A former LDS Institute teacher and historian at church-owned Brigham Young University, Ron Walker came to the task with questions of his own, he said. Some people asked whether the project should go forward, and Walker conceded it was a question they asked themselves as much as anyone.

"There is a collective sense of guilt here that's part of our heritage. The only way you can really deal with it — you can't put it in a closet. Ultimately, you have to open it up, open the windows. There is short-term pain, but it seems the only way to get beyond that is with honesty and open disclosure and a sense of regret. Maybe even a sense of confusion."

Yet the long-standing confusion about who did what and when regarding the planning and execution of the massacre was addressed by a set of statements and affidavits collected by assistant church historian Andrew Jenson in 1892, Walker said.

Sent by the LDS First Presidency to southern Utah to secure confidential accounts from those who participated or had been told by the perpetrators about the events, Jenson found himself dealing with memories that were 35 years old.

"With any lapse of time, historians have to be suspicious of faulty memory," Walker said. Yet, "by and large, these statements were given on a confidential basis and have a ring of honesty to them."

Richard Turley, an attorney by training who now serves as assistant church historian, said the combined evidence in the affidavits proved helpful in ferreting out truth from lies. "When they vacillate or try to protect themselves (in the documents), you can triangulate on other data to verify the information."

Jenson was charged with securing the information not only to help flesh out a history of Utah being written by Orson F. Whitney, but for a larger purpose, Turley said. "He was told to 'learn all you can about the subject ... so the world may know at some future day what really happened."'

Combined with other sources, the authors were able to determine that most of the perpetrators "gave a statement of one kind or another during their lifetimes. Of those, some survived, but not all. Some of them were intended to be alibis and not accounts. What makes it important for historical purposes is that they tend to be self-justifying. They tended to want to cover for themselves and their closest friends, but they often gave details that would indict others, that when accumulated with other information, indicted themselves."