Murder Among the Mormons

Can I ask a favor?

Don't make me answer that.

Don't make me answer that.

Let somebody else do it.

I don't wanna make a hero out of him.

Because he was fantastic.

No one has come close to doing what he has done.

- Officer? - One male fatality.

The calm of Salt Lake City, Utah, was rocked today by two booby-trap bombs

that left two people dead.

...a morning of fear and death.

The first explosion ripped through a downtown office building, killing a man.

The second explosion outside a Holladay home claimed another life.

There was dark talk involving religious documents, hired professional killers.

A Watergate-style cover-up,

and one of the wealthiest,

if not most wealthy, church in America involved,

the Mormon Church.

There is a common thread that seems to connect all the victims.

A mysterious Salamander letter.

The Salamander letter challenges

the Mormon Church's account of its own origin.

The bombing's impact has drawn the Church into an uncomfortable spotlight:

Murder among the Mormons.

What I love the most about treasure stories,

they're always about lost treasures, you know?

Whether we're looking for Atlantis or the Titanic or whatever,

there's a lot of treasure out there.

But the thing is, treasure stories always have the same ending.

The treasure is temporarily found.

But then some calamity happens, and the treasure's lost again.

You know, the old airplane pilot joke about,

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're landing in Salt Lake City.

Set your watch back ten years."

It's an old chestnut.

- -It's a very conservative community.

The state of Utah has long been the home of the Mormons.

Mormons are members of a worldwide church,

headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.

We'd like you to meet the Mormons.

Mormonism is relatively young. It was founded only 150 years ago

by Joseph Smith.

In 1829, a young man named Joseph Smith translated a set of gold plates

to which he was directed by an angel,

into a volume called "The Book of Mormon."

This is the true story of Joseph Smith's valiant mission

in bringing forth "The Book of Mormon."

I am a messenger sent from the presence of God.

My name is Moroni.

There is a book deposited, written upon gold plates.

Joseph Smith formed a church

called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,

abbreviated to "LDS."

Translate these ancient writings and bring them forth to the world.

The real treasure is not the gold in those plates,

but what's written on them.

The LDS Church believes it has a divine mandate to preserve its history.

For Latter-Day Saints, the history is integral with the faith itself.

Joseph? Is this where you saw Heavenly Father and Jesus?

Yes, Lucy.

This is the very place.

Early Mormonism is full of treasure tales,

and it really carried over into the '70s and '80s.

You've got a growing LDS religion and a growing market for Mormon artifacts.

So the Mormon people have always had a propensity

to seek those kind of treasures out.

It's a thinking man's game,

dealers who know history well enough to purchase old books and pieces of paper

and sell them for a profit.

There are only a handful of men who've acted as dealers

for these pieces of high-prized history.

Shannon Flynn's one of them.

There's a certain amount of detective work.

There's a certain amount of excitement, high stakes, valuable pieces.

I had taken an interest in LDS Church doctrine,

probably since those late teenage years.

I remember clearly the first collectible item I bought.

It was a third edition of a pamphlet by B.H. Roberts.

I didn't know what I was doing. I paid $10 for it.

But I was interested in the history,

and in the Salt Lake area, it was centered mainly on bookstores.

And that kind of became the Mormon history coffeehouse,

if you want to think of it in those terms.

You would go, meet people.

"Hey, come over here.

Let me show you this. Let's see that book."

And it was at that time that I was introduced to Mark Hofmann.

And I was very excited to meet Mark.

He was...

In the Mormon document world, he was a rock star.

Mark Hofmann, a student at Utah State University,

found the document.

It appears to be the earliest Mormon document

and the earliest Joseph Smith holograph.

Also, I think it's exciting just to think that

apparently, this piece of paper was copied by Joseph Smith's own hand,

the characters were, right from the gold plates that were right there.

It's covered with carefully drawn symbols.

On the back, a statement signed by Joseph Smith.

