Introduction to the Series and Sandra Tanner

Part 1 of 2 · Ep. 1405

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to this super exciting special Mormon Stories podcast interview, where we kick off our exploration of the brand new Netflix series Murder among the Mormons by Jared Hess and Tyler Meesum, dear friends of mine, which is about the Mark Hoffman bombings. Before we launch into this amazing interview with Sandra Tanner, I just wanted to give you a few quick announcements and explanations about why this interview is so important. First off, Sandra's amazing. Second off, Sandra and Gerald Tanner were observers of the Mark Hoffman scandal for the five years that it was going on. It was actually seven years, you'll find out in the interview. So Sandra offers a really important perspective. Third is that Gerald Tanner played a really important role in discovering that the Salamander Letter, Mark Hoffman Salamander letter was a forgery. And he did that at least a full year before the bombings. And of course, if the church and or the media had paid any attention to Gerald, who had every incentive to simply accept the Salamander Letter, but instead had integrity and discovered it to be a fraud a full year before the bombings, so much pain and obviously two deaths would have been avoided. So that's another reason why it's important. And unfortunately, Tyler and Jared weren't able to discuss Gerald Tanner's role in discovering the forgery because the film didn't have enough time. So it's really important that that story get told here. And then finally, because Jared and Tyler had to focus on the basic story of, you know, Mark Hoffman and the bombings and they only had three hours to do it, they were not able to really get into the LDS Church or the Mormon Church's culpability in creating the environment that would lead to the bombings, in using Steve Christensen and others as human shields that made them vulnerable and exposed ultimately to the bombings, to creating the perception the Mormon Church leaders had some sense of discernment that would, you know, make people feel safe when really they were put in danger. And of course, how the Mormon Church was sort of obstructing the investigative process that could have made it a lot easier on the investigators to convict Mark Hoffman. So those are all really important reasons why this interview is so interesting and so important. Plus, it just gives more amazing background on Sandra and Gerald Tanner. In addition to Mormon Stories podcast episodes, I believe 472 to 475 that we've already done on Sandra Tanner. So, anyway, enjoy this episode. You're going to love it. And most importantly, you're going to love Murder among the Mormons by my dear friends, Jared Hess and Tyler Meesum. Check it out on Netflix and enjoy Mormon Stories Podcast and just we love you, Sandra Tanner and Gerald Tanner. All right, roll the tape. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is March 8, 2021, and we are kicking off this week, the beginning of about a week and a half to two weeks of, let's just say, a Mark Hoffman focus. Of course, March 3, five days ago, the documentary Murder among the Mormons was released on Netflix. Directed by my friends, I consider them dear friends, Jared Hess and Tyler Meesum. The movie has gone viral, as they say. It's on Netflix top 10 as I understand it, as of March 8, 2021, it's in the top three in many, many countries and of course within Mormonism and progressive Mormonism and post Mormonism. It has been widely viewed and there's a lot of buzz about it. I have discussed the Mark Hoffman interview on Mormon Stories podcast at least four times, if not more. My amazing interview with Sandra Tanner, which is the top 10 interview of all time. I also interviewed Brett Metcalf, which is another Top 10 Mormon Stories interview of all time. And then Dan Witherspoon interviewed Kurt Bench along with somebody else, and they talked for a couple hours about Mark Hoffman. And I'm pretty sure in my interview with Dan Vogel we discussed Mark Hoffman. At some point I'm going to need to go back and pull those excerpts out and create shorts of them or at least provide time codes because I think there's some really important stuff there that have not been cold. But what you're going to hear over the next, I am going to do my best to interview several people to give their reactions to Murder among the Mormons and also just their reflections on their understanding of the Mark Hoffman story. I'm not going to tell you now who all the people are that I'm going to interview, but they're going to be good. And then this is all going to culminate in an interview a week from today with Jared Hess and Tyler Meesum where we're going to do an in depth discussion about them, their interest in Mark Hoffman, all that they learned about Mark Hoffman and, and they're making the documentary and they've, they've given me the indication this will be their longest and most in depth interview that they probably will do. So I'm excited about that. But today we're kicking this off, bringing back to Mormon Stories one of my top heroes, if I can say that. I don't know if she'll like it, but. Sandra Tanner, welcome back to Mormon Stories podcast.

Sandra Tanner [00:05:24] Good morning.

John Dehlin [00:05:26] You made the joke coming in that you. You said you weren't sure who was more infamous, me or you, right? I'm not sure about that, but I think you deserve to be much more infamous in a good way than I do. What do you think about that?

Sandra Tanner [00:05:38] Well, I don't. Well, I've been at it a lot longer.

John Dehlin [00:05:41] A lot longer. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in. Thanks for joining us.

