Are there contradictions between Nephi & Abinadi? Dr Joseph Spencer says Yes! He also makes the case that when Jesus quotes Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, it is really different than Abinadi, who is really different than Nephi. We’ll also discuss why Joe isn’t interested in the multiple Isaiah problem in the Book of Mormon. Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/OJMIijxSXYQ

Don’t miss our other conversations with Joseph: https://gospeltangents.com/people/joseph-spencer/

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Is Abinadi trinitarian? Joseph Spencer is one of the leading experts on the Book of Mormon. He’ll tackle that question. He’s also the incoming president of Book of Mormon Studies Association, and he’s written a new book, “A Word in Season,” which discusses the Book of Mormon’s treatment of Isaiah. As LDS, we are told to study the words of Isaiah, so we’ll dive in and talk about how Abinadi, Christ, and Nephi approach Isaiah. It’s not the same! We’ll also discuss trinity in the Book of Mormon. Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/YOh3gyLinK8

Don’t miss our other conversations with Joseph: https://gospeltangents.com/people/joseph-spencer/

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For this GT Live! show, we’ll announce contest winners for Kurt Francom’s book, the Manti Temple, and my visit to polygamist communities on the Utah-Arizona border.

https://youtube.com/live/DRurZvvPLgE

In our conclusion, we’re talking about the Gospel of the Brother of Jared, and why Rosalynde prefers reading to podcasts! Check out our conversation. Sign up for our free newsletter at gospeltangents.com/newsletter to hear the conclusion….

https://youtu.be/gBD-U5qLqhA

Don’t miss our other conversations with Rosalynde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ih_Fh585xk&list=PLLhI8GMw9sJ7ftt9c-Ndta9jcDH0NOQyr

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It’s always fun to put Kurt Francom on the hot seat. What does he think about girls passing the sacrament like boys? Is Christian Nationalism a problem in the LDS Church? Check out our conversation by signing up to our free newsletter at https://gospeltangents.com/newletter

https://youtu.be/UpiJBY4Gdiw

Don’t miss our other conversations with Kurt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/kurt-francom/

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Some people trust in God, but God either leaves them hanging, or answers in a way they don’t understand. Are some disappointed in God? Others are quite lax in their religious devotion. Should God be Disappointed in some? Kurt Francom answers. Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/GrCpDaAfw6o

Don’t miss our other conversations with Kurt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/kurt-francom/

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In LDS Culture, we are constantly told to keep ourselves pure so that the Holy Ghost can dwell within us, that somehow sin separates us from the Holy Spirit. But there are cases where the Holy Ghost ministered to clearly sinful people. How do we explain that? Does God dwell in unholy temples? Kurt Francom will tackle that question. Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/afEWYDY82_M

Don’t miss our other conversations with Kurt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/kurt-francom/

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Kurt Francom is the author of “Is God Disappointed in Me?” He says God is never disappointed in us and embraces grace. But did he go too far? Is orthodox Kurt Francom spouting heresy? Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/zRMArlcd3CQ

Don’t miss our other conversations with Kurt: https://gospeltangents.com/people/kurt-francom/

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We’re going to be discussing Mormons and crime. Steve Mayfield passed away on March 30, 2024. This interview is from 2018 where we discussed his collection of Mormon crime, both good guys and bad guys. For example, did you know that it was a Mormon FBI agent who arrested Patty Hearst following her participation of a bank robbery? We’ll also discuss one of the most notorious spies in U.S, history, Robert Hanssen. Hanssen was also a Mormon FBI agent who passed secrets to the Russians. Of course, Steve also has a collection on the Mark Hofmann case, and we’ll discuss his work with George Throckmorton who discovered how Mark Hofmann was forging documents. The “Dead Lee Scroll” is also a forgery we’ll discuss, that hasn’t been definitively tied to Hofmann. Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/JzCO6LI5lXg

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Mormon Connection to Patty Hearst Kidnapping

Introduction

I’d like to introduce Steve Mayfield.  We’ll talk about Mormon involvement in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case.  Did you know that it was a Mormon FBI agent that arrested Patty?  Check out our conversation…

GT:        00:01:01             Welcome to Gospel Tangents.

Steve:   00:01:03             Thank You.

GT:        00:01:04             I’m excited to have Steve Mayfield here. He is a documentation collector and we’re going to talk a little bit about Mark Hofmann. We’re going to talk a little bit about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We’re going to talk a little bit about the FBI and Mormons.

Steve:   00:01:31             Yes.

GT:        00:01:32             Which I think will be a lot of fun. So, Steve has some amazing stories and so why don’t you get us a little bit about your background?

Steve:   00:01:36             Okay.

GT:        00:01:37             How did you get involved in collecting?

Steve:   00:01:39             Oh, gee. Well, I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. For those interested in genealogy, I’m a seventh generation Latter-day Saint. So, my family history goes all the way back to Ohio in one family line and Nauvoo. And I’ve always had an interest in history. When I was in high school, my desire was to be a history teacher specifically, maybe teach seminary or institute. But when I was a senior in high school, this was way back in 1974. Most people weren’t even around. We had one of these field trips to San Francisco and it included Golden Gate Park, the Chinese Tea Garden, an unofficial trip to the Haight-Ashbury, for those who remember that area, and also tour the FBI office. And I just fell in love with what people in the FBI did, all that work that I wanted to become the next was Efrem Zimbalist Jr, who happened to be the star of the TV show FBI back during the ’60s. After I graduated from high school, I served my mission in Colorado-Nebraska. And in late 1972 I was assigned to way out east to Grand Island, Nebraska, which is kind of hard for person used to mountains when it’s all flatland and wintery. One of the members of the local LDS district presidency out there was also the local FBI agent. So, we had a number of conversations. I indicated my interest in working with the FBI. And so, he suggested, well, get hired on as a clerk or clerical position with the bureau and then get a college degree and then you might become an agent. So, we put the paperwork in. I came home in February of ’73 and then by July I had received my appointment to work as a file clerk in San Francisco.

Steve:   00:03:27             I was there for four years. Of course, all this time I’m worried. I love history, but yet I’m in law enforcement. How can I intermingle? Well, my whole working career has been in law enforcement, but I seem to have come across historical occurrences in each of the agencies I worked for. When I was at the FBI, I was there during the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. But more importantly I was there during a very well-known case, this little kidnap case you might have heard of Patty Hearst. I wasn’t an agent, but I was involved in that in the fact that I was assigned to the Berkeley Office of the FBI where the kidnapping occurred for about three or four months. Then I came back to San Francisco. I was there the day she was arrested and brought in.

GT:        00:04:14             Ok, let’s back up a little bit. I’m not going to tell you how old I am. I am older than I want to admit, but even for me, (I’m sure some people think, wow, he’s an old man,) I don’t know the Patty Hearst story that well, so let’s, let’s back up and talk a little bit about that. Actually, I believe her father was actually more famous than she was.

Steve:   00:04:39             Yes, her grandfather–The Hearst Corporation, they are newspaper people. They owned one of the San Francisco papers, a very wealthy family. They have the Hearst Castle down in southern California, which is, you can’t buy it if you even tried. And she was a little 19-year-old college student.

GT:        00:04:57             So let’s talk about that. So, William Hearst, is that what his name was?

Steve:   00:05:01             Yes, William Hearst.

GT:        00:05:01             He was kind of the Bill Gates of his day, right?

Steve:   00:05:04             Yes.

GT:        00:05:04             So, he was a super-rich guy.

Steve:   00:05:06             He had these newspapers.

GT:        00:05:07             He had a bunch of newspapers.

Steve:   00:05:08             Right.

GT:        00:05:09             And then let’s talk a little bit. Wasn’t it called the Symbian Lebanese Army?

Steve:   00:05:14             Symbionese Liberation Army.

GT:        00:05:15             So tell me about that first.

Steve:   00:05:16             They were a group of radicals that are organized out of the prison system back in the ’60s, into the ’70s, started by a black radical by name Donald DeFreeze. He incorporated some white folk around him who were radical. And this is a time when you had actual physical violence as a meaningful trade. A couple of these members of the SLA killed the school superintendent in Oakland, Marcus Foster. {He was killed by] a guy named Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, and they were caught. The SLA did a lot of other things, but they had a list of some violent acts they were going to do. One of them was to kidnap. Patty is living with her boyfriend in Berkeley, going to school. They show up one day and break into the house and kidnap her. Boom. Well, [they said] “We want money, we want reputation, we want notoriety.”

GT:        00:06:08             So this group, the Symbian Liberation Army, were they just like an anarchist group?

Steve:   00:06:11             Yeah just radical, you know, terrorists.

GT:        00:06:17             They just wanted to create chaos basically.

Steve:   00:06:18             Yes, terrorists.

GT:        00:06:18             They didn’t really have any strategic, big long-term goals.

Steve:   00:06:21             Well, political, you know, help for the poor, help for the minorities, but [they] just need to raise money. They were trying to overthrow the government. But he had a small group of maybe eight people: Donald DeFreeze and a whole bunch of these white kids, white, young folk. Bill Harris, there was back in February of this year, CNN did a six-day special.

GT:        00:06:50             I saw that.

Steve:   00:06:50             And so, one of the people we interviewed was William Taylor Harris. He was one of the people involved with that, that whole thing. He’s been to prison, out, and whatever. So, she [Patty] was gone for a good time.

GT:        00:07:03             So let’s back up. So, the idea was this is just the kind of a chaos group, right?

Steve:   00:07:08             Yeah.

GT:        00:07:09             And .they just wanted to sow chaos. How can we sow chaos? Oh, we will kidnap the richest man’s daughter in the world. That’s basically what happened.

Steve:   00:07:16             Well, a very rich man and a very well-known person and she would do these tape recordings that would go to the media, you know, mom and dad.

GT:        00:07:25             Who is she?

Steve:   00:07:25             Patty Hearst would do these tape recordings. At first, she’s a victim, but over time she started changing from being a victim. Now she’s joined up with them. Now they’re wanting money and they’re running around doing various things, doing bank robberies. Somebody was killed along the bank robberies, but now she’s part of the radical group.

GT:        00:07:46             And she’s part of the group that robbed the bank.

Steve:   00:07:48             Yes.

GT:        00:07:48             Okay. So she’s gone from victim to the perpetrator essentially.

Steve:   00:07:52             Yes, and now she comes up with, they gave her the name of Tanya. They all had their little names. So that’s why you have here. This is a copy of the Wanted poster.

GT:        00:08:02             A little higher. There’s Patty Hearst right there. I think she actually didn’t like the name Patty. I heard that on that CNN [show] you were talking about she likes to go by Patricia.

Steve:   00:08:11             Patricia. Yeah. But this is after she committed the bank robbery. So now we have a problem because she’s a victim from a kidnapping, but now she’s wanted for bank robbery and all these other things.

Steve:   00:08:23             So, they’ve committed some crimes. They decide to go down to southern California which was probably a mistake. If they had stayed in the Bay area where there was this radical movement, they had safe houses. They had friends that would support them. They went to L.A., a completely different environment, trying to get in down here and that’s when they got caught in one of the suburbs of L.A. and the police found him and they had the shootout where the house burned and killed everybody. Patty wasn’t with them. The Harris’s and Patricia Hearst were in L.A., but they weren’t there at that case, while these other members of the SLA were killed. And then Patty and the Harris’s went back east came back out and eventually the FBI and of course the FBI was criticized very harshly because why can’t you find her? Why can’t you find her? But the FBI just started connecting the dots: who we know, knew Donald DeFreeze? Who knew these other people? Who are their friends?

Steve:   00:09:19             And eventually they connected the Soliah family. They said, “We know where they live.” So, they do surveillance on these homes. And I saw the Harris’s and they saw Patty. Then one day they did the rush, they arrested them. Now my interest obviously because I work for them, but also because there is a Mormon connection with the FBI. And in this case, the supervisor of the squad that handled bank robberies and kidnapping was a guy named Brian Wheeler, who at the time of the kidnapping was a member of the San Francisco Sunset Ward bishopric. When they divided and made a special squad of agents just to work on that case, one of the agents was a guy named Jason Moulton. He is LDS and he is one of the agents that arrested Patty Hearst and on the CNN special, he’s the FBI agent they interview on it. Jason retired about 15 years ago. [He] was the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in Seattle.

Steve:   00:10:14             About five years ago, he and his wife served a mission out in Kentucky, a short term mission. But you had a number of other agents in the San Francisco Division that worked on that case. Again, I had the involvement because I worked within the Berkeley Office. After she was arrested, myself and other clerks spent a whole week booking in all the evidence and all the materials they picked up and I had an opportunity on two occasions to go out up sit in on the trial. And I sat a couple of rows right behind Patty and her attorney F. Lee Bailey.

GT:        00:10:42             Oh really?

Steve:   00:10:42             Yes.

GT:        00:10:42             The O.J. lawyer.

Steve:   00:10:45             Yes! Which I learned that he was not much of an attorney at that time. I never had been impressed with him, but that was intimately involved in that thing. So, these historical events, I’m saying, well, my history. And of course, that’s what I started doing what you see around me. It’s being a documentation collector. I collect newspaper clippings and things off the Internet. I will tape record things off the TV and radio. That was a label that George Throckmorton gave to me. I’m not a document collector per se, dealing with old documents, but they’re connected because I collect these things now.

GT:        00:11:25             So you have a lot of newspaper clippings and things like that, and recordings.

Steve:   00:11:29             Yes, and recordings. A lot of this stuff that had been donated to BYU since 2004. I’ve been donating my collection down there and I’ll share with other people. We were talking about Matt Harris.

GT:        00:11:42             Well let me back up. Before we do that, I noticed that wanted poster you have is autographed it looks like. Can you tell us who that autograph is?

Steve:   00:11:52             Well, it says Patricia Hearst. The problem is, this is not an actual [poster.] Oh, this was an original one here. This one is a photo.

GT:        00:12:07             Oh, it’s a photo of the original.

Steve:   00:12:08             I don’t know if that’s a real autograph or not because there are some differences.

GT:        00:12:11             We have got to talk to George Throckmorton to figure out.

