"Killing Christensen might have bought him some time" — if Hofmann himself hadn't immediately become a suspect, says former detective Farnsworth. The murder of Kathy Sheets was a diversion but was, in a sense, random. As Hofmann later told his parole board: "At the time I made that bomb my thoughts were that it didn't matter if it was Mr. Sheets, a child, a dog."

Steve Christensen and Kathy Sheets were Hofmann's most tragic victims. But Hofmann also had three other financial victims: the LDS Church, which owns 446 Hofmann forgeries and whose history was challenged by some of Hofmann's more damaging distortions; coin and document dealer Al Rust; and Provo document collector Brent Ashworth.

Ashworth, who says he lost his retirement — about $400,000 — to Hofmann, is a self-deprecating attorney with a passion for old papers. He has walls and file cabinets full of Mormon and Americana documents. He used to have a much bigger collection — an original copy of the 13th Amendment, a handwritten letter written by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War — but he traded these and more to Hofmann for early LDS documents that turned out to be bogus.

During their four-year business relationship, Ashworth was continually amazed that Hofmann was able to find the very documents Ashworth wanted the most, including a letter written by Joseph Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, and a letter written by Joseph Smith from the Carthage jail.

"I don't understand," a reporter began as she interviewed Ashworth, to which he interrupted, "How stupid we were?"

"Collecting is an insanity," he said, by way of explanation. "My wife calls it a greed. It might be a greed. I've tried to analyze it myself, but I'm not very good at that.

"I don't remember ever being suspicious but one time," Ashworth said. One day, Ashworth recollects, he went to Hofmann's home and ran into the dealer exiting his house with a document Ashworth recognized as a Paul Revere. "Doggone it if the ink didn't look not quite dry," he remembered. The sunlight, he says, seemed to reflect off the surface of the ink. "It almost looked brand new."

But Ashworth just brushed the observation aside, he says, only remembering the image later, when it was too late. Eventually, he did begin to think of Hofmann as a liar and con man, who bounced checks and made promises he didn't keep. But even when Ashworth occasionally thought the documents Hofmann showed him didn't look real — including the Salamander Letter — he never thought Hofmann himself was the forger.

As Curt Bench, former friend and former head of Deseret Book's rare book department, said: "Nobody ever thought Mark could have been the one, because we trusted him." And, too, "there were no known (LDS document) forgeries in our field, so it wasn't on our radar."