Sandra Tanner [00:05:46] Good.

John Dehlin [00:05:49] So we won't be going into detail on Sandra Tanner's story. I'll just give a quick highlight and Sandra, you can fill in the blanks. But basically, as I understand it, Sandra's husband was Gerald Tanner. And Sandra and Gerald were raised Mormon and lost their faith, I would say, in the early 1960s. Is that right, Sandra?

Sandra Tanner [00:06:10] Yes. Well, 1959, right?

John Dehlin [00:06:13] 1959, yeah. And basically they dedicated the rest of their lives to researching Mormon history and educating the world about factual Mormon history. Gerald passed away several years ago, and Sandra's still at it. So I really can't think of anybody who's done more work on investigating the truth about Mormon history and then sharing it with the world. I can't think of anyone who's done more than Geraldine Sandra Tanner. And that includes Dan Vogel. That includes Michael Quinn, Fawn Brody. Think of the biggest names. I don't know anyone who has spent more decades more, published more pages of writing and done more research and had as big of an impact as Gerald and Sandra Tanner. Do you want to correct me on any of that?

Sandra Tanner [00:07:03] Well, we've certainly been at it the longest. It's been over 60 years at this point. I hate to even admit that. My word.

John Dehlin [00:07:12] Well, there are organizations called Utah Lighthouse Ministry. You can find them in Salt Lake City today. You can find Sandra in Salt Lake City today. She has a house right next door to the office for Utah Lighthouse Ministry. And they, they have an amazing website, utlm.org Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [00:07:32] Right.

John Dehlin [00:07:33] And to this day, you can purchase pamphlets and writings and books and documents. But one of the amazing things is they've published all of that for free on the Internet. Is there anything you haven't made free on the Internet that you sell?

Sandra Tanner [00:07:50] Yes, we have a lot of our research that is just sold, but we have a lot of it also posted free on the Internet. And when I retire, my thought is to put everything that we've been able to put in a PDF file on the Internet for free. At that point, we aren't there yet.

John Dehlin [00:08:08] But so, like, in preparing for this interview today, I was immediately, through Google, brought to your website. And you've got several. You've got Mark Hoffman's Confessions. You've got at least one book that talks in detail, several chapters about Mark Hoffman, about all his forgeries, about Gerald's analysis of the forgeries.

Sandra Tanner [00:08:31] Right. Yeah. Gerald's book, Tracking the White Salamander is posted on our website in full, plus all our old newsletters. And if you go back and look at the newsletters in the 1980s, you can see the development of the story of his documents as we follow through and find out about them and put them in our newsletters.

John Dehlin [00:08:58] Yeah. And as I was doing research just this morning, like as an example, in multiple chapters, Gerald goes through and discusses each one of Hoffman's major forgeries, the history behind it. If there were attempts by the church to purchase it, to conceal it, it's discussed there. And Gerald even shares his analysis, not just after, but even before some. You know, it was known that Hoffman was a fraud. And this is a really valuable source of information.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:30] Right.

John Dehlin [00:09:31] Yeah. Yeah. Real quickly, how do you decide. How have you decided what to share on the Internet and what to sell, but not share on the Internet? Is there a rhyme or reason to it?

Sandra Tanner [00:09:41] Partly it's a matter of retyping it all. All our books were originally done on a typewriter, and so we have to retype them all to put them in a PDF format. And it just takes time. So we're gradually getting books into PDF and then we usually sell them to try to recoup a little of the money invested to try to get them ready for the Internet. But I guess the ones that we put up free were ones we thought were like the Salamander one. We put that book up online because we didn't think very many people would pay for it, and we wanted the public to be able to know the information.

John Dehlin [00:10:27] Okay. Well, it's. It's super valuable stuff. And so anyway, thank you so much for coming today to talk about Mark Hoffman. We're gonna. We're gonna dig really important stuff. I'll ask you guys to refer to Sandra's original interview for her life story and a lot of those details. But we may cover some of the same territory we covered when we talked about Hoffman today that we talked about with Sandra before. But let's begin at some point. I want to ask about your reactions to the documentary, but if it's okay, I think I want to just ask you some contextual questions first.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:05] Sure.

John Dehlin [00:11:06] And then ask you about the documentary. Is that okay? Okay. And a lot of these questions you may not be prepared to answer. And, you know, I just want to get your perspective on what, what you remember. Is that okay?

Sandra Tanner [00:11:20] Sure.

