The Salt Lake City Bombings | The Criminal Mindset

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It's January 7th, 1987, in one of Salt Lake City's quiet middle class neighborhoods.

Inside his modest home, attorney Ronald Yengich gets up to answer the door.

He's been waiting for these visitors all morning.

Ron's client, 32-year-old Mark Hofmann, follows him down the hall to greet the guests.

There on the front porch are Robert Stott, one of the men prosecuting the murder charges against Mark, and David Biggs, an attorney for the county.

Mark hangs back from the door a little, like a timid child.

But when Robert and David step inside, the men shake hands, all politeness and tight smiles.

They've been on opposite sides of the courtroom for the better part of a year now, and this day was a long time coming.

Ron leads the group into the dining room, where they all take a seat around the table.

Mark reaches out and grabs a pastry from a tray, starts picking at it while Ron gets the ball rolling on the conversation.

Then the three lawyers turn to look at Mark.

In the past few days, Mark's deal has been finalized.

In exchange for admitting to what he did, he won't face the death penalty.

Now it's time for him to start talking.

First off, Mark finally says it out loud.

He made the bombs that killed Stephen Christensen and Kathy Sheets just over a year ago.

After the awkward start to the meeting, it's like Mark is excited to talk about his crimes, like he's been waiting to let it all out this whole time.

He explains that he built his first bomb in school after he read about how to make black powder in an encyclopedia.

Once he decided to kill Steve, making the explosives was easy.

It was just a matter of shopping for all the pieces he needed and putting everything together.

It's like he's talking about baking a cake, a cake he's very, very proud of.

It's two hours of tedious detail and explanations, punctuated by occasional questions from the attorneys.

Eventually, they get to the subject of how Mark chose his victims.

Mark shrugs as he lists off the candidates he considered.

The college friend he swindled out of thousands and who had been on his case about it, Brent Ashworth, the collector who'd been one of Mark's best customers for years.

Both were appealing for different reasons, Mark says, but Steve Christensen just made the most sense in the end.

In his head, Steve's death would solve everything, and a second bomb would throw people off the scent.

It's all so matter of fact for Mark, and he's so clinical in his confession that it's unnerving.

The rest of the pastries sit untouched in the middle of the table.

No one else feels much like eating after hearing how Mark Hofmann's mind works.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In October of 1985, when investigators were sure they figured out who was behind the Salt Lake City bombings, they turned their attention to proving it.

There had been plenty of theories about who could have pulled off such attacks and what their motives might have been.

But once Mark Hofmann blew up his own car with a third bomb, there was little doubt in the detective's minds.

Mark was their man.

Now they just needed evidence that supported the notion.

Because a hunch, even a really good one, doesn't usually hold up in a court of law.

If they wanted to nail Mark Hofmann, they needed to figure out how he did what he did, and more importantly, why.

Over a period of many weeks, detectives traveled around the country, searching for answers about Mark's numerous document deals.

What they couldn't work out was what could inspire a successful businessman like him to turn to such attention-grabbing murders.

Slowly, the pieces started falling into place, though.

And when forensics document experts proved that Mark had made his name and fortune by selling incredible forgeries, officials knew they had enough to press charges.

Eventually, Mark owned up to his crimes and eagerly told the authorities all about them.

But he didn't tell them everything.

After a while, Mark lost interest in talking about himself and stopped giving interviews to the men who put him behind bars.

So, in the decades since his crimes, people have been left to wonder about what was going on in the mind of this ruthless killer.

Here to discuss Mark Hofmann, criminology, and the path from forgery to murder is author and professor of forensic psychology, Dr.

Katherine Ramsland.

Katherine Ramsland, thank you so much for joining me here today on American Criminal.

Thank you for having me.

I'm looking forward to it.

You have been researching and writing and teaching people about criminals for a very, very long time.

What drew you into this field?

Well, I didn't originally aspire to do this.

