00:00:08
- So Steve, I see you had your
breakfast of champions there
with you? - Janet McDermott planned to
stop by her office only briefly
on the morning of
00:00:15
October 15th, 1985. - Have a nice day, Steve. - She had a number of business
appointments around Salt Lake
City that
00:00:22
day. [explosion] Moments later, an explosion
rocked the building, killing her
colleague who worked
00:00:32
next door. Science uncovered a
tale of forgery, fraud and
murder. b b - The explosion occured on the
sixth floor of the historic
Judge building in downtown
00:01:11
Salt Lake City. Killed in the
blast was 31-year old Steve
Christensen, a financial
00:01:16
consultant who left behind his
wife, Terri and a young family. - He was lying in the doorway of
his office and he was lying on
his right side,
00:01:27
burn marks on his face,
smoke marks and blood. - The explosion ripped the door
off it's hinges and the location
of the debris told
00:01:37
investigators that the blast
occured directly in front of
Steve Christensen's office door.
00:01:44
- You could tell the precise
location where the bomb
exploded. Match that with the autopsy and we could tell
where the bomb was when it
exploded because of its
00:01:53
sheering power, breaking bones,
going through skin, things of
that nature. - Small pieces of batteries and
fragments of pipe were found in
the hallway as well.
00:02:02
Many of the parts had the name
Tandy imprinted, a brand sold
exclusively in Radio Shack electronic stores.
All of the fragments were
collected and pieced back
00:02:13
together, revealing that the
explosion was caused by a pipe
bomb. This is a replica
00:02:20
of the type which was used. But
who wanted to kill Steve
Christensen and why? Christensen had recently
resigned his job as Vice
President of Consolidated
00:02:33
Financial Services or CFS, a
real estate investment company
which was undergoing
00:02:39
serious financial difficulties.
Many clients had lost large sums
of money and some were alleging fraud. In the
debris, police discovered a
piece of brown
00:02:51
wrapping paper with
Christensen's first name written
in thick black marker. Bruce
00:02:58
Passey had a jewelry business a
few floors below Steve
Christensen's office. He told
00:03:03
police he noticed something
unusual in the elevator that
morning. - I told them that I saw a box
this morning that had the name
Steve
00:03:12
Christensen and that my father
and I went up in the elevator
with the gentleman holding this box.
00:03:19
- Janet McDermott recalled
seeing the package in the
hallway directly in front of Steve Christensen's office
door. A motion sensitive mercury
switch was found
00:03:31
in the debris, an indication
that the bomb was activated by
tilting the package.
00:03:37
Motion-sensitive bombs are
almost always delivered by the
bombers themselves so they can be delivered without
going off. Bruce Passey
described the delivery man as
00:03:49
a white male, about 5'8" tall
with medium brown hair. - Once he came in, I mean he was
wearing a high school letter
jacket without the
00:03:59
letter on it but it had
the colors of a letter jacket. - I was just very concerned for
the business community and that
other people
00:04:06
might be involved on a
revenge-type situation, whether
it be for investments gone bad or
something similar to that and I
was
00:04:14
worried who would be the next
victim. - That worry became reality
just two hours later.
00:04:25
Two hours after the bombing
which killed Steve Christensen, there was another explosion
across town. This time the
victim was 50-year old
00:04:35
Cathy Sheets. Her husband, Gary, was the
former business partner of Steve
Christensen.
00:04:43
- It was real devastating to
have your mother killed on your
front doorstep. You feel that you're safe in
your home and that it's okay and
to have something
00:04:51
like that happen really
shattered your faith that things
are okay. - Once again, the fragments
recovered at the scene were
consistent with the pipe
00:05:00
bomb. Police found scraps of
brown paper near the blast with
the name of the victim's husband, Gary Sheets.
00:05:09
- The time I got to the second
scene, I already knew what I was
looking for if there were going to be
similarities. Within 25 minutes,
I had found the
00:05:19
similarities. Within five hours,
I found a component. That
component was a very small
00:05:26
piece of a Mercury switch. - A Mercury switch was found at
the Christensen bomb site as
well.
