members
1:44:55 that's kind of that feels like kind of significant right he's trying to basically uh he builds more drama into the whole thing and tries to build paint a picture of the early church leaders as deceptive in how they're handling things and i mean people had problems with brigham young taking over there would have been some pushback from some people that would feel he wasn't the rightful one to lead the church so you could build in attention into your document that would fit what some people possibly could have felt i don't know that thomas bullock would have felt that way but mark puts it in there to add drama to the whole thing but it makes another level of forgery you got to do two forgeries now you've got to forge that letter and you've got to forge the blessing document but i mean the central issue for many of us that became radicalized or activated or became activists was are the brethren
1:46:07 intentionally deceiving us yes and so in this act to me as i'm looking back he's like he's seems to be thinking about this thing that all of us are wondering i mean i get kind of you know one of the number one questions i always get two big questions and you you get questions all the time my biggest two are is the church in decline you know is is this is this the time where the church is really gonna be in decline you know ex-mormons and people who feel defrauded or just always eager for the church to have its comeuppance right but then the second is do the brethren know they're deceiving people are they intentionally deceiving people either as non-believers or as believers that are just okay with deceiving people and i'm just saying that this appears like hoffman is is trying to make that point to all of us that the brethren starting with at least brigham young if not sooner are intentionally destroying or hiding evidence
1:47:10 so that the members won't know the true story well yes mark's trying to do that one of the amazing things to the church's credit i guess is that they don't seem to actually have destroyed that much uh now in re since the 1900s now maybe they did under brigham young i don't know but the amazing thing has been for the historians the church has preserved everything so that that's why we have all this uh great history now is as the archives are open they're finding all sorts of stuff that we didn't know about before because i have to take that a little sidetrack on that one i think there's a problem with mount metal massacre i think there was some documents i suspect destroyed on that one that may have been a bridge too far that that they may have had to uh dispose of some pages of diaries and things on that but it is amazing how much the church has saved that has turned out to be embarrassing to it i mean that's that's fair of you to acknowledge of course we don't know what's been
1:48:33 destroyed because it's been destroyed right um we there is kind of the question of like the the remaining missing pages out of the joseph smith 1832 journal that you know we know that the first vision account got pasted back but i'm continually told that there are other pages still missing right and they may be in some repository someplace else i mean maybe joseph fielding smith had his own vault at home or something you know who knows but i think that on certain really sensitive things like mount miller massacre i think there were things that were destroyed in the way of diaries or pages out of diaries yeah uh but you're not aware of a lot of other things but i'm not sure about other things and the only deal is we wouldn't know would we and how would we know unless you were looking at diaries and could show that pages were missing yeah there's no way to know but but you feel it's fair to
1:49:38 conclude that that hoffman threw this bullock cover letter was basically trying to accuse brigham young of hiding and destroying information from the members right i wonder why he would make that right what do you think true what do you think well it reminds me of when when we questioned mark's documents in 84 and i passed out a pamphlet at sunstone of gerald's questioning of the salamander letter and mark came back down to see me the next day uh and he was just so amazed that we would attack his documents uh because he thought we were on his side of trying to expose the church and that we would be putting the skids on his document deals to get more of this great stuff you know you don't want to hamper my efforts here to acquire all the true history and then he gives me this big sales pitch about he was in touch with the descendant of the thomas bullock family and that bullock had saved all kind of financial papers of brigham young
1:50:49 and that this would show how the church had uh misused funds and brigham had spent all this money on his own personal pursuits and it would have all this damning evidence against the church and if i kept persisting in questioning his documents the bullock family might back out of the deal with mark and so i needed to lay low on any of this so he could get these bullock papers he was very good salesman i mean i just bought it klein and sinker yeah at that point at that point yeah i thought oh wow gee there's going to be all this great bullock stuff but see who is playing to my interest in brigham young and the brigham young estate because you're a young youtuber young and the senator brigham young so he's trying to play to that interest did that make you uh no because gerald came home after mark left and i tell this to gerald just so excited there's going to be all this bullock stuff coming out on finances and cheryl's like yeah and i got a bridge in brooklyn i want to sell you
1:51:57 you know i so were there no bullock papers no he was making making it all up i don't know maybe he's going to try to produce some but right but no he he didn't have any line on the bullock family but he knew how to play to people's interests well like what is it thomas uh brent ashworth he asked brent one day uh is there any documents are you particularly interested in brent gives him uh oh he wants a particular thing was it a letter of joseph smith or something that he wanted and oh okay i'll keep a lookout on that and i think it's within the week that he calls brent up and tells him oh hey i got this great letter for you that is like made to order a document finding that's sketchy that's so sketchy did that make brent wonder evidently not oh that's just uh that's so funny and tragic okay so going back to this joseph smith the third letter what i read you have to correct me is that he he tries to sell it to the lds church because obviously at this point it's a document the church
1:53:13 would want to own and potentially hide yeah the church apparently balks at the price from what i read yes so then he takes it to the rlds church and and then starts like a bidding war yeah do you want to do do you remember the story i don't remember the story well enough but i remember all of that back and forth between the two groups and then uh finally the reorganized church gets it and then the mormon church buys it for no the church gets it and they trade it back to the reorganized church and the organized church has to give the church a book of commandments and which would have been worth a lot of money uh at a bunch of different documents i read there was an original book of mormon in there was there the first edition book of mormon but but did hoffman did hoffman get paid what did hoffman get for giving up that do we know uh i don't remember what he got paid but he had to get paid some bucks for so the church your memory is the church did pay him for that well the question would be whether the
1:54:17 church paid him or or was it some uh member that the church got to buy it for them yeah they would often have a front buyer so that they had deniability which i think shows some uh funny aspects of the church that they can't buy stuff outright they have to have a front buyer so they have deniability that no we don't have it we didn't buy it they did this on uh in a sense on the uh jose smith papyri when they got it from the metropolitan museum uh the museum in the 60s right yeah back in what 68 67 the church wants to acquire the papyri that the metropolitan museum has and the metropolitan museum turns it over to them but then in dialogue they have an interview with the curator at the metropolitan and they ask him well is this typical that you just give stuff out oh no no there had to be a trade and so a the mormon church tapped this mission president in the east in fact i think his last name was christensen
1:55:34 but they tapped this mission president who buys a couple of statues that he donates to the metropolitan which makes it possible for the metropolitan to gift the papyri to the church so the church can say we didn't buy it a lot of people ask me for in connection with this documentary why does the church use front buyers what would be a charitable explanation and then your most uh cynical or realistic explanation for why the church uses front buyers they would not want to have the publicity of them spending all this money on things that members might question or wonder why the church was acquiring things so they don't want tithing funds church members might be upset that their tithing money was being spent to find to purchase all these different kind of documents and things also they get someone else to pay for it right yes well so then this mission president i assume gets to claim on his uh tithing that he donated
1:56:54 all this money to the church or something uh so it protects the church and then if it's a document they don't want to own up to they have deniability and i think they did that with mark hoffman's stuff and that's why i like on the mcclellan collection that they're trying mark's trying to broker a deal where the church will buy the mcclellan collection side unseen and mark will be the holder of the documents not turn them over to the church so then the church would have deniability we've never seen the mcclellan collection and we don't have it [Music] but that's why they wanted steve christensen to see the collection he was to verify there was such a collection before the church would pay for the documents and unfortunately christensen was getting leery of mark's financial dealings and mark couldn't produce enough documents to satisfy christensen that he had the kind of collection that he had told the church he had uh
1:58:08 and so that sealed uh christensen's fate which is a real unfortunate thing he just was friends with the wrong person yeah but it it shows the church's um to me uh effort at hiding their transactions hiding the documents not having to go public to explain all these things that the fact that they wanted mark to keep the documents says they weren't interested in preserving their history they're interested in preserving the history away from their files right well this um and i'll just say just to close out the discussion of the joseph the third blessing that uh apparently when when mark gives up the joseph smith the third blessing and and gives it to the church he also made sure the new york times knew about it and uh and um and so it wasn't until the new york times runs the story that then the church acknowledges that that they in fact knew about her had this document is that that was yeah so that's what mark was
1:59:28 famous for was always letting the cat out of the bag so even though originally things were supposed to be done secretly they end up publicly leaked somehow and so the new york times ends up with stories on his documents that the church had not thought would be made public and that also it makes me question makes me wonder about his motives because as i'm thinking of if i mark hoffman and i've got this document that no one else has and i know that the church will pay big bucks to hide something then what i would want to do is not tell anyone sell it to the church for a crapload of money and then never tell the media because then the church will be like oh my gosh this guy's supplying us with all the damaging documents we can trust him he's keeping it secret and we'll want to work with him more because we'll know that whatever we gobble up he will keep our confidences and so it seemed like him dribbling out the evidence of these documents to the new york times and others
2:00:43 in some sense number one um potentially put a jeopardy his credibility with the church as being trustworthy does that does that make sense right he's risking losing his main buyer however if it's just as satisfying to him to embarrass the church he can always leak him out himself when he sells them to some other buyer he just doesn't get as much money for it but he can still accomplish the same goal by just going to some other buyer i guess i'm just saying that if he was just looking for money alone right he would have never wanted these things ever be leaked he would have maybe been motivated to make sure they never got leaked am i making any sense right do you think that that logic yes if if your only goal was to make money on the deals you wouldn't leak out the transactions and what the documents were the fact that he does leak things out shows that part of the motivation was to embarrass the church not just to get money from them yeah
2:01:54 and i just think that's important because i i want to see i i want to think that i don't know why i i mean he's a murderer so like and he's a liar like yeah this is weird i'm just i'm i'm like on the fly inspecting my own motives but i guess i guess i've seen so many people get hurt and so many people be deceived so many suicides so many broken families so many divorces so so many lives um misled under false pretenses that i i want to think that people in this game at their core are are upset about that that that there's somewhere and and obviously there's some people even friends that i have are activists that go too far right but i want to think that something that we all kind of have in common is sadness of betrayal and or outrage and i want to think as i'm trying to explore his motives i keep wanting to think about whether that was at least part of what he was doing i'm coming back to something we've already
2:03:04 covered yeah so it's half greed and it's half vindication yeah vindictive uh storytelling yeah and i'm i'm returning to it because i'm trying to think about the evidence along the way yeah and i'm not trying to like use motivated reasoning to just prove my thesis i'm really trying to be fair about it but anyway okay so um so i i was wondering whether the church once this you know he gives them the document then it comes out in the new york times would that have been something that made the church go we don't want to deal with this hoffman guy anymore everything he shares with us gets leaked do you know what i'm saying well yeah you'd think that they would be leery but then they're also worried about what he might turn up so they're they're caught in the horns of a dilemma of what if he found some more stuff that we wouldn't want uh out there we cut off our chances of um containing he's too powerful yeah
2:04:11 so mark can embarrass us a lot with bringing out his documents if he doesn't go through us and i wonder if mark was careful to like let them know people know about this one you know what i mean so that they wouldn't be surprised when it came out or maybe he would have told them that other people leaked it to the new york times so that because i i would think he would want to make sure he wasn't suspected as the leaker to the church right well i didn't suspect him at first of being the leaker you didn't no i just thought oh he's shown the document to somebody else and they've told their friend who then told their friends other people are the leakers yeah would he tell you when he showed you stuff don't tell other people keep the secret well we never got the first round of talking with him he went more to the uh inner group of his associates which would have been metcalfe and yeah those uh