I actually taught philosophy before I did this, and I was a writer, but I was working for the Court TV website writing about crime stories, and decided to go back to school and get a master's in forensic psychology.

And I carried on from there with multiple more graduate degrees and then began teaching the subject.

Well, this makes you the perfect person to answer this question.

Will you please explain the difference between forensic psychology and criminal psychology?

Well, it's a little complicated.

There's forensic psychology, there's criminology, there's criminal psychology, there's criminalistics, and profiling.

All of those are distinct, but they overlap.

Forensic psychology is wherever psychology interacts with the court or investigative system.

So things like competency, evaluations, mental state, time of the offense, prison psychology, etc.

Criminology has more of a sociological context and it uses a lot of trend analysis and looking at what factors contribute to crime and how can intervention help.

And then criminal psychology is kind of a subset of forensic psychology that is focused very much on the criminal mind and motivation and treatment and developmental factors.

Gotcha.

Okay, everybody, does that make sense?

There you go.

There's your answer to that.

So obviously, most people have not studied this field and yet you cannot throw a rock without hitting somebody who is completely fascinated by true crime.

They love it.

Why do you think that is?

I think there are a variety of motivations, but probably the number one factor is the puzzle, the puzzle of human beings who become offenders, especially very serious, extreme offenders, but also the puzzle of an investigation, a whodunit, a missing person, where did they go, what happened to them, why did they leave?

So I think the puzzled nature of it is part of the intrigue because you often don't know the ending.

And even if you do, you're still very interested in how to get there.

So that's mostly it.

But there are also people fascinated by true crime because they are fascinated by the criminal mindset.

They want to understand how a person could have gotten that way.

I'm just about to go to a big conference with all kinds of true crime things.

And there are so many different topics that draw people in.

It's hard to kind of generically say why it's so fascinating.

Yeah, it's true.

It's almost like there are so many subsets now.

You know, it's very, very interesting.

So speaking of the puzzle aspect of it, let's talk about Mark Hofmann as a puzzle.

This was a guy for all intents and purposes who was supported as a child.

His parents thought he could do no wrong.

Good prospects, he was in college.

What makes a guy like that decide one day, I'm going to forge documents.

This is going to be my thing.

Way before college, he was still a teenager, a young teenager, when he was collecting coins and he wanted to see if he could take an ordinary dime and make it into a minted dime with a special D, kind of raised D's insignia on it that made it much more valuable.

He wanted to see if he could turn a dime into that.

And he did.

And it was certified essentially by an official body, which as a kid, gave him this feeling of importance, accomplishment, one-upsmanship, because he had fooled the highest authority in the land on this stuff.

And he realized he could get away with these things.

And it was exciting.

There had been very little risk involved.

And it proved that he had this kind of skill even as a kid.

So he began developing that sense of a deceptive lifestyle right from the start.

And it carried on.

So even by the time he was in college, he was studying church history.

He was in the Mormon church.

He was studying history and finding contradictions, according to him.

And if he ever wanted to really feel superior to someone, it would be to fool the church elders, the apostles, the people who protect all the church's documents.

And so he thought if he could forge some, that he would make them look like fools, but he would be superior to them.

And so it was always about putting himself in a position where he was making authorities look like fools, and he had this secret.

It was something that really satisfied him.

Right, and you've talked about him as someone who was amused by his own crimes.

Do you think that that's what it was, some kind of revenge on the church once he started to find disparities in its history and all of that?

It was initially that, but then he also made money.

Right.

So that was, you know, icing on the cake, essentially.

Initially, he had real scorn for some of the church teachings.

He wanted to kind of show them up and to just see what he could get away with.

And the more he did that, the more he realized the church was hiding secrets, according to him, and that made him feel like now he was really in the driver's seat because he knew that they had documents that he had made that they believed were genuine documents, and at any time he could pull the plug on them, and that made him feel very powerful.

But also, you can't discount the financial aspect of it because it's the financial aspect that really gets him into trouble.

And it's interesting too because he admired Joseph Smith, even though he knew all of the bad stuff about him, essentially.

