How the Austin bombings are ‘hauntingly similar’ to Utah’s Mark Hofmann case

Mark Hofmann “immediately” came to mind when former Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis saw news coverage of a string of bombings in Austin, Texas.

It’s been 33 years since Hofmann killed two people in Salt Lake City with packages containing pipe bombs, injuring himself when one went off in his car.

DePaulis, who was mayor at the time, recalls the tense response from a community gripped by fear. Though the bombings lasted two days, it felt much longer.

“It seemed to everyone a long time because of the sense of unease,” DePaulis told The Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday. “It was a such a shock to have any kind of bomb go off.”

Mike Carter, a former Tribune reporter who covered the Hofmann case and now works for The Seattle Times, said the sense of panic was heightened in the midst of bomb attacks by Ted Kaczynski, nicknamed the Unabomber, who used modern technology to target victims. Some of Kaczynski’s bombs were either mailed from or detonated in Utah — injuring a Salt Lake City computer store owner in 1987.

“People were checking under their cars, in the dog house,” Carter said. “We were all paranoid.”

And as he watched events in Texas unfold, Carter says the attacks, especially at the beginning, were “hauntingly similar” to Hofmann’s.

In the Hofmann and Texas cases, he says, the bombs were fairly sophisticated, concealed in packages that detonated when they were opened or moved. The suspects in each case was eventually injured by a bomb in his own vehicle.

On Oct. 15, 1985, Hofmann, then 30, delivered a nail-filled pipe bomb to businessman and documents collector Steven Christensen’s downtown office. The device killed Christensen. Another bomb was delivered to the home of Christensen’s former business associate Gary Sheets, and it killed his wife, Kathleen Sheets, when she opened it.

The next day, Hofmann became a suspect when he was seriously injured by a third bomb that exploded in his car. It was parked downtown, near Deseret Gym, which has since been torn down.

Hofmann later said the explosion was an attempt at suicide, but others — including Carter — believe Hofmann accidentally dropped the bomb, which exploded on the floorboards on the passenger side of the car, on his way to target a third victim.

In recent weeks, bombings in and near Austin have killed two people and injured four, not including the suspect.

The first in the series of Texas bombings killed a 39-year-old man March 2, when he opened a parcel left on a doorstep. Ten days later, two other parcel bombs were left on doorsteps and detonated. One killed a 17-year-old boy and injured a woman, and the other injured another woman. A fourth bomb wounded two men at a shipping facility Sunday night after it was triggered by a tripwire, which police said demonstrated a “higher level of sophistication.”

Then early Tuesday, a fifth package, believed to have been bound for Austin, exploded at another shipping facility in Schertz, Texas.

In what officials hope to be the last of the Austin bombings, a suspect detonated a bomb in his vehicle early Wednesday morning. Police had tracked the suspect’s car to a hotel parking lot in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin. They followed him as he drove onto a frontage road near Interstate 35, where he stopped his car.

As SWAT officers closed in on the car, the bomb went off, and the blast injured the suspect and knocked an officer backward. An officer then shot at the suspect, who died in the vehicle, police have said. It was unclear whether the man died from the explosion or the gunfire.

While authorities have not publicly released his name, the suspected bomber has been identified as Mark Anthony Conditt, of Pflugerville, Texas, according to two officials familiar with the investigation who spoke to The Associated Press. Police said Conditt was 24, while some public records suggested he was 23.

After the Wednesday explosion, police told reporters in Texas that they were still investigating a motive behind the violent acts. They also admonished area residents to be “vigilant,” as police did not know where Conditt had been over the last 24 hours and were concerned that he could have sent out additional bombs.

That could take time, according to George Throckmorton, who worked on Hofmann’s case as a forensic document examiner and spent time as a special agent with the Utah Attorney General’s Office.

“The rule is, it takes weeks and sometimes months,” to narrow down a motive, Throckmorton said.

Though Hofmann became a suspect soon after the two victims were killed, the investigator said the team didn’t determine the motive for Hofmann’s attacks until January 1986 — three months after the Salt Lake City bombings.

Hofmann had spent years forging documents purported to have been created by early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Hofmann created his infamous Salamander Letter, among other documents, with the hope that Mormon leaders would pay a significant amount of money to keep the potentially embarrassing material private. The fabricated letter, purportedly written by early Mormon convert Martin Harris, described the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith conversing with a spirit that first appeared as a white salamander.

Suspicions were circling about the authenticity of Hofmann’s so-called discoveries, and around the time of the bombings, Hofmann had made a deal with Christensen and other buyers to sell them a collection of journals and letters from an early Mormon apostate, William E. McLellin, though he had no such collection, and he would have needed months to forge the documents.

But Christensen threatened to expose him as a fraud unless he delivered the collection by Oct. 15, 1985, Hofmann wrote in a 1988 letter to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole. The ultimatum led Hofmann to take “drastic measures,” in order to divert attention from himself.

“The most important thing in my mind was to keep from being exposed as a fraud in front of my friends and family,” Hofmann wrote. “When I say this was the most important thing I mean it literally. I felt I would rather take human life or even my own life rather than to be exposed.”

Fooling people, Hofmann wrote, gave him a “sense of power and superiority.”

In January 1987, Hofmann pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated murder and avoided the death penalty by agreeing to give interviews to prosecutors that dealt mostly with his forgery techniques and his knowledge of Mormon history.

Hofmann reportedly survived two suicide attempts in prison: once in 1988 and once in 1990. Today, Hofmann continues to serve a life sentence at the state’s prison in Gunnison.

Although it’s been decades since Hofmann was sent to prison, Throckmorton says he’s asked to speak about the case five to 10 times a year, and interest in the case has led to conventions and documentaries focused on the case.

While both sets of bombings are out of the ordinary for the communities in which they occurred, Hofmann’s work was “very deliberate,” Throckmorton said, while police haven’t released much information on how the victims in the Austin may be connected. Throckmorton doesn’t want to draw premature conclusions.

“I spent over 40 years in law enforcement,” Throckmorton said. “I don’t think there’s ever going to be anything that can surprise me. ... I don’t ever jump to conclusions anymore. I’ve seen so many things that have changed in the courses of the investigations. I like to look at all the evidence. After doing it for so long, I never jump to any opinions.”

It took time for community members in Salt Lake City to recover from the distress they felt as Hofmann’s case unraveled, DePaulis said. Police continued to warn people that “there could be another suspect, there could be another bomb out there,” just as they are in Texas.

“All in all, it was a very scary time,” he said. “It took a while for that to fade.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.