2:05:12 and different researchers that he would have known from byu contacts that he had to develop brent ashworth or whatever who were his closest confidants do you think well the his closest one that never got mentioned in the video was lynn jacobs and uh lynn was quite a fascinating guy in his own right in fact i thought after the bombings and everything came out i wondered if lynn had maybe helped mark with his forgeries but i talked to the detectives about him uh when they're trying to look into the whole case i said well have you looked into lynn as a possible collaborator with hoffman and the detective ken farnsworth said yes they looked very hard at lynn but they couldn't find a money trail that they felt was significant to show a sharing of the wealth from the documents so that they didn't see anything that would suggest that kind of involvement he had helped mark front a couple of documents
2:06:37 for sale but nothing that that the investigators felt would indicate that he'd helped to make them unfortunately lynn died a few years later and so we don't have him to we know how to ask about it how did lynn die i believe he died of aids oh i don't know anything about lynn no he was he always reminded me of a shakespearean actor he had a very dramatic look a striking look dark curly hair dark mustache beard thing that just made him look theatrical that very smart very intelligent guy and of the two mark and lynn i would have said if i were looking for a forger i'd been looking at lynn because lynn came across as smart and cunning and with a flare that i could have seen writing these early documents mark came across as just this nondescript mousy guy and but then i guess that's mark's genius that he didn't look like he could perpetrate something like that but i always wondered about lynn but he may have been a victim like everyone else i don't know
2:08:18 so this is you know these days these questions are always kind of uh fraught or complicated to ask but if if if lynn jacobs died of aids one would assume that he might have been gay yes he was gay okay i just i i had this question not knowing anything about lin and i don't know why but but hearing i think i think it was hearing mark hoffman's voice when they played when they played recordings of his voice in the documentary his voice sounded really weird to me and i thought is that an actor or is his voice distorted did you do do you have any thoughts about mark hoffman's voice well it was uh yeah it was a little high and odd uh one of the recordings they had on the video though i felt was played at a little higher pitch and and as soon as i heard it i thought i don't think that pitch is quite right but most of them that are at a slightly lower pitch rang true to me that that's what mark sounded like and whether that's an affected type of
2:09:36 speech he had for whatever reason but that's what he sounded like yeah had you have you ever heard any speculation or rumors that mark hoffman might have been gay back when the whole thing was going on even before the documents even before the murders there yes there was speculation around the investigation that it seemed like there were a number of gay people in the mix with mark and so there was some speculation now this would be uh partly coming from our talks with the detective ken farnsworth we got to be kind of friends with him but they're who is dead now uh but ken was asking questions about all the gays that seem to be around mark that was this some sort of gay retribution against the church some sort of gathering of disgruntled former members that had a axe to grind over their treatment of being gay and so there was questions about uh the so the guys around mark all got this questioning look from people you know are you part of the gay crowd uh that's friends with mark
2:11:18 so it was your it was your understanding that there was any of his associates mark's associates were gay some thought they were i don't know how many of them actually were okay but there was this question in straight people that i talked to yeah that were wondering it looked like there were a bunch of gay friends around mark so was this a gay reaction against the church and of course the other side was well uh look at the different ones that are married in the group you know well we know in mormonism that doesn't necessarily mean anything because a lot of the gays got married back then and still do yeah and so uh that wouldn't solve the issue so it was a question that was discussed at the time and i don't know was mark k i i have no idea but he was married and had kids so who knows did investigators ever are you aware of any conclusions that they drew looking into that well i think they dropped it because they couldn't make any conclusion on it and it looked like more and more
2:12:24 like mark was just working alone and that the people that were around him were just victims that got sucked into his lies and really thought that his documents were authentic so it just i think it became a dead end for the investigators they didn't see what they could make out of it did you draw a conclusion in your mind about mark no it's just one of those questions that sits back at the back of your mind i mean we knew that lynn was but i didn't know what to make of any of the others because that would be another if that were true that would be another level of anger or frustration um and yeah i don't know why i even had that thought but but there must it was a question at the time yeah and who do we look at if we're looking at mark did he have help with the documents if he had help who would have been the helpers and what would have been their motive yeah so um i got we got i thank you for sharing about lynn jacobs and uh
2:13:38 we got there by asking who the people were that were closest to him who else would you list as the people closest to him including the obvious ones well shannon flynn and brent metcalfe i don't know who else would be in his close-in circle i mean obviously he had a lot of dealings with kurt bench but i don't know if i would list him as necessarily a friend of marx okay so um the the next letter and the one that i think is potentially the biggest smoking gun as it relates to an instance where it appears as though the church literally purchased scooped up a document hid it lied about it and then only made it available once it got called out on it was the 1825 joseph smith letter to josiah stoll now do you do i can i can give my best description of the letter or do you do you want you give your description of it and you can correct me okay so apparently this is a letter it's one page it's supposedly written in joseph smith's hand
2:14:57 in uh it's dated june 18th 1825 it's to josiah stoll and those who are into mormon history will know that when joseph smith ends up going to uh the susquehanna area boarding with isaac and emma hale um not the hails oh yeah the hails okay to uh to to dig in the silver mine for josiah stoll you know and that's where he ends up getting really in trouble and getting the reputation making emma's dad hate him but it's also where he meets emma and ends up eloping with her like so this is that josiah stole it's the guy that joseph smith and his dad end up doing treasure digging with to find the silver mine so mark hoffman knows about that story and so he thinks huh i'll write a letter that's supposedly from joseph smith to jesus stole sort of pre-counseling him about uh tips and tricks on how to treasure dig and it mentions um it mentions treasure being guarded by clever spirits it mentions the use of a hazel stick as
2:16:08 kind of a treasure detector that you cut it and cleave it and then somehow it responds to treasure that it finds a dousing rod so to speak and it has joseph basically saying something to the effect if i have time maybe i'll come out and help you later okay so those are my memories of kind of what the document says anything else you want to add to that from your memory does that sound right does that sound right yeah on the letter yes uh-huh okay and then what's so so do you remember when that letter comes out and do you remember what what you and gerald might have might have thought of it anything you remember about that uh well when it came out we were all excited because this would fit right in with what we knew about joseph smith and his magic involvement and the details in it would certainly sound historically accurate in documents that mark would have had available to him he could have found quotes from the wayne sentinel the newspaper in joseph smith's area
2:17:19 that had published articles about which hazel rods and about money diggers seer stones uh guarding spirits and that type of thing and i'm i don't remember specifically but i imagine they're probably referenced in brody and uh they're referenced in our material so mark would have been aware of that kind of activity that could be shown in joseph's neighborhood that he would know the church would also be privy to so that he knew it would fit what they could imagine could have been in a letter at that time because they would be equally familiar with the sources that mark is using to draw on to write the letter up so it's fulfilling the church's worst nightmare to have this come out because they realize it is plausible for smith to have written such a letter as this the only question would be whether it's authentic but the subject matter would have been common for his for joseph smith's day and it would
2:18:38 so directly tie him to it to magic um because if it's just martin harris you can always just dismiss him as just kind of a flake and it doesn't affect the restoration claims but if joseph himself is uh we want it both ways of martin harris yes we want him to be a credible witness because he's one of the three witnesses of the book of mormon right but then and i want to say we i mean the church they also need him to be a fool because he was a fool and he did he he had so many crazy beliefs he went off and followed the strangites and became a witness for strange book the church needs to have it both ways with martin harris right but it's much more problematic to have your prophet saying those things and uh tied so deeply into the magic world scene yeah so that would have been very troubling for the church which also meant that we were more excited about it because it directly tied to joseph smith
2:19:44 yeah yeah and i help us understand the context at the time because on the one hand we've got fon brody's book published in 1945 right right and we also had dialogue and sunstone and and you know your friends publishing and you guys publishing stuff about folk magic and treasure digging right but we didn't have michael quinn's or magic in the early mormon worldview or whatever it is what was the church what was the church true how was the church dealing with the allegations of folk magic around 1983 when hoffman would have come out with this letter did you remember the historians in the mormon church we're all familiar with these same early stories that we were uh that i wouldn't have said anything in 1980 about our research that would surprise a church historian they just had a way of discounting them as irrelevant to mormonism's truth claims and somewhat they're still doing it today that now that they admit he had a seer stone
2:21:06 oh isn't that wonderful it works just like a cell phone well they weren't telling people that in 1980 so they were aware that all of that type of uh claims of seer stones and rod working and all were going on in joseph's day and that the smiths probably were involved in quite a bit of money digging and magic but they always wanted to cast it in joseph smith's teenage folly and that he outgrew it all and that it was just it was just garden variety uh folk magic stuff like playing with a ouija board like it wasn't serious that that he didn't really believe that there was magic stuff but when you look at mother smith we know it was i mean she talks about the family following the the faculty of abrac and abrac would be a magic spirit and so i mean they knew about the smith family involvement the uh hiram smith magic papers uh patriarch smith the descendant of hiram he had the magic papers of joseph smith and uh the hiram smith's papers
2:22:28 and the church would have to have been i would have said what which said what wouldn't have said anything it was these magic papers that uh little parchment pieces of paper that that if you followed folk magic you folded up and carried a little pouch on you and they gave you uh special blessings powers like having a rabbit's foot that you carried around or something you know they had special powers and joseph and hiram smith had these magic papers uh did he carry around where yeah iron smith hiram did yeah so joseph's brother wore a little pouch with like magic papers in them magic papers and they had a magic dagger um oh and joseph had his jupiter talisman which is what it's another amulet magic piece that gives you power and money and success with women or something but uh so the family was deeply involved in magic this wasn't just uh like playing with tarot cards in your front room just for
2:23:42 fun or something these guys were seriously seeing these as sources of power that doesn't mean they saw them as demonic but they just saw them as part of the way of harnessing the powers of the universe and would not have seen it as contrary to the christianity they could hold it within their christian framework of these uh magic powers the good forces the bad forces and how you make them work and be very similar to mormon's view of the power of the priesthood today that there's the evil powers and the good powers and the priesthood power triumphs and so the early mormons the joseph smith's family and all would have had a very that's why quinn calls his book early mormonism and the magic worldview there was a magic worldview of many people not everyone but many people were following these kinds of things many people in joseph's neighborhood that's why when they talk about all the persecution that joseph had in his early
2:24:48 life what really was happening was the money digger company that him and his dad were a part of were trying to get the gold plates from joseph because the smiths had signed an agreement with stolen these different people looking for treasure that if anyone found a treasure they were going to split it in this money digging company and when the smiths claimed they had found gold plates then the money diggers felt that the smiths owed them part of the booty and so here the smiths are hiding these gold plates and that should be partly ours and that's where you get the persecution stories not on his religion so it was common but not everyone engaged in that sort of thing right and i guess if if we're gonna believe that joseph and hiram and others in his family believed in folk magic it kind of means that they probably believed in religious stuff because because it believes in it it's not a purely secular worldview it's kind of a supernatural worldview where you believe in in spirits and special powers that you
2:26:03 can't see so in a weird way it's it feels like to me an acknowledgement that joseph and hyrum believed in superstitious folk magic stuff also inclined you to believe that they really did believe in angels and in god and and maybe in a lot of the central tennis of christianity right their magic is kind of an extension outgrowth of their christianity that the jupiter i mean the magic papers that hiram had they had like jehovah elohim and different things christian words on them like that but in a magic sense that you're using this as spells to get the powers of the universe to work for you so they wouldn't have seen it as like black magic stuff yeah yeah this was some sort of christian power the way of that a christian could tap into the powers of the universe interesting so their folk magic was sort of tied to their christianity yes yeah the people that were in the money digging group a number of them were uh church-going people
2:27:16 but the rank-and-file leadership of the churches would not have accepted this that's why when joseph tries to join the methodist church in 1828 that they won't let him join because he hasn't repented of his magic involvement and um emma's cousin says what a thing to have a practicing necromancer be a part of the methodist church so uh he was dropped from the membership roles so not everybody was on board with this kind of magic money digging stuff right so when we go back to what the church so we know that the church historians and probably by extension high-level church general authorities they all knew joseph was involved in this treasure digging stuff and and folk magic they would have known from the 60s and 70s and just all the stuff coming out would they have been honest and open with the church membership about this stuff uh in the early 80s and then how much would the church membership on average have known about this kind of stuff well the church was still denying all that sort of thing i mean the official church