Steve:   00:12:13             Yeah, probably have to show it. I just bought it because I wanted a copy of her “wanted” poster, just her.

GT:        00:12:18             Ok, show us the other one that you’ve got there.

Steve:   00:12:20             Ok, this isn’t what, this is legitimate. This is one of the original, Wanted posters of the Harris’s and Patricia Hearst.

GT:        00:12:31             Wow. That’s cool.

Steve:   00:12:32             Again this was one of the things. Before I left the FBI in ’77, they were authorized to get rid of some old files. So, it became a kind of a free-for-all for getting things. They had copies of a Tokyo Rose’s tape recordings from World War II.

GT:        00:12:52             Tokyo Rose?

Steve:   00:12:52             She was this lady during World War II would send messages to the GI’s trying to convince them that they’re going to lose the war.

GT:        00:13:01             Oh she was a Japanese propagandist.

Steve:   00:13:03             Yeah. Yeah.

GT:        00:13:03             Okay.

Steve:   00:13:04             And it wasn’t on tapes. It was actually on records. That’s how they were recorded. They were going to throw it away. Well, then we started lifting these things, a Wanted poster. They had one Wanted Posters of some of the gangsters from the 1930s. They went in a hurry. And so I was able to snag a few things, but you know, people were making collections. I don’t know if that was proper or not, you know, but a lot of these historical things or being salvaged from the FBI files.

Steve:   00:13:30             So anyway, after I was there for four years, I came back. My folks had moved back to Utah and I moved back here so I could go to Weber State. I graduated in 1980.

GT:        00:13:39             Weber State! Weber State! Great! Great! Great!

Steve:   00:13:42             Wildcats, Yes.

GT:        00:13:42             There’s not many of us around.

Steve:   00:13:46             That’s a comment I made there in Boise at Sunday devotional.

GT:        00:13:50             Yes, Paul Reeve, we love Paul Reeve, but don’t be talking trash about Weber State.[1]

Steve:   00:13:55             That’s right. That’s what [Paul] had made a comment during his talk up there. Anyway, that’s another topic.

 

Steve Mayfield: Crime Scene Photographer

Introduction

In our next conversation with Steve Mayfield, we will learn more about his background.  It turns out he is a crime scene photographer, and we will briefly touch on some cases he has worked on.  Check out our conversation….

Steve:   00:14:01             I moved back to Colorado in 1981 and got on with the sheriff’s department. Hey, my degree is in law enforcement. [I got a job] in Jefferson County, Colorado, which is out of Golden, which is on the west side. Now during that nine years I worked for them, nothing too exciting [happened] except the fact that Jefferson County, after I left, nine years later in 1999, gave us Columbine.

Steve:   00:14:30             So that was my department. I used to work for and I knew a lot of the people involved. Again, I can get these newspaper clippings over there and like I told you earlier, that one thing I’ve been doing since I started doing this, whether I was in San Francisco or Denver or even Salt Lake, if I didn’t buy the paper, I could go to the library and get out of state newspapers. I think almost every other week I would go to libraries and spend [time.] In the Denver Library is [I spent] three or four hours just photocopying clippings. I fell in love with the New York Times. The New York Times is one paper that they have microfilm of all their papers from way back. From the start of 1850 to the present. So, I’d get the microfilm and go over all of the articles. I had a project. I was going to photocopy everything they had on the Mormon Church and I got halfway through it and I’ve still got more to do, but it’s amazing how, as they go over the years, these articles that they would have, like from the 1850s, where you’d see names like Grant or Sherman, or Custer, all these people. And Brigham Young’s getting just as much space in the papers as these guys are. They even had reporters in the 1800s out here doing stories for the New York Times. Of course, the New York Times, is the grand dame of all papers and in America. And there was one year, particular year, they had over 100 articles in one particular year on Mormonism.

GT:        00:15:55             Wow.

Steve:   00:15:56             That’s almost two a week.

GT:        00:15:57             What year was this, approximately?

Steve:   00:15:58             The 1880s.

GT:        00:15:59             Oh, so polygamy was big.

Steve:   00:16:01             Yeah. And when you consider the paper wasn’t the big paper it is. It may have been eight or 10 sheets, but that’s almost two a week.

GT:        00:16:08             Wow.

Steve:   00:16:09             There would be other years where there was none. And that’s not even talking about articles about Ezra Taft Benson or George Romney or politicians. And so it kind of back my mind is one thing.

Steve:   00:16:21             I’ve got boxes someplace of all these photocopies of their off their microfilm. But that was one of the things I loved to do, was going down, and going to the library. And of course, point [your camera] over here. I will buy papers and do it. When I lived in Colorado I had the major papers of Utah sent over to me. That was the Logan, Ogden, Salt Lake papers, the Provo, St. George papers were sent to me. I had subscriptions and, oh, and BYU, the Daily Universe, whatever. I came back here and I kind of backed off on the other papers, but I still get the local papers here.

GT:        00:17:03             So are you one of the biggest collectors of Mormon media stuff?

Steve:   00:17:06             Well, probably not as much as a church, but I do. And because of that I’ve collected–not just to kind of hide it for myself, but to share it. That’s why last number of years I’ve shared, for example, you’ve interviewed Matt Harris in Colorado. For the past year, I will pick up things. Because of his interest in the black priesthood issue, [I’ve given him] clippings. Now he says some papers he get on the Internet, but others he doesn’t. I’m picking things out. One of the things I’ve noticed is that on the church magazines: The Ensign, and The Friend, and whatever, the teeny bopper [magazine is.]

GT:        00:17:44             New Era.

Steve:   00:17:45             New Era. [There are] a lot more photos of black members of the church in it. it’s just [happened in the] last couple of years, like the Conference issue. A number, about 20 pages, had black people in them. No, I don’t know if the Church magazines are trying to incorporate that in a show of that inclusiveness or what, but I just kinda noticed it. So, I will buy….

GT:        00:18:08             So you’ve noticed a change in church magazines where it was all white before and now there’s more color.

Steve:   00:18:13             Yes, there’s more diversity of minorities and things like that. And the same thing with the Church News and with this being the year of June 8th and things like that. So I’m just sending you a big packet one. Oh, I went up to Boise Mormon History Association, Matt was there. “Here you go Matt.” I had taped interviews off the radio. Again, I enjoyed doing this because I’m collecting it to help people who might be writing. Me, I have poor writing skills, so I’ll never write a book, but to share it with people. And I’ve done that with a number of other people who have presented too. My friend Craig Foster has written along with Newell Bringhurst, three[-volume] series of Persistence of Polygamy. Volume three has my photos in them of some of these communities.

GT:        00:19:00             Oh, yes. You’re a photographer.

Steve:   00:19:02             Yes.

GT:        00:19:02             Tell us about your photography.

Steve:   00:19:05             I grew up in a home where my dad was a camera salesman. [He] managed to camera store in San Francisco. I was lousy as a kid taking pictures. I had this little instamatic when I went on my mission. If I took more than one roll of pictures a year, I mean it was great. But I got here in Utah when I went to school and got myself a nice camera, the 35 millimeter. So, I started taking more. But 35 millimeter is expensive. A roll of film is 7-8 bucks just to get it developed. Well, they came up with a digital camera, thank goodness. Now one of my, which we haven’t gotten to yet, where I work now in law enforcement, was the Salt Lake City Police Department in the crime lab and that’s how I know George Throckmorton, but we’ll get into that. One of my things I do at crime scenes is photography, so that gets built right into it. And with digital you can take a thousand pictures and not waste a dime on anything. You just have to download it on a computer and you’re fine.

Steve:   00:20:05             Well, a number of years ago, maybe 15 plus years ago, I started taking pictures at the Sunstone Symposium and they appreciated that. So next thing you know, I’m now their official photographer. I go to the symposium and I just documented everything. I miss some of the sessions, but I just go around and taking pictures and they know it. I have fun with it because I catch people sometimes eating with their mouth open or sleeping or whatever. Then I got involved with doing it for the Mormon History Association, for the John Whitmer Historical Society, Utah State Historical Society when they have their conference, they have me come and do it. And they were very gracious about it because they’ll put my name up here, who does this because I’m willing to miss out some sessions or hearing the whole session, like taking photos of people who are speaking, what’s going on. And of course, you know why I go to things like Curt Bench’s book signing and take pictures and Curt is very good about it. Here’s a disk of my photos. Again, back in June we went up to Boise with a Mormon History Association. We had 1500 images I took.

GT:        00:21:13             Oh Wow.

Steve:   00:21:14             And I’ve got a back list of people, “Can lose sending me a disk? Can you send me a couple of my photos?”

GT:        00:21:19             I’ll say one of the first–I don’t remember. I think it was Mormon History Association. Usually I try to either sit in the front or the back, wherever the closest plug is because I was got to plug in my laptop. But I remember, they sent out a newsletter and I was in the picture. I was like, “Oh, nice.”

Steve:   00:21:36             And you got one of me too, a good one. But it’s fun too because everybody knows me after 20 years of doing this as “You’re the photographer.” I got to know Elder Jensen, the church historian and Elder Snow. They know I have a camera. I have people come up and say, “Where’s your camera?”

Steve:   00:21:53             “Well, here it is.”

Steve:   00:21:54             If I don’t have my camera with me, they say, “Well go get your camera. There’s something wrong. You have to have you camera.” But it’s fun and it’s enjoyable and I feel I’m involved in something. And again, it’s something that’s historical enough, but eventually these can go to BYU. And I get with digital where you don’t know how long the digital is gonna last. We’re finding out that negatives, if they’re not preserved, right, they start to fade. That’s why the fun part is going to BYU because the film negatives, they’re putting in a freezer basically and if you want to get it, you have to have a two-day notice because they have to bring it out, let it out.

GT:        00:22:31             Thaw it out.

Steve:   00:22:31             Thaw it out to use it. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the disk. Putting it on a computer saves them, but on the disk itself, we don’t know yet when they will disintegrate or not.

GT:        00:22:42             Put them on the Internet and they will last forever.

Steve:   00:22:46             Yeah, exactly. Like I said, it’s been one of the things. Besides some criminal historical events I’ve had pictures on. It’s the LDS stuff. I’m proud to say that in 2008, the Mormon History Association Conference in Sacramento, I was given a special award for my contributions to Mormon History because of what you’ve seen here, the collection, the photography and things like that, which I’m very humbled at because it was such a sweet thing to have happened. So, I got to stand up there and get my little certificate. So, it excites me when I go to these things because of this stuff, you know, and get away from what I do for a living.

GT:        00:23:30             Now you mentioned you were a crime scene photographer.

Steve:   00:23:34             Or a crime scene investigator. A crime lab tech. These are all titles I have.

GT:        00:23:39             So, especially here in Utah, can you talk about your participation in some of the more famous or infamous crimes?

Steve:   00:23:49             Not presently, as long as I’m employed. I will say in the 25 years I worked with Salt Lake Police Department, I’ve been involved in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. I did some photography and work on that; Lori Hacking murder; the little girl that was kidnapped and killed Destiny Norton. One of the things I’ve done for about 11 years was to document the activities of the protesters at General Conference.

GT:        00:24:16             Oh, Kate Kelly?

Steve:   00:24:18             Yep. Just the street. Preachers and things like that.

GT:        00:24:23             Oh, the street preachers.

Steve:   00:24:23             Because of the lawsuits that these folks have had against the city and the police department, it became necessary for us to document their activities to show that as a city, as a police department, we’re following federal guidelines of free speech and city ordinances. They were taking pictures of us and we would take pictures of them. And for 11 years I did it every Conference. So I don’t know what went on inside Conference Center, but I was out there with all the various groups and things. It was important enough that when they had the federal lawsuit here, my photos went to the federal court and they also went to the appeals court in Denver. They used my photos and defending the city.

GT:        00:24:57             Which federal lawsuit? I’m not familiar with that.

Steve:   00:24:59             The federal courts here in Salt Lake, on the lawsuit. The street preachers sued the city for violating their rights of free speech.

GT:        00:25:07             What year was this?

Steve:   00:25:07             Oh this was 10 years ago, something in the past. Because I started in ’95 and went to about 2006 or so. Then we stopped doing it because it became unnecessary, but they were saying that–see, we had free speech zones where these people could stand as long as they weren’t blocking people walking across the crosswalk or blocking entrances. Sometimes you might have a little–I call them push and shoves, you know. Somebody didn’t like what you’re doing and push and shoved. We had to control it.

GT:        00:25:39             Yes, some of those can be not very nice people.

Steve:   00:25:41             Yeah. Sometimes they get mentioned. There was some fun stuff other times because you’ve got the street preachers and anybody who had something. Sometimes they’d have protest marches, you know, it was almost like it was conference, and then there was a circus going on outside. Even Mormon people do their thing.

Steve:   00:25:59             There was one lady came from Idaho and she had a sign that said, “If you’re a Mormon, I’ll give you a hug.” And she was hugging everybody. It’s like, “Whoa!” So that was interesting seeing that and it usually had media coverage sometimes. “Well here they are out there protesting.” Again, Craig Foster and I, a couple of years ago at a FAIR conference did a presentation, at Mormon History and at a FAIR conference about the history of protest around Temple Square. And just some of the stuff, it’s just crazy. I mean when the day comes when there’s nobody out there, I’m going to worry because they’re going to be there. They always have. I saw that when I first attended a General Conference in April 1970 when I came back with my stake president and they were passing stuff out. What’s all this?

Steve:   00:26:41             And that’s how I came across Jerald and Sandra Tanner, because someone was passing out their newsletter, Utah Lighthouse Ministry, or Modern Microfilm Company at that time. So that’s why I found out about them and all these people pamphleteering out there. Now it’s even gotten bigger because they’ll have signs and whatever and you’ll have marches. I mean it’s part of the environment in Salt Lake and in other places because they’ll also do it at Temple Pageants, temple open houses.

GT:        00:27:11             Yeah, Manti, I’ve seen them there at Manti Pageant.

