Few stories connect the Library of Congress, one of the greatest missing artifacts of American history, and a series of murders.
This one does.
And at the center of it all is the Oath of a Freeman.
The Missing Oath
Printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639, the Oath is generally considered the first known item printed on a press in what is now the United States. It was more than an early example of American printing. The broadside required freemen of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to pledge their allegiance not to the English Crown, but to the government and laws of Massachusetts Bay.
And then it vanished from the historical record.
The oath survives in manuscript form, but no copy of the 1639 printing is known to exist. For generations, antiquarians, bibliographers, historians, and collectors searched for one. None succeeded. Over time, the Oath of a Freeman became something close to the Holy Grail of early American printing—a document any major collection would covet, and one the Library of Congress could scarcely ignore.
Then, in the 1980s, a man named Mark Hofmann appeared to have found one.
The Forger
Mark Hofmann grew up in Utah and enrolled at Utah State University as a pre-med student. Medicine was more than a casual career choice. He had a strong interest in biology, chemistry, and science and was preparing to take the medical admissions test when one of his first remarkable document “discoveries” interrupted his plans. He postponed the test and never took it. Simon Worrall, author of The Poet and the Murderer, later described Hofmann as having been intensely interested in chemistry, biology, and science from a young age.
History, it turned out, offered another career.
Rare documents could command extraordinary prices, and Hofmann seemed to have an uncanny ability to make them appear. Soon he was building a reputation for finding historical documents—particularly those connected to the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
There was only one problem.
Many of the documents he was finding had never existed.
Hofmann was creating them himself.
He became extraordinarily skilled at forgery. He acquired old paper, learned to manufacture convincing period ink, studied historical handwriting, and developed techniques for artificially aging his creations. But his real gift went beyond chemistry and penmanship. Hofmann understood that forging a document was only half the job.
A convincing forgery needed a convincing story.
Where had it been found? Who had owned it? Why had no one seen it before? Hofmann learned how to answer those questions almost as convincingly as he could imitate nineteenth-century handwriting.
During the early 1980s, Hofmann concentrated heavily on Mormon history, producing documents connected to the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—some containing material historians had never seen before.
His most notorious creation became known as the Salamander Letter.
Supposedly written in 1830 by Martin Harris, one of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon, the letter offered a startling version of Joseph Smith’s discovery of the golden plates. Instead of the familiar account involving the angel Moroni, the letter described a spirit that had “transfigured himself from a white Salamander.”
The implications were explosive. The document appeared to connect the origins of the Book of Mormon much more closely to the folk magic and treasure-seeking traditions of the early nineteenth century.
Hofmann, working through an associate, initially attempted to place the letter with LDS Church leaders, but they declined to purchase it. Eventually, Utah businessman and historical-document collector Steven Christensen bought it for $40,000. Experts examined the paper, ink, and handwriting and found no indication that it was a modern forgery. Christensen later donated the letter to the Church, which subsequently published its contents.
Hofmann had fooled them all.
And Mormon history was only the beginning.
He soon ventured into other corners of American history, creating documents supposedly written or signed by George Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and other major historical figures.
He even wrote an original poem by Emily Dickinson.
Years later, long after Hofmann had been exposed, the poem resurfaced and fooled the literary world all over again. It appeared at Sotheby’s and was purchased for the Jones Library in Amherst before researchers discovered that the supposedly unknown Dickinson poem could be traced back to Hofmann.
By the mid-1980s, Hofmann had become one of the most successful document forgers in American history.
Then he decided to create his masterpiece.
An Oath of a Freeman.
Hofmann understood exactly what he was attempting. If he could manufacture a convincing copy of the long-lost 1639 broadside, he would not merely be forging another presidential letter or Mormon document. He would be resurrecting one of the most coveted missing artifacts in American history.
But an extraordinary discovery required an extraordinary provenance.
So Hofmann manufactured that too.
Forging a Past
Hofmann had created the Oath.
Now he needed to create its history.
He took the counterfeit broadside to the Argosy Book Store in New York City, secretly slipped it among the store’s old materials, and forged a price on the back.
Then he did something audaciously simple.
He “found” it.
Hofmann purchased the document for $25 and walked away with something almost as valuable to his scheme as the forgery itself: a receipt. On paper, the Oath of a Freeman had now come from an established New York bookseller. Hofmann could tell prospective buyers that he had simply stumbled across an extraordinary piece of history buried among ordinary old papers.
For $25, Hofmann had bought his forgery a past.
It was a small performance, but an ingenious one. He understood that experts would not examine only the ink and paper. They would ask where the document had come from.
And Hofmann had manufactured an answer before anyone thought to ask the question.