2:28:29 officially the church was downplaying anything that you brought up about the magic involvement they would just make it oh well yeah there were people of the day that did that sort of thing but it wasn't the smiths but hinckley for instance had written the little pamphlet truth restored which kind of a little summary history of the beginnings of mormonism which was one of the books we were allowed to read on our mission so it's like miracle forgiveness jesus the christ articles of faith marvelous work in a wonder and truth restored i forgot about that little book yes well truth restored is a very sanitized telling of the church history and hinckley would have known more than he tells in that little book so you see the control of dissemination of information by someone who knows better by how he frames the story at that time in that little book uh dallin oaks wrote the book on um the enemies of joseph smith or the
2:29:36 carthage is the god carthage conspiracy yeah so to research that he had to be very informed in joseph smith's life so he had to be aware of those things as well they would have all those that had paid attention to history would have all been aware of font brody's book which lays all this out in there i mean from 45. they all knew the story laid out in fond brodie's book if they had read it i mean it's possible that hinckley and oaks never read no man knows my history because they believed like many of us that it was anti-mormon isn't that is that possible they wouldn't have read it i think they had to have read it because they were writing defensive books for the church and i think that they would have read it to have known how to frame the story away from do it away from the things that brody brought up okay but we're speculating a little bit we're speculating but i think they i think they knew enough of the early documents to realize
2:30:50 that the things hoffman was bringing up could potentially exist and would be a problem for them interesting so the fact that okay what i hear you saying again is that if the general authorities in 80 1983 were interested in a hoffman document the fact that they were interested in might want to scoop it up is it is extra evidence that they knew that that it was there were credible problems behind the document otherwise why would they even bother with the document oh this is just silly specious anti-mormon made-up stuff right right they knew church history enough that mark's documents had the potential of being authentic they would fit what they knew of some of the documents from the time period interesting okay but you're saying that overall the church was officially was hiding down playing or dismissing any talk about folk magic tied to joseph smith or smith family is that right right yeah they um and they had to know about
2:31:59 um patriarch smith having those magic papers although to give them credit on that i think they thought they were masonic which raises a whole other question why would the smiths be keeping these uh odd masonic documents but so patriarch smith had these documents and what was he doing with him how do we know about him he would show them at different fireplaces uh firesides firesides of a different group little meetings elder eldridge smith was that his name uh he would show and tell you could have him come to your fireside and he would get out the family heirlooms of the smith family and have these magic papyri uh things that he would have uh and another guy that we haven't mentioned well he doesn't commit to the mark story but a fellow by the name of wilford wood uh he was a furrier in bountiful and he had gone back in the 50s i guess it was he 40s and 50s he had made trips back east and it helped the church acquire
2:33:14 a lot of the um property that had been involved with mormonism and wasn't owned by the church anymore like their property in new york and in nauvoo and susquehanna area and that but he went around different areas buying up artifacts of the early mormonism and trading fur coats to people to get documents and artifacts of joseph smith and he even has a well he's dead now but his family has had a museum up in woods cross for years where they displayed these things and they're the ones that own the original uh jupiter talisman the little magic medallion of joseph smith although they may have they may have passed that on to the church at this point i'm not sure who currently owns it but mr wood was one that acquired that jupiter talisman from um from i believe the bitumen family okay yeah that would have been emma's second husband right yeah right the descendants of that yeah but there was so there was information out at the time that there were
2:34:33 um magic things around but you had to be in the right circles to hear about them they weren't in the improvement era or the enzyme they just things that people talked around about oh i went to the museum up at the woods cross and i saw this and that artifact oh i heard eldridge smith talk at fireside and he showed us these ancient artifacts of joseph smith and stuff and then there was joseph there was richard bushman's first biography called joseph smith in the beginnings of early mormonism which did acknowledge the folk magic treasure digging stuff and provided an apologetic kind of explanation or excuse do you remember when that book came out i don't expect you to remember no i don't i know that was written as part of leonard arrington's intended multi-volume history of the church that got scrapped and then bushman publishes that yeah so i i wish i knew what year that book was published anyway so so the church so when hoffman comes
2:35:37 up with this 19 with this 1825 letter to jesus stole it was in the context of the church knowing about the problematic history around treasure digging in folk magic but not acknowledge denying it and or hiding it from the church membership correct right uh if you'd asked the average member if joseph practiced magic that it said you've been reading anti-mormon literature there's no truth to it because who would you have brought up as proof edie howe's book von brody the tanners i mean we're all a bunch of liars you can't trust anything we say so without knowing any of the early history of mormonism the average member would have thought they all sounded like a terrible slanderer against joseph smith and when people are looking to gather evidence around the church misleading people i think you have to mention the excommunication and smearing of honest researchers and critics because that's it has to be at some point they're like whoa this information is really damaging
2:36:47 so we have to always smear and excommunicate and damage the messengers because that's the only way to taint the information that could ever be passed on i mean that's must that must have been part of their playbook from brody to now right like i don't remember what year it was stan larson worked at the church as a church translator and he had degrees in those biblical studies of some kind or other and anyways he was working as a translator for the church but then he started looking at the book of mormon account of the sermon on the mount that jesus gave supposedly here in america and he wrote up a private paper on this showing that the um third nephi sermon on the mount is copied from the king james and in fact would follow the king james in problematic areas that show it can't be an independent document it has to be from the king james not just some other language version or something of the sermon on the mount but the king
2:38:12 james version and and maybe even the one joseph had a copy of yeah right i don't remember if he directly addresses that he may but anyways the showing that there was a problem with it being so dependent on the king james text and he shared this with a colleague and for the listeners who are new to this and don't understand why that's a problem connect the dots and tell listeners well then it would mean the book of mormon can't be an ancient document it has to be a modern day fabrication because it's using the joseph smith has to be using a current bible to put words into jesus mouth here in america that he couldn't possibly have said because it's dependent on a text from the king james authors that everything isn't every word is not exact it's the way it copies the king james that shows it's a modern day fabrication it can't represent a translation of an ancient text so i'm i'm fuzzy on book of mormon but but third nephi would have been written
2:39:23 by someone named nephi right if the third nephi was written by a prophet correct yeah okay and and if that's true then if jesus came to america and gave the equivalent of a sermon on the mount talk it would have been in his own words with whatever he was experiencing at the time it wouldn't have been in king james english but it also would have had differences or anomalies or peculiarities but it certainly wouldn't have had direct uh copied text from the king james bible because the king james bible would have been written much much much later like what 14 1500 years later and it certainly would have include wouldn't have included errors that somehow got into a certain version of the king james bible yeah and so it would indicate that it wasn't it wasn't third nephi whoever that prophet was nephi that wrote about an authentic account with jesus in america 33 a.d but instead joseph would have just been saying okay i need the sermon on the mount as i'm as i'm filling in the words for what jesus said when he was in the americas
2:40:37 as i'm making all this up let me just pull out the bible and start copying my king james version right into the book of mormon i i i did a worse job of explaining it to you but that's my attempt to explain right right right and that's a problem yes a problem and so stan shares this paper with a colleague at work never making it public but just shared it with this i think it was a woman anyways um someone in the department became privy of the paper and saw it as threatening to the truth claims of the book of mormon and turned it into a higher up which got larson in trouble and he was forced out of the department he was given an ultimatum um if you resign uh we'll give you a separation from employment if you'll resign for church employment we'll give you a severance package if you don't resign and we have to fire you you get nothing and stan was financially in a position where he didn't feel that he could afford to stand his ground
2:41:56 and fight him on it so he took the severance package and then he got a job at the university of utah in special collections over there but stands an example of the church's fear of church history of analyzing the documents and looking at whether things really were supported by history the church had that kind of control on things the scholars what decade was the stan larson thing uh 60s 70s no it'd be i don't know late seventies early eighties late seven years maybe in the seventies like no i i'm not clear on that so he wasn't excommunicated but he was forced to quit he was forced out of his job yeah out of the church historian the church translation department and and then since then there have been other scholars that have been forced out fired or whatever byu professors that have either lost their job or been forced out some that i've talked with that once they figured out there were problems they transferred to another university before
2:43:17 the church could catch up to their questioning of the church but the church was never there was david wright that inspired brett metcalf right right right it is if i'm remembering that right yeah new testament studies and uh he ended up writing some very important papers yeah so the church does not have a a good history with honest straightforward historians if you're going to work for the church you have to come up with something that aligns with sunday school material they don't want anything surprising coming to the membership which put them in the problem of being able to be blackmailed in a sense by hoffman with the documents because they had so tried to control the narrative that when he came along with documents it threatened that narrative and thus we have the whole they created they created the environment that would make hoffman you know exist and and eventually lethal right by always dismissing and denying and hiding and lying about documents right right right so
2:44:37 um yeah so i mean this is what i think about a lot because you know again i told you the two big questions people ask is the church on its way down and then do the brethren know or really believe or are they just intentionally uh deceiving us and none of us can know for sure whether the brethren actually believe in god i actually believe in jesus i actually believe in the church's restoration the truth claims the book of mormon you know divinity although most of the people i know that are close to them including my own brother who spent years with these men they all say that these are sincere believers so whether or not there's there's um fraud going on at the highest levels of the church in terms of them not being sincere believers what this story about stan larson and the one we're about to tell about the 18 25 letter to josiah stoll what they seem to prove beyond a shadow of doubt is that the brethren have known about
2:45:48 these problems and intentionally hid them misled the members about their truthfulness and punished anyone who dared talk openly as a way to keep them silent and or smear them or take away their credibility so that they would never be believed is that a stretch no i think that's true and and i don't know whether they sincerely believe or not i will grant them the possibility that maybe they really do have a belief in the joseph smith's uh call was authentic but they also know that there are a ton of problems with that claim so that now they have to wrestle with problems of uh is the book of mormon an actual record of real people or is it some sort of divine allegory or something were there really gold plates or was this something joseph just saw in a dream you know they're trying to find some way to frame the story that gets them off the hook of looking like joseph smith made it all up as a con man he has to come out sincere so the name of the game is no matter what you write
2:47:11 it has to end up with also being sincere he can't be a known deceiver and the historians now are struggling with how to frame this story because the documents show that it didn't happen the way we've always been told the book of mormon is not the historical record we were always told so how do you frame that in a way that keeps people believing joseph smith but not destroyed by finding out the book of mormon can't be history so it's a it's a tough game to try to re cast it all in a new way of talking about it i think the church historians really believe even though they know all this material curly for example truly i assume turley really believes it yeah my cousin mark amherst mcgee uh i think he really believes it is asher's amherst amherst okay okay mark amherst mcgee he's involved in the joseph smith papers project yeah and and i assume he really believes it all but he someway has to find a way to
2:48:23 marry joseph smith's divine call with a very problematic history that has all sorts of uh things that look like fraud yeah yeah yeah um and and this is a little bit of a side trail but we'll come right back to this letter but in my mind just doing the math and connecting the dots you get enough of the brethren with enough exposure to the problems with enough time you have to think that there are points where they're like that we all arrive at right before our big faith crisis which is what if this isn't true what if this isn't true you have to think that at least hinckley or oaks or or benson or or mcconkey or joseph failing smith or joseph f smith or one of these dudes one of them at least reached the point that all of us reached who have lost our faith which is whether we're willing to say um what if it's not all true and then once you're willing to ask yourself that question [Music] then oftentimes you're you're if the the rabbit hole opens up and you go down it yeah and then there's some that i guess