Mark Hofmann's Early Life and Loss of Faith

John Dehlin [00:11:20] Okay. So the first thing I wanted to talk about was Mark Hoffman's early. Your. Your understanding or impressions about Mark Hoffman's early life. And one of the big questions that people want to know is, was this guy mentally ill? And if I had a way that I would want to ask the question. Having a Ph.D. in psychology, a bit of a background in the field, there's this type of diagnosis called a personality disorder, and it's a separate thing from depression or anxiety. When you're talking about personality disorders, you're not talking about sort of like mental illness as a disease that you can acquire and then cure. So like depression or anxiety, a lot of times if it's situational, something happens, you get depressed, then you get a treatment, and then ultimately you get better over time. And that's kind of, you know, a certain class of disorders. And that's not quite accurate because you can have sort of genetically informed lifelong chronic depression or anxiety. And again, but, but, but personality disorders are a whole other category altogether. Things like narcissistic personality disorder, and the one that I think might be most applicable to Mark Kaufman, which is called antisocial personality disorder, which is a weird name because it, you would think antisocial, that just means you're kind of clumsy with people. But what my understanding of the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder is you have no conscience that you, you, you know, you kill cats when you're four because you just don't care. And when you hurt people, you just don't feel it. And so not all people with antisocial personality disorder become murderers, of course, but some do. And so, understanding what you know or have read about Mark Hoffman's childhood, do you have a sense that he had a conscience as a boy and as a teenager and even as a missionary? Do you know anything about that or have any thoughts or reflections on that?

Sandra Tanner [00:13:24] Well, I don't know that much about his childhood, but obviously when he went on his mission, he was living a lie. So at some point in his teen years, obviously he had come to a way of rationalizing behavior with what he knew. And of course, what I've read about it makes supposedly lost his faith in God when he was able to fake that dime with a mint mark on it. And it got authenticated. And so it was sort of like, well, anyone can fool anyone and God doesn't Do anything about it.

John Dehlin [00:14:07] So, okay, so what age was. Was he. Was that when he was like 12 or 13 or 14.

Sandra Tanner [00:14:13] Early teens.

John Dehlin [00:14:15] And tell us the story of what he did there that you.

Sandra Tanner [00:14:17] He was studying coins and saw that there were certain coins that had mint marks on them that made them more collectible. And I believe it was a dime of a certain year. I don't remember what year it was. I mean like 1941 or something. I don't remember what the year was, but that if it had a certain mint mark on it, it was worth a lot more money. And so he sets out to try to duplicate that mark on a dime and then he sends it in. I don't remember. Did he send it to the government?

John Dehlin [00:14:53] Yeah, I think to have it.

Sandra Tanner [00:14:55] To have it authenticated. And they wrote back, said, yeah, you got the real thing.

John Dehlin [00:14:59] Which increases its value.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:01] Yes. Which now makes it a valuable coin instead of just a 10 cent piece. So I suppose that must have been the launching of his forgery career once he realized he could fool the experts and he must have had the ego at that point to say, I could do this, whatever I want to do. I can create forgeries into the question

John Dehlin [00:15:27] of like mental illness. I, I would guess that he had to have been precocious because most 14 year olds are like comic books and playing soccer. So like he must have been precocious. So there's a high intelligence factor there. But the fact that he would maybe lie or tell a fib. I guess lots of teenage boys and girls would have done that throughout their life.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:51] Oh, we all have had our episodes in our teen years that we didn't tell our family about and it's a wonder we all lived through it. But Mark obviously was at a different level than the rest of us. I mean, I never ever thought about anything that involved.

John Dehlin [00:16:16] Yeah. So what makes you tie that experience with the dime to his loss of faith? Was it something you read or something from his.

Sandra Tanner [00:16:27] No, just my own. My own study of what he ended up doing. And then looking back on his life, trying to think, at what point does this crystallize in your mind? And I think that was an important factor. I know when he found out that his was it. His grandparents had practiced polygamy and it had been the big family secret. And he found that everyone had been lying to him about that, that there were obviously things that came into his teen life that that put him in a position of who gets to lie and how much do we believe people if even the good people get to lie so at some point he decides that there isn't a God, and all the stuff about Mormonism is not true. But he's in this evidently very, very strong LDS family and a very strong father, and evidently feels he has to go on a mission. And I'm sure there are many people that will be watching this that will sympathize with him.

John Dehlin [00:17:42] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:43] That a lot of people went on missions because of family pressure.

John Dehlin [00:17:47] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:49] But he evidently had already decided that Mormonism wasn't true. And I assume also that there wasn't a God.