So do you think it's possibly a case of one scam artist admiring someone who he perceives as a scam artist?

A little bit of professional envy or admiration?

That's what I think.

Because we do, we find that a lot where a con artist will recognize somebody who also got away with this on a large scale, on an impressive scale.

And they will want to not only duplicate those efforts, but be superior to them.

So before he started committing murders, he pretty much thought his crimes were victimless because they were nonviolent.

Do you find that that's common?

I know Frank Abagnale sort of felt the same thing.

Mark Landis, the art forger, he never thought that he was doing anything wrong.

So is that a common thing when it comes to nonviolent offenders?

Yeah, the idea that they are not hurting anybody is a justification that they're fooling themselves because overall they are going to really hurt people.

Somebody's going to get hurt.

I mean, it wasn't just the church's documents he was forging.

He was forging all kinds of documents of early writers, early American documents.

People were buying it and essentially paying money for things that were worth nothing.

So there were victims.

He just wasn't understanding how he was hurting people, and in part because he did not care.

So when you talk about there were no victims, it's because you have the kind of mindset that because it's not violent, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter who you hurt.

Now, do you think that goes as deep as sociopathy, or do you think that that's just sort of a common trait when you're not actually punching somebody in the face, you don't really think you're hurting them?

Well, I personally don't use the word sociopath because there's actually no diagnostic instrument for it.

I use psychopath, and there are plenty of credible tests and assessments that help us understand a person like this.

And I think Mark Hofmann, although I don't believe he was ever put to any of these tests, I think he shows psychopathic tendencies in his lack of remorse, in his sense of superiority, his narcissism, the way he used people, and even the idea that, and this is later in his case, that he might harm people on the parole and pardons board who he didn't agree with their opinion, so he wanted to bring harm to them.

So these are all the kinds of things you would expect from someone we think of as a psychopath.

He could have come clean before he started blowing people up.

He could have come clean about all this.

But instead, he decided to start murdering people.

Why do you think that that was?

Do you think he just thought he was in too deep and couldn't get out?

Do you think, in for a penny, in for a pound, basically, you know?

I don't think he could come clean.

I don't think there was a point at which he felt as if he could step out of it, in part because he had, it's a Ponzi scheme.

He had juggled all kinds of things against each other and everything had to work out.

For example, he had to sell the one document, the Oath of a Freeman, for this substantial sum, up to a million dollars, in order to pay off debts for other things.

So to have stepped out would have collapsed his whole family into financial ruin, would have exposed him as a liar.

People like this, he's built his whole life from a series of layers of deception.

Who he is, even how he identifies, is a scam artist and a good one.

And to lose all that is to lose essentially himself.

So it wasn't just a matter of, well, I've made some bad decisions, now I'm going to step out and apologize.

It wasn't that, because he was facing shame, humiliation and financial ruin for him and his family.

And I think that that was just not something he could have tolerated.

It's just kind of a perfect storm of bad decisions.

One bad decision spiraling and oof.

Right, they all are interconnected in a way.

It makes my neck sweat just to think about it, like, ugh.

Well, I want to say that people underestimate the role of humiliation in these things, shame and humiliation.

I think that plays a big part in some of the worst crimes we've ever seen people do.

And I think with Hofmann being as narcissistic and immature as he was, the idea of facing humiliation when he had convinced himself that he was this genius was just too much.

It's interesting.

I mean, I wonder, you know, you often, you look at people in certain professions and you're like, oh, he's a basketball star, but that same skill set could be applied to this and he would also be a star in this world if he chose to go into this field.

And so I wonder with people like Mark Hofmann and other famous career criminals, if they had gone into something else, what would that field have been and what would their good contributions could have been?

I know that's a rabbit hole to go down to, but I think it's an interesting thing to think about.

Well, I think he was, he was a very bright man and boy.

And I think that's partly what got him in trouble is he's kind of the smartest guy in the room, so to speak, and is full of it, essentially.

