Whenever someone did question any of his documents, Hofmann always blamed the person from whom he had bought them. Several times, when New York handwriting expert Charles Hamilton told him some signature or other looked like a fake, Hofmann would quiz him as to exactly why — then went back to his basement and tried harder to get the signature right, Ashworth says.

Some people think Ashworth was the intended victim of the third bomb. Hofmann contends he was trying to kill himself. Prosecutor Stott thinks Hofmann was just trying to damage his car so he could claim that the McLellin collection had been destroyed. The truth sits with Hofmann, who, say his friends and enemies, can't be trusted to ever tell the truth about anything.

"If I can produce something so correctly, so perfect that the experts declare it genuine, then for all practical purposes it is genuine," Hofmann once told his former prison guard, Charles Larson, author of "Numismatic Forgery." In Hofmann's mind, if it was a perfect forgery, no one was being deceived.

"He has little or no conscience," his former friend, Shannon Flynn, said. "He doesn't think about things in moral terms, like punishment by God. . . . He believes in a sense we just live in a biological system," where a murder is the equivalent of a lion killing a water buffalo, simply for survival, Flynn says. "He killed those people to survive, to get out of it. Things were closing in on him. His forgeries were very close to being found out."

"This is what makes Mark Hofmann so stinking dangerous," Flynn added. "You and I would have just gotten caught for forgery, and gone to prison for three years. But Hofmann has no limit. Would he kill again? If the pressure was high enough, you'd better believe it."

He murdered to save himself. He forged to make money and, apparently, to hurt the LDS Church.

"A Burning Testimony," a poem he wrote in prison seems to sum up his feelings: "In my opinion (And I 'know' I'm right!)/The Book of Mormon can best shed its light/ at four-fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit."

Ashworth believes Hofmann's anger resulted from the fact that Hofmann's grandfather had been excommunicated for practicing polygamy. Ashworth now owns Hofmann's Bible from his LDS mission days in England, and reports that "almost all the notes (in the Bible) were about polygamy. It seemed to be on his mind all the time."

And, too, Hofmann forged simply because he liked tricking people. He liked getting away with whatever he could.

"Looking back now, it seems obvious," said Salt Lake City coin dealer Bob Campbell — that one man couldn't have found so many rare documents, that the photos he passed off as old were on paper that was too thick, that the coins he sold weren't authentic. "But they so much wanted to believe," Campbell said. "So many people."