Steve:   00:27:12             Manti, up at Martin Harris [Pageant.] Every temple-opening they will be there. Again, in Denver, in the ’80s when we had Denver Temple opening, we had three weeks and they were out there and like I said, there was always somebody every night, for those three weeks lecturing about the church someplace in Denver. And they had the one Protestant church where they had their own little visitor’s center where you go to the temple, and then you go over there, and they can have their little thing too.

GT:        00:27:44             A protestant visitors’ center?

Steve:   00:27:47             It was a Lutheran church, but a number of Protestant churches, evangelical churches that kind of joined up together to present that stuff. The thing about history that church leaders say, there’s nothing new with this stuff. We’ve had it from day one. I jokingly say that the minute Joseph walked out of the grove, we’ve had it. We’ve had our critics both secular and religious and nothing’s new. It’s the same thing and like I said, the day comes when they don’t do it, I’m going to be worried. It’s just part of the environment and you go with it. I know one of the things I try to tell people down there, because people would come and say, “Well, can we stop them doing it?”

Steve:   00:28:23             “No. They have a right to be out here on the sidewalk and do it. Just ignore them. Don’t get involved with them. We don’t get into fight. Just ignore them.” Sometimes they will go way overboard what their insults. They used to stand out before they were removed from the Main Street Plaza and stand up there near the gate of the east side of the temple and yell and call the brides sluts, whores, and prostitutes.

Steve:   00:28:45             The most important day of your life, and your family filming and taking pictures and these guys are yelling this stuff. And they would taunt. Sometimes they would wear temple outfits. That’s another thing. They were wearing temple outfit outside, wave the apron at people, wave the garments at them. They had one case way back in ’94 before I started doing it where this gentleman, member of the church from Provo area came up got in the way and grabbed the garment out of the guys hands. The Guy said, “Well, he assaulted me. He touched me.”

Steve:   00:29:22             You know, this poor guy had to go to court. And they basically said, well, “you really didn’t attack him,” but he did. So he was given a year’s probation and they said, “if you keep your nose clean, we will wipe it off with books.” But it’s this taunting that you see sometimes. And sometimes the best thing is just ignore it.

GT:        00:29:38             Which is very hard to do sometimes.

Steve:   00:29:40             Sometimes.

GT:        00:29:41             They can be very offensive. I’ve heard some.

Steve:   00:29:43             And of course like I say, you’ve got to be careful because they’re filming. I’ve seen on some Facebook pages my picture shows up and “Oh, there’s the guy taking our picture of me taking a picture of them taking a picture of me.”

GT:        00:29:59             So let me back up. There’s nothing, you can’t really talk too much about the Elizabeth Smart case or Mark Hacking?

Steve:   00:30:06             You know, just I was involved. I’ve been in the Smart house on a couple occasions, well in fact a number of places. My job was just take pictures or process for fingerprints and things like that. That was a part of what I would do. The same thing with the other cases. I was just involved with them to some degree with what I do, photography or collecting evidence or so forth. Like I said, I missed out on Trolley Square.

GT:        00:30:38             That was horrible.

Steve:   00:30:39             But I did do all those things.

GT:        00:30:42             Some people might not know what you were referring to with Trolley Square. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Steve:   00:30:47             Yeah. It was 2007. A gentleman walked in to Trolley Square in Salt Lake.

GT:        00:30:53             Which is a mall.

Steve:   00:30:53             Yes, on the east side there and opened fire and killed five or six people before he was killed by an off-duty police officer on scene. It was one of those just random mass shooting type of things. And that comes right after Elizabeth Smart, so it got a lot of national publicity.

GT:        00:31:17             It was Valentine’s Day, or the day before I think it was.

Steve:   00:31:17             Yes, something like that because I remember I was on the phone talking long distance to a girlfriend and I’m watching TV and all of a sudden I was like, “Oh my God.” Because they’re right there live. And I said “That’s Trolley Square, what’s going on? But, I never got involved with that one.

GT:        00:31:35             I was actually in graduate school at the time and I remember somebody said, “Don’t go down by Trolley Square. There’s cops everywhere.” And so, I remember I did kind of drive by and I had no idea what was going on at the time and I found out later. It was terrible.

Steve:   00:31:49             It takes a lot of work because of the scene itself, and diagramming, and pictures, and collecting. It’s just one of those tragic things in our time. We have too many.

GT:        00:32:01             It was so senseless. It just made no sense at all.

Steve:   00:32:03             It’s one of the sad things of my business. I kind of joke, sadly joking, but I’ve always got job security.

GT:        00:32:16             Unfortunately.

Steve:   00:32:16             Unfortunately. But I’m looking forward here in the next year to retire maybe. So, I go back to doing the fun stuff. Like I said, what I do with this stuff I enjoy. I have such a high, going to these conferences and dealing with all this stuff that just takes my mind off the bad stuff. But yet at the same time, my interest in history, I’m involved in some historical things.

 

Mormons & the FBI

Introduction

I’ve often heard that the FBI likes to hire Mormons.  Is that true?  We will discuss that with Steve Mayfield, and discuss Mormons killed in the line of duty at the FBI.  We will also talk about the only Mormon FBI agent to be caught spying for the Russians and talk about a religious discrimination case where Mormonism was a central issue.  Check out our conversation….

GT:        00:32:39             Well, let’s talk. I know earlier we were talking a little bit about Mormons and the FBI and so that is something you can give us some more details.

Steve:   00:32:48             Yes.  Again, working with the FBI for four years, there was a very noticeable thing about the Mormons. There’s been an underlying fable about Mormons and the FBI, some good, some bad. When I started working in San Francisco, they had what they call the 10-day interview where you were interviewed by one of the big bosses. This gentleman was not LDS, but he was an assistant special agent in charge, which means he’s one of the big bosses. It was interesting because he is one of the agents who worked on the Mississippi murders back in the early ’60s of the three civil rights workers.

GT:        00:33:28             Emmett Till?

Steve:   00:33:29             Not Emmett Till. It was these three college students who came down and were killed and buried out in the field. Mississippi Burning movie is kind of about that. But he was involved. Because on his wall was a picture of him overlooking these bodies as they’re pulling him out of the ground, kind of gross.

Steve:   00:33:44             But he asked me, he says, “Why I see you served a Mormon mission.” And he talked about Mormon agents he knew. My interview was 20 minutes. Five minutes was about my work and what I thought of the FBI. The other 15 was about Mormonism, my mission, and things like that. So that started up. Well, I got to know a lot of the Mormon agents there. In fact, two of the agents were in my LDS ward in Walnut Creek, California. But, I was told when they identify, “He’s a member of the tribe.”

Steve:   00:34:15             “What do you mean a member of the tribe?”

Steve:   00:34:16             “He’s LDS.” That’s how we would identify ourselves. “He’s a member of the tribe.” In L.A. they were called the LDS Mafia in the L.A. office, and we’ll get into that story, but that’s how we knew it. Well, one thing I noticed, I just come up my mission, so antagonism, we saw it.

Steve:   00:34:33             Where the agents sat, they called the bullpen and they hit a little storage room where they put their files and things. They had a bulletin board. Every once in a while there’d be an article about the LDS Church pinned up to the board, underlined and marked and everything. It would come down and go back up, come down. There would be snide comments about Mormons, as you go around not realizing I’m LDS. I’d hear these things. But it was kind of “Be forewarned. There’s some antagonism.”

Steve:   00:34:59             We had a couple of agents in San Francisco. They were evangelical Christians. They had this one run around with this one guy. He kept trying to give me stuff and “I’ve already got that pamphlet. I don’t need to see another one.” But then of course we had the Patty Hearst case. The special agent in charge of the squad that handled bank robberies and kidnappings was LDS. His name was Brian Wheeler. Did I already say this?

GT:        00:35:26             No, go ahead.

Steve:   00:35:26             His name was Brian Wheeler. At the time of the kidnapping. He was a counselor in the bishopric of the San Francisco.

GT:        00:35:32             What was the time of the Patty Hearst kidnapping.

Steve:   00:35:33             It was 1974. A number of the Mormon agents were involved in investigation, various aspects. But the big one was one of the agents that was credited with the arrest of Patty Hearst. It was an agent named Jason Moulton, a Utah native. He came from Heber Valley, went to BYU. [He was] LDS. And in fact, in the CNN documentary back in February, he was the agent they interviewed, so he [was] an expert on the thing I would think. He retired about 15 years ago as the assistant special agent in charge of the Seattle office. And he and his wife served a mission in Kentucky about five years ago. And I’ve had some minor contacts with him since then. But one of the things that happened during the Hearst case when I was assigned to the Berkeley Resident Agency, they brought a number of agents in from other agencies for extra manpower. [They] came in from Sacramento, San Diego and L.A. One of the agents they brought up from L.A. was a guy named Richard W. Miller. [He was a] very interesting character because 10 years later he was first FBI agent arrested for espionage as a Mormon—as a Russian spy.

GT:        00:36:45             As a Mormon, Russian spy.

Steve:   00:36:47             Ex-Mormon because he’d been excommunicated prior to this for extra marital affair. But that didn’t stop people from going after him. Well, I found out very quickly he was LDS because we would ask them, “We have an agent in the Eureka office. He is part of the San Francisco Division who LDS who was the stake president at the same time up there in Eureka. Are you related to him?”

Steve:   00:37:07             He said, “No, I know who he is. This is first Richard Miller.”

GT:        00:37:11             There is two Richard Millers.

Steve:   00:37:12             Yeah. We got Richard W, which is agent I’m talking about.

GT:        00:37:16             The spy.

Steve:   00:37:16             and Richard G. Miller…

GT:        00:37:18             Was the stake president. He was the good guy.

Steve:   00:37:22             Interesting connection. Again, another connection. He says, “I know who he is. He’s Mormon. I’m a Mormon too, but I’m not related to him.”

Steve:   00:37:30             Well, some of the backbiting and backtalking about him was that they would describe this Richard W. Miller, the future spy as that fat, dumb, lazy, stupid Mormon agent, not realizing, “Hey, I’m LDS too here.” you just kind of ignore it. Well, after about three or four weeks, they all went back to L.A. and I’m sitting at my desk next to the office of the senior resident agent, the boss of the Berkeley Office named Don Jones. He was not LDS. He was a Presbyterian elder and he knew I was LDS, but I’m sitting there listening. He’s talking to this other agent about how unprofessional these agents were about this other agent badmouthing him and attacking his religion. He says, “I’m going to write a letter to the SAC down in L.A., the boss down there and say how bad this was. And then he kind of saw me, kind of eavesdropping, turned to me and said, “So does that meet with your approval?”

Steve:   00:38:23             “Oh yeah, sure.” So, there’s always an underlying Mormon thing there. And again, like I said, it wasn’t like every day. And you got along fine, but it was just once in a while you can get these snide comments. I had one agent who I got along with fine until he found out it was Mormon. After that he gave me the cold shoulder. So anyway, Richard Miller 10 years later and so being busted. He lasted almost 20 years in the bureau, but he was just sloppy. Some people would say, “he should never have been hired.” He went to BYU, served a mission, could speak Spanish, but he was overweight all the time. He lost car keys. He was trying to sell things like Amway out of his car. He was just always in trouble.

GT:        00:39:07             Oh really?

Steve:   00:39:08             So I guess he was trying to resurrect his career his best. So, he got started communicating unofficially with this female Russian spy. He had an affair with her. They arrested him, went through three trials. But what added onto that problem is that the special agent in charge of the FBI office in L.A. at that time was a guy named Richard Bretzing, LDS. He’d been a bishop, was in a stake presidency and he had butted heads. After he came in there, one of the assistant special agent in charge in L.A. was a guy named Bernardo Matt Perez. Matt Perez had been special agent in charge of the San Juan office, but got busted back, and sent to L.A. So, he got demoted and went there. Well, Richard Bretzing butted heads all the time. Well Matt Perez felt we should fire Richard Miller. He is incompetent. Bretzing said, “We’re not going to do that. I’m trying to help him.” And then come the spy thing, which kind of turned to black eye.

GT:        00:40:11             So let me make sure. Bretzing was LDS?

Steve:   00:40:14             Yes he is LDS.

GT:        00:40:19             So Matt Perez, he was not LDS.

Steve:   00:40:20             No.

GT:        00:40:20             So Matt said, “You need to fire this Mormon agent that everybody viewed as incompetent.”

Steve:   00:40:24             Yeah. And Richard Bretzing, I don’t think he can. He can make recommendations. I think the final decision comes out of Washington DC, whether they do it. I sense a lot of agents were not up to par, but the bureau was very reluctant I think to fire people because you spend all that money and time recruiting them and training them and you kind of hope that they will quit on their own. I saw that. I saw them do that with not only agents, but with clerks because I was supervised by some clerks and she of course wanted to get rid of people but let’s just give him a stupid job and maybe they will quit, which would happen. I’m sitting in this corner and I’m just going to leave because I’m not doing anything. But again, that’s just my perspective of how they would do things.

Steve:   00:41:05             Well, later on they had three trials on Richard Miller. He eventually went to prison. Richard Bretzing retired, moved to Utah, became head of the LDS Church security for number of years. He was a mission president in Washington, DC and now he’s just enjoying his retirement. Matt Perez was part of lead plaintiff in a lawsuit by Latino FBI agents against the FBI for discrimination. They had two groups: racial discrimination and religious discrimination. And also, he kept bringing up the Mormon issue all the time and when it finally was settled in federal court in El Paso, Judge Button, I believe that was his name, ruled that yes, there was racial discrimination against these agents for promotions and whatever. But the religious aspect, I think there’s points there, but he kind of backed off. He didn’t rule on that issue. This is big-time.

GT:        00:42:01             Let me make sure I’m understanding that. So, Matt Perez was complaining about religious discrimination, that the Mormons were protecting Mormons. Is that what you are saying?

Steve:   00:42:09             Among many things. Mormons are getting promoted over Latinos.

GT:        00:42:12             Wow. So, Mormons are being favored in this case.

Steve:   00:42:15             Yes, favored. And because of Bretzing being kind to Richard Miller by not firing him, or things like that. And of course, we bring in all these other agents from other offices who are Latino. The religious issue came up. In fact, one of the co-plaintiffs in this case was also a Latino agent and was also LDS. So, we did have that, but I have a book that he wrote or somebody wrote for him with his name on it where he talks about this all time. Not only was there discrimination on the race issue, but Mormon stuff comes up all the time. So there was apparently some major concern there. And this comes right after Black agents had sued the bureau.