2:49:54 can put that genie back in the bottle but you have to think that at least a couple of these brethren at some point realized that it wasn't true you would think but i don't know who to say it was you don't know no maybe hubie brown um possibly and possibly maybe bh roberts maybe with brown when he talked with ferguson this goes back a long time ago tom ferguson was a lawyer from california that wrote church books to defend the book of mormon and was getting money for the church to run expeditions down in guatemala area to try to prove the book of mormon and he came up to talk to brown apostle brown and trying to get some more money from the church for his expeditions and um ferguson told us about brown and seeming to indicate that the book of abraham wasn't true and well that all leaves you with the question well what do you do with that you're saying hubie brown indicated to ferguson yeah you're saying hubby brown indicated to ferguson that the book of abraham might not be true
2:51:18 yeah according to to well the uh problem of the translation of the like the facsimiles right that they were on the horns of a dilemma with that stuff brown acknowledges this to ferguson yeah which questions which which raises the question is it possible that hubie brown didn't believe the book of abraham was a translation right yeah okay really quickly where do you come down on b.h roberts losing his faith in book of mormon historicity by the end of his life i think he has to know the book of mormon is not actual history or i think the bh roberts knew the book of mormon wasn't actual history he may have been able to rationalize that way in some ways still hold on to a belief of joseph smith's divine calling maybe he is the original one to come up with this allegory explanation to his mind or something but i think he knew there was no real gold plates there there was not nephites what's your what's your evidence or indication that beatrice lost his testimony in book of mormon historicity when in his studies of the book of
2:52:36 mormon he had done a manuscript where he raised questions about the book of mormon could it have been put together by someone who read view of the hebrews which was early book 1823 reprinted 1825 speculating on the american indians whether they were from israelites and their similarities in the book to book of mormon ideas so b.h roberts does this study and it wasn't published during his lifetime it came out published later but in robert's statements he will make a little speculations was this particular item in view of the hebrew sufficient to suggest to the author of the book of mormon this particular idea whatever it was and there would be these different questions all through his manuscript that say to me roberts realized that the book of mormon did not have historical standing now the mormons look at his manuscript and they say oh he was just playing devil's advocate that wasn't robert's real feeling
2:53:49 he was just telling the church this is what an outsider could raise as an objection to the book of mormon well yes one could say that but i think the questions the way he poses them i would suggest were his own questions not just that he was playing devil's advocate but they were really his thoughts which would say he saw the problem of being a historical book are you are you familiar with shannon caldwell montez's research of the past few years where she actually finds a source or two late in bh roberts's life who who claim to have spoken with bh roberts where he had indicated a loss of faith in book of mormon historicity no i haven't read that you haven't read that no would you be interested in reading that well yeah i would put on my shelf of things to read but is it a book or just a pamphlet it's a it's a master's thesis oh a master ceases yeah no i'm not familiar with that okay okay yeah it's really good i'd be curious to hear your reaction to that
2:55:00 okay well back back to the josiah stoll 1825 letter and i really appreciate uh your generosity of your time um so um now that we've kind of dug deep into the historical context let's talk about um gordon b hinckley so so this letter comes out um purportedly of of in joseph smith's handwriting writing to josiah stole giving him tips about folk magic and spirits and dousing rods and treasure digging saying hey maybe i'll come later and help you find a buried treasure this document comes out what's your memory of how of of gordon b hinckley's response to the document coming out oh i can't remember what the church said about it but i knew we were pretty excited about it because i mean what he tried to do what hinckley tried to do okay you don't remember okay i'll tell you what i remember okay so in my readings and this is from your book by the way by everything that tanner's have ever published
2:56:11 go to utlm right now buy books buy reward give them donations reward sandra tanner she's got staff she's still doing this work 60 how many years 60 years 60 years later so send her money give her money support her for this work okay so um reading from gerald's research and yours what is indicated is that gordon b hinckley and i'll put a link to this article gordon b hinckley apparently purchases hoffman lets gordon mchinkley know that this letter exists before it gets published to the world right okay hinckley uh is alarmed by this letter and so he pays hoffman by some reports out of his own pocket somewhere between 15 and 25 000 for this document now that begs the question number one where is gordon b hinckley getting between 15 and 25 000 of his own money um and then why is he buying it and and um you know that's that's a question but then it appears as though when hinckley or the church was asked soon after hinckley buys the document whether this document exists or whether
2:57:35 the church had it or whether hinkley bought it it appears like there was a period of time where the church and or hinckley were denying that hinckley had purchased this document and then it isn't until the church realizes that again hoffman leaks to other sources that this document in fact does exist and that hinckley and or or the church did purchase it that then the deseret news is forced may 12 1985 two full years after hinckley apparently purchases the document that the desert that the church admits to the deseret news that this document does exist and does publish it and this is the game that the church seems to play where they deny deny deny it until they're forced to admit it then they publish it and admit it only after they're forced and then later apologists can say see the church is transparent you see it published all these things now that's what i have read i want to really get clear on
2:58:38 this evidence now that i've said all that is there anything you remember i couldn't give you any more than that i just remember because all that sounds right yes that's that's it it all sounds right yes that does seem to be the way they were operating at the time yeah and so well operating for years decades decades yeah so so is it your memory that hinckley was in fact involved in trying to buy up a letter with his own money to hide it that he denied it and then the church only fessed up to it after they were exposed yeah that's my understanding of the situation okay yeah and what do you think about that i think it just shows the church knew they had a problem with their history and they were trying every way they could think of to try to keep the real narrative from coming out because it does raise questions about mormonism's validity if you see all of if if you were to accept all of mark's documents on the magic stuff it looked pretty bad
2:59:51 so at the time uh it was heyday for the anti-mormons they were there was this everyone was gleeful that we had all these documents that questioned the church uh however we felt there was enough evidence before mark to establish all of that but it would have been more evidence if they had been authentic and because gerald wanted to have his case built on things that were actually true not just stuff that would support his cause he was able to question the documents and allow himself to question them and to look into it that he didn't want to accept them just because it helped his cause but he didn't want to be surprised years later when someone came along and said these aren't authentic he didn't want another situation like the cadre defense where he had used something and then later some mormon comes along and says oh we've proven the counter defense isn't true he didn't want someone come along later and say well we've proven mark documents aren't true so he wanted to be sure if he was going to use them that they were authentic
3:01:03 yeah that shows a lot of integrity and i think that's a that's a real you know for any activist today in mormonism uh you know progressive mormons post mormons that want to uh you know wake orthodox mormons up to the truth about the church that want the church to be held accountable i love that example of saying not by any means necessary not by means of fraud not by means of deception and and instead with as much allegiance to the facts and the truth as possible to me that makes you and gerald kind of heroes right well gerald was uh not perfect but he certainly was committed to being honest yeah yeah so why isn't this like all the hubbub around mark hoffman is around the salamander letter but in my mind this josiah stole 1825 letter seems more damning and condemning the church than even the salamander letter because you've got hinckley this beloved prophet buying it hiding it denying it
3:02:24 and then only admitted to him when it fell it's got it all right there why isn't the 1825 letter the scandalous letter that hoffman that is remembered in association with hoffman why and why isn't this something that we all know about like even you when i first asked you you were fuzzy on the details why isn't it the 1825 just i stole letter that's remembered as like the smoking gun of the whole hoffman thing does that make sense well because so much of the i don't know the books that came out at the time focused on the salamander letter uh well and gerald's questions for authenticity started with the salamander letter so i guess it becomes foremost in discussions because of that reason it leads to the discovery of the fraud yeah right yeah it's the first document that gerald starts raising questions about and uh so it becomes a focal point and besides salamanders makes a crazy story so that catches your attention
3:03:34 okay so but but but you agree this 1825 account with hinckley it's kind of it's very damning isn't it yeah i think so yeah in the cover-up it would have been damning if it had been true and it's even more damning that it isn't right although everything in it could have happened this is definitely plausible right okay let's jump to the salamander letter now okay and i'm guessing your your memory is going to be more fresh on that one so when this letter comes like i have so many questions about it let's get okay let's start give people a background if you if you can or want to on what it what it was who supposedly wrote it what it supposedly said well you have martin harris writing this uh kind of introductory letter on mormonism and in it he recounts uh joseph going out to the get the plates and when he opens the box this salamander jumps out turns into a spirit and what is it knocks him down i can't remember all the details of the letter
3:04:51 now but it casts it all in this magic folklore which we now know was suggested to him by statements uh by letters in the edie hall mormonism unveiled book so you're saying hoffman hoffman used the ideas got his idea for the white salamander from one of the people in hal's book talking about a toad-like creature that jumps out of the hole and so mark spins it then to salamander so there's actually some there's a basis for the story yeah yeah he just uh uh enlarged on it from just being a toad like creature that becomes a spirit to this salamander that becomes a spirit so it makes it a little more colorful so there's the salamander which is colorful there's the tying it to the folk magic which the church obviously doesn't want right to you know let let out of the bag but then there's the fact that martin harris is one of the three witnesses right yes and martin is such an odd guy anyways that it's all believable that martin could write
3:06:16 a letter like this uh he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer but you know i guess it's hard to pick your witnesses but martin tried to test joseph at different times but he wasn't very deep thinker on what he thought would prove joseph was a prophet uh like joseph like martin dropping his toothpick in the straw and asking joseph to find it and joseph supposedly puts a stone in his hat and he bends down and reaches in the straw and picks up martin's toothpick and hands it to him and martin takes this as proof that the seer stone really works and joseph's a prophet and i'm thinking well he just saw where the toothpick fell you know uh so i mean you could envision martin harris writing a letter like this and and not seeing this as being detrimental to his faith that uh a guardian spirit was as good as an angel there's also tell me if i'm wrong there's also some suggestion of incrimination amongst the brethren or or some motive for deception
3:07:39 is i think about joseph's evolving narrative about the emergence of the book of mormon wait was it was it the 1820 version was it the lord was it god and the lord and then was it nephi that appeared to joseph or moroni like it would you would think that the brethren by the 70s and early 80s would know that the story is so all over the place in terms of the founding of both the book of mormon and joseph smith's history and the church that they would they would be open to all sorts of crazy versions because in fact the historical record is isn't the emergence of both joseph smith's first vision story and the book of mormon all over the place in terms of different accounts or am i doing that wrong yeah and they would have been aware of this but um like i say when our friend wes walters did all this study on the revivals in new york and on the 26 trial documents that had been a launching pad for the church historians to go back to new york
3:08:44 and do all sorts of research through the different repositories and people that could have had any document so the church in the 60s and 70s was very intent on trying to understand the early history which set up the market for mark's documents because the church already was aware that they had to figure out how the story really happened and figure out ways of softening the blow to the membership as they found out about these things that the church had answers so by the time mark comes along the hinckley and company are already somewhat practiced in getting their story together to explain these problematic parts of church history yeah so this document comes out the salamander letter comes out was it leak do you remember if it was leaked first do you remember any hoffman's you know shenanigans in terms of trying to sell it to find a buyer i don't know about the selling or buying of it but the at first there was rumors going around
3:10:04 about uh possibly a a collection of material in texas and this is the start of the mcclellan stuff there might be a collection in texas and there might be something connected to mcclellan and then there was stuff about some uh stuff that might relate to magic and then you start getting rumors of the martin harris letter and so evidently mark's just throwing out all kinds of little suggestions of different things and so gradually you get more specific rumors about the martin harris letter and that it's got magic stuff in it but then no one has a copy of it uh well so and so uh had someone read them a part of it on the telephone and someone else had talked to someone else and so you know you keep getting these different things brought up people calling wanting to know what we do you know about this what do you know oh jeez i don't know nothing you know like well tell me more so then we got more specific
