"Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders" -- a Conversation with Co-author Allen D. Roberts (Season 2, Ep. 16)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history about Utah accessible to the widest audience. The goal is to cover all of Utah's regions, all the varied and diverse communities, social, religious, ethnic, and vocational.
Utah history is big and wondrous and complex.
So much of it needs to be better understood. That is why we have Speak Your Piece. Today, we're diving into the story of forger and murderer Mark Hoffman, spurred on by the recently released documentary, Murder Among the Mormons produced by Netflix. My guest today is architect, artist, activist, and historian, Allen Roberts. Hello, Allen. Thank you for being here.

**Allen D. Roberts** (1:06)
Good morning.

**Brad Westwood** (1:08)
With the late writer and historian, Linda Sillitoe, Allen Roberts co-authored the Pulitzer Prize nominated bestseller book, Salamander, The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders, which was published by Signature Book in 1988 and has gone through at least a second and more editions and six or more printings, and is, in my estimation, the very best book on the subject. In a minute, we'll talk to Allen about the various other books that have been published on this topic. Allen has recently retired as co-founder, senior principal and president of the architectural firm CRSA, which stands for Cooper Roberts Simonson's Architects. In 2017, Allen was made a member of the College of Fellows in the American Institute of Architects. You cannot get a higher award and have your peers approve of your work. Being a fellow is a big deal.
Beyond his prolific and influential 45-year career in architectural design, teaching and advocating for the built environment, Allen also co-owns the Salt Lake City Art Gallery and has authored 12 books and scores of articles on Utah's history and architectural history.
He was also co-editor and publisher of Sunstone Magazine and Dialogue, a Journal of Mormon Thought. Once more, Allen, thank you so much for being here.

**Allen D. Roberts** (2:35)
Glad to be here, Brad. Thank you.

**Brad Westwood** (2:38)
As we begin our podcast, Allen, will you take a few minutes and give a quick recap of the story? Now, as we said before we got onto the air, this is one complex story.
But will you just speak about the key people, the events and the implications of the story, which you and Linda Sillitoe so carefully documented in the book, Salamander?

**Allen D. Roberts** (3:00)
The crux of the story comes from the October 15th, 1985 bombings that killed Steve Christensen and Kathy Sheets here in Salt Lake City, two murders that were committed by Mark Hofmann. Mark Hofmann, as it turns out, was a phenomenally gifted, but horribly twisted forger of historic documents. And we'll get into the motives, I suppose, and the details.
But these forgeries ended up putting pressure on him, and that pressure caused him or led him to believe that he needed to commit these murders to get out from under the pressures that he was experiencing. So that's the basic event that caused the whole story. But as it unraveled, we find that it goes way back to 1979, when he decided to do forgery as a career. And even before that, when he had a falling out with the Mormon Church, and as his partners claimed, he became an atheist at about age 13 And he had a number of motives. One was to have a career that made money, but another had to do with influencing Mormon membership to believing and elements of their history that they weren't acquainted with, that caused them to bring into question the divinity of the mission and life and works of Joseph Smith.
And then you have a cast of hundreds of characters who ended up being victims.
Everything from church leaders, document buyers, businessmen, his partners, people involved in investigating and prosecuting the case. The list of characters in the book is huge. In fact, in the last editing, before it was published, we reduced the size of the book by 100 pages and took out maybe 100 characters. And we're talking about thousands of documents. The forensic examiners looked at 6,000 documents, out of which, for the church alone, LDS Church collection alone, 443 were known to have come from Hofmann, and 107 of those were determined to be forgeries, about 25%. And so, his career as a forger was significant for the local population, but he also forged American documents.

**Brad Westwood** (5:45)
The extended far beyond the Intermountain West.

**Allen D. Roberts** (5:48)
Exactly. Lincoln's, Washington's, Betsy Ross, Jack London, Oath of a Freeman, which purported to be the first printed document in America in the 1600s. And so, this career really was a career. It wasn't just a sideline for him, it was what he did for a living.