GT:        00:42:56             Over racial discrimination?

Steve:   00:42:57             Yes. So, Hoover’s FBI was very white, you know, and it took a long time before–it wasn’t until the early ’70s they hired a female agent. And same thing with this. Well, things have really changed since then. But in the ’80s they had to go through these lawsuits to change things. Matt Perez later was promoted to assistant, or the special agent in charge of Albuquerque. He went back and was the supervisor back in DC at the FBI office back there. So, I guess he got what he got. But just the fact that there was this Mormon connection involved in this.

GT:        00:43:32             Now is it true that the FBI likes to recruit Mormons?

Steve:   00:43:36             I think that’s more myths and truth. It stands out because hopefully a young man or young woman who goes to work for the FBI has the background. Well technically, you know, we’re supposed to have these morals and characteristics. We don’t party, we don’t smoke, we don’t drink. A lot of them served missions, so they had language skills and so that was attractive. Now some of this may go back to a Mormon FBI agent was killed in the line of duty back in 1930. We had the gangsters, you know, Don Dillenger.

GT:        00:44:10             Before we do that. I just want to finish up with one more thing. We’re back to Richard Miller. So, what was he convicted of?

Steve:   00:44:17             A spy. He was passing on information.

GT:        00:44:19             What was the information what he passed on?

Steve:   00:44:21             Just internal material on what the Russian spies are doing and passing on information that he acquired as an agent and passing onto this female.

GT:        00:44:33             So passing information about Russian agents in the US.

Steve:   00:44:37             And other stuff that she could use to pass onto her superiors.

GT:        00:44:42             Okay. So, did he get any agents killed or anything like that?

Steve:   00:44:45             No.

GT:        00:44:46             He wasn’t passing on FBI information.

Steve:   00:44:48             It may have been FBI information that he had as an agent. He was passing on, trying to get stuff from her. So, he had to kind of tempt her with stuff too.

GT:        00:44:59             Was this financial? Was he getting paid?

Steve:   00:45:02             I can’t remember whether it was financial or not. It was unauthorized and that’s where he got in trouble. But he was trying to save his career because they had pictures of him meeting with this girl under surveillance. He was put under surveillance by the FBI so they have pictures of him and he was doing it unauthorized and that’s what probably got him convicted. So, after he served his time, he moved here to Utah and I heard a rumor a couple of years ago that he’d passed away, but I haven’t been able to verify that.

GT:        00:45:33             Okay, so he could still be in jail right now?

Steve:   00:45:35             No, no, he’s out. He’s out of prison. Whether he’s still alive or not, I don’t know.

GT:        00:45:40             Okay. So, go back to you. So, you were saying something.

Steve:   00:45:46             During the time of the John Dillinger and the Baby Face Nelson and all these criminals, a number of agents were brought in to do special things. Of course, the most famous was Melvin Purvis. He was the lead guy out of Chicago checking with people. We had a team of other agents, inspectors with him, including one name Samuel P. Cowley. The name sounds familiar. That’s because he was a son of Apostle Matthias Cowley and half-brother to Matthew Cowley. Samuel Cowley served a mission in Hawaii for four years and got a law degree and he became an agent. He was only going to be there a short time. He wanted to be a lawyer, but he got involved. He was one of the members of this team. Well, he was involved in the Dillenger case and the Barker family thing. But he was killed in the line of duty by Baby Face Nelson. Baby Face Nelson has three notches in his belt for three agents that he killed during the time before he was killed. Samuel Cowley is buried here in Salt Lake area. And so, he was the first.

Steve:   00:46:50             Hoover took a liking to him because he was a hard worker. He just came and did his job and Hoover did not like Milton Purvis because Purvis got a lot of publicity that Hoover didn’t get. And eventually Purvis left in I think 1960, the same gun he used to kill a Baby Face Nelson or another gun he used to kill John Dillinger. He has done himself. He committed suicide, one of the sad things. Well, we’ve had three Mormon agents, FBI agents killed in the line of duty. Sam Cowley was the first and there was another agent.

GT:        00:47:21             He was killed. So, Samuel Cowley was killed by Baby Face Nelson.

Steve:   00:47:24             Right.

GT:        00:47:24             Okay.

Steve:   00:47:25             Another agent on this team of agents was a guy named Jay Newman, who was also LDS. Jay Newman served as special agent in charge of another office when he was in San Francisco in the ’30s or ’40s. He was a bishop in the San Francisco area. When he retired, he became the first director of public safety for the State of Utah and he’s been dead now for 20 years now, but he was part of this team. In fact, he was shot. The bullet went through his hat, bounced off his head, so he had a scar up there and he has a picture of his hat with a hole in it, but he’s great. He was a great diarist though. You go on the Internet, look on under Jay Newman, FBI, [you will find] pages and pages. This guy wrote big [stuff] talking about his career and everything. And it’s classic historically that you have somebody writing all this stuff about it.

Steve:   00:48:14             So there was another Mormon agent involved with these teams of agents. The second Mormon agent killed in line of duty, it was 1968 in San Antonio. [It was] a young man from Paris, Idaho named Douglas Price. He went to Utah State, served a mission, got in with the FBI and this is the first field office. They were down searching for a wanted fugitive. He was sent back to a car to pick up more ammunition and weapons. Boy, he got confronted by the guy they were looking for. He shot and killed him. And this wanted fugitive then turned the gun on himself. Douglas Price was buried up in Paris, Idaho, the Mormon community up there. What is interesting, is that his body was escorted back to Paris from San Antonio by another Mormon agent named Bob Porter, Robert Porter. What is significant about that is I knew Bob Porter in the San Francisco office. He had been a bishop down in San Ramon. And after I left he was transferred down to the San Diego Office and in 1979, was in the and the resident agency of El Central, which is east of San Diego where he and the other agent, that was in the office were to meet with a gentleman who had some complaints about the bureau. And this guy walked in and opened fire on these two agents and he killed them, but they also killed him. Rob Porter was one of those agents killed there in El Central. And it’s so interesting that he was one involved taking Price’s body back. [He was] a great man. I really appreciated him. He was a hard worker. I got to know his son, a guy named Ken Porter. Ken followed in his father’s footsteps and became an FBI agent, served 30 years, retired about five years ago. He was assistant special agent in charge here in the Salt Lake Office. He and I did a session at Sunstone in 2011, on Mormons in the FBI. That’s where all this idea came from. He is now a director of church security for North America.

GT:        00:50:21             Oh Wow.

Steve:   00:50:22             So they moved them up. Four other Mormon agents have died while on duty, but due to accidents. We got an agent Hart in 1960 died in an auto accident in Idaho. We had Mark Kirkland in an airplane crash and Hereford in another airplane crash. Then a Gregory Knapp was the last one about five or six years ago. It was in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He’d been on the beach and saved somebody from drowning but drowned himself. So, there are Mormon agents. And we’ve had a number of agents over the years. Once in while you read in the Church News about somebody in a stake presidency, FBI agent. There has been one Mormon, I forgot his name. I think Christiansen was an assistant director of one of the divisions for a while. So anyway, it’s there.

Steve:   00:51:14             Again, going back to your question is there favoritism? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Some people there, there’s a large percentage of Mormons in the FBI than any other religion or something like that. Or there’s a higher percentage compared to the population. I don’t know. No one’s ever done a study, so I think it’s more myth or people just supposing than it really is. It attracts people. Again, depending on whether you like or hate the FBI, you may make a thing about it.

 

John D. Lee’s Role in Mountain Meadows Massacre

 

Introduction

September 11, 1857 was the largest mass-murder in American history.  Over 100 immigrants from Arkansas were killed in southern Utah.  John D. Lee was the only person executed for this atrocity.  In our conversation with Steve Mayfield, we’ll talk more about Lee’s involvement in the massacre.  Check out our conversation….

GT:        00:51:44             Well, I see you’ve got a another, in fact I think you said this was an old newspaper article.

Steve:   00:51:53             It’s Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. I have to say that, I have a friend down in Rocky Ridge which is down near Nephi. Malcolm Vickery is his name. He’s a member of the AUB Church, which is a polygamous church. They are the ones at the Point of the Mountain[2] is where their headquarters is. But he is down in Rocky Ridge.

GT:        00:52:21             AUB, that’s Kody Brown’s group, of Sister Wives.

Steve:   00:52:24             Yes, Kody Brown’s group. We’ve gone down. [He is] a very nice guy, very friendly guy, but open, you know. Like I said, and Craig Foster introduced me to them because Craig’s done a lot of work with them. But you go into their home. He’s only got two wives.

GT:        00:52:42             Only. {chuckles}

Steve:   00:52:42             But very warm, very welcoming. Well he collects books and things, so one day we’re down there having dinner one Sunday and he just says, “I got something for you.” He goes into and pulls this out and he’s [said], “These are photocopies, these are actual newspapers from 1877.”

GT:        00:52:57             Wow.

Steve:   00:52:58             And it’s about John D. Lee and Mountain Meadows [Massacre.]

GT:        00:53:00             That’s John D. Lee in the coffin.

Steve:   00:53:03             Yes, that’s him in the coffin and there’s a picture of him here, a drawing. And it was like, he just gives me these. [I said], “What do I owe you for them?”

Steve:   00:53:10             “Nothing.”

Steve:   00:53:11             I said, “Well, who do you want me to hurt? You know, who do you want me to beat up?”

Steve:   00:53:14             He said, “No.”

Steve:   00:53:14             He was just very gracious because that is his business. One of the things, he does to make some money is selling these things, like many of our friends who are book dealers. And so it’s like, Wow! that is just a generosity that you can just overlook.

GT:        00:53:30             It was an actual newspaper. So, tell us who John D. Lee was.

Steve:   00:53:32             John D. Lee was the young man from back east. I think he joined the church when he was a young man. He was an adopted son of Brigham Young.

GT:        00:53:44             Now the interesting thing about that is he was actually older than Brigham Young. Did you know that?

Steve:   00:53:51             I think you’re right. Yes. But, he had that tight connection with Brigham Young. Well, he goes down to southern Utah, northern Arizona and settles down there. There was a place, not far from Page, Arizona on the Utah side called Lee’s Ferry. He only lived there a couple of years, but it was where they could go across the Colorado River.

GT:        00:54:11             So let’s jump a little bit back in time, because as I recall, John D. Lee lived in Nauvoo, was there when the prophet was killed. He was sealed to Brigham back when they had what they called the Law of Adoption. I know my namesake, Dr. Richard Bennett, no relation, (kind of like the Millers there, no relation there,) but he talked a little bit about the Law of Adoption. So, at any rate, John D. Lee was sealed to Brigham as a son. Everybody came west, Brigham became governor.

GT:        00:54:54             And so what was it? It was 1857, I believe it was the Mountain Meadows Massacre. So, what was John D. Lee’s role in the massacre?

Steve:   00:55:03             He was one of the subordinates to it because he had other church leaders, Higbee. I’ve forgotten the names, but there were a number of others, Dame, William Dame, Higbee.

GT:        00:55:14             There’s a Klingensmith I know.

Steve:   00:55:16             Yes, Klingensmith, who were really in charge. He was just one of the military leaders.

GT:        00:55:20             In the Nauvoo Legion.

Steve:   00:55:22             Yes.

GT:        00:55:23             So Nauvoo Legion here in Utah.

Steve:   00:55:25             Yes, and they were the ones who committed the atrocity of killing these people from Arkansas.

GT:        00:55:30             Now what were the Mormons upset [about]? Because the Fancher Party, as I understand, they came down through northern Utah and then were going through southern Utah, on their away to California. What precipitated that?

Steve:   00:55:44             A lot of rumor. Again, you’re talking about a topic we could talk for the next 20 years about.

GT:        00:55:50             Oh, I know we could. Just give me a thumbnail sketch.

Steve:   00:55:50             [There was] something about this group. Now, according to the Mormons, and they are the ones that survived, these people were making threats at them, poisoning the water, poisoning the animals, saying they were going to join the army and come back. Because there was the army coming out to Utah.

GT:        00:56:06             Yeah. So, there were rumblings because there was supposedly a Mormon rebellion.

Steve:   00:56:11             Yes.

GT:        00:56:12             And so, was it Buchanan that was president?

Steve:   00:56:13             Buchanan sent the army, Johnston’s army.

GT:        00:56:15             But he hadn’t sent it yet.

Steve:   00:56:17             Yes, but there were rumors.

GT:        00:56:18             There were rumors that they were coming out.

Steve:   00:56:19             But they also had a Parley Pratt being murdered. So, you have this stuff. For some reason the Mormons got it. Robert Briggs, a lawyer in southern California, called it the fog of war. That was something Robert McNamara talked about the Vietnam War, why the atrocities happened. The fog of war blinded people.

Steve:   00:56:40             For whatever reason, they went after these folks for a three-day siege down there in the Mountain Meadows, killed all the adults except for some children they saved. Then they kind of hid the story about it.

GT:        00:56:53             Because as I recall, let’s talk a little bit more about the massacre, and especially Lee’s involvement. So basically, what happened as I understand it, I’m still trying to get Rick Turley to get on here and we’re having a little trouble there. But at any rate, so the Fancher Party is coming down. They’re kind of like these street preachers that are just being really taunting, according to the Mormons.

Steve:   00:57:18             Yeah. Plus, the fact with the onset of the army, they weren’t getting supplies from the Mormons who are not going to help you because we’ve got to support ourselves.

GT:        00:57:25             Because Brigham had said, “We need all the supplies. We’re not going to sell any to immigrants.”

Steve:   00:57:30             So right off the bat. Again, there’s a butting of the heads.

GT:        00:57:32             And the immigrants needed it, in order to get to California.

Steve:   00:57:34             Yeah.