"These characters were diligently copied by my own hand from the plates of gold."

Well, I feel pretty lucky.

Mark bought an old Bible from a man in Salt Lake.

The man said he'd purchased the Bible

from the granddaughter of Joseph Smith's sister.

Uh, Dorie walked in. She just got home from work.

He had this Bible, and I started flipping through the pages.

And there was this part

that was folded up and had this sticky gum on the end of it.

I think it was black,

and I called to him, saying, "There's something in here."

She was there when I finally succeeded in prying off the top page ...

that revealed a folded piece of paper.

Well, the Anthon Transcript.

Things in that document validated The Book of Mormon

and Joseph Smith...

And it was thrilling.

That's when he said he wanted to do this as his job.

He said, "I'm gonna be going into the document business.

Is that okay with you?"

The LDS Church and its members are world-renowned

for their zeal in collecting historical documents.

Dozens of researchers and collectors

are committed to finding tidbits from the past.

That Joseph Smith's first encounter with the Divine

was his experience with the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.

At the time, my particular interest

was the origins of Mormonism.

And the first time I heard about Mark Hofmann

would have been seeing the picture of Mark

surrounded by major figures of the Mormon hierarchy.

Here they are, gathered to see what this young man has found.

The Anthon Transcript discovery was widely publicized

and brought Mark Hofmann into contact with top leaders in the Mormon Church.

Mark wanted to be the ultimate document dealer,

and so, Mark would ask me to do the genealogical research,

where we would research the descendants of certain mission presidents

and see if they had any of these family documents or books on hand.

I was so enthusiastic,

and it just started snowballing at that point.

A 137-year-old letter was found and proved authentic

by a Mormon Church historian.

The document was found by Mark Hofmann.

I'd never seen anybody come up with the material that Mark was coming up with.

The first time I actually read the letter,

I think I about fell off the chair I was sitting in.

The letter is from Lucy Mack Smith,

mother of the Church's first prophet and president, Joseph Smith.

He'd track old letters down by postage stamps,

wax seals, and all that.

He always had some inside track on how he was getting things.

Part of the collection...

I bought a lot of them over the years.

There haven't been a lot of dealers in this kind of thing before.

It was almost like a new era for Mormon collectibles.

The buying and selling of Mormon documents

has attracted so much attention lately,

they're commanding top dollar.

It's become a lucrative business

because many new items come from a period of Mormon history

for which very little is known.

Mark would travel to different places, including New York City,

and discovered a number of things.

Hofmann's dealings soon branched out

from selling only Mormon-related documents

to letters and signatures

by some of the most prominent names in American history.

It certainly smacks of Indiana Jones.

He didn't look the part. He looked like a nerd, and he was a nerd.

He was able to remember minute, who-could-give-a-care details

that somewhere along the line would make a lot of difference.

We had a friendship that extended to his wife

and our families.

One of the times I was there,

we played Celestial Pursuit,

Trivial Pursuit for Mormons.

One by one, Mark sat there with the cards, every one right.

Never missed one.

And so, I started working on document deals for him.

It was like I was given the opportunity to play along Michael Jordan,

or, um, Brett Favre or Ryne Sandberg.

I worked in the genealogical archive

doing research on the beginnings of Mormonism

and contemporaries of Joseph Smith,

people like Martin Harris, David Whitmer...

Back then, I spent a lot of my time in the historical archives,

uh, researching documents and working for the LDS Church security department.

I'd come across a book.

Um, how can I put it?

It became a lightning rod for a number of general authorities

because they felt that that material was damaging to the Church,

and they were concerned that I would publish it.

I was called in by my supervisors,

and was terminated.

And so the Church is in kind of an ironic situation.

On the one hand, they are driven by history,

and they want to preserve documents.

Their appreciation for the builders of the past will be enhanced.

But on the other hand, what do you do with documents

that have the potential of destroying someone's faith?

I remember it specifically because it was my birthday,