At that point, Hofmann was receiving pressure from all fronts to repay the loan and to either give back the investments or come up with the documents. Meanwhile, the deal Hofmann had been hoping would help him repay these and other bigger debts wasn't panning out. For a while, it had looked like the Library of Congress was going to buy Hofmann's rarest "find" yet — the early 17th century "Oath of a Freeman" — for $1.5 million. But in June the deal went sour.

Hofmann's deals were one big Ponzi scheme, says former Salt Lake City police detective Ken Farnsworth. Hofmann would promise investors a 30 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent return on their investments in rare documents, would take their money to repay earlier investors, then would look for still newer investors to pay off the others. At the same time, Hofmann was getting loans from local businessmen using real, rare books from his personal collection as collateral. And his checks were bouncing all over town.

Farnsworth, who investigated the Christensen and Sheets homicides, remembers that investigators kept a running tally of Hofmann's debts as the case became clearer in the winter of 1986. "We made this thermometer, much like one of those charity benefit thermometers" that show a steadily rising "mercury" of dollars, Farnsworth recalls.

The total of debts — $415,000 to Salt Laker Thomas Wilding and others in his investment group; $185,000 to the bank; $20,000 to a dealer in California for a Sherlock Holmes manuscript; a $180,000 down payment on a new house on Cottonwood Lane, and on and on — eventually reached $1.1 million, Farnsworth says.

"When you put together this whole morass of bad deals he had going on, he was in a box he couldn't get out of," he said. "It would have taken a whole year of forgery to get out of it."

In addition, Hofmann knew that Massachusetts autograph expert Kenneth Rendell was planning a trip to Salt Lake City in late October. Hofmann knew that Rendell would be visiting Christensen, who was thinking of buying a piece of Egyptian papyrus Hofmann said was from the McLellin collection — but which, in fact, Hofmann had bought from Rendell earlier in the summer.

However, according to George Throckmorton, the Salt Lake City forensic examiner who helped pin down the Hofmann forgeries, Hofmann's real motivation for the Christensen murder was not the McLellin collection nor Rendell but a separate transaction.

"I'll tell you, it has something to do with an old farmer in Idaho," he said cryptically, perhaps referring to Sidney Jensen, investor Thomas Wilding's brother-in-law.

Throckmorton, head of the Salt Lake City Police Department's crime lab, is spearheading this weekend's "The Hands of Hofmann, Motive for Murder" symposium. He has also just finished writing a book that will detail his findings.