Mark Hofmann was no ordinary forger. His mastery of creating convincing documents and his grasp of the psychology of his targets sets him apart from other criminals, but he stands alone for another reason: The 53-year-old disgruntled Mormon resides in Utah State Prison, not for forgery, but for murder, having received a life sentence for the October 1985 bombing deaths of two people. He attacked the first out of fear that the victim would expose his forgery scheme, and bombed the second to confuse authorities and make them think Hofmann could not be a suspect in the original death.

Hofmann’s dark journey began with the success of the Anthon Transcript, his first major forgery. Mormons believe that in September 1823 in upstate New York, their religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, discovered golden plates containing the text of their holy book, and that the divinely inspired Smith translated the so-called “reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphs carved upon them. In 1828, Martin Harris, a follower of Smith, showed a page of reformed Egyptian symbols to Charles Anthon, a classics scholar at Columbia College in Manhattan, for his opinion. Harris claimed that Anthon wrote and then destroyed a letter of authenticity supporting the odd language, but Anthon stated that he penned no such letter. The paper featuring the curious symbols became known as the Anthon Transcript and was later lost.

Hofmann pretended to rediscover it in April 1980, saying he found it stuck between the pages of a 1668 copy of the King James Bible. Ultimately, he brought the Anthon Transcript to the Mormon church, whose historical department spent four months evaluating it before an official negotiated its purchase from Hofmann. By then, church experts had issued an interim report that generally pointed to its authenticity. Though they confirmed that the paper and ink was correct for the period, they declined to perform more rigorous tests that would require a sample cut from the document.

Simon Worrall, author of “The Poet and the Murderer” (Dutton, 2002), a book on Hofmann’s crimes, says the forger chose his debut subject well. “(Hofmann) presented (the church) with a document that they were in great need of to prove a piece of their story,” he says. “I have said that collecting is irrational, but here we’re dealing with a double irrationality. They were doing it in support of the most irrational, unsupportable human institution: religion.”

In October 1980, the church arranged a trade for the document, giving Hofmann rare 19th-century Mormon currency and a first edition of the Book of Mormon that together was worth about $25,000, the estimated value of the Anthon Transcript. Hofmann received something else much more precious, however—a tool for future forgeries. “What he really gained was access to the Mormon church,” Worrall says, explaining that his connection to the Anthon Transcript convinced officials to admit him to the archives. Hofmann repaid that trust by selling the church dozens more forgeries, including the Salamander Letter, in which Harris says that Smith found the golden plates by crystal-gazing, an occult practice that is a taboo subject among Mormons. Also, Hofmann branched out, faking an Emily Dickinson poem and a copy of “The Oath of a Freeman,” the first document printed in America, before he was arrested in February 1986 on 28 counts, including two for murder and 10 for mail and wire fraud.