00:05:36
A Mercury switch is a glass ball
filled with Mercury, a liquid
metal. When the Mercury is tilted, it
completes the electrical
circuit,
00:05:45
triggering the explosion. - We had a lot of similarities
and they would include the
cardboard container, the
00:05:54
types of tape, more than one
type, the size of the pipe that
which includes the diameter and the length. The
explosive inside, the type of
00:06:02
explosives inside. - Gun powder from both bomb
sites were sent to the Federal
Bureau of Alcohol,
00:06:10
Tobacco and Firearms lab for
analysis. They store samples of
every known gun powder manufactured. The
particles of gun powder from the
pipe bombs were placed on
00:06:22
a profile projector, which
measures the size and shape of
the granules. When this
00:06:29
information was entered into a
computer database, the gun
powder was identified as
00:06:35
Hercules Bullseye brand. The
same type was used in both
bombs. Since Radio Shack
00:06:43
batteries and electrical
components were found at both
bomb sites, detectives checked all of the Radio Shack
stores in the Salt Lake City
area. Records showed
00:06:54
that an individual by the name
of Mike Hansen had recently
purchased the same components from this Radio Shack
store in Holiday, Utah. The
store had an address
00:07:04
for Mike Hansen but it was a
vacant lot and detective
suspected that the name was
00:07:10
an alias. The only individual
who reported seeing anything
suspicious at the Sheet's
00:07:16
home was a 13-year old neighbor,
Aaron Taplick. He told police he
saw a tan Toyota minivan turn into the
Sheet's driveway around
midnight, the night before
00:07:28
the bombing. He said the van
drove out of the Sheet's
driveway a few minutes later
00:07:33
but the boy could offer
no description of the driver. - I think we have a
serial bomber out there.
00:07:39
What was entering in my mind was
how soon are we gonna have
another bombing? - It was a very short wait.
00:07:52
While investigators were sifting
through the rubble of the
bombings which killed Steve Christensen
and Cathy Sheets, there was a
00:07:59
third explosion the very next
day. This time, it happened in a
parked car in downtown Salt Lake City. The
victim was 30-year old Mark
Hoffman, a rare documents
00:08:13
dealer. Unlike the other two
victims, Hoffman survived the
blast. Hoffman's injuries were severe.
The explosion blew off
00:08:23
the tips of two fingers, a
portion of his right knee cap
was missing and a piece of metal was
imbedded in his knee.
00:08:31
- Mark Hoffman said that he
pulled open the door and the
package fell from the seat of the car onto the
floorboard of the car, at which
time it exploded
00:08:38
and he was injured. - Mark Hoffman had no connection
with the CFS Corporation. He was
a well known and
00:08:46
respected rare documents dealer
who specialized in early Mormon
currency and documents. But Mark Hoffman and
Steve Christensen knew one
another.
00:08:57
Christensen was a collector of
rare books and documents and had
purchased some items
00:09:02
from Hoffman over the years. One
thing detectives knew, the bombs
which killed Steve Christensen, Cathy Sheets,
and seriously injured Mark
Hoffman were all
00:09:14
made by the same individual.
They also knew that evidence
inside Mark Hoffman's car was inconsistent with what
he told police. Hoffman said
someone placed a
00:09:28
package on the seat of his car
and when he opened the car door,
the package fell onto
00:09:33
the floor and exploded. But when
a pipe bomb explodes, the end
caps blow out in a
00:09:41
straight line. One of the end
caps blew a hole through the
side door on the passenger side. The other end
cap was found in Mark Hoffman's
knee.
00:09:53
This important detail told
investigators that the bomb did
not explode on the floor
00:09:58
of the car as Hoffman indicated. - It didn't line up with the
exploding bomb. We can't change
that because of the
00:10:05
holes in the vehicle. That's the
truth, it's not taking the
injured pieces of the
00:10:10
individual, putting them so they
come in contact with the bomb. - The injury to Hoffman's knee
indicated that his right knee
was on the driver seat
00:10:21
at the time of the explosion.
And the injuries to Hoffman's
fingers indicated that he had been touching the
bomb when it exploded.