GT:        00:57:35             And so yeah. So, there was some issues that are going on and as I recall, Brigham had told everybody, “Don’t sell to any emigrants, period.” And so, the Fancher Party, in the worst timing possible, comes during this very tense time, [and] tries to buy some supplies. The Mormons won’t sell supplies. And so, they were pretty ticked off about that.

Steve:   00:58:01             And for whatever reason, they got their at Mountain Meadows. They were surrounded.

GT:        00:58:05             And Lee was an Indian agent, right? Wasn’t he the Indian agent?

Steve:   00:58:07             Yes.

GT:        00:58:07             So he was kind of in charge of talking to the Indians. Like that was actually a government position. Is that right?

Steve:   00:58:15             Yes.

GT:        00:58:16             So I guess this is where it gets really confusing because, you know, it’s kind of a “he said, he said” sort of a thing where, you’ve got–the Fanchers aren’t here to speak for themselves.

Steve:   00:58:32             Right.

GT:        00:58:32             But at any rate, so it seems like Lee had talked to the Indians and said, “Hey, if you want to attack this Fancher Party, you’re welcome to it. Take all their stuff.” Because we were ticked off about them. So, the Indians, as I understand it, tried to attack the Fancher Party. The Fancher party circled their wagons, and basically fought off the attack. And so, what happened next?

Steve:   00:59:03             Well again, I can talk for years on it and I see this bookcase here is all Mountain Meadows. They went there with the idea we’re going to help these people but turned on them. Again, what was going through their minds? I don’t know why they would do that.

Steve:   00:59:22             The whole argument that seems to be, how much were the church leaders in Salt Lake involved with ordering this? Was this a thing that these saints in that area did on their own? We know that after they had these people surrounded, a rider was sent to Salt Lake: “Brigham what she would we do?”

Steve:   00:59:42             He sends Haslam back and says “Leave them alone.” By that time, it was all done.

GT:        00:59:46             Yeah. Because there was no telegraph back in the day. In fact, the telegraph–Brigham Young put in the telegraph so they wouldn’t have these communication problems. But yeah, so a rider goes from basically was it Cedar City or St. George?

Steve:   01:00:00             Cedar City.

GT:        01:00:00             And he goes to ask Brigham what to do. He comes back, and the settlers are already dead.

Steve:   01:00:07             Yeah.

GT:        01:00:07             So as I understand it from what I understand what the Mountain Meadows Massacre, there’s a lot of tensions going on. John D. Lee kind of spurs the Indians to attack, says it’s going to be an easy target, but it’s not an easy target. And so, they surround themselves. So, John D. Lee and William Dame and Klingensmith and Higbee, they’re kind of the leaders of this whole thing. So, they come out and they say, “Well, if you’ll turn over your weapons we will save you from the Indians.”

Steve:   01:00:39             Yeah.

GT:        01:00:40             So as I understand it, every Mormon man had a gun. [Each Mormon] was walking each man from the Fancher Party out. And then the women and children were kind of in the back and somebody gave a signal. Was it Lee that gave the signal?

Steve:   01:01:01             I can’t remember.

GT:        01:01:02             There was something to the effect of “Do your duty,” and then every Mormon man turned to the Fancher [Party] and shot and killed him. And then they left the women and children to be attacked by the Indians.

Steve:   01:01:12             Yeah. Again, you’ve got so many different stories and the fact is I think they realized, whoops. Because when they reported back to Brigham in Salt Lake, what happened is not what they actually did. You know, they, they kind of lied to Brigham.

GT:        01:01:27             Because Lee was one of the people that went to Brigham and told him what happened. But he lied about it.

Steve:   01:01:36             Yeah. One of the interesting things is that supposedly the church or the church leaders trying to hide this. But I saw an article in New York Times two months later, before the end of the year, were talking about this massacre of white people done in southern Utah. I mean, it’s not like we have instant news today. But it was very quick when this started going around and when the government comes and then they to look into it. And again, the Johnston’s army there and all the government investigation. Here comes Mountain Meadows in the middle of it. Now of course, you know Brigham kind of telling John D. Lee to take off and hide because they were trying to find him. And of course, it was 20 years later when they [try him.]

GT:        01:02:20             Ok, let’s make sure we’ve got those details there. So, Lee participates in the massacre. Of course, he wasn’t the only person that was in the massacre.

Steve:   01:02:27             He was a major player, but he was not the lead in this whole [fiasco.]

GT:        01:02:31             He was not the lead. I guess there’s a dispute as to whether he was the one that issued the order, “Do your duty,” as the order [to kill] supposedly, or not. So, there’s, a lot of dispute as to who actually said that, and you know, a lot of controversy.

Steve:   01:02:48             Like I said, we could spend the next 20 years about it. Like I said, and we have various parties because the whole issue really is not that there was an atrocity, but what does Salt Lake know about it?

GT:        01:02:58             Right.

Steve:   01:02:58             Did they order it?

GT:        01:02:59             And that’s the new book coming out with Richard Turley and Barbara Jones-Brown.

Steve:   01:03:04             Of course, we have our friend Will Bagley, who is promoting one view of it, who will go to his grave promoting that idea. Others how do you protect? And the fact is that there were so many things. My old professor at Weber State, Gene Sessions says, well, the church leaders didn’t order it, but they did a good job trying to cover it up when they found out what was going on.

Steve:   01:03:25             Plus the fact that you’ve got the army coming down and then I go back to what Rick said, the fog of war. When you have all this stuff going on, you don’t know what’s going on. When you see what happens with Johnston’s Army, they [the Saints] were ready to burn down Salt Lake and head to the mountains and, we did it before. We will move again, and that’s when they {U.S. Army} went down to Camp Floyd and settled outside of Salt Lake so they wouldn’t have those problems. There was a very high war-fighting attitude going on, or fear there. And right in the middle of it, here you have Mountain Meadows, which does not go over well with Mormons out there, just killing people left and right. And we had other instances of individuals being killed: the Gunnison thing to all the parishes. All this stuff is that there’s this western activity going on of killing people.

GT:        01:04:15             [There] was a lot of vigilante justice out here.

Steve:   01:04:19             Oh yeah. And so again, that’s not my expertise other than the one document.

GT:        01:04:25             Ok, let’s just tell this for a second and then we’ll get to that where your expertise is. But okay. So, at any rate, as the story goes, at least as I understand it, Lee, after the massacre goes up to Brigham Young, lied about it, lies about the whole thing, blames it all on the Indians. He says we had nothing to do with it.

Steve:   01:04:46             And in his diary, he says, because people were saying in the newspapers from back east that Brigham Young knew. He said, “Brigham knew nothing about it until I told him.” That’s in his diaries, you know.

GT:        01:04:57             Oh really?

Steve:   01:04:58             “So he didn’t know anything until I told him.”

GT:        01:05:00             Okay. So, he was sent up to tell, “Hey, all these people died, but we had nothing to do with it.”

Steve:   01:05:05             The Indians, yes.

GT:        01:05:06             It was all the Indians. He blamed the Indians for the whole thing.

Steve:   01:05:08             Yeah.

GT:        01:05:10             So at any rate, Brigham, at least as we understand it, the best we can. Now Will Bagley disagrees. He thinks Brigham was in on the whole thing. But, so he lies about it. And so, Brigham is a little bit worried and tries to protect John D. Lee and sends him to Arizona. I think you were talking about Lee’s Ferry, right? To kind of hide him basically.

Steve:   01:05:40             Yeah.

GT:        01:05:41             So can you talk a little bit about Lee’s Ferry then?

Steve:   01:05:43             Okay, well, Lee’s Ferry a little outpost near the Colorado River. It takes a couple miles drive in off the major highway. It’s an old rock fort. Lee was only there a couple of years. North of that is a little farming area called Lonely Dell, which is a very nice little thing. But Lee wasn’t there that long, but it got his name because this was where they would come across the river, the Colorado River because it winds down through that section of the state. But he wasn’t there that long. Again, it was just one of the many places. He lived up in Parowan. I think John D. Lee is buried in Parowan[3] and so he would kind of go out until it finally got to a point where somebody had to be tried and he became the one. Not that he was innocent, but because the others kind of got off on it and he was the one that was found guilty.

GT:        01:06:39             When was the trial? Do you know?

Steve:   01:06:41             Oh, 1875 or ’76.

GT:        01:06:44             So the massacre occurred in 1857.

Steve:   01:06:47             Twenty years later.

GT:        01:06:48             It’s about 20 years later that the trial actually happens.

Steve:   01:06:51             They had one [trial where] he was acquitted. Then they did another one where he was found guilty.

GT:        01:06:54             Yeah. So, from what I understand, because I’ve got some of those [books.] If you want to pull out those Mountain Meadows Massacre books. Believe it or not, I’ve actually read those. Well go ahead and show those to the camera. This is the Collected Legal Papers. And so that’s volume one. And then we’ve got volume two, which is the Trial and Aftermath. So, these are raw documents. Now I know, because I went to the book signing. In fact, I think I saw you at that one. And [the authors are] Richard Turley, Janiece Johnson and LuJean Carruth. LuJean is fantastic because she transcribed a lot of these court records. I know one of the things that Richard Turley said was everybody thinks they know about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but nobody had ever actually transcribed the record. One of the things that he was finding was you needed to get original source documents and a lot of these were in shorthand as so LuJean is the one who put those together. I actually talked to LuJean and I asked her if she would be interviewed and she said no because she said she was almost getting post-traumatic stress disorder because the trial notes were so graphic, and this was such a horrible atrocity. She just didn’t feel comfortable talking about that, but it really was a tremendous tragedy. But Richard and Janiece I know were just saying before we can really tell the story, we have to have original source documents. So that’s what those two volumes are. So, they’re original. There’s no narrative in them. And so, I’ve read through them, but I’m waiting for the next book.

Steve:   01:08:46             Yes, the one that has been taking all of these years.

GT:        01:08:47             And so, do you have his other book, Richard’s other book?

Steve:   01:08:51             Oh yeah. Massacre at Mountain Meadows. This is the first one.

GT:        01:08:56             So that ends basically at the massacre. And that’s a fantastic book too. Let’s see Ron Walker, …

Steve:   01:09:05             Glen Leonard, and Richard Turley [are the authors.]

GT:        01:09:07             Yeah. So, they put that one together and so they basically stopped at the massacre. And so, the next book is supposed to be about the cover-up. And how much did Brigham know, and when did you know it?

Steve:   01:09:19             And again, it’s one of those things. I have a list of the 10 biggest controversies in Mormon history. First one is of course polygamy, as does everybody else. As you go down the list, Mountain Meadows is one of the controversies. Because even after 150-some-odd years, it is still a major topic. People always bring it up. Mark Hofmann’s on the top 10 list.

GT:        01:09:43             Well, and Hofmann has some stuff to do with that. We’ll get into that in a minute.

Steve:   01:09:46             But yeah, it’s just the fact that it’s interesting how you’re talking about the western U.S. in the 1800s. One of the classic ones I have is we know about Billy the Kid and all these cowboys, Jesse James and all that. And yet the one person who probably killed more than all of them combined was Porter Rockwell. At least that’s what the claim is. Porter Rockwell killed more people than Billy the Kid, Jesse James and all these other outlaws back at a time. In fact, he was claimed to have killed somebody two years after he actually died. It’s one of the myths on him. It’s just, there’s a line and George told me to give this line. Okay, so I’m going to do it now.

GT:        01:10:30             George Throckmorton.

Steve:   01:10:32             Throckmorton. When we’ve given lectures and discussions, we quote a line from one movie and if anybody, whatever you hear what I say today, this is it. It was a movie that came out in I think 1950s or early 1960s called “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin. And it’s a story about Jimmy Stewart who comes back to this old town in some western state to bury his friend John Wayne, who had died. Well, his notoriety came because when he showed up in this town, he was a lawyer and he’s credited with killing the outlaw, Liberty Valance played by Lee Marvin and beautifully done. He’s evil. He’s given credit with killing this guy because he was a bad guy.

Steve:   01:11:17             Eventually he goes on to be the governor of this new state, senator and ambassador, and as the editor of the paper says, “With a snap your fingers, you could be the next vice president of the United States.” So, when he and his wife show up, wife had to be an old girlfriend of John Wayne in the movie, shows up for the funeral, the editor of the paper says, “Well, we want to find out the true story of what’s going on here because you’re a senator.” Boy, this is big news. Well he tells him the story, but what he tells them at the end is that when they rehearsed the scene where he shoots Liberty Valance, he didn’t shoot Liberty Valance. It was John Wayne in an alleyway who shoots and kills Liberty Valance. But yet Jimmy Stewart gets the credit, becomes this famous person.

Steve:   01:12:04             And John Wayne’s just this little farmer. So that’s who this guy is. This guy we came to bury, his friend. Well, here’s the reporter, writing all this stuff down. So, when he gets done with storytelling, “I’m not the guy that did it,” the editor takes the notes, tears them up, throws the notes in the fire.

Steve:   01:12:19             “Oh, you’re not going to use that story?”

Steve:   01:12:22             He says, “No,” and here’s the line. “This is the west, sir. When the legend become fact, print the legend.”

Steve:   01:12:32             That is very productive in Mormon history and history altogether, where the legend is more important than the actual facts. And I’ve seen that with a lot of things of history and we get into Hofmann and all that. But that’s just a great line and I always remember that when I hear stories, whether it’s Mormon history or American history. I mean George Washington didn’t stand up in the boat going across the Delaware?

Steve:   01:13:01             Of course not, no. Did he cut down the cherry tree? We don’t know. But sometimes history is built that way. The Western novels of the 1800s, you know, are not that way. I read of stories about Wyatt Earp. [He] was never shot, never injured or anything, great career as a lawman. But half the stuff wasn’t true. But I think that’s a problem we have when we don’t try to find the truth. We have it today in politics, fake news, you know? Did they really say that? Did they really mean it, you know? And that’s the sad aspect of our society and our culture and our humanity because we want to believe things that aren’t true. And I share that with a lot of people say, “Why you believe in the Book of Mormon?” Oh, well, you know, now we are going, going crazy on it. But, it’s just one of those things that happens with history.

 

What is the Dead Lee Scroll?