So he doesn't want to lose that status, even though it's mostly in his own head.

But you really can't take away from the fact that he was pretty smart and he could have applied that to something else and done very well.

He certainly knew how to manage money up to a point until he got himself dug in.

He certainly knew how to look for things.

He was a great researcher in terms of looking for the kinds of documents that would be valuable, the kinds of devices he would need to make these really extraordinary fakes.

I mean, when you look at his mechanisms and even the authenticators were astonished how well he put this stuff together and did fool the FBI labs and a lot of other people, one of the document examiners, Throckmorton, who was considered one of the best in the world on this, couldn't figure out how did he, if this was a fake, the document that he was looking at, how could he have made the ink bleed through the paper in a way that made it look so aged?

Because that's the way that particular type of ink would have acted on old paper.

And then you find out that Hofmann had used a vacuum cleaner on the other side to pull it through.

So, wow, that's clever, very clever.

It's ingenious to have spent all of that time figuring out how to game the system.

So you've written a lot about serial killers and other violent criminals.

You've worked with Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, on his biography.

Given everything that you have learned, do you think that there's a way to spot somebody like this coming fairly early on, or is this something that's always going to take us by surprise?

Well, most predators who are aiming to be fraudsters count on the superficial way that most people operate and the expectations that most people have of other people.

And so they learn how to develop facades that will be convincing enough that they can pass as not just normal, but caring, you know, authorities and things that they actually have no authority on.

You know, whatever it is they need, they have watched people enough to know how can I duke them.

So that's always going to be our disadvantage, is that we don't go around expecting people to be doing this to us.

And when someone's like a member of the church, a family man, someone who appears to be well off, and no one's expecting that person to have built all of that on fraud.

So a predator counts on that, and they manipulate it, often successfully, for years.

So what we're looking at here is not just the psychology of a con artist, but of a predator, people who look for easy marks that they can manipulate to their advantage.

And that's a very different kind of psychology than most people are used to dealing with.

However, that being said, in terms of self-protection, not only to be mindful of people who want to involve you in a business deal, for example, but watch for lies.

Watch for things that are inconsistent in a person's life that they quickly cover over.

If they have a quick cover story and they pivot easily, that's the kind of person I would have some suspicion of and want to watch more closely.

Doesn't mean they're doing something, but that's the kind of person who's duping somebody, whether it's because they're having an affair, lying to their spouse or they're serial killers, while they have a cover story of an ordinary individual, whatever it is, they often slip up and say something that you catch them.

And if you are willing to follow that through, you may be able to trace that behavior to something even bigger.

So the problem is sometimes it's the spouse who catches it, and they have a lot invested in looking the other way and believing, oh, this is nothing.

Like, for example, I was just reading about the recent work on Herb Baumeister's former farm, Fox Hollow Farm, where they found 10,000 bone fragments, charred and crushed bone fragments, and they're piecing them together to see how many victims he actually had.

And it all started with finding a skull on the property.

His 15-year-old son found a skull on the property, and he very quickly said, oh, my grandfather had medical experiments.

No way is that skull a medical experiment, but his wife didn't follow through.

Now, she did later, and then when cops got on the property, they found the places where he had burned the bones of his victims.

But right away, if somebody says something that just doesn't sound right, you have to follow through on that.

Yeah, that's a really weird answer.

Oh, my grandfather did medical experiments.

Oh, somebody died randomly and probably got in a flood or something.

Who knows?

Exactly, but it's also weird to not respond to it.

Pfft.

In an investigation like this, when a bomb goes off, what are they trying to do to catch this guy or this woman at this point?

Is it just about physical evidence, or is this when your phone starts to ring and they start asking questions about behavior and about patterns and things like that?

Well, I mean, they're not calling anyone until they've done a victimology.

They have to first see why was this person targeted or this business was targeted.

So perhaps the first bomb was picked up by accident by somebody who was just in the building.