He had forged the Oath of a Freeman.
Now he had forged its provenance.
The Library of Congress
Then Hofmann aimed higher.
He set his sights on the Library of Congress.
This was not simply another collector or another prospective buyer. The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, an institution whose collections span centuries, continents, languages, and virtually every form of recorded human expression. It is one of the great repositories of history anywhere on Earth.
And Hofmann believed he had something even the Library of Congress did not have.
An Oath of a Freeman.
The asking price was $1.5 million.
For the Library, this was no ordinary acquisition. If the document was genuine, it was a surviving copy of the first known printing produced in what is now the United States—a piece of American history scholars and collectors had searched for for generations.
And now, apparently, it had surfaced.
For an institution built around preserving the historical record, the opportunity was difficult to ignore. But so was the risk. Before spending $1.5 million on one of the most important discoveries in early American printing, the Library had to answer one very simple question:
Was it real?
So the Oath was examined.
And examined.
The Library put it through a battery of tests.
Experts examined it under microscopes. They subjected it to X-ray fluorescence and infrared spectroscopy. They ran chemical tests on its paper and ink and compared it with the Bay Psalm Book, another surviving product of Stephen Daye’s seventeenth-century Cambridge press.
They poked. They prodded. They looked for anything that might expose it as a modern fake.
And the Oath held up.
Strictly speaking, the Library had not proven that the document was authentic. Scientific examination could reveal an anachronism or other evidence of forgery, but passing those tests could not establish authenticity beyond doubt. What mattered was that the examination found nothing inconsistent with a mid-seventeenth-century origin.
Mark Hofmann’s counterfeit had survived the test.
By every scientific measure applied to it, his forgery looked legit.
He had created a document convincing enough to survive examination by some of the nation’s leading experts.
But passing the tests was not enough to close the deal.
Questions still lingered over the Oath’s provenance, ownership, and $1.5 million price tag. The science had found nothing that exposed the document as a forgery, but neither could it prove beyond doubt that the Oath was genuine.
For an acquisition of that magnitude, the unanswered questions mattered.
In June 1985, the Library of Congress walked away.
Not because anyone had discovered Hofmann’s secret.
They hadn’t.
The forgery had survived.
The deal had not.
The Trap Closes
With the Library of Congress out, Hofmann turned to another institution that would immediately understand what an Oath of a Freeman might be worth: the American Antiquarian Society.
Its experts examined the document as well.
Once again, the forgery held.
The Society was interested—but not at Hofmann’s price. It offered $250,000.
For almost anyone else, $250,000 would have been a remarkable offer.
For Mark Hofmann, it was a disaster.
Because the Oath of a Freeman had never been just another forgery.
It was supposed to solve a problem.
Behind the appearance of a thriving document business, Hofmann’s finances were collapsing. He spent heavily, bought expensive genuine books and collectibles, borrowed money, and entered into increasingly complicated deals in which new money was needed to satisfy old obligations. By 1985, he had accumulated more than $1 million in debt.
That was why the $1.5 million asking price mattered so much.
Hofmann had not simply forged the Oath of a Freeman because he believed he could.
He had forged it because he needed it to save him.
By then, however, the Oath was only one of Hofmann’s problems.
He had also claimed to have located the papers of William E. McLellin, an early Mormon apostle who later broke with the Church. Hofmann promised an extensive collection and accepted money tied to its supposed acquisition.
There was only one problem.
He didn’t have it.
And now the promises, the lies, and the deception were beginning to close in.
People were waiting for documents. Investors were waiting for money. Checks were bouncing. Collectors who had trusted Hofmann were beginning to ask questions—and some of those questions were becoming difficult to answer.
The historical-document empire he had constructed was beginning to collapse under its own weight.
By October 1985, Hofmann could no longer keep everything together with another forged letter, another invented discovery, or another convincing story.
So he turned to something else.
Murder.
Among those beginning to press Hofmann for answers was Steven Christensen—the same man who had purchased the Salamander Letter.
Christensen had become deeply entangled in Hofmann’s document dealings, and by the fall of 1985 he was waiting on promises Hofmann could no longer keep. The questions were becoming harder to deflect, the money harder to replace, and Christensen was getting too close to the truth.
Tuesday, October 15, 1985
Tuesday, October 15, 1985, began ordinarily enough for Steven Christensen.
The 31-year-old businessman arrived at the Judge Building in downtown Salt Lake City and took the elevator to his sixth-floor office, carrying Cokes and doughnuts for an early-morning meeting.
Later that day, Christensen was supposed to meet with Mark Hofmann.
The two had unfinished business. A $185,000 deal involving Hofmann’s supposed McLellin Collection had already run into trouble, and Christensen was expected to help verify the documents so the transaction could finally close.