3:11:23 information fed to us uh about the martin harris letter and the magic and the and i don't know how early we heard the word salamander but the general outline of the ideas of the letter were being spread around and i think finally someone read part of the letter to gerald on the phone and it would have been the part that had the salamander word in it and want to know what geralt thought of it and he said i'd have to see the document i've got to see the whole thing and finally he was able to get a type script of the letter which started his study on the wording that he compared with e.d howe and then it was some time before we actually got a photo of the handwritten document itself okay and right now i couldn't even tell you what years and time frame for this uh well it definitely would have been between night you know 1983 and 1985 right right yeah so it must have all been in 83 yeah that all that was going on yeah okay and so what okay so
3:12:42 really quickly there's there's kind of that iconic photo i think oaks is in it is there a press conference yes what can you tell us about that you know what you know about hoffman and the church and oaks or hinckley or pinak or whoever the lawyers were and that was that photo is of the um and the transcript though isn't it okay you would know you know anthony transcript has mark presenting it to the church and he's there with um who's the prophet then king kimball wasn't either okay yeah that sounds right yeah kimball prophet was in the picture and then hinckley and uh and eldon tanner um i don't remember who else is in the picture but there's several general authorities along with the prophet standing there but uh kimball is uh front and center with a magnifying glass examining the anthem transcript and mark's there pointing his finger and showing him the document this was in the deseret news and the salt lake tribune and everything it might even have been in
3:13:57 the new york times probably everyone had this great photo of hoffman with the prophet and the apostles with this great new find on the ant and transcript which of course in hindsight looks pretty damning to the claim of these men having been ordained prophet seers and revelators especially when you realize the prophet is supposed to have joseph smith's gift uh mentioned in what is it section one of the doctrine of covenants that he's a uh prophet seer revelator and translator that's right and so here's the prophet suppose the mantle of joseph was supposed to have fallen on kimball so how come the prophecy or revelator and translator can't look at the anthem transcript and see that is nonsense it doesn't translate anything why isn't he able to discern this yeah that's a good question and i know in the video they have what is it turley saying oh well people expect too much the prophets are human and uh they're just like everybody else
3:15:12 uh you know they're god gives free agency and whatever and you just go on your own power sort of stuff and i'm thinking wait a minute wait a minute uh section one of the dnc gave me the idea this was gonna have a lot more power in this job than just like the rest of us then why did we need him if he's no more divinely guided to determine a fraud on the church that will eventually lead to murder i i would have thought god might have thought that was important when does he use his prophetic gift if not for things like this murder and the church's reputation and being fooled and yeah yeah yeah when when when does that kick in if not then when um okay so so what do we know about hof what do you remember about what we know about hoffman the salamander letter and the church selling it to them them buying it hiding it do we do do you know oh i spent too long i don't remember how old that went that's fine okay so this letter at some
3:16:26 point what is it that made gerald what is it that started bringing up the question of authenticity for the salamander letter specifically and i just want to say that this is one of my favorite stories in all of mormon history is the fact that a you know you guys are known as the world's greatest you know anti-mormons um that you would have had every motivation to use confirmation bias and motivated reasoning to just rubber stamp the salamander letter and say yep up another damning evidence that the church is false but then not only were you not or you and or gerald weren't operating uh under that mindset something would have made gerald ask the question is this authentic and then something would have then um made him investigated and then something would have led him to conclude that it wasn't authentic and have the courage to say that publicly so can you just tell us that whole story well gerald was so anxious to get this copy of the letter to see the actual wording
3:17:45 assuming it was true up to this point we're thinking that mark's on the level and his documents are true and so when he finally gets the type script in to prepare for when he would get the type script he'd gone back and reviewed the neighbors of smith's statements in edie howe's book so that he was aware of what people had said that had talked to joseph smith or martin harris or whoever and uh like the byu studies article that had been a few years before on joseph knight a family friend of the smiths his recollection of things gerald had reviewed different documents of the time so that he could better evaluate when he finally got a copy of the salamander letter so as soon as he gets the type script and he's reading through he goes back to edie howe's statements to try to see how it stacks up against the memories of the people giving statements in 1832 33 time period so they're just a few years removed from the events
3:19:08 and how do those documents stack up with this new document and as he's pouring through comparisons of these different early sources with mark's document certain phrases start to pop out to him and he would say to himself wait a minute that i've read that that sounds familiar where did i see that and he'd go back and forth and back and forth and looking at the phraseology and realizing someone composed this letter looking at the early documents that i'm looking at someone's looking at edie howe and someone's looking at this byu studies article on joseph knight and using this as source material for phrases for martin harris because that's what he these are people's recollections of what martin harris told them so the person making up the salamander letter is using these early phrases that supposedly reported things that martin harris had said to make up this letter and so gerald finally comes the awful realization that he
3:20:29 thinks he's looking at a forgery why did gerald even what was making gerald even question the authenticity of the letter well he thought we were there were you starting to was anybody starting to be suspicious at the time of mark hoffman or were people just starting to get suspicious what was making him even want to spend his time this way versus just celebrate and do a spike to football and do a victory dance you know well the mormon scholars were all uh critical of all of this stuff that trying to downplay the magic stuff and trying to find explanations for everything and of course they were doing all sorts of articles on how salamanders were wonderful and apologists apologists would find some way of spitting it all to be a beautiful confirmation of joseph smith's claims but gerald's work that he had done in the 60s on the country defense played into this because he had seen how someone had used phrases from oliver cowdery's letters
3:21:43 to compose a document supposedly written by cowdery so he wanted to make sure it wasn't another situation like that where someone was using supposed phrases of martin harris to build a letter and claim it was from him just like someone had made up a calgary defense relying on early cadre letters to get the phrases so that people would accept it as authentic gerald wanted the document to be authentic he did not start looking at all of this to disprove mar hoffman he started out to build a case of why it was authentic and it was only as he poured over the older sources compared to mark's documents that it started dawning on him that it looked like it was going the other way that this looks forced to sound like martin harris not a natural flow the specific word similarities rang a bell like the cowdery thing that this is being built off these other documents one one quick question i have is did he apply the same level of scrutiny to the
3:23:12 hoffman forgeries that he didn't know her forgeries but to the to the letters ultimately forged by hoffman prior the ones that we've already talked about the joseph smith the third letter again the the anthon you know letter had joseph up had gerald applied the same level of scrutiny to those documents and found them authentic whereas this was the first one he either investigated fully and or investigated fully and decided wasn't authentic do you understand my question well up until this point i don't think it had raised that question of forgery to his mind the joseph smith the third blessing was certainly something that could have been and i guess it didn't it didn't to do gerald it didn't look as damaging uh to church claims um because we already knew that joseph had he's already known it wasn't new it was something that had been talked about before that he may have appointed his son so it didn't raise the same question and the anthem transcriptions we spent so much time
3:24:39 trying to figure out what script joseph smith used to bring out the ant the transcript that it didn't occur to us that it was mark making it and what about the josiah stole letter had he given that scrutiny that you're well again it was something that could have been it wasn't super scandalous it wasn't new information right well i don't know if he knew a way to to i don't know if he'd thought yet about checking the phrasing and that oh i'm actually remembering some of the stuff i read i think i read gerald's commentary that it seemed to be better writing than joseph smith was capable of based on what we know about joseph's penmanship that there weren't i don't know if you said this earlier but there weren't things crossed out that that it it seemed like it just had better handwriting than joseph smith was capable of to have been written from his own hand in 1835. now i'm not sure if that was gerald's analysis
3:25:45 i can't remember after hoffman was discovered of fraud or is before if you really want to know you'll have to read his book buy the book buy the book buy the book and read it okay all right so anyway but but but okay you answer the question because you're saying that he tried to prove the white salamander letter as true as authentic so that it could be defended but he was willing to follow the evidence where it led right and you're saying the evidence led him to conclude that it wasn't authentic really quickly this idea that the phraseology seemed borrowed from a few sources one could just as easily say well that was all in the air and so yeah that's what i said to him tell us what you said i said well gerald if this guy in howe is record reporting his conversations with harris and the joseph's knight material is recounting what harris told him then maybe harris just has common phrases right
3:26:51 he always uses to tell the same story see i i have the same thought as you so even a broken clock is right twice a day no i'm telling you it's the other way around and i never could exactly see how he was so sure but he was absolutely adamant that no the borrowing has to be the other way someone saw the edie howe which anyone could have seen that but he says they also had to have seen the byu article on the joseph knight material which who had even remembered the article you know but geraldine dug it out and he says i'm telling you someone saw this article and so i know the salamander letter i'm speaking for gerald i know the salamander letter could not have been written before that byu studies article came out which was in 78 1978 and he says no it had been written after that someone's used how and josiah stole this is this is mark hoffman meeting his match yes right this is really this is two brilliant
3:28:01 people yeah there needs to be like a drama or a documentary series about this story because as everyone wants you know the beginning of the of the you know hess meesum murder run the mormons documentary is about how brilliant you know mark hoffman was and you've got that famous opening quote by by shannon flynn saying don't make me don't make me answer that don't make me answer that because he was brilliant you know just but so was gerald right yeah or maybe even more so yeah well i don't know more so but maybe but they were they both had fantastic memories no but but more than that yeah very creative well i don't know gerald had a sixth sense on language on on the phrasing stuff and like even going through the book of mormon and all those things he just had a an insight on those things it it's very hard to be married to someone that's almost always right and it's right right you know so oh
3:29:21 man we had arguments on this hoffman stuff so what happens when when he concludes for himself that it's not true take us through the conversations of like do you be honest about it do you tell people do you not do you confront hoffman are you arguing with him are you trying to tell him he's wrong are you like this isn't going to help our cause like talk us through all of those conversations and deliberations i was afraid we were going to get sued i said gerald he's going to sue us for libel you can't go around claiming people or frauds and and all you got is the it looks like the phrases are borrowed from this other document i mean this is enough and i was pleading with him i said gerald please don't lose our house now we were just coming off from a lawsuit with a byu guy at that time who had sued us for uh that's another long story the clayton diary extracts and this man andy e hat from byu had sued us for
3:30:29 printing his copy of his notes of the extracts from the clayton diary and the notes were all authentic they were from clayton's diary but they just happened to have been typed up by mr e hat and he was claiming copyright andrew he had right andrew e hat he was claiming copyright interest in him so it was a copyright lawsuit uh which is a whole another just fantastic experience i think you do tell that story in our our earlier interview maybe a little a little bit of it but you'd have to read the whole thing we had all the church historians uh and taking depositions from them i'm surprised more people haven't been interested in reading about that uh trial because it's got fascinating comments by the different historians that we took depositions anyways we were just finishing up on this one and i could just envision us going into another very expensive uh long lawsuit and i please don't lose
3:31:26 my house and gerald says he's not going to sue us he they aren't real documents and i says gerald everybody says they're real i mean the church historians don't want to accept these if they aren't real they had to have done some kind of tests and they they're convinced i mean here's dean jesse the church's story and this the famous uh one that knows all the handwritings knows joseph smith's handwriting and he's not going to want to accept these as if they aren't real what they are and charles says i'm telling you he's not gonna what anyone says they aren't true well so joseph writes up gerald got all these j's mixed up gerald writes up his thing on the salamander letter and wants me because gerald's a shy introvert that doesn't do things publicly and so he wants me as the front person to take up this pamphlet he's written up on why the document the salamander letters of fraud and take it up and pass it out at the