00:10:30
- So now we have an injured
hand, an injured leg and I know
the attitude the pipe bomb was in. I also know
that he has uninjured body
parts, the other
00:10:45
leg is in very good shape.
There's not even any burn
damage. So I have part of him outside the car,
part of him inside the car.
00:10:53
- The evidence revealed that the
bomb exploded over the center
console, in between the two front seats
and not on the floor of the
vehicle
00:11:02
as Hoffman indicated. When police searched Mark
Hoffman's home, they found a
high school letter jacket
00:11:11
with the letter missing, similar
to the one Bruce Passey saw on
the delivery man
00:11:16
in the elevator on the morning
of Steve Christensen's murder. Even more alarming, police
discovered that Hoffman owned a
tan colored
00:11:26
Toyota minivan similar to
the one the teenage boy saw driving into the Sheets'
driveway the night before the
bombing.
00:11:35
Inside Hoffman's van, police
discovered a single flake of gun
powder. Tests revealed that it was
Hercules Bullseye gun powder,
the same type used
00:11:46
in making the pipe bombs. - We had no idea why Mark
Hoffman, if he were the
perpetrator, would kill a close
00:11:56
associate and friend of his,
Steve Christensen. And for all
we knew, he didn't even know Cathy Lee
Sheets.
00:12:02
- Hoffman told police that he
was a victim and even took a lie
detector test to prove
00:12:05
his innocence. - We had him take a polygraph
and he passed with flying
colors. Not even close.
00:12:13
He passed with a high number
saying that he was not deceptive
and that he did not
00:12:16
do the bombings. - Despite the polygraph results,
investigators were suspicious of Mark Hoffman since the
scientific evidence was
inconsistent
00:12:27
with his description of the
bombing. On the day of Steve
Christensen's murder, Mark
Hoffman was scheduled to meet
00:12:35
with Mormon church officials to
discuss some early Mormon
documents he was selling
00:12:40
known as the McLelland
collection. Steve Christensen
was active in the Mormon church and was asked to
attend that meeting in order to
certify that the
00:12:49
documents were authentic. - As I was inquiring about who
examined the documents, it was
my feeling
00:12:59
it had never been examined
forensically. - George Throckmorton was
asked to do just that,
00:13:05
to use scientific forensic
methods to find out whether some
of the world's leading experts
had been fooled.
00:13:16
Despite the fact that Mark
Hoffman passed a lie detector
test, bomb experts from the
00:13:21
Federal Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms were
convinced that Mark Hoffman
00:13:27
was inside his automobile,
possibly arming the bomb, when
it accidentally exploded.
00:13:32
[explosion] The scientific evidence
supported their theory but
missing was a motive.
00:13:42
- How do you prove Mark Hoffman
was a murderer is you first
prove that he was a con-man, that his whole life
was based upon fraud.
00:13:50
- George Throckmorton is a
forensic document examiner who
was asked to examine the rare documents Mark Hoffman
had sold over the years.
00:13:59
He compared them to other rare
documents the Mormon Church had
in its vault from the same time period
which Hoffman had nothing to do
with.
00:14:09
Under ultraviolet light, many of
the documents Hoffman sold
turned blue. This was not the case with the
documents the Mormon Church
obtained
00:14:19
from other sources. Under a
microscope, Throckmorton noticed
that the ink on Hoffman's documents
ran in one direction.
00:14:30
In the other documents, the ink
was absorbed by the paper
uniformly, spreading in all directions.
And Throckmorton discovered
00:14:39
microscopic cracks in the ink on
the documents Hoffman uncovered. Throckmorton calls it
alligatoring and there was none
of this
00:14:49
in any of the other documents. - At this point, it made us say
something's wrong but we don't
know what.
00:14:57
Why are Hoffman's documents
different than the other
documents? - When Mark Hoffman's home was
searched following the bombings,
police discovered
00:15:05
a book which contained a recipe
for Irongallotannic ink, an ink
that was common in the 1800s.