 

Introduction

 

A lead scroll was found at Lee’s Ferry in Arizona.  Was it a long-lost admission of guilt from the only person convicted of participating in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, John D. Lee?  Steve Mayfield will tell us more about it and attempts to authenticate it.  Check out our conversation…

GT:        01:13:57             All right, well I wanted to lay that foundation of John D. Lee, because one of the things you are an expert on is something that to be perfectly honest, I had never heard of it until you mentioned it to me, which was the Dead Lee Scroll. So tell us about the Dead Lee Scroll.

Steve:   01:14:15             First of all, I want to do a disclaimer here. I don’t consider myself an expert, Hofmann expert. It’s been applied to me. I kind of tag my wagon onto George Throckmorton, who you interviewed. He’s been kind enough to include me in stuff. I’ve assisted him in some things. Well, one of the documents or artifacts that came up in 2002 was a lead plate they found down in Lee’s Ferry and it’s been given the nickname of Dead Lee Scroll. Will Bagley gave it that name. It’s a piece of lead. [It’s] very thin. So, it’s not the hardest thing. The plate has an inscription written by John D. Lee suggesting Brigham Young and George A. Smith, who was an apostle back at that time, were the ones…

GT:        01:14:57             St. George is actually named after him.

Steve:   01:15:01             Yes, a cousin of Joseph Smith. [Brigham] did authorize the Mountain Meadows [Massacre]. Well, right during the [2002] Olympics, they find this artifact in Lee’s Ferry. Now this fort was rundown. It was locked up. You couldn’t just walk in and do it and it was dirty and filthy. So, this gentleman named Al Malmquist who is a school teacher in that area at the time, but also on his off time, he was a park ranger for the National Park Service. He was the interpreter, which is a kind of a historian down there. He had a three-year contract with two years he’d get paid but one year he wouldn’t. But he could do voluntary things like at Lee’s Ferry or at Lonely Dell, cleaning the place up and be covered by workman’s comp[ensation.]

Steve:   01:15:45             Well, he’s in their cleanup because they had dirt up to here and bat droppings and rat droppings. So, he is in there cleaning. And all of the sudden he come across this thing rolled up. He opens it comes up and starts reading John D. Lee. Whoa! That has something to do with it. So, he cleans it off and they look at and they come up, hey, is this a confession? Is just some document that points out to it. Well, of course, boom, everybody loves it. Well, March of 2002, the archeologist for the Park Service, she’d taken it to Phoenix and showed it to Bill Flynn who worked with George Throckmorton on the Hofmann documents. Bill Flynn’s not LDS. Then she brings up to Salt Lake to George Throckmorton who was my boss at the time in Salt Lake Police crime lab. And so, he examined it, taking pictures of it and everything. And of course, the fun part of it, he knew very well I wanted to see it and be there, but he [said], “I can’t let you see it. You’ve got to sit.” So, I’m just anxiously going for it and finally he said, “Oh, you can come and see it.” And he asked the lady, “Can he see it?”

Steve:   01:16:44             “Oh yeah, he could’ve been here all the time.”

Steve:   01:16:46             And George is just laughing. He’s laughing at me because he didn’t [let me see it.] But then the next year in 2003, George and I took a trip down to Lee’s Ferry to do an examination of the scene, look at the scroll again, and kind of look at the overall environment of Lee’s Ferry. Again, with Al Malmquist there, the fort is locked up, but he has the keys. He’s the man with the keys so we could actually go in and I took photos and everything. And, the examination that he came back with, he and Bill Flynn says this is a forgery. It’s a bad forgery. The spelling’s bad and the names are spelled wrong. Even how he inscribed his name was printed because it wasn’t cursive, it was printed. The print isn’t even the same.

GT:        01:17:31             Wouldn’t it be hard to do cursive on lead?

Steve:   01:17:35             Yeah, it might be. But John D. Lee did a lot of printing. There is a rock formation down there in Arizona on House Rock. We call it House Rock. We call it Singers Rock because the pioneers going through there would graffiti up there. They would carve their names in the thing up there. You have to go off the main road. It’s kind of hard to find. But again, it’s nice to have the Park Service guy lead it. Well John D. Lee inscribed his name in it and very distinct.

GT:        01:18:05             Really. Is this down by Moab kind of or not?

Steve:   01:18:05             No, this is down along the Arizona Strip, right? I think it is still in Arizona.

GT:        01:18:05             The Arizona strip between Utah and Nevada?

Steve:   01:18:05             Yeah, it’s on the Utah side, but it’s a couple of hours drive from Page, [Arizona.]

GT:        01:18:20             Okay.

Steve:   01:18:21             But it’s to the west. You compare that with how he wrote his name on the scroll. It’s completely different. What George does he take various examples? Here’s, here’s how John D. Lee did the rock formation. Here’s how he did it in his diary. Here’s how I did it in another letter. And then you’ve get the fourth one is what’s on the scroll. And you can tell three of them are the same. One is not the same.

GT:        01:18:44             Well the signature clearly looks like a forgery on the scroll?

Steve:   01:18:48             Yeah. Everything was bad about it. Some young man, I can’t remember. I can’t remember his name, Bunting, I think. He did an examination and said, “Well, they could be an actual lead plate from that time period, the 1850s, or 1860s, whenever, I can’t remember the date on it, but we found out that a lot of the major lead was manufactured down in Arkansas and Missouri on the borderline, but he wasn’t sure.

Steve:   01:19:18             It might’ve been a new. He left the door open and saying it might have been recent manufactured, this lead thing, but we don’t know. So, it might have been a legitimate piece of lead.

GT:        01:19:29             Let me make sure. I’m unclear on that. So, you’re saying that back in 1870, let’s say approximate year, that the lead could have come from Arkansas?

Steve:   01:19:37             Yeah.

GT:        01:19:37             Or it could be a modern manufacturing.

Steve:   01:19:41             [Yes,] but majority of the lead was manufactured in that area.

GT:        01:19:44             Even in modern times?

Steve:   01:19:47             Yes.

GT:        01:19:47             Is something that he would have? I mean if John D. Lee had made this, it’s not like he just dug a bunch of lead out of the ground and made a lead plate.

Steve:   01:19:55             Yes, they would have had it. Now there’s a lot of stories about it. Number one, well he didn’t have enough paper to write something. He had plenty of things on his diaries and letters and things. In fact, somebody looked at his diaries where besides writing, he’s writing down the sides and around it, you know he’s using the paper the best he can, and he had enough paper to write diaries and journals and letters and things like that.

Steve:   01:20:16             The idea that has been presented by Will Bagley, “Well this is a very popular thing to do is write on a lead plate.” But I can’t find any other example other than this one.

GT:        01:20:24             This is the only example of a lead plate.

Steve:   01:20:26             That I can think of other than when you look on the Internet, it says gold plates of the Nephites, you know. But we wanted to see if somebody in the western United States during that time period had actually done that; written on a piece of lead, piece of metal that we can compare. We still can’t find one.

GT:        01:20:41             This is the only one that exists.

Steve:   01:20:44             Yeah.

GT:        01:20:45             I will say this just really quickly. I was in Sandra Tanner‘s Bookstore and she has facsimile of the golden plates that are made out of lead plates. The idea is you pick it up, it’s pretty heavy. She said gold is even heavier than the lead. So, her thing is, there’s no way Joseph could have done it.

Steve:   01:21:05             Yeah.

GT:        01:21:05             So there are some. So, if any of my readers know Sandra and want to see what a lead plate looks like, you can go to her bookstore.

Steve:   01:21:13             It’s right there in the bookstore.

GT:        01:21:13             She has one right there.

Steve:   01:21:15             So anyway, this [presents] just some major problems. Bill Flynn determined that the engraving was done with a four-sided nail, but they rarely ever existed in the American West. They had the two-sided flat nail, but the [engraving] might’ve been used with a modern-day nail.

GT:        01:21:35             Okay. So, whoever inscribed this used of four-sided nail. And in 1870ish, John D. Lee only have two sided-nails.

Steve:   01:21:45             Yeah, most likely. Now, there was a four-sided nail invented in the 1870s in France, but not in America. So, we’re dealing with something questionable. But then the idea is that, well, this lead plate has been sitting up in the log roof of Lee’s Ferry for all these years and it just kind of fell down. We found it.

Steve:   01:22:05             Well that’s not the case because at least twice in the previous 20 years before this was discovered in 2003, the Park Service took that roof down and re-varnished it to save the wood. So, it seems like it just barely got there.

GT:        01:22:18             Somebody would’ve found it.

Steve:   01:22:19             Yeah. Now in 1999, this is a couple of years before it was discovered, somebody, we found out they did an archaeological, architectural study, a big multipage thing the National Parks did. And somebody took a picture looking in to where it was. And Alan Malmquist says, “Well there it is right there in 1999 photos. There is the lead plate because that’s where I found it, and there it was. So, I’ve got that picture showing where it is. So at least by 1999, it was in the fort but didn’t come out of the roof. So, we’re assuming somebody probably just tossed it in there.

GT:        01:22:53             Tossed it in there after 1999.

Steve:   01:22:55             Or before 1999 it was tossed in there and had been sitting there because again, nobody was in the fort and you had dirt piled up here. So, it looked like an old beer can or, pop can. It was just sitting there until Al Malmquist went in and cleaned it.

GT:        01:23:10             So now was it actually rolled up like a scroll?

Steve:   01:23:11             Yeah, it was rolled up. That’s why he called it a scroll and then they laid it down.

GT:        01:23:15             So it wasn’t a flat plate, like the Golden Plates.

Steve:   01:23:16             No, no. When they brought it out it wasn’t. Yeah.

GT:        01:23:19             So somebody actually had to unroll it.

Steve:   01:23:21             Yeah. Al Malmquist unrolled it and he cleaned it off and that’s when he found it. It’s right now being housed in the vault down at the National Park Service vault in Page, Arizona. And like I said, we saw it up here. We saw it the two other times. I know that when they first had the press conference in 2002, they showed it to the press and everything.

Steve:   01:23:40             But it’s a bad forgery according to George Throckmorton. It’s bad. Now whether it has a connection with one Mark Hofmann, we don’t know. Bill Flynn says it is Hofmann-esque. Mark did work with metals, because he did some coins and some other items. It was controversial. It was Mormon-related, but that’s what we got. Now back in 2002-2003. I wrote Mark Hofmann when he was in the Point of the Mountain Prison three different times. I point blank asked him, “Mark, did you have anything to do with it?” I never got an answer from him. He doesn’t have to answer me.

GT:        01:24:18             He doesn’t respond to anybody I’ve heard.

Steve:   01:24:19             Yeah. Well a few people he has, but rarely. He has written some letters. Jack Ford, who was a reporter for the Deseret News during that time later became the spokesman for the prison and I talked to him one time. He says, “Back when he was there…”

GT:        01:24:34             There at the prison or there at the News?

Steve:   01:24:34             Yes, there at the prison, not the News. When he was the spokesman, he’d get requests from the media three or four times a month. “Can we interview Mark Hoffmann?”

Steve:   01:24:43             He’d go down and say, “Mark, this paper wants to talk to you.”

Steve:   01:24:46             He says, “No, I don’t want to talk to him.”

Steve:   01:24:48             He said, “It happens all the time, but I can’t make him talk to anybody. It’s up to him.”

Steve:   01:24:52             I’ve asked Ron Yengich, his attorney and said, “If I gave you a letter that I’ve written for him, and he won’t answer me, will you give it to him?”

Steve:   01:24:59             He says, “I’ll take it to them, but I can’t make him answer you.” And I think Ron doesn’t even think he’s as attorney other than, “Well, when Mark talks to me, I’ll give them some advice, but you know, I’m not going to make my millions off of being his attorney.” So, it’s one of those things. It’s a mystery. Is it a Hofmann? We don’t know.

GT:        01:25:16             To me it seems unlikely that it would be because the bombings were in ’85?

Steve:   01:25:21             ’85.

GT:        01:25:22             and he went to jail and ’86 or ’87?

Steve:   01:25:27             ’87. January of ’87, yes.

GT:        01:25:28             And so the earliest that we can even think that this might have gotten in there was about 1999?

Steve:   01:25:35             Well the first time we know it’s there because of this photo. It might have been there a long time.

GT:        01:25:39             So we have a photo in 1999 that was a photo of just the plates?

Steve:   01:25:43             Of the interior of Lee’s Ferry, but it’s Al Malmquist who found it says that’s it right there in that photo. So, we know at least by ’99 it was in the fort. It could have been there a lot longer.

GT:        01:25:53             Oh, okay. It could have been sitting there for 15 years.

Steve:   01:25:58             Yeah, or it might’ve just got there. I asked Shannon Flynn about it and says, well, as far as he knows, Curt Bench may have said the same thing. I can’t remember either Shannon or Curt said we don’t know of Mark ever being down in that side of the state. If we could prove that, you know, here’s a receipt from the motel and Page during that time period, you know, wouldn’t that’d be great? But we don’t. So we don’t know if he went down there. And here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to necessarily be Mark Hofmann the did it.

GT:        01:26:28             It could have been somebody else.

Steve:   01:26:29             It could have been somebody else. Mark wasn’t the first one to do forgeries. He wasn’t the one who invented it. He perfected it a long ways, but there are people, and it has been surmised, and I agree with this idea that there’s somebody out there learning from Mark Hofmann’s mistakes and they’re going to improve.

GT:        01:26:48             I mean talking with George, he’s authenticated Babe Ruth Jerseys that have been fake.

Steve:   01:26:55             Oh yeah. A lot of stuff.

GT:        01:26:58             So there’s a lot of forgers out there.

Steve:   01:26:59             Yeah. I just say that Mark improved. He studied up on it. He read about it and improved on that. But he got to a point where he got sloppy too. But people wanted so bad to believe what he had was real, they would overlook stuff. As Dean Jessee told George one time, why would anybody want to forge a document?

Steve:   01:27:20             Well, another movie quote, another movie quote. Why would Mark want to do forgery? Why? A line from Smokey and the Bandit. Burt Reynolds is talking to his friend about why we’re going from Atlanta, Georgia, to Texas to bring some beer back. Why are we doing this? He says, “Oh, for the all-American life, for the money, for the glory and for the fun, but mostly for the money.” That’s Mark Hofmann.

