Steve Christensen & Kathy Sheets

Case background and investigation

On October 15, 1985, two pipe bombs disguised as packages killed two people in the Salt Lake City area. Steven Christensen, a businessman and collector of historical documents, was fatally injured by the first device; The Salt Lake Tribune later described testimony from a witness who found him lying in a hallway. Later the same day a second device, left outside her home, killed Kathleen "Kathy" Sheets. She was the wife of J. Gary Sheets, Christensen's business partner. According to Wikipedia's account, a secretary was also hurt by shrapnel in the first blast.

The following day, October 16, a third bomb exploded in a car belonging to Mark Hofmann, a dealer in rare documents who had sold items relating to early Latter-day Saint history. Hofmann was seriously injured. Investigators at first considered whether the bombings were connected to the troubled investment business run by Gary Sheets, which the Los Angeles Times reported was the impression Hofmann had intended to create.

Hofmann was arrested in early 1986 and charged with murder, bomb offenses, theft by deception and fraud. At a preliminary hearing in April 1986, prosecutors presented evidence linking him to the bombs and to a long series of forgeries. In January 1987 he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and to fraud-related counts involving the so-called Salamander Letter and a purported collection of papers of early church leader William McLellin. As part of the plea he agreed to answer prosecutors' questions about his crimes.

The Los Angeles Times reported on the resulting 544-page interview transcript, released in July 1987. In it Hofmann said he killed Christensen to stop a pending document transaction from exposing his frauds and that the Sheets bomb was meant as a diversion. He claimed the third bomb was a suicide attempt, a claim prosecutors and the Salt Lake City police chief publicly doubted.

Judge Kenneth Rigtrup sentenced Hofmann to five years to life and recommended that he never be released. In 1988 the Utah Board of Pardons, after hearing Hofmann describe the bombing, decided that he would spend the rest of his natural life in prison, according to published accounts cited by Wikipedia. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints subsequently published a list of documents it had acquired or used that were now known to be Hofmann forgeries.

Hofmann was held for decades at the Utah State Prison in Draper. In September 2016 the Utah Department of Corrections confirmed to Fox 13 that he had been moved out of maximum security to the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison. The case was the subject of the Netflix documentary series Murder Among the Mormons, released in March 2021.