3:32:37 sunstone symposium do you remember the year 83 85 84 84 yeah so i just wanted just a year before let me connect the dots this is before the bombings before all the investigations this is a true prophet seer and revelator right yeah this this show us i don't know what is it read it to our audience what you're showing them i'm showing the march 1984 salt lake city messenger which is on our website you can go to utlm.org and can they buy this from you if they want to throw you some money well then uh no it's how to print it's just our newsletter i just want to get you some money okay well they can send a donation okay but if you go to the website and look under your newsletters you have to go back to issue number 53 and it has this uh all the content there moroni or salamander was the title why is that the title because who's the who who's the guy that shows up when joseph gets the plates out of the hole
3:33:49 moroni or a salamander why doesn't it say gerald tanner declares mark hoffman's salamander letter fraud well the first heading says is it authentic oh okay so this is where gerald uh brings up this problem of uh the story and uh it's not very it's only a couple of pages throughout three pages uh of it and so that doesn't have the uh example of the phrase borrowing that comes out in i think our next newsletter but uh i mean that's march of 84. he makes the statement he thinks it's not authentic in that yeah can you do do you have the uh yeah he says at the outset we should state that we have some reservations concerning the authenticity of the letter and at the present time we are not prepared to say that it was actually penned by martin harris and it goes on about uh that so gerald's question is casting casting doubt on it and but then gerald does this study of the phrases which comes out in the next
3:35:06 newsletter which you can go on our website and sequentially follow our newsletters as we progress through this examination of mark hoffman and his documents and we i it must be the next newsletter i think we have a kind of a split statement where gerald gives his reasons for thinking it's all a fraud and me giving a short little defense of saying well all the historians accept it as genuine so we don't know for sure yet people you know and at the time people criticized us by saying oh you're just playing both sides of the road so you're protected no matter how it turns out because you each took a different side as though this was some sort of planned scheme of ours to always be right no we really disagreed and i my heart was not in it to take that study of gerald's up and pass around at sunstone but as a dutiful wife supportive of my husband i went up and passed it out and of course that's what brought mark hoffman down the next day wondering why
3:36:23 we would question his documents with his whole bullock story that he conned me on and sagan the argument was he was about to close a deal on thomas bullock papers embarrassing on brigham young and um about his financial dealings and other if i kept questioning his documents it could end the process it could it could it could foil his attempt to get the bullet papers right right it could uh foul the whole thing was he also just mad was he like stop this no no he was all just so like a wounded friend how how could you do this to me how could you of all people i thought you'd be supportive you'd be so excited with this fine how could you bring up questions don't you realize how this hurts the document business and i i've got fingers in the pine all these other great things i'm going to get and people will might not want to do business with me if you raise questions about what i'm doing what'd you say how'd you respond
3:37:35 was it to you was it to you and gerald no just to me gerald wasn't home oh so you're you're meeting alone with the future murderer yes who's there to find out why i'm questioning his documents oh my goodness and well and i suppose the thing that saved us from getting bombed is no one believed us so okay so you you okay what did you tell what did you tell mark when he gives you this sob story tries to gaslight you make you feel terrible what did you tell him at the moment i said okay where's the provenance for the document who did you get it from and he couldn't explain the the steps of well who's owned it all this time where did it come from what do you say oh well that's all uh in a you know agreement with the buyer and i'm or the seller and i'm not at liberty to discuss all those matters she's claimed confidentiality yeah and all that so that's sketchy yeah but and it was troubling and i says well gerald has sincere questions about it
3:38:49 and we just don't seem to see the answers and so it was an amicable discussion and that's when he launched into this whole big bullock thing to divert the question from the providence of the document to how i was hurting his business and now i'm going to love it because it's going to expose brigham young on finances oh right so he's trying to he's trying to manipulate you in whatever way he can get me over on his side some way so what was you already mentioned this but what was the what was the reaction of sunstone what was the reaction among the mormon historical community and then what was the church's reaction to your newsletter and then what was the general membership's reaction like what were all the reactions uh because this is well church never says anything so no we don't have any idea what their reaction was the historians would talk to each other about what do you make out of gerald's questions and
3:39:54 all of this and it was sort of like oh well gerald's always been kind of a loose cannon you just don't know and uh it's all been authenticated so you know it was just all dismissive interesting and what about the mormon people as a as a nobody read our stuff so the mormon people would anything the tanner said was suspect and if it had our name on it you just passed it by it didn't matter what side it was on we we were just non trustworthy because excommunication and smears work yes so was anybody else mad at you saying sandra gerald cut it out you're hurting the cause any other people express anger frustration unfortunately the christian community that uh write books and pamphlets to uh try to get people out of mormonism into christianity were all upset at us well probably i don't remember specifically ed decker but different ones like that were like how could you guys do this why would you put a
3:41:11 fly in the ointment i mean everything was going so well uh and and these all have been authenticated and and you bring up these questions that so we were seen as uh traitors to the cause because we had brought up these questions when everyone of the authorities said they were authentic so here was the christian community down on us for making waves over stuff that was going to end the mormon church and gerald's like but if it's not true it's not true i'm not going to use something fraudulent against the church uh that's just playing the same game no it's got to be real material but yes we had a lot of pushback from other people that wanted the documents to be true from christians yeah were there any other were there any other people that were known as being kind of open outspoken critics of the church in 83 to 85 were you guys like the only game in town or were there did you have kind of collaborators partners
3:42:28 friends allies other people that were trying to expose the church as being fraudulent or not true were there and who else were your partners in crime well uh well i don't know when you phrase it like that who to say phrase it your own way re-rephrase it rephrase it gerald talked a lot with mike marquardt about research and they shared a lot of research and contact mike wasn't trying to disprove mormon claims he was just trying to do historical research to figure out how the story really happened and so even though they shared information mark wasn't trying to prove anything one way or another on truth claims he was just trying to get out the history and in fact along the way uh gerald and mike didn't share as much information as the years went by because mike told us one time that he could have more access to research by different historians if he wasn't so closely tied to our name i relate to that i relate to that there's a lot of people that stopped going on mormon stories as soon as i got
3:44:08 excommunicated richard bushman and claudia bushman wouldn't come on anymore terrell and fiona givens wouldn't come on anymore and there's a lot of like aspiring mormon studies historians that ultimately want a job at claremont or a job at virginia or a job at byu matt bowman is one of these people that's like i can't come interview with john because i i want to get the right you know faculty appointment someday and it'll look bad if i do an interview with you and that's part of again that's why they excommunicate people so that everyone who wants to in it and sometimes it's even people that don't believe like there's plenty of totally non-believing even ex-mormon historians that still want to be in the good graces of the mormon history community or want access to church archives and so they they keep distance from truth tellers public truth tellers and speakers to be able to um manage their uh political capital to be able to have access to documents or stay in good graces of members of the
3:45:11 community that's the story of my life how do you feel when you hear me talk about that what what kind of i identify with this story has it ever been discouraging for you because for me yes whenever i get turned down talk about that discouragement well through the years our research has been used by many other authors and they just don't say that's where it came from because through the years you had to kind of just uh distinguish yourself by who you were or weren't associated with to prove you're a good guy and so like i mentioned earlier about saying that joseph was sincere that seems to have been an unwritten rule in sunstone dialogue uh byu studies anyone's book that came out dealing with these issues you could say anything about joseph smith the book of mormon first vision or whatever raise all kinds of questions about any of it as long as you ended with joseph smith was sincere the cardinal sin was to end up saying
3:46:47 it was deliberate fraud and that's how you divide the camp and if you're going to conclude that he was a fraud you're part of the others and part of the others is where the tanners land and so you distance yourself to prove you're a good guy by not giving any credit to the tanners or mentioning them or footnoting their book because that shows that you're part of the bad guys good guys don't quote the tanners so but you can use our stuff but you just don't say it but don't attribute it to us so then you've got all these mormon historians that are basically plagiarizing not citing you as a source well stealing stealing your good work and not giving you credit that's dishonest well a lot of it they would have found themselves eventually but i think they would have found it all but it's yeah it's kind of i mean we were talking about problems with blacks and the priesthood and elijah abel and all of that in the 60s so before the 73 dialogue article by who wrote the
3:48:08 uh i was remembered now but yeah in the 60s we were doing that um well it's another example the i mean gerald what he did on the book of abraham in one of the early issues of dialogue which was wonder the lester bush so it's lester bush that's attributed by people like greg prince and others as like this landmark article in 1973 where in dialogue he he tells everybody that look elijah abel and all these other people have been ordained black men have been ordained to the priesthood prior to the black priesthood ban and everybody likes to make a big heralding of that as being groundbreaking scholarship you're saying there's a chance that lester bush might have been tipped off about some of that from you guys in the in the 60s possibly i i don't know what he had seen but we were talking about all of that already yeah publishing on it already okay and then you were going to talk about the book of abraham you're saying that gerald and a friend grant heward did an article on when the papyri were
3:49:21 found on showing how the facsimiles on the hypocephalus disc how the writing was filled in on the printed uh hypocephalusis the round illustration in the book of abraham the obviously when joseph got it uh it wasn't complete parts had broken off and they filled it in to make the facsimile picture for the great price and so they were showing how it was filled in using material from the sensing text which if none of this makes sense do you read the book but they showed how this was filled in using other parts of the papyri that had to be done by smith and associates for the times and seasons it couldn't have been what was originally on the document and this was groundbreaking research and that's not where you're getting all the stuff on credit for what gerald did on very early on the book of abraham 60s yeah yeah 60 what was it 68 69 i don't remember what the year was on the dialogue article but it was groundbreaking research
3:50:42 on the facsimile and nobody mentions that and there's just uh stuff that we did on the first vision uh of course wes walters did all the stuff on the 1826 trial in the revival now he does get mentioned by people later on he finally gets referenced by different people but again wes was a established minister with a degree master's degree and had more credibility in uh historical circles i mean gerald and i have no education we were just a couple of dumb kids that checked out the story but we were right and we were doing all this very serious research we didn't have any money so we're just doing it on a mimeograph machine and it does look childish it is very amateurish productions that's all we could afford but the research is solid if you look at our mormonism book in um well what do we do at 72 and then we do an enlarged one in 83. this is shadow reality mormonism shadow reality you look at our early
3:52:13 books and all the important topics are covered there and still hold up and still hold up is that right yes yeah go read our shadow last edition 87 and you'll find it covers all the stuff you're reading about today yeah yeah and first of all i was just going to say it's almost as if if you want to know what really happened in mormon history find out who got excommunicated yeah and read their stuff yeah and you're probably gonna get all the important stuff there is to know is that is that fair to say i think that's fair okay and then the other thing i was gonna ask is how did eugene england dialogue and then the sunstone people how did they treat you did they treat you as anathema do they treat you as damaged goods as as or do they treat you like kindly and private but then in public they didn't want you around you know how were you treated by eugene england dialogue sunstone and kind of that middle ground progressive mormon you know studies crowd that
3:53:22 still lives on today by the way how are you treated by them it changed after hoffman how were you treated before um it's like the crazy uncle that showed up for thanksgiving that everyone hoped would have stayed home uh we were politely treated but uh not uh not we didn't have friends there i mean i went to the different meetings and i was just there by myself alone no one to talk to or sit with or anything to kind of ignore you yeah it i wasn't someone people wanted to be seen with there was guilt by association we tried at different times to have a book table this is way back then before hoffman we asked at times about having a book table a sunstone with sunstone who was uh already being cast as a dangerous crowd this is peggy and albert peggy fletcher stack and albert peck right and and we couldn't have a book table at their place and for years i mean i i don't think that would be the case today i just haven't asked