Throckmorton made a batch of
that ink and wrote with it on
00:15:17
some paper. He then applied an
ammonious solution which is
known to age paper. The test document displayed the
same blue haze under ultraviolet
light. And when it
00:15:30
was hung to dry, the ink ran in
one direction and exhibited the
same alligatoring condition as the
Hoffman documents. Finally,
Throckmorton turned
00:15:43
his attention to the Oath Of A
Freeman, believed to be the
oldest printed document
00:15:48
in the United States. It was a
document Mark Hoffman said he
purchased in a used
00:15:53
bookstore and was valued at over
$1 million. It had been
authenticated by both the Library of Congress and the
FBI. When Throckmorton looked at
it closely, he
00:16:08
found a curious anomaly, there
was a tiny flaw in the letter M. - That microscopic flaw was not
caused by old age, was not
caused by a printing
00:16:21
problem, it was caused through
the photographic process.
Therefore that document had to go through that
photographic process.
00:16:30
- The flaw looked like emulsion
on a photographic negative. This
modern printing method did not exist in
1638 when the Oath Of A Freeman
was allegedly
00:16:41
written. - Therefore it had to be
counterfeit. - Inside Hoffman's home, police
discovered a receipt from a
printing company in Utah.
00:16:52
It was for a printing plate for
the Oath Of A Freeman document.
The printing company thought the plate was
used to print facsimiles. In
fact it was.
00:17:04
Hoffman took the plate, added
the old ink recipe and a piece
of old paper to create
00:17:10
the forgery and offered it for
sale as an original. On the
receipt was the name Mike Hansen but it included Mark
Hoffman's telephone number. It
was the same name
00:17:24
used at the Radio Shack store to
purchase the bomb components. Throckmorton's forensic document
examination proved that Hoffman
was a
00:17:35
fraud and a forger. Prosecuters
believe that Steve Christensen
was on to Mark Hoffman and was about to
expose him as a liar and
possibly a fraud.
00:17:49
Hoffman sensed this and decided
to murder Steve Christensen with
a pipe bomb. But Hoffman wanted Christensen's
murder to appear to be
business-related,
00:18:02
so he delivered a diversionary
bomb to Christensen's former
business partner, Gary Sheets.
00:18:12
The boy living across the street
saw a van similar to Hoffman's
pull into the Sheet's driveway around
midnight.
00:18:24
Hoffman placed the pipe bomb
package on the front walkway to
the Sheets' home. The next morning, Hoffman
delivered the primary bomb to
Steve Christensen's office
00:18:40
building. It was packed with
more than a hundred masonry
nails, leaving no doubt
00:18:46
that its intent was to kill, not
injure. The jewelry store owner
identified Mark Hoffman as the
man wearing the letter
00:18:56
jacket in the elevator. He was
carrying a package addressed to
Steve Christensen.
00:19:08
Hoffman left the package outside
Christensen's office door. It was armed with a
motion-sensitive Mercury switch
set to explode
00:19:17
when tilted at a 45 degree
angle. - Bye. Have a good day, Steve. - Steve Christensen picked up
the package when he arrived for
work.
00:19:34
[explosion] Two hours later, Cathy Sheets
noticed the package left outside
her home addressed to
00:19:43
her husband, Gary. [explosion] Mark Hoffman was arrested and
charged with two counts of
murder and for theft
00:19:58
by deception for selling forged
documents. Hoffman pleaded
guilty to second degree
00:20:04
murder and was convicted. A
parole board recommended that he
spend the rest of his
00:20:08
life in prison. Ironically, many of Hoffman's
forgeries are still on the
market.
00:20:17
- Every single document that I
looked at had been forged or
manipulated in some way
00:20:23
to make it valuable and I looked
at over 600 of his documents.
Every single one of
00:20:28
them was forged. He never found
a single genuine document ever. - And the deception turned a
mild mannered documents dealer
into a killer.
00:20:39
- I think Mark is probably the
most evil of people that I
worked with. Serial bombers by and
large are much more evil.
00:20:49
They don't want to just hurt
you, they want to continue to
hurt many people. - And how common is it for a
bomber to blow himself up
00:21:00
when handling one of his own
bombs? - Not common enough.