They have to try to figure out what was the bomb made of, who was the target, what were the circumstances, what was the timing?

Did anyone see somebody around the area before it went off?

I mean, there's a lot of aspects to the investigation just to try to recreate it.

They're also gonna be looking at the physical properties of the bomb, because often bombs have a signature element to them.

So there's another bomb which there was in the same day.

They're gonna compare them to see, could these both have been the same person?

And if they are, that's even more behavior because now you have two victims for the victimology.

You have to see how were they connected.

And as we know, the second victim, she picked it up by accident.

Wasn't intended for her, but she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, essentially.

Still, it probably was intended for her husband.

So what was her husband's connection to the first victim?

Detectives don't need to call any psychologist or anything like that for them to follow through on this.

It's only at the point at which they might come up against, you know, they've done everything they can and they kind of have a dead end.

So maybe they've connected a few people to those victims.

They might then turn to somebody with expertise in the psychology of bombers to say, what's the likelihood of one of these people being that person?

Now, they didn't have to take that much time because the third bomb was the bomber.

I have a theory about that third bomb.

They think that he dropped it, that it accidentally went off.

My theory is that he set it off on purpose trying to get hurt just enough so that he would be in the sphere, but not blamed for it.

He's a victim too, so it couldn't be him.

Do you think there's anything to that?

Almost.

That's my favorite answer.

Because I think had he wanted to do that, he could have just blown up the car and said he was a targeted victim.

And that would have gotten rid of the so-called McClellan documents because they would have been in the car, and he did have fragments of burned papers in there.

So he could have done that without hurting himself.

But he could have made it look like he was the target because it's his car.

However, the way the injuries were sustained and the way the bomb was in the car suggests that he picked it up and did something that rattled it and he dropped it by accident.

So that's more likely.

But I do think he could have intended to have blown up his car, and that would have achieved everything you just said without hurting him.

I almost passed the detective's exam.

Well, we don't actually know what he intended, but of course the suicide story saves face for him because he's a narcissist and he's trying to show that he's remorseful and it's better that he subtract himself out of the world.

That narcissism, do you think that that had something to do with the fact that once he actually got caught, he got really talky for a while?

Oh, yes.

Love to talk about the forgeries, love to talk about how he made the bombs.

You see this all the time.

Why do you think that it, again, is it hubris?

It's hubris, it's boasting, it's...

It is.

I would say not all the time, though.

Sure.

Because I sure wish the Long Island guy would start doing that.

I was living up there when they started to find all those bodies and I had just watched the interview that you had done about that guy and I didn't realize that they had caught him a few years ago.

Yeah, because he's narcissistic.

It would be nice to have him start, you know, telling the tale, so we don't always get them.

But once they know they're caught, they're cornered, it's over, they want to strut their stuff.

They want to show, see how superior I was.

I just want everybody to know that I'm the guy.

So it's a way to be the person he's always had in his mind.

He's always seen the headlines of Mark Hofmann outsmarted the entire Mormon church and the FBI and all the document examiners.

He's always seen those headlines in his own mind.

This is his way of getting them.

And then he suddenly stops talking.

Why is that?

Because I think what he wanted didn't happen.

I think that his, well, first of all, the confessions were to save his life.

That was the first thing, because otherwise he could have had the death penalty.

It was also a way to save his wife, because for all they knew, she was in on it.

So there were things that he was getting from that confession that he no longer gets.

But I will say, even though he stopped talking, then when Greg McCrary, the FBI agent that I co-wrote the book with, where we have a chapter on Mark Hofmann, he found a way to get him talking.

And then he kept talking and didn't stop talking.

So I think if you have the right approach, he will talk.

But unless he sees that there's something in it for him, why bother?

Out of curiosity, what was it that he did to get him talking?

What was the magic topic?

He avoided any talk of the crimes and talked to him about the stress.

He must have been under just kind of human things.

And then Hofmann began to edge into the conversation like, oh, you get me, you understand.