3:54:53 but for years they could have uh polygamous uh guys that believe in flying saucers whatever you want could have a book table at sunstone but not us so it was they were under suspicion of being subversive and being charged with being apostate so one of the ways you established you weren't apostate you weren't dangerous is you didn't have anything to do with the tanners and if and so even though some of them would have been friends with us and welcomed us uh to their session or whatever there's this fear of guilt by association and so they can't look like we're kosher we are not acceptable to be publicly acknowledged as legitimate enough to have a table because that would solidify in the church's mind that see they're really promoting apostate positions and so there was this distance to the whole thing but after hoffman we got some credibility because gerald was right and all the books you read on hoffman all say gerald was first to question the documents
3:56:26 and after that there was sort of a begrudging acceptance of oh hi and people got more friendly i think also by the time of hoffman they realized that we weren't we weren't belligerent people that were going to be disruptive i think at first there was a fear that oh well if we're anti-mormon uh we're going to be obnoxious and interfering in their meetings and standing up and asking bad questions and i have to say i admitted i asked a few questions of uh quinn and during the salamander stuff of uh pointed questions but uh we weren't trying to make a scene in any of the things that we attended but there was this fear of us that are we going to make a shambles of things would we some way disrupt stuff and they have they have to keep this separation of uh being on the side on the good side of the team not the opposition joseph was sincere as long as you can end all your articles with he was sincere you can say whatever you want and i wouldn't end anything with he was
3:57:51 sincere and other than ed decker i'm just trying to think of who else would have been walking in these shoes and i can't think of anybody like even michael quinn when he starts coming out with books and articles even to this day he still maintains to be a believer so not him yeah like who else would it you were the only game in town it seems like well i mean mike and wes were doing things uh but yeah they weren't the sincere thing um yeah so i don't know yeah um how did that feel like i there there are a few people in the world that i can talk to who have had us experience like mine and i've been excommunicated and i know what it's like to be treated like a pariah i know what it's like to be viewed as dangerous and radioactive and since my ex communication you know radio west one really had me on the podcast or you know and i don't know why uh you know but peggy fletcher stack doesn't ask you know be with your source anymore there there became this kind of drying up
3:59:02 of you as someone that people would you know they won't even want to like like a facebook comment or friend you on facebook it's a it's a there's two parts of the sadness to it one is that the church does it and then the second is that so many people in the progressive and sometimes even post mormon community buy into it and follow those rules right and it's it's uh it's sad it's hard and i'm just wondering were there times where you and gerald just for decades being held at arm's length being plagiarized from without credit not being friends of these people being viewed as the crazy grandma and grandpa was it ever discouraging or sad or hard or what was that like emotionally for you and gerald we had developed a community of friends outside of that circle in our christian community and so it wasn't as lonely as it could have been if we hadn't have had a separate community that was totally divorced
4:00:15 from mormonism and through the years as different family members left mormonism then the feelings shifted on a lot of things that way so it's not been as hard as it might have been because of our faith community that we developed outside of mormonism your church basically your church community my church community yeah and not just my church community but just christian community of people i know around the united states that have read our writings that are christians and that i've become friends with i mean outside of mormonism that we've just become friends so um that helps on a lot of that stuff but it doesn't take away from the sense of loss from the ones you started out holding dear to you and being distanced from them that happened to you people yes and um well i think i've told before but uh like early on when my sister who's now left mormonism uh said to me one day i finally able at relief society to admit that you're my sister and she says that so sweetly like she really accomplished something
4:01:39 and i mean what do you say to that oh thanks what did that make you feel uh well it was very sad and hurtful that that she feels that kind of shame of having me for a sister and it's all changed now but early on when people say those kind of things to you it just kind of takes your breath away that wow is that where things are at i didn't realize that i was that big an embarrassment to you or that it was that big of a deal yeah but there been times like when i've been at the mall and i see someone i know like a man that's come in and talk to me about mormonism and he's walking with his wife and i see him take a step back from his wife and shake his head to me no like don't acknowledge me and so i just walk on by but there were years of that type of thing where there would be signaling out in public don't acknowledge me i don't get that anymore but back in uh prior years those sorts of things were common for me here in utah
4:03:03 i've had that happen no yeah and so what kept you going what kept both of you guys going well it just seemed that god had put us in a direction of research that some documents just seem to people would bring them to us or things would come up that would pull us back into more research so part of it was your belief in god oh absolutely yes and i know a lot of the mormon stories crowd don't believe in god anymore but well i do but yes we felt that we felt that god had brought us together i mean god delivered me to gerald's doorstep uh and it just seemed like things came about that god was directing it and there were times though as the years went by that one of us or the other would feel okay that's it we're done we've accomplished what we wanted to do we got out our 72 mimi graphed mormonism book we're done and then more stuff comes out oh well no now we got to do a new edition so he can't do a new edition well you keep doing new editions
4:04:36 and gerald keeps saying to me well this is the last book see we got to keep going on this because this is the last book i got to get this one done and one day it dawned on me there's never going to be a last book we're going to do this forever and you still are here i am but i still am so for ex-mormons that don't like that sandra tanner still believes in god and jesus be grateful that she still she and gerald both still believed in god because you would not have gotten their amazing research and and publications and knowledge and commitment including the revealing of the salamander letters of fraud without their belief in god and jesus how's that amen [Laughter] okay i have to just ask again did you ever have interactions with eugene england or kind of that dialogue crowd at all um i mean i know you talked about the letter between yeah no not uh on any kind of personal level you just don't know anyone they
4:05:44 they had their own lives and it was separate from ours and we the only time our circles would have crossed would be like a mormon history association or something that way which uh they weren't going to come up and talk to me so and as all these articles come out in dialogue in the 70s and 80s about bh roberts about the book of abraham about the first vision all these things that you guys kind of really broke the ground on would you would you wait eagerly for the newest edition of dialogue or sunstone to come out read it and then would you say hey wait a minute they're getting that for me they're getting that from me here and there were you following dialogue in sunstone to see whether they were either breaking new ground and or borrowing your stuff and maybe not giving you credit well we didn't follow it for those reasons for whether they gave us credit or not but we we did follow it all very closely there for many many years i don't know at what point gerald
4:06:47 started into his alzheimer's but by 1990 gerald was becoming less engaged in his research so uh that's why there was never another addition after the 87 mormonism shadow reality is because he was past the ability to do that but yeah up till then we were following all of the different magazines to see what they said how what more they had found and see what things they said that we already said yeah it was fun to try to track and see uh where all they were getting their information yeah okay anything else about the salamander letter really quickly before i just ask you a couple more oh no you're good okay there were there there are other forgeries that hoffman is you know credited with letters from the three witnesses from harrison whitmer about their visions they say that was faith promoting do you remember anything about about those letters uh not right off okay and then there's this contract i guess the grandin press printing of the book of mormon contract
4:08:03 between smith and grandin anything noteworthy about that that you remember i can't remember okay and then there's a letter from smith lucy max smith on the origins of the book of mormon yeah it was interesting but not as earth-shattering as the other things okay um okay and then there's the mcclellan papers yeah anything anything you remember about about that well the mcclellan uh this guy gets back to this guy named trauber that knew mcclellan and um this is a historical figure from a historical figure from way back when and um i think hugh nibley had tried to look for uh trauber and his collection i mean i think there was some knowledge that this guy had some material and had some mcclellan stuff um in fact i think that's how they the church historians well the church leaders whoever was had been in touch with trauber i believe back in the like 1910 time frame something like that and had bought a mcclellan diary at way back at that time
4:09:33 i think trauber may have been trying to sell his collection to them um they bought the mcclellan diary locked it in their vault and forgot about it so as the decades go by and no one does an inventory on the first presidency's fault the knowledge of the mcclellan diary sitting on the back shelf gets forgotten okay so when mark comes along he's aware of this trauber and maybe some trauber papers in texas that might have some mcclellan stuff in it so that evidently gives him the idea of claiming he came up with this big collection because there could have been such a thing it's just not as big as he was claiming so when he pitches it to the church he says it also contains the mcclellan diary that's just one of many things in the collection it's supposed to have had the church not hid away mcclellan's diary they would collection and so they don't become aware that they've already bought it until after the bombings and the detectives want to know we want an inventory of everything you bought from mark
4:11:06 so then the church trying to go through doing an inventory and someone they are asking about well what's in the first presidency's vault do you have material from mark in there wow evidently no one knew about an inventory for the place so the staff someone's told we gotta inventory everything in the first presidency's fault now this is a big walk-in fault as i understand it so you'd have room for a lot of stuff a little diary could be easily lost in this place so they do an inventory and they discover ah by darn we already have the mcclellan diary now this doesn't come out until turley does his book on hoffman victims and so when turley's book victims comes out this is a few years after everyone else's book has come out i can't remember the time frame but it's it's a few years after the initial three paperbacks that came out well there was sort of a ho-hum attitude in the historical community oh
4:12:17 turley's gonna do church spin and i'd ask different people if you read turley's book no no i haven't bothered i know enough about hoffman stuff and then suddenly someone calls me on the phone hey have you read paige such and such of turley's book and i said no i haven't even bought it well you got to buy it and read whatever page it is like 263 or whatever you know you gotta so what is on this page so we go get the book and it's the page that tells they found they had the mcclellan diary oh the book came out more than five years after the hoffman case our cynical assumption was they waited till after the um investigation term of limitations that's your limitations statute of limitations thing that you couldn't be guilty of uh harboring information on crimes yeah so they wait till after they're past that point to print their book that tells they already had the mcclellan diary and they never came forward with it because they found out
4:13:34 before the deal with mark to get his life sentence before the deal they found they had the diary and they never the church never came forward to the detectives to the prosecutor we found the mcclellan diary how would that have been helpful it would have gone to motive for the murder what they one of the problems they had in the trial for hoffman is that was connecting the documents to the motive for the murders this would have proved motive for the murders because he was trying to sell the mcclellan collection that was the immediate steve to steve christensen yeah uh is that right no the church was going to buy the mcclellan collection steve was going to verify its content that's right and if the church had come forward that we found the mcclellan diary it proved that mark's collection was fraudulent because he was trying to sell them the diary so it would have gone to proving he was doing a con game of some sort that they already have the diary so they'd never they didn't come forward to
4:14:51 the detectives and say oh by the way here's something that will help you in your prosecution of mark this proves he was had a fraudulent collection he was trying to sell us because he couldn't have had the mcclellan diary and they don't tell about this the church doesn't tell about this until at least five years after the whole thing and you know one motive is they're just incompetent didn't know what they had and another is that they intentionally withheld the information well they did both at first they just didn't know they had it but when they found out they had it they didn't want to bring it forward because it brings up the whole question of why did you hide it in the first place and what does it say why did anyone know about it right yeah so that's important that they had the mcclellan diary yeah they had it they had it and didn't know it and then when they did know it they didn't bring
4:15:46 it forward to the prosecutor that would have helped improving the motive for the killings because it would show the mcclellan collection wasn't authentic well certainly it wasn't hard to convict mark hoffman was his conviction ever really in jeopardy the problem was the motive for the murders you can have the documents be fraudulent but that doesn't prove why he killed christensen right it's to the motive of christensen's death that you had a problem for them to prove and uh but ultimately they proved it without the knowledge of the mcclellan diary yes but they didn't go for the death sentence uh they made a plea bargain now the question of course comes up because they weren't as confident in their case as they could have been yes they would have been more confident in the case if they could have known that oh that's kind of serious yeah what we thought it was yeah evidently the church thought it was because they waited five years before