By then, his patience with Hofmann was wearing thin.
Christensen never made it to that meeting.
When he stepped off the elevator shortly after 8 a.m., a plainly wrapped cardboard package was waiting near his office door.
It had his name on it.
Inside the package was a homemade pipe bomb packed with nails.
Christensen picked it up.
The bomb exploded.
The blast tore through the hallway with enough force to rip his office door from its hinges.
Steven Christensen was killed instantly.
A few hours later, another package was waiting in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay.
Kathy Sheets had returned home from a walk when she noticed a package near the garage. A newspaper had been placed over it.
The package was addressed to her husband, J. Gary Sheets—Christensen’s former business associate.
Kathy picked it up.
The bomb exploded.
Kathy Sheets, 50 years old and a mother, was killed instantly.
Wednesday, October 16, 1985
The next day was Wednesday, October 16.
And Hofmann still had one more bomb.
Investigators would later identify another document collector, Brent Ashworth, as a possible intended victim.
Hofmann and Ashworth had developed a routine. On Wednesday afternoons, usually around 2 or 2:30, they met in the open area near Waldenbooks inside Salt Lake City’s Crossroads Mall.
That Wednesday, Hofmann showed up.
Ashworth did not.
For reasons having nothing to do with Hofmann, Ashworth had changed his schedule and was not in Salt Lake City that afternoon.
It may have saved his life.
Hofmann was at Waldenbooks. Investigators later found a receipt placing him there about eleven minutes before the explosion.
Outside sat Hofmann’s Toyota sports car.
And somewhere in Hofmann’s possession was another live bomb.
What he intended to do with it remains one of the unresolved pieces of the story. Ashworth later said he believed the bomb was meant for him, and investigators considered him a possible target. Hofmann would later offer a different explanation.
But at approximately 2:40 that afternoon, Hofmann returned to his car.
A witness reported seeing him carrying a box or briefcase as he opened the vehicle.
What happened next took only seconds.
The bomb exploded.
The blast blew Hofmann out of the car and into the street. He was critically injured.
But he was alive.
One day earlier, two of Hofmann’s bombs had killed Steven Christensen and Kathy Sheets.
The third had found the man who built them.
Aftermath
That explosion changed the investigation.
Until then, police had good reason to consider whether the first two bombings were connected to Christensen and Gary Sheets’s previous business dealings. That was precisely the direction Hofmann later admitted he wanted them to look. The bomb at the Sheets home had been intended to divert attention toward Christensen’s other financial activities.
But when a third bomb exploded in Hofmann’s own car, the investigation began turning toward him.
Police examined his finances, his document transactions, and eventually the supposedly extraordinary historical discoveries that had built his reputation.
The facade began to collapse.
Forensic document examiners George Throckmorton and William Flynn found microscopic evidence in Hofmann’s inks that revealed his artificial aging techniques. Investigators also uncovered evidence tying the Oath of a Freeman to a modern engraved printing plate Hofmann had ordered under an alias. A photographic negative found during the investigation contained defects that matched defects printed onto the forged Oath.
One by one, the discoveries fell apart.
The Salamander Letter was a forgery.
The supposed McLellin Collection did not exist.
The presidential and literary documents were forgeries.
The Emily Dickinson poem was a forgery.
And the Oath of a Freeman—the document that had survived scientific examination and come tantalizingly close to entering one of the nation’s great historical collections—was a forgery.
The mystery of the third bomb never received quite so tidy an answer. Hofmann later claimed that, overcome by what he had done, he intended to kill himself. Investigators had initially concluded that the explosion was accidental, and Ashworth remained convinced that he had been the intended target.
Gary Sheets survived.
Brent Ashworth survived.
Mark Hofmann survived.
Steven Christensen and Kathy Sheets did not.
In January 1987, Hofmann pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of theft by deception. He received an indeterminate sentence of five years to life, with the judge recommending that he spend the rest of his life behind bars. The following year, the Utah Board of Pardons ordered that Hofmann serve his natural life in prison.
The forged Oath of a Freeman eventually acquired a strange historical value of its own. In 2021, no longer presented as a seventeenth-century treasure but explicitly as one of America’s most notorious forgeries, it sold at auction for $52,500.
The authentic Oath of a Freeman, meanwhile, remains missing. Nearly four centuries after its printing, the Library of Congress still notes that no surviving copy is known to exist.
For several years, Hofmann fooled collectors, historians, document dealers, forensic experts and some of the country’s most respected institutions. His greatest talent may not have been handwriting, chemistry, or even forgery itself. It was understanding what people wanted to believe—and then creating the story that allowed them to believe it.
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