Steve:   01:27:49             You read his story. It was glory because for five to six years there, he was a hero. He was the greatest thing in the Mormon history community. He was getting the press nationwide, worldwide. He admits it was fun fooling people. “I loved it. I love fooling people.” And the money was good except the fact that Mark had a problem. He didn’t know how to finance himself well. He spent money he didn’t have. That’s why he was borrowing money and bouncing checks all the time and that was his mistake. If Mark had stayed away from the controversial stuff and just said, “Well, here’s an autograph by Joseph Smith or Brigham Young,” if he kept doing that, he would still be doing it today. But he got into the controversial stuff and he tried to go for the opus.

GT:        01:28:33             There’s a lot of money in that.

Steve:   01:28:33             Yeah, The greatest thing here, which was the Oath of the Freeman and he got to a point and I think George mentioned it, where he had the one guy from Idaho that slapped Mark, you know, “I don’t care.” And he got nervous.

GT:        01:28:46             Can you tell us his name?

Steve:   01:28:46             George never told me.

GT:        01:28:52             He wouldn’t tell me either.

Steve:   01:28:52             Because he made three Oath of the Freeman‘s. The one that is back in New York, the one in Idaho and there’s one in Brazil. And it’s like, Mark got nervous. Part of the thing too was that fact that he gave Steve Christenson some Egyptian papyrus which was legitimate. But Steve was going to bring Kenneth Rendell from New York to look at it and that’s where Mark got it from. Now he’s panicked because [he was] going to be exposed. So, he kills people. He kills Steve Christensen to get him out of the way. He plants a bomb at the Sheets home because there was that [business issue.]

GT:        01:29:29             He was trying to throw the investigators off.

Steve:   01:29:31             Throw people off on it. But then the next day, you know, so my friends killed blah, blah, blah. I’m supposed to meet with somebody and the next day, the person doesn’t show up, he takes a bomb back. It goes off on in his car up there near where is now the Conference Center. And what burned him is in fact he thought he could fool people, but this time he said, “Oh, I got in the car, shut the door, and a bomb went off on me because I just found it there.”

Steve:   01:29:54             And the ATF guy says “[No.] If that door was shut, you’d be dead, but the door was still open. It just blew you back out to save your life. So right off the bat, something’s not right here.” Then they find the bomb parts for the other two were the same ones in his one. Aha! Same bomb.

GT:        01:30:09             And George told me there were bomb components in the trunk, which I didn’t know that either.

Steve:   01:30:12             Yeah. So yeah, when the actual scientists and professionals start looking into it, you can’t fool us. You can fool the media, you can fool historians, you can fool collectors. But no, {you can’t fool professionals.] Well he goes up to the hospital and then he lawyers’ up on them. Because the nurse kind of [heard something.] So he is stuck there, but one day it was the bombs had something to do with the Christiansen/Sheets business dealings. The next day, boom! At first of course law enforcement weren’t buying into the documents, but the media was. What’s [the connection between] Steve Christensen and Mark Hofmann? It’s the Salamander Letter and so they’re pushing that idea, you know, and what happens?

Steve:   01:30:53             Then of course Dean Jessee is the one that calls George. George was working for the attorney general’s office with Wilkinson.  Dean says, “Well, you’re the document guy because you’ve been trained to do forensic stuff. Can you come take an hour or so and teach me how to do this?”

Steve:   01:31:11             “No. It takes three years. I can’t do it.” But he gets interested. He starts, looking at this stuff. So, he gets permission from Wilkinson to go work for the county attorney’s office.

GT:        01:31:19             Who is Wilkinson?

Steve:   01:31:20             Ernest Wilkinson Junior.

GT:        01:31:22             Junior. Oh, okay.

Steve:   01:31:23             He was attorney general for the state for a while.

GT:        01:31:25             Oh really? So, the former BYU president’s son?

Steve:   01:31:28             [His] son was attorney general in the state back at that time.

GT:        01:31:30             Oh, I did not know that. Wow!

Steve:   01:31:33             Ernie Jr. said, okay. So, George gets hired part-time with the county attorney, before he [worked] for the became district attorney working for Ted Cannon. And then after a few months, Ernie said, “I want you back.”

Steve:   01:31:45             “Well I got a lot of work here because I got all these documents,” and [George] says, “Well I’ll quit the AG’s office. I’ll come work there.” So now he’s hired on as an investigator to work with the documents. He brings in Bill Flynn because in forensics you always sort to have two sets of eyes on things. So, he works on all these documents now. I don’t know if George told you the problem they had with the church overseeing documents.

GT:        01:32:10             Yes, he did.

Steve:   01:32:10             The fact is they had to do an end run to Elder Oaks to get permission. Did he tell you about our lunch we had with him? With Elder Oaks?

GT:        01:32:17             No, he didn’t tell me about the lunch.

Steve:   01:32:19             Every couple of months I meet with George at our local Mexican restaurant and we just talk about things. Hofmann comes up. Well back in November we met down at this restaurant and Curt Bench came with us. So now you got me, my brother, Curt. Well what do we talk about? We’re not talking about the weather, or sports, we’re talking about Hofmann. Well, George, rehearses this story about doing an end run and getting permission [with] Elder Oaks pushing through, so they can look at these documents that the church had acquired from Hoffman. Now Curt had never heard that story, so that’s a different story. After we talked about this and how great it was, I’m sitting there, and they had their back to it, but the driveway to this restaurant, this car pulls up. This lady’s driving it and this bald-headed guy steps out, turns around and says, “That’s Elder Oaks right there!”

Steve:   01:33:09             And so I kind of said, “Well, what do you know? you’re talking about it. Here’s Elder Oaks.” Well they couldn’t see him. They say, “Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.”

Steve:   01:33:15             I said, “Okay, wait until you see him come in the door?”

Steve:   01:33:17             A few moments later, here comes Elder Oaks and we all started laughing. So, my brother says “Hello.” He comes over and we introduce ourselves to them and George says, “Maybe you don’t remember me. I’m George Throckmorton. I worked on the Hofmann case.”

Steve:   01:33:29             “Oh I remember the name, I just didn’t remember the face.” So, we had a nice little talk. We kind of teased him. He says, “Well, you can sit with us.”

Steve:   01:33:35             “No, I have my wife. I got a better offer with my wife,” because he was driving, so they’d go down to sit there.

Steve:   01:33:40             It may only take 20 minutes to eat, but we spent two hours just talking. So he finally gets up and comes over. I guess maybe now it clicked what was going on. So, he’s talking and talking to us, and [gives] high compliments to George about the work you did and how, the important part. His wife is over there pulling on his sweater like, “We gotta go, gotta go.”

Steve:   01:34:02             Then Curt jumps up and says, “Well, if I bring some books to your office will you autograph it?”

Steve:   01:34:08             He said, “As long as they are books I wrote.”

Steve:   01:34:10             And he said, “Well, it’s Carthage Conspiracy.”

Steve:   01:34:12             He says, “Well, we’re not supposed to give autographs out but I can do that for you.” And so, we had a very nice conversation. It was so funny. We were talking about him. So, our ongoing joke now is every time we meet, “Did you call Elder Oaks to come have lunch with us?” You know. But it’s one of those things that once the science got involved and once he and Bill Flynn started looking at the documents, this stuff started coming out. The document do have something to do with this homicide.

Steve:   01:34:41             And then of course Ted Cannon had a sex scandal going on in the county attorney’s office. So, he has to resign. They bring in an old county attorney named David Yokum to take over. And the first thing he said is, “Clear this case off the desk. It’s going to cost too much. Plea bargain it.” And that’s what he and Bob Stott, the lead attorney on it, will plea bargain it. And of course at the same time he’s saying, besides plea bargain,” I need to cut budget. So George, you’re out of here. You’re low man on the totem pole.” So, George is out the door now after all this work, he’s done for a year or so on this stuff. So, it was kind of sad, but thank goodness because eventually he became my boss in Salt Lake Crime Lab, which is one of the highlights of my career with the 10 years I worked with him.

GT:        01:35:32             Yeah, George is great.

Steve:   01:35:32             Yeah. So, that was just [cool.]

GT:        01:35:36             I still want to, I need to set up another interview because he was talking about the Howard Hughes will.

Steve:   01:35:43             That, and his involvement in stuff. But obviously that put his name out there. A lot of people now, [hear] George Throckmorton. “I know the name, but …” And some people say, “Wasn’t he involved with Hofmann and his bombings?” Well, not with the bombings.

GT:        01:35:58             In a roundabout way.

Steve:   01:35:59             Yeah. But having George as my boss for 10 years, he and I have done some presentations like at Sunstone and so forth.

 

Buying the Spalding Conspiracy Theory

Introduction

There has long been a theory that Book of Mormon was plagiarized a manuscript originally written by Solomon Spaulding.  The problem with the theory is that there was never a connection between Joseph Smith and Solomon Spaulding—until Mark Hofmann came up with a document.  Steve Mayfield talks about buying this Hofmann forgery.  Check out our conversation…

GT:        01:36:08             So let me ask you this, jumping back to the Dead Lee Scroll. So, you mentioned two things. Number one. So, George says that’s a terrible forgery. Wouldn’t Mark Hofmann do a better-quality forgery? Isn’t that a reason to believe it is not Mark?

Steve:   01:36:24             Yes and no. Mark did some fabulous jobs on some of them. Others, he did crap. Crap. He got to a point where he was in such a rush to do it, he had one letter that was a letter that was legitimate letter in the 1700s signed “Betsy.” [It was] just a letter to the family or something. Well, he just added on “Ross” and people bought it. When you look at it, you can see the “Betsy” and the “Ross” and it’s different ink, different style, but people bought it. I owned a document that was a legitimate document that Mark used and made forgeries on it. Maybe you want to talk about that one. Because I have a copy of it sitting right here.

GT:        01:37:03             Oh right here? Well here, let me hand both of those to you. That one looks better.

Steve:   01:37:08             Yeah. These are photocopies. Right prior, maybe a year before the bombings, Mark claimed he was getting pieces from what is known as the McLellin Collection, papers that belong to William McLellin. And there’s a long story with that. Among the documents was a papyrus and a land deed that had the signatures of Solomon Spalding, Sidney Rigdon on it. Well of course the story to that is that is the fact that there was a claim that Sidney Rigdon, being in Pittsburgh, borrowed a manuscript that was written by Solomon Spalding called “Manuscript Found” or “Manuscript Story.” [He] took that Joseph Smith and that’s how they created the Book of Mormon. Even Sidney Rigdon and Joseph said, “I don’t know this Solomon Spalding. It had nothing to do with that.” And it has always been claimed they knew each other.

Steve:   01:37:57             Well, this would kind of give proof they did know each other. So, Mark has this document and he takes it to Elder Hugh Pinnock of the Council of Seventy and says, “Here’s this document. It is part of it, but I need some money, so I can buy the McLellin Collection.” So Elder Pinnock calls, I think First National Bank, because I think he was on the board of directors and says, “Give this guy a loan for $186,000.”

Steve:   01:38:23             Of course the problem with that is Mark fumbled it and couldn’t pay it back in time enough. So poor Elder Pinnock had to fork up the money to cover it. But this document, about a month later, was sold to Cosmic Aeroplane for $400 because he needed the money. He was hurting for money. Well, Cosmic Aeroplane has it. They do the investigation, George has it for a for year, examining it. He gives it back of Cosmic Aeroplane after the trial.

GT:        01:38:53             This is the land deed.

Steve:   01:38:55             Yes, the land deed.

GT:        01:38:56             This is the land deed. So, he sold it for $400,000 but he needed $186,000?

Steve:   01:38:59             No, he sold it to Cosmic for $400 but he got $186,000 on the loan by just showing it to Elder Pinnock. That was a lot of money to fork up. So, in January of 2000, the former owner of Cosmic Aeroplane sold it to Ken Sanders who used to work there. He now had his own bookstore there in Salt Lake, Ken Sanders Books. Well he had it on display and I’m just sitting there just [thinking], “Oh, oh, I love it.” But it was like $4,000 they wanted for it. Well, I had enough in a credit card, so I bought it from him.

GT:        01:39:33             Oh my goodness.

Steve:   01:39:34             In August of 2000. So, for four years I owned a Hofmann.

GT:        01:39:38             You knew it was a forgery.

Steve:   01:39:42             Yeah, Yeah. I mean he sold it as that. The minute he sold it after I bought it, I take it back to the office and show George. He showed some things on the document that only he and I know. There are certain things that a document person does, so he verified, “That’s the document, I examined it. Here’s this and this.” So, I owned it for four years, showed it at some symposium and then in 2004. I donated it to BYU, so the document is down at BYU. It was starting to crumble apart. Now the significance of the document is the fact–here’s a photocopy of it. The fact that you see that there’s names here, if I do it right.

GT:        01:40:19             Well actually the other one’s easier to read, plus it is in color.

Steve:   01:40:23             Here we have Sidney Rigdon and over here is Solomon Spalding. It is the Connecticut land deed in which a gentleman by the name of Jesse York, and this is back in Connecticut, is selling some of his land to Asa Spalding. Okay. No, wait a minute. Asa Spalding is selling some land to his wife’s cousin, Jesse York. The problem you have with the document is that Mark made some changes besides adding those two names, the original date up here is not 1822, but it’s 1792. So, Mark changed that.

GT:        01:41:05             And you can see that.

Steve:   01:41:05             The eight, yeah.

GT:        01:41:06             it looks totally scratched out, wrong.

Steve:   01:41:08             And then he also wrote it at the top 1822.

GT:        01:41:12             I don’t know if we’re going to be able to see that on the video.

Steve:   01:41:13             It’s at the very top. Now on the side down here, the original had some squirrely things down here, but he apparently cut it out for some reason. This is a legitimate land deed from 1792. These other signatures were legit. The writing is legit, but he added the names, changed the date.

GT:        01:41:33             So he added the names Solomon Spaulding.

