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Welcome everyone to another edition of Mormon Stories. I'm Dan Weatherspoon.

Today we're going to talk about a story that began almost exactly 25 years ago.

On the morning of October 15, 1985, Salt Lake City was rattled, both literally and psychologically, by the explosion of two bombs, which each killed a person.

The next day brought a third explosion, and it was clear that a serial bomber was at work and no one knew who the next victim might be.

At first, because the first two bombing victims, Stephen Christensen and Kathleen Sheetz, had been connected through marriage to a high finance company that was in crisis.

The primary motive for the bombs at first was thought to be related to revenge for bad investment deals and things like that.

But when a third bomb exploded and nearly killed Mark Hoffman, definitely the focus changed.

Mark Hoffman at this time was a well-known document dealer, both in Mormonism as well as on the national stage, who had built quite a reputation for finding some rare and very interesting documents.

But because of this connection with Mormon history and Steve Christensen, the first bombing victims interested Mormon history and his role in having obtained some documents and things for the church in the past,

all of a sudden it was clear that the motives for these bombs had to do something with Mormon history.

And it soon became clear that there was this set of documents called the McClellan collection that may have been a big factor in this, and we'll talk more about that as we go.

Anyway, from the clues in Mark Hoffman's car where the third bomb exploded, an investigator soon realized that perhaps he was not so much the third bombing victim as the person responsible for this particular bomb as well as the two that had exploded the day before.

And in the course of the investigation, a story of Mark Hoffman as a master forger began to emerge.

As I mentioned before, Hoffman was already known within Mormon circles as a discoverer of high profile documents related to Mormon history.

Now, a few of these are a document known as the Anton transcript, which was the sheet of paper that had some Egyptian characters that Joseph Smith was said to have copied off the golden plates and given to Martin Harris, who then took them to Professor Charles Anton.

I believe it was Cornell University, it's a pretty famous story in Mormonism.

Anyway, one of these documents was supposedly this actual piece of paper that Anton authenticated.

Another interesting piece was called the Stole, Josiah Stole letter, and it was a letter supposedly from Joseph Smith to Josiah Stole.

And then it Joseph, you know, through the different things that he says revealed to Mormon historians and those that were interested in the document, a bit more of the extent to which Joseph had been involved with money digging in his early life, his pre-prophetic career or however you'd want to put that.

The interesting document, and the one that may have the most confusing title for some of you until we get going here in the podcast, is called the Salamander Letter or the White Salamander Letter.

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