Word: christensen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After Salt Lake City Businessman Steven F. Christensen and Housewife Kathleen Sheets were killed by pipe bombs last October, Utah authorities almost immediately named Mark W. Hofmann, a dealer in rare Mormon documents, as their prime suspect. Last week they finally charged Hofmann with the two first-degree murders, as well as 26 other felonies. In building their case, moreover, prosecutors claimed to have not only established a motive for the killings but also to have uncovered a bizarre religious fraud...
...called White Salamander Letter, which purportedly traced some of Mormon Founder Joseph Smith's beliefs to folk magic, rather than to divine revelation as the church teaches. Prosecutors claim that the letter and many other documents that Hofmann peddled to the church were forgeries, and that Christensen learned of the scam. Sheets, they believe, was killed in a diversionary effort to connect Christensen with her husband's controversial business dealings. Hofmann, who was injured a day after the slayings in a car bombing that police say was accidental, maintains that he is innocent of both murders...
...rumor mill in Salt Lake City was abuzz about another, more exotic, possibility. Christensen and Gary Sheets, both Mormon bishops (local church leaders), were involved in publication of a controversial historical document that challenges the authorized version of the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1983 Christensen paid a reported $40,000 to Mark Hofmann, 30, a shadowy, highly successful dealer in Mormon documents, for an 1830 manuscript known as the "White Salamander Letter." Written by a disciple of Mormon Founder Joseph Smith, it says Smith's finding of the Book of Mormon came...
Because it implies that folk magic led Smith to his scriptural discovery, the letter has caused considerable consternation among Mormons, leading some to question their faith. Christensen and Sheets helped finance efforts to determine the document's authenticity, and Christensen ultimately donated the letter to the church. Many in Salt Lake thought the bombings were tied to the church controversy. "Most of us were scared to death," said Ronald Walker, an expert on Mormon documents. "It looked like screwball vendetta against anyone who had dealt with that letter...
...Hofmann, it seemed, had accidentally set off a bomb of his own making. After eight hours of surgery, Hofmann, who was expected to survive, maintained from his hospital bed that he was a target, not an assailant. But police say he is the primary suspect in the deaths of Christensen and Sheets...