Steve:   01:41:34             Yeah. And Sidney Rigdon and change the dates. So anyway, like I said this was the one that he was able to get money from the bank and that was controversial. Now the fun part is after I bought it, I was making photocopies of it and on the back of the thing, usually on the back when they fold up, there was a section where they have some writing when they fold away. Well, I did it in a dark coloring and you see here the very back in the middle, there’s some writing.

GT:        01:42:06             You’ll have to read it. It’s very hard to see.

Steve:   01:42:07             It’s very faint, but even on the original you can’t see it until you darken it up and it says deed from Asa Spalding to Jesse York, 1792. Mark missed it. He didn’t see it in the back, but it’s like nobody turns the page over, and you couldn’t actually see it with your naked eye until I darkened it up. So, he missed it. It was a legitimate document, but he just made some changes on it and that that’s what he did with the Betsy Ross and he probably did others. Now we’ve had, over the years since he’s gone to prison, some documents. There was one that was a marriage certificate out of Kirtland, signed by Joseph Smith for a Marshall Brewster and a Chloe Smith. Again, my friend Craig Foster who works at the Family History Library checked the actual records of the Kirtland marriage book and there was a Chloe Smith and Marshall Brewster married by Joseph Smith. Now, nothing significant about it except the fact that this document we knew came from Hofmann. But I’m thinking back to the time before his forgeries were uncovered, what if I was a descendant of these people? How much money would I be willing to pay to have the actual document: marriage certificate?

Steve:   01:43:17             I’d probably be begging all my relatives, we need to have that certificate. That would make him a lot of money. And we all noticed on this page or these marriages out a Kirtland, four or five different people. You wonder, did he just do the one or did make copies for everybody? So, all he did was just [make copies.] He was good to the point that he could do Joseph’s autograph. And he was able to age ink, do something to the paper.

Steve:   01:43:40             Now here’s the thing, a lot of his forgeries, he would do things to the paper. He’d kind of rip them, have rips in them, or water stains on them or darken them or something like that. Because just to your idea that all old documents are deteriorating and their crummy. But not necessarily. Down at the archives at BYU, I was shown some of the original handwriting of the sections of the D&C (Doctrine and Covenants.) And those papers are preserved. The papers are turning brown, but perfect. No cuts, no water stains, nothing on them. The Whitney family did a good job of taking care of these documents. So not all old documents are beat up. But Mark kind of thought that’s what they would look like and people bought into it because they were not sophisticated enough to read them.

GT:        01:44:27             If they look old then yeah.

Steve:   01:44:28             So, anyway, for four years, I had a good time with that one. And so those were the involvement. Now there is another one that is probably the last. Although I think the people working on the Joseph Smith Papers last couple of years had one in their collection that they said most likely a Hofmann. I can’t remember.

GT:        01:44:52             Now, let me just back up. I’m sorry to keep going back to the Dead Lee Scroll. Because one of the things you mentioned before we turned the camera on was that both Will Bagley and Richard Turley had used the Dead Lee Scroll?

Steve:   01:45:05             Yes.

GT:        01:45:06             Is that in this book here?

Steve:   01:45:08             I think so. And I can’t remember which one of Will. But yeah, Will had two books. One, he just makes a footnote on it. Another book he takes this one document. What it is is a typed….

GT:        01:45:20             So wait a minute. If this wasn’t discovered until you said 2002, so it was believed legitimate for a while?

Steve:   01:45:28             It wasn’t this document. It was.

GT:        01:45:29             No, no, no. I’m talking about the scroll.

Steve:   01:45:30             Okay. Yeah.

GT:        01:45:31             So was the scroll used in the Turley book?

Steve:   01:45:34             No, no, no, no, no.

GT:        01:45:35             Oh, I misunderstood that.

Steve:   01:45:36             Okay. The document we’re talking about is this affidavit by–I’ve forgotten his name. A young man, Edwards I think his name was. He was 15 and he was at Mountain Meadows.

GT:        01:45:52             Oh. So, this is a different story.

Steve:   01:45:55             Yes, a different document altogether. This young man was there in 1926. He’s been a bishop. He writes an affidavit, supposedly a typed affidavit, has it signed. He signed it and the judge signed it, talking about being there at Mountain Meadows, nothing sensational, other than he’s the last living survivor of Mountain Meadows.

GT:        01:46:18             On the Mormon side.

Steve:   01:46:19             Yeah. So now you have the Turley book referencing it in a footnote. Will Bagley referenced it.

GT:        01:46:29             So what did, what did the document actually say? Why? Why was it important?

Steve:   01:46:32             It says, “I was there. This is what happened.” Blah, blah blah. It doesn’t point the finger at anybody, but it’s sort of an innocuous document, but it just says he was there. And he literally was. We knew he was there. Well, when this and one of the books Will Bagley quotes the whole letter. Well, when they did a book review on that book, a lady up in Seattle named Polly Aird, independent historian said, “You better think twice about that one,” because she knew the people in the state archives where the document was being held, saying that they had gotten this document from a guy named Lynn Jacobs who was one of Mark’s associates back during this time.

Steve:   01:47:12             Lynn has since passed away. Well, both the state archives in the church says, I think we had looked into it. Prior to this, George Throckmorton had spent some time with the archival Staff at the Church Historians’ department teaching some fundamentals about forensic document examination. Well timing was right, because now they bring this up there. George comes down and they have got these archivists up there, the people work with the documents and looked at it. Where they figured that they saw that this document, which was a letterhead of this particular judge, was a legitimate letterhead, piece of paper, but they saw that the signatures were assigned, were, traced is a technique of putting the paper on top of illusion and then trying to copy it. Well, the coup de Gras, the whole thing is they take this document back to New York to a guy named Peter Tytell in the forensic document business.

Steve:   01:48:07             He’s the typewriter guy. He does all that work on it. His father sold typewriters and was a typewriter repairman. So, he transferred that over to his own education. So, you have a document that has type writing. He looks at it. Well, he determined, now this letter, this document was supposedly done in 1926 well he found out the typewriter used on this document was a 1950 Royal typewriter. So, it’s like yeah, and the fact that, then also Brent Ashworth who was one of Mark Hofmann’s victim said “I sold or gave those letterheads to Mark Hofmann and if there’d been anything in Mountain Meadows, I would never have given anything to him. So, we kind of make that connection. It went from Brent to Mark.

GT:        01:48:54             So Brent gave him some blank paper with letterhead.

Steve:   01:48:55             Yeah.

GT:        01:48:56             Mark types it up on a 1950 typewriter.

Steve:   01:49:00             Yeah, gives it to Lynn who then donates it to the state archives.

GT:        01:49:05             Which Richard Turley and Will Bagley used.

Steve:   01:49:07             Yeah, Quote from.

GT:        01:49:09             What a mess!

Steve:   01:49:12             What it also says is that there are a lot of documents out there. Now I think 1988 or around that time, Mark was pulled out of his cell and being interviewed because there had been stories that he had made–was trying to hire somebody to bump off some people, like one of the people on the parole board and George Throckmorton, so interviewing them. So, they did a cell search, and they came up with a one sheet, yellow prison paper where he wrote a book on the top, Mormons who I have forged, and on the other side, famous Americana I have forged. Well you look at these names, there’s a couple of names on there that we don’t have documents for. We don’t have a forgery, or anything related to that. So, there are probably documents that are still out there that Mark Hofmann did that they just haven’t shown up.

Steve:   01:49:59             So it behooves that collectors have documents whether libraries or something, need to think twice. You need to be careful. Brent Ashworth talks about the Emily Dickinson poem. There was a poem that one of the major document auction houses had, that was a Hofmann forgery. It was a poem and they struggle with it. They don’t want to admit it. And Brent Ashworth was the one that brought it to their attention that it was Hofmann forgery. And again, something that comes up after he’s gone to prison, everything, but they come. They find these things. In fact, there was a book written on that, the Poet and the Murderer was about that particular document. And so the intrigue is still out there and like I said, we need to not be so excited when some document [shows up], and there’s probably–this is how Mark played the game because we knew that people had documents, material than an institution didn’t have.

Steve:   01:51:03             His claim was, “Well, I did my backwards genealogy. Instead of going back, I went forward and found the great grandson of some famous Mormon, i.e. Bullock. And I went to the family and said, “I can help you with this. And Oh, here comes Joseph Smith III blessing from the Bullock family up in Coalville, [Utah.] But don’t bother these people. They want me to be the go-between. They don’t want to be bothered. They don’t want to be hassled.”

Steve:   01:51:27             “Okay.”

Steve:   01:51:28             And here’s this document, which again, each document has their own history and story because a couple of years back, the kindness of Brent Ashworth, we released at a Sunstone Symposium, a tape recording that Mark made back in the early 1980s when he had this Joseph Smith, III blessing, calling the Community Christ, or Reorganized Church saying, “I got this document,” where he’s calling for the church historian and he reads it to them and it’s intriguing tape recording that he did.

Steve:   01:52:02             And they’re like, “Wow.”

Steve:   01:52:03             And so great story. “I got this. It relates to you,” blah, blah blah. “I want to trade it for a Book of Commandments.”

Steve:   01:52:10             “Yeah, right.”

Steve:   01:52:11             And they want it. So, they plan on coming out the next week to Salt Lake to do it. Well before they got there, he goes down to the LDS church in Salt Lake and trades it with them.

Steve:   01:52:20             So here comes the Community to Christ folk. “What the heck’s going on here? You double-dealed on us.” So, there was a story on that one. But this tape recording is great. Maybe you want to do a program with just playing that tape because an hour tape where you hear him playing this little game. He is just bringing these people in and they’re buying this whole thing. The actual document where Joseph was blessing his son to be his successor, which was for a long time, part of their policy.

Steve:   01:52:49             Interesting story with that. 1982 Mormon History Association meeting in Ogden. They had a particular session in the LDS Institute chapel to talk about the blessing. Mark was up there. It was the one time I ever met him. I shook his hand and whatever, if you can call that meeting him. Well, as he’s telling this story, “Oh, I did this and this and that.”

Steve:   01:53:13             Out in the audience was Richard Howard, who at the time was the church historian for the RLDS church who had all these dealings. Well, he was not very discreet in his comment. Every time Mark would make a comment, I won’t use the full word, but he was going BS, BS, BS. But he used the full word every time Mark said something, and people were out there just chuckling. But they did the smart thing because actually they took the document. They had it authenticated by good professional people said it’s authentic. But the dealings was the fact he double-dealed on them. And he said, “We’ll never deal with this man again,” which saved them a lot of the problems.

Steve:   01:53:47             It is too bad. This stuff wasn’t passed on, but part of the problem too with people that he dealt with were willing to keep secrets. “Don’t tell them where you got it from.” In fact, you had the Salamander Letter that he claimed he gave it to Lynn Jacobs, but Lynn claimed he got it. “I’ve got too many documents. Maybe you claim some.” Lynn went along with it so he could convince people to do things for him. Brent Metcalfe and I don’t blame them that they had some negative or they had some nefarious thing what they’re doing, but they were all part of this claim and you had like Shannon Flynn and Brent Metcalfe, Lynn Jacobs were the ones that dealt with him. And, I guarantee you that the police did look at these guys and see if they did anything, but they did nothing [wrong.]

GT:        01:54:33             They sure looked at Shannon. They put him in jail.

Steve:   01:54:33             That was over something else.

GT:        01:54:37             Yeah, I know.

Steve:   01:54:37             But I know because my involvement, because I was in Colorado as a deputy sheriff. I got two interviews with Bob Stott and Dick Forbes, one of the detectives on it by phone and once in office. And their dealings were asking me, and I’ve told this so it’s nothing surprising. My knowledge of Lynn Jacobs and Brent Metcalfe because they were friends of mine, what I knew about their involvement with Hofmann. They were doing their job, kind of trying to connect the dots between Mark because some people thought that he couldn’t have done this alone. One time, Sandra Tanner asked me, “I just don’t think he could have done this all alone.” Well he did, but he was able to manipulate news people, you know, and that’s the sad thing.

Steve:   01:55:25             It’s like maybe we need to communicate more often to know what’s going on. So that’s what the tragedy is that two people died. I kind of cringe when I hear people in the media or something call him “Mark Hofmann the forger.” No, he’s a murderer. Forgery is secondary to all of this. And I know that there is a documentary that’s being put together and the Facebook page on is “The Forger.” Well, okay, we look at that, but no, he’s a criminal. He’s a murderer and he’s where he needs to be and most likely he’ll die in prison.

GT:        01:56:02             Not soon enough.

Steve:   01:56:02             So no, I will predict. I will just say, you know, he’s where he should be.

GT:        01:56:11             Well Steve, I appreciate it. I appreciate you letting me spend so much time with you and any last thoughts you want to say before we go?

Steve:   01:56:20             I enjoyed the interview and I didn’t lose my cool. I hope I didn’t swear. So I look forward to it and maybe down the road more stuff comes up. And like I said, I collect this stuff not to hide it away or keep it secret but to be used by scholars and researchers and things like that. So eventually it will all go to BYU. And so look for the Mayfield Collection down there.

GT:        01:56:46             All right, will do. I appreciate you spending your time here on Gospel Tangents! Thanks a lot.

Steve:   01:56:50             Thank you. Thank you.

[1] Dr. Paul Reeve is the new president 2018-2019 for the Mormon History Association.  In introducing Dr. Philip Barlow, Reeve said Barlow was a graduate of Weber State, and then commented, “Who knew such excellence could come from Weber State?”

[2] Point of the Mountain is a geographic location between Salt Lake City and Provo, near Draper, Utah.

[3] He is actually buried in Panguitch

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Some people think the Exodus story is more myth than real. How does George Potter explain it? Check out our conversation…

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The Bible talks about the 12 Springs of Moses for the 12 Tribes of Israel. George Potter has found them in Saudi Arabia. Check out our conversation... https://youtu.be/C98VYjaXF10 Don’t miss our other conversations with George: https://gospeltangents.com/people/george-potter/ transcript to follow Copyright © 2024 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved Except for book reviews, no content may be reproduced without written permission transcript to follow Copyright © 2024 Gospel Tangents All Rights Reserved