And then when McCrary wanted to know how he had done certain things, of course he couldn't resist telling him because by that time, and it wouldn't say he trusted him, but he felt comfortable enough with him to now take on that role of mentorship.

Oh, I'll tell you how I did this.

And once he was in it, you know, the narcissism, of course, kicked in.

But their strategy was two of them that went together.

Their strategy was to see which of us will he respond to and then the other one will recede and let it progress however it will.

And just being as low key as they possibly could be, just talking to him about his own experience like they cared about, you know, how he was feeling.

Do you think that the fact that he's such a massive narcissist has something to do with his lack of remorse?

Well, narcissists are like arrested development.

They're infantile.

They're like four-year-old kids who think the world is all about them and can't see beyond themselves.

So not seeing beyond yourself means you don't really connect enough to experience another person's pain.

He might have said things like, oh, I love my wife and my kids.

However, did he ever think about what was going to happen to them?

Likely, he didn't think anyone would ever discover it.

So he didn't have the kind of deep connection, what we call pro-social bonds, to help form what is a mature emotional response, which is remorse.

A narcissist is somebody who just hasn't matured.

But that moment when the maturation stops, why does it stop and what caused that?

Or did anything cause it?

Did they just decide that they're, I'm done, you know?

I think when he began to have success at duping people that became part of his desire to keep doing this and become more skillful at it, and that's a direction you take where you're taking it away from caring about others and caring about social norms and laws and whatnot.

I mean, he had already justified that none of this would hurt anybody, which is completely wrong.

Of course it hurt people.

I mean, if you saw the interviews with the various dealers who were, you know, he fleeced them.

Some of them were in financial ruin as a result of buying documents from him that turned out to be worthless.

And that's hurting people.

And he never saw it that way.

And I think he did not develop that sense of it.

Now, we'd have to really look a lot at his family dynamics, and that's something that's kind of lacking in the studies of him.

I mean, I've seen a few short interviews with his parents, but it really has a lot to do with the way they process things.

Because you could take three kids in the same family, and they're all going to process the way their parents treat them differently.

Some will be fine, others will whine about it and feel like they're victims.

Others will think that their parents were almost perfect.

So it really depends in part on the child and how they process things.

Absolutely.

Well, on that note, that is a lot to process.

And you had a book that came out on April 16.

Would you tell us a little bit about that, please?

Yes, that was an unusual book where I talked with a guy who, as a teenager, had been recruited by a predatory adult serial killer to kill other boys with him, alongside him.

And it's called The Serial Killer's Apprentice.

The person I interviewed for many, many hours, his name is Elmer Wayne Henley Jr.

And he was 15 when he was first recruited.

That's when he killed the first person.

He had wanted to be a minister, so I was very curious how someone like this could have been recruited, could have been vulnerable to this adult predator to the point where he would kill somebody, and not just once, but many times, and then also help with the burials.

So he was willing to talk with me about what that had been like, how he had been leveraged, what had been going on in his life.

He's been in prison for 50 years, and still it's all very fresh to him.

Gosh, 50, five zero?

Yes.

It's the first book where anyone has actually looked at the nuances of the accomplice relationship.

I am humbled that you decided to join us today.

This has been a really fascinating conversation, and I really appreciate you joining us.

Dr.

Katherine Ramsland here on American Criminal.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

That was my conversation with Professor of Forensic Psychology, Katherine Ramsland.

Her book, The Serial Killer's Apprentice, is available now.

From Airship, this is the final episode in our series on the Salt Lake City Bombings.

On the next season of American Criminal, a young prodigy with some big ideas takes the world of cryptocurrency by storm.

But just when Sam Bankman Fried looks set to achieve every goal he set for himself, one decision brings his empire crumbling to the ground.

We used many different sources while preparing this episode.

One we can particularly recommend is A Gathering of Saints, a true story of money, murder and deceit by Robert Lindsay.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases, we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio Editing by Mohammed Shazib.

Sound Design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing Producer Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham for Airship.