4:16:52 they published it so now do we have the mcclellan diary yeah it's been published is it interesting at all uh well it yeah it tells about all why he didn't believe joseph smith why he left the movement uh what in 37 or 38 or whatever his dissatisfaction with things in kirtland and stuff like that so yeah it's an interesting part of church history uh but it's uh the church had already dealt with mcclellan's arguments and claims because he had printed other things it's uh not like we didn't know what mcclelland's thoughts were he hadn't published other material yeah yeah okay and if i remember you did you say that hoffman had struck a deal where he would keep the mcclellan he would once they were authenticated by christensen he would keep them so the church would have plausible deniability did you say that earlier right and i don't know that the church would have phrased it that way but but the point was the church could then honestly say they don't have those documents
4:18:02 and they didn't buy those documents because if they buy them from mark and mark hides them away then they can honestly say we i do i don't know what you're talking about we don't have them but they wanted steve christensen to verify the collection was really what marx said it was i wonder why they didn't agree to have some other more trusted individual third party keep possession of them versus mark well they might have if they'd got down to actual transfer of money they may have said no we want steve to keep him right i mean i would have i wouldn't have just trusted mark but okay but it was the mcclellan papers that were probably hoffman's undoing because he had over why he had oversold them he had worked himself into debt and he needed a big sale to help him uh he was waiting for the oath of a freeman to sell that would have solved a lot of his financial problems but it was lagging and he needed money right away so if he could sell the mcclellan collection he could get a bunch of money for that but to get enough money
4:19:18 to help him financially he had to claim it had all sorts of material in that he didn't have time to fabricate so he can't have steve verify the whole collection he could show steve a few things but he couldn't show him a total collection and is it is it fair to say that that the first murder of steve was because steve was set to expose hoffman as a fraud like well we don't why would what pushed hoffman to want to kill steve versus some other method do we know uh well i assume steve well we know steve was upset about mark's uh handling of money and he was uh having bounced checks with different people not giving a document to someone that had paid him for a document there were starting to be rumblings in the document community that he's kind of squirrely on his business deals and um so i think steve had started to see a pattern that it was getting him concerned with not that the documents were authentic but that mark might have been some sort of shyster on
4:20:43 selling documents to several people and uh not paying his bills and stuff i think it was more that way and probably demanding some sort of evidence from mark beyond what mark could supply and just to have him question mark to seriously be putting him on the spot just was uh a breaking point for mark it was all gonna unravel so he had to get rid of steve and then he had to kill someone he didn't have to kill someone he just had to have a diversion to make the police think it had to do with christensen's business dealings investments that had gone bad that it was an investor not anything to do with mormonism and that's why the document the bomb is put at the sheets residence because it's a former business partner of christensen's and it didn't matter who picked up the bomb it didn't matter if the bomb went off it could have just been found there and not gone off but it still would have pointed to something between sheets and christensen's uh which shows the callousness of mark that he didn't
4:21:59 care i mean some kid could have just come and picked up the box they didn't care who picked it up and in the documentary he basically says that he he didn't care who picked it up right right it didn't even have to be picked up he just had to be found yeah at the sheets home yeah but then the church still wanted to go he wanted he calls the church and want to still go through with the mcclellan collection but they want to have some other guy come in now to verify the collection well you're back to game one he can't have anyone verified the collection and of course brent ashworth pressing him for paying bills to him and so i think he tended to blow up brent ashworth when that didn't work i think it was an accident the bomb goes off in his car i don't think it was suicide attempt who do you think the third bomb was intended for brent ashworth do you think it was brent ashworth yeah the document dealer that he usually met at the mall
4:22:57 on what was wednesday's he always met him at the mall so yeah i'm sure it was the mall downtown because he was downtown right yeah the mall directly south of temple square was it oh zcmi mall not ccmi someone across the street crossroads was that what it was called okay so is that generally understood that brent ashworth was the target of the third bomb because i've heard people say they don't know i think the i think the investigators thought it was for brent and brent uh i think thinks that it was for him did they have a meeting planned that morning they met every wednesday at walden's book at the mall and after the christensen sheets bomb brent ashford's wife asked him not to go to salt lake on wednesday and so he didn't go but mark went because there was a receipt in his car for walden's books for a new york times that showed mark had been there just what 20 minutes before that or something
4:24:07 so mark had gone there to meet brent brent didn't show up mark went back to his car and picks up the bomb we assume he was going to try to undo the wires to dismantle it well when he goes back to his car is interesting in the preliminary hearing when he went back to his car he fumbled in the trunk for a while he picked open the trunk fumbled with some stuff closes the trunk before he tries to get in the car i think he was trying to see how sensitive the bomb was [Laughter] and so when he opens and closes the trunk nothing happens and so i think he thinks well it's not as sensitive as i thought it was so he opens the driver's door and he puts his right knee on the driver's seat but his his leg his left foot's on the cement and he leans into the car and picks up the bomb and might have been trying to undo the wire for it but he must bump the package on the center steering column and makes the bomb go off the forensic guides no the bomb went off just above that central column
4:25:31 between the two seats and the fact that it blew mark across the street told the detectives that he can't be sitting in the car he has to already have the door open he has to be leaning into the car or it would have killed him and they find him on the other side of the street because the door was open well when he gets to the hospital and the police finally are able to ask him questions he says he got in and sat down in the car and then noticed the box and picks it up and it blows up well then they immediately knew his story didn't match the forensic i mean they knew immediately with that day they knew mark was involved in the bombings he has to be at least a party to the bombings uh because his story doesn't match what they knew had to have happened his injuries were such that couldn't have they couldn't have happened the way he describes so he was immediately a suspect but then how do you prove all of that who all was
4:26:36 involved did he have partners and leads to a big investigation right um okay so that's the third bombing oh i was gonna ask you if he thought he was meeting brent ashworth at the bookstore how is he going to deliver the bomb at the bookstore or get it to brent in a way that wouldn't expose mark do we yeah i don't think he carried the bomb with him i know somebody i've heard a couple of people say that he was carrying the bomb no i don't believe he took the bomb to the mall the bomb was in the car the whole time i think mark was going to tell brent one of his great stories and say i've got this great find that's on the front seat of my car and here's my keys i need to go talk to hinckley a minute or whatever and you go down and look at the document and see if you want to buy it and i'll be there in just a minute and he could have sent brent to get the box and open it at the car that would have ruined his car sure that's okay because he could show he was a victim
4:27:54 it would help mark prove he was a victim that he wasn't a party of it he wouldn't blow up his own car but that would tie him to these bombings you're saying is a victim but that's not bad but then why did he go after sheets to implicate to implicate the financial dealings if he's gonna then try and tie it to mark hoffman which would have made it be about church history and not about steve christensen's financial dealings does that make sense i think he realized that the sheets diversion wasn't going to make it that that wouldn't solve it that there already were questions by the police that that weren't sure that that was an end to the an explanation for the whole thing and he still had the problem of not having the money or the documents that he could uh settle things with the church he owed all this money to these different people so now what do i do what's next what's the next step i could take since the sheets diversion doesn't look like it's going to be
4:29:06 sufficient and so he thinks well if he can make himself and the documents the object of some crazy person out there because he tells the police at the hospital oh there was some white van that had been following me around and tried to make it sound like he had been being tailed by some sinister person and trying to divert things to make it seem like someone was trying to stop his transactions i wonder if if he intended ashworth to go to his car pick up the bomb and have it be detonated i wonder what story he had planned to tell the police about why how a bomb got in his car in the first place oh someone was trying to stop him giving this great collection of the mcclellan collection to the church and in the he was probably hoping that more of the stuff in the trunk would have burned up but see some of that stuff was in the trunk that he was claiming part of the mcclellan collection the pieces of papyri that he'd got on loan from new york that were of the same time frame as the joseph
4:30:26 smith papyri that he was claiming as part of the mcclellan collection we're in the back of the car i think he would have claimed oh chucky darn church the mcclellan collection went up in smoke and we only have these few shards left after the fire and how would he have explained how a bomb got there that then because there's some sinister mob out there that's trying to get rid of they would have planted that bomb there yeah they would plant trying to get rid of uh people doing church history and documents and whatever whoever he would have spun as the evil guys and how would he have explained why ashworth was going back to his car without him being there well he could have just said i'd send him out to check he was going to look at the mcclellan collection he could sp he could easily come up with story why he sent mark first to the car i mean brent first to the car okay and that takes the heat off of him for not being able to produce the mcclellan papers it it also adds
4:31:30 drama to his life that allows him to get make more excuses for any deadlines or financial things he's not able yeah because he's got a stall if he can sell the oath of a freeman it'll solve everything he just got to stall till that sells yeah and maybe garner sympathy for him oh sure he becomes the hero he becomes a hero oh he's a great dog he's the great document dealer that's uh finding all these wonderful things and so someone's trying to kill him he's pathetic oh poor mark right sympathetic yeah yeah okay well brent was still feeling that after the bombings he thought that it was all aimed at mark and that he was a target of some sort and couldn't let himself believe that mark could be the one responsible yeah right and if it's your trusted friend i mean i sympathize with mark and those uh kurt bench and those around him that had fully trusted this man that how hard it would be to believe that of someone no one wants to believe their best friend
4:32:40 was a cold-blooded murderer that was one of the chilling parts of the document when kurt bench says he called mark hoffman to say be careful they're coming after people like us yeah isn't that sad so he's calling the murderer to tell him to be careful you could get hurt yeah that was a little bit sad yeah really quickly something that i'd either forgotten or didn't know and i think there are other people that didn't know this even informed people like i think i talked to a radio free mormon the other day he didn't know this that the the documentary murder among the mormons brings out that hoffman's ultimate kind of like coup de grace or like biggest con or whatever was to produce 116 pages and i think i've heard jared hess or tyler or both talk about the fact that they were able to see some sort of like sketching or outline in hoffman's hand of kind of i think he said ashworth might own this
4:33:45 uh of kind of the document that sort of showed his initial thoughts about what what the 116 pages would say yeah but but did you did you know that that hoffman at some point was planning on doing 116 pages what do you know about that and what are your thoughts about that in hindsight that's obviously what he was building up to we didn't know it to begin with but he was inventing handwriting samples of martin harris with his different documents he's selling to the church and it didn't matter if they're faith promoting or not faith promoting he was building an uh collection of martin harris handwriting which is all his and so when he eventually would come forward with 116 pages and he wouldn't have to do the whole 116 pages he'd only have to do a few pages and claim they were part of that manuscript and the other pages lost i mean that'd be believable that you'd only find a few of the pages
4:34:51 but then martin harris handwriting on that document we would be compared with mark's other forgeries of martin harris handwriting and ta-da they would be authentic they were the same hand for both documents so we have no evidence we have no samples of martin harris's handwriting right now i think there's a signature i don't know that there's much more than just a just a signature okay okay they may have one or two documents now uh i haven't kept on what all the joseph smith papers has been able to come up with so i'm not sure well that suggests some prettiest the potential of some pretty serious premeditation if he if he breaks onto the scene in 1980 with uh with the anthon document in harris's handwriting and that was all a setup for the 116 pages however many years later that shows that a lot of this might have been mapped out and premeditated i think the martin harris thing had to have been he seems to have
4:35:57 had this trail of mark of martin harris signatures documents with that end game in mind so yeah looking back at it now i would say when he first came up with the first sample of martin harris handwriting he already had in his mind where it was going yeah and have you ever tried to kind of fantasize what would have happened if he had been successful what he would have put in there what would have been devastating and and how that might have been received would that be a game changer i i imagine the story of the liona would have been much more magical uh there would just have been more of that kind of magic uh tone to the story would it have been less religious would it have been more of a fanciful tale yes it was less scriptural yes because he came up with more spiritual stuff as a filler i mean joseph did so mark would have probably had it be less of any kind of normal christian spirituality in it and more maybe christian magic but the casting spells kind of
4:37:25 variety that the early smiths were involved in uh so that i mean because i think the la hona itself is kind of a funny magic deal but he could have cast that in a much more magical framework i think there would have been more of that type of thing in it yeah that's interesting to think about what what he might have done with 116 pages with that mischief interesting