Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Scammed The Mormon Church - The Mark Hofmann Story

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

Mark Hofmann is a former document dealer and convicted murderer from Salt Lake City, Utah, known for perpetrating one of the most elaborate forgery schemes in American history. In the early 1980s, Hofmann created and sold numerous forged documents related to the history of the Latter-day Saint (LDS) movement

So this guy's a total fraud who ends up killing people with bombs. Now the dude's name is Mark, and Mark, he's around 26 years old when the story starts and he's living in Utah. And Mark really, really wants to make money, even if he has to scam people. And he realizes he can do that through forging documents. So one day in 1980, he makes a fake of an historical document from 1828 that was supposedly written by Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. And this document would be extremely rare to find. And so he makes a forgery of it and he pretends that he found it folded up in an old King James Bible. Then I guess he takes it to the Mormon church leaders and he's like, I found this very old important Mormon document. And the

Mormon church buys it from him for $20,000. And this is like a big deal to the church. Like they make a public announcement of it that this very special historical document has been found. And Mark is watching all this go down and he's like, oh shit, they fell for it. I got to do this again. And so he drops out of college and he becomes a rare document collector, which is, I guess that's a real thing. And he starts forging all kinds of historically significant documents and selling them to people. And he goes all out making these things look legit. Like he'll age the paper with ammonia.

He'll practice the handwriting and signatures over and over again. And he like forges letters from Paul Revere and fakes letters from George Washington and fakes letters from Mark Twain. He even makes a whole ass poem written by Emily Dickinson. It's a total fake. He'll pretend to discover documents signed by the same guys who signed the Declaration of Independence. Again, all fake. But then in 1981, he f***es with the Mormon church again. He goes to the church leaders and he claims that he found letters.

that says that the long dead founder of the Mormon church, Joseph Smith, actually designated his son to be the leader of the church and not Brigham Young. And this letter would ultimately sow division among the church and make them look, you know, pretty bad. And so, boom, he makes another 20 grand selling that. Three years later in 1984, he forges yet another Mormon letter and he sells it to a collector for $40,000. He actually ends up selling quite a bit of fake documents to the Mormon Church specifically. By some counts, he sold them 48. I guess they just like believe whatever he was telling them. And so anyway, so Mark keeps going. He keeps doing this for years. He's traveling around the world, selling fake documents that he just made up to a bunch of people and he becomes kind of

famous in his field. Like they write about him in Time Magazine. They write about him in the New York Times. Plus, he's making lots of money from all this. And he's living a fancy life with nice, cars and a nice house and he's buying really expensive, legitimate first editions of books for like tens of thousands of dollars each. Like he pays $22,000 for the first edition of Sherlock Holmes, stuff like that. But here's where Mark starts to run into a problem. He essentially starts conning people into investing in him, saying that if you give me a bunch of money, then I'll finally have the resources to look for and find you this really old, document. And they do. People start investing in him. But eventually, he can't forge the amount of

documents that he's claiming to find. So over time, investors start asking for their money. They want to return on their investment. But Mark doesn't have it. So he'll just pay them off with money from new investors. Basically, he turns this rare document search into one big Ponzi scheme. And so he keeps conning investors and conning investors. And eventually, by 1985, his debt, from this Ponzi scheme get up to $1.1 million. And there's no way he's going to be able to pay back all of these people. But here's where it gets really crazy. Mark comes up with a new idea.

He's going to scam the Library of Congress, which is the United States National Library and the largest library in the world. So he goes to the staff of the Library of Congress, and he tells them that he's uncovered a copy of OTH. of a free man. Which is historically the first document ever printed in the United States. It's extremely rare and from 1639. And only like 50 copies were ever made, but none of them exist today. Well, Mark, he forges a copy of one. Here's his fake copy. And he claims that he found it in a

random bookstore in New York and he offers to sell it to the federal government for a million and a half dollars. So if he sells this, he's not only going to be rich, but he's going to be able to pay back all his investors. And so the government agrees to this price. However, they want to do further testing to determine the document's authenticity. And this further testing is taking a while and it keeps pushing back the sale. Meanwhile, Mark is trying to scam the Mormon church again. I guess he just finds them really gullible because he needs to pay back those investors.

This time he's trying to sell the Mormons a collection of historical. documents, documents that would make them look bad. But this time he screws up because this collection of historical documents he claims to have is huge. And a huge collection like that would take him a really long time to forge. So there's no way he's going to be able to do it. And the Mormon church, they don't want unfavorable stuff to come out about their history. So now they're in negotiations with Mark to buy these documents from him so that they can lock them away so that no one will ever see them. And all of this is taking a while. It's taking too long. And by this point, the investors, they're getting impatient. And he really needs to buy himself some time. And so he decides

to create a distraction and murder some people with some homemade bombs. So he starts building some bombs, I guess. And eventually the day comes that he's supposed to turn over the documents to the Mormon church like he promised them, but he doesn't go turn over the documents. Instead, he puts on a hat and a letterman jacket as a disguise, and he takes a package that has a bomb in it to another known document collector's office. And he leaves it at the door, and he leaves. Some time later, the document collector comes to pick up the package left at the door, and kaboom. It explodes, and he unfortunately dies, and this also injures a secretary who was nearby. That same day, he plants another bomb in someone else's yard, and someone comes along and picks it up and

kaboom, it explodes too. And it unalives the wife of someone connected to the document collecting business. And I'm not sure if this bomb was actually meant for her, but unfortunately, it got her. Now, this next part gets really weird. The next day, he builds yet another bomb, and he puts it in his own car. Then he intentionally gets into that car and kaboon. The whole thing explodes. And Mark, he goes flying out of the vehicle. But he doesn't die. Somehow he survives.

Now, why did he blow himself up? Well, some theories say that he was trying to throw off police's suspicion while he claims he was trying to unalive himself. Either way, he blew himself up. And so the police, they come talk to him. And he starts bullshitting them and saying that he was minding his own business and he opened the door to his car and suddenly a package fell out. And when he reached down to get it, boom, the bomb exploded. However, when the police investigate the crime scene, it's very clear the bomb exploded in the front seat of the car, not on the ground outside. Which means that Mark was inside the car at the time.

And so police are like, this motherfucker is lying to us. And because of that, they get suspicious of Mark and they start. looking into him and they find out about all this money he owes investors and about his plans to sell this massive document collection to the Mormon church. Then they start looking into some of the documents that he had sold and they finally figure out that they're all fake. And so bam, Mark is arrested. Here's his mugshot. And ultimately he ends up taking a plea deal and he gets sentenced to five years to life in prison.