Utah Docudrama

By Amy Wilentz

Steve Christensen had just stepped out of the elevator en route to his sixth- floor office in Salt Lake City, one arm filled with Cokes and doughnuts for an early-morning meeting. At his office door, Christensen, 31, reached down to pick up a cardboard parcel with his name on it, and a shrapnel-filled bomb inside blew up in his face, killing him. Some 90 minutes later, in the hilly suburb of Holladay southeast of the city, Kathleen Sheets, 50, returned home from a walk. She bent down to pick up a curious package, with her husband's name on it, sitting by the corner of the garage. The parcel exploded, and Sheets was killed.

Police initially suspected that the murders were connected to a soured business deal involving CFS Financial Corp., a failing investment company. Sheets' husband Gary was the president of CFS, and Christensen a former officer.

But the rumor mill in Salt Lake City was abuzz about another, more exotic, possibility. Christensen and Gary Sheets, both Mormon bishops (local church leaders), were involved in publication of a controversial historical document that challenges the authorized version of the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1983 Christensen paid a reported $40,000 to Mark Hofmann, 30, a shadowy, highly successful dealer in Mormon documents, for an 1830 manuscript known as the "White Salamander Letter." Written by a disciple of Mormon Founder Joseph Smith, it says Smith's finding of the Book of Mormon came not from an angel of God, as is accepted, but from "an old spirit (which) transfigured himself from a white salamander."

Because it implies that folk magic led Smith to his scriptural discovery, the letter has caused considerable consternation among Mormons, leading some to question their faith. Christensen and Sheets helped finance efforts to determine the document's authenticity, and Christensen ultimately donated the letter to the church. Many in Salt Lake thought the bombings were tied to the church controversy. "Most of us were scared to death," said Ronald Walker, an expert on Mormon documents. "It looked like screwball vendetta against anyone who had dealt with that letter."

The salamander angle gained credibility the following day when another pipe bomb critically injured Hofmann as he was climbing into his parked car half a block from Salt Lake City's Temple Square. In the Toyota's blackened interior, investigators found pipes and other equipment for bomb manufacture, as well as rare books and valuable documents relating to the Mormon Church. Hofmann, it seemed, had accidentally set off a bomb of his own making. After eight hours of surgery, Hofmann, who was expected to survive, maintained from his hospital bed that he was a target, not an assailant. But police say he is the primary suspect in the deaths of Christensen and Sheets.

"We're looking for a revenge motive now," says Jerry Miller of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, one of the more than 40 local, state and federal investigators who are working on the case. One possibility, authorities speculate, is a financial disagreement between Christensen, Sheets and Hofmann over a new document deal in which Christensen may have been acting as an agent for the church. The church-owned daily, the Deseret News, theorizes that Hofmann may have been trying to cover up a complicated forgery of purported Mormon documents. Police at week's end arrested Shannon Flynn, 28, a partner of Hofmann's, for questioning about the bombings that have rocked Salt Lake City and its Mormon community.

With reporting by Michael Riley/Salt Lake City