John Dehlin [00:17:57] Yeah. There's this clip in the documentary that shows him as a boy burying a jar of coins and then going out and convincing his friends to go on a treasure hunt with him. And then, of course, he discovers the coins in front of his friends. And of course, that reminds me of Joseph Smith. Like, once you read about Joseph Smith's, you know, let's say years from like 1823 to 1827, that's like what Joseph Smith was doing. So that. But I mean, that gives me the impression that he was reading about folk magic and treasure digging in the 70s, I'm guessing, because during the Leonard Arrington years, if I'm trying to match up the dates, when was he 14 or when would that treasure digging thing with Hoffman have happened? And then what books or resources would he have had exposure to where he would have learned about the treasure digging? Because as I understand it, the church was denying that all through the 60s and 70s and even 80s. So do you have a sense for how he would have been learning about treasure digging in the 60s or 70s? And then if that might have contributed to his loss of faith, sort of studying controversial, forbidden, banned Mormon history. As a teenage boy in the late

Sandra Tanner [00:19:24] 60s, our friend Wes Walters, Presbyterian minister, was doing research on Mormonism because he had pastored in several areas where the Mormons had been, New York and Illinois. And he was in New York on a vacation doing research, looking for documents relating to Joseph Smith's 1826 money digging trial. And it was known at that time that there was claims of such an event, but evidence for it was very sparse. And Wes was doing all kind of research on the revivals in the 1820 time frame in looking at Joseph Smith's first vision. And so Wes was just foundational for a lot of the research that helped us in our studies as well.

John Dehlin [00:20:24] What was his last name again?

Sandra Tanner [00:20:25] Walters.

John Dehlin [00:20:26] And he lived where?

Sandra Tanner [00:20:28] In Marissa, Illinois.

John Dehlin [00:20:30] Okay. Oh, you mentioned that in our interview.

Sandra Tanner [00:20:31] Yes. And he co authored with Mike Marquardt the Book Inventing Mormonism, that signature books printed. But years before that book came out, Wes had done all of this primary research and he had gone to New York to look for documents relating to the trial. He found the docket papers for the judge and another county official. And I can't remember what his position was, but he found these documents of these papers. And so here was Justice Neely giving his costs to the county for what he needed to be reimbursed for, for this hearing with Mark, with Mark Hoffman, with Joseph Smith. And when that came out, this was a big announcement. This was a big find. Also his research on the 1824 revival in New York, that was obviously the one Joseph Smith went to, that didn't happen in 1820. And those got written up in different newspapers and articles and things.

John Dehlin [00:21:51] Around what years would those have been written up?

Sandra Tanner [00:21:54] 68 to 70.

John Dehlin [00:21:56] Okay. And those would have shown up in Salt Lake newspapers, maybe like the tribe.

Sandra Tanner [00:22:02] There would be things about this. Well, dialogue, BYU studies. There were different articles on this. And this. Wes's research really forced the church historians office to go back to New York and do more digging. I mean, from my point of view, I see it as the church telling their historians, we don't want any more surprises. You guys get back there and make sure that there's no other things coming out that are going to shock us. And they went, that's so funny. And so they went through all of this. So in the 70s, there was a lot of talk and articles published on the magic on the early 26 trial, because that was the glass looker thing and on the lack of the revival in 1820. So historical journals at that time were running articles on this and going into the magic of money digging. So it's not like it suddenly appeared on the scene when Mike Quinn did his book. His book comes at the end of years of everybody doing research on magic and money digging. Now, he expanded all, and he has a lot of information in his book, but. But he didn't start this. He was building on research that had been done before that.

John Dehlin [00:23:33] I have to ask you, how did this not. How did this alone not take the church down in the late 60s, early 70s? Like I'm thinking about, you know, I mean, the way that it's thought about now, it's like, oh, someone stumbles on Mormon stories or the CES letter, learns about things like the. The seer stone in the hat, and then they lose their faith. But. But if this stuff's coming out in newspapers in Utah and in Salt Lake City. How did this, not back then, cause the equivalent of this crisis of faith that we're now only seeing thanks to things like the CES letter or Mormon stories or other things?

Sandra Tanner [00:24:17] Well, because the Mormon Church itself didn't talk about it, everything went on as usual in the Ensign. Well, the improvement era back at the beginning of all this, and I mean, even like when they found the papyri in, what was that, 67 or so. I mean, the improvement era ran articles by Hugh Nibley trying to smooth everything over for the Saints that, don't worry, don't fear, we got it all under control. Abraham's good, it all checks out, we're fine. These aren't the droids you're looking for. And life moved on. And so if the church doesn't publicly talk about issues, the Saints at that time didn't know, there wasn't any Internet, there wasn't any podcasts. And so if it wasn't in the Ensign, it wasn't true.

John Dehlin [00:25:14] But what. But if it's in the newspapers, I mean, they read the newspapers and there would have been also, like, word of mouth, right?

Sandra Tanner [00:25:23] Faithful Saints didn't talk about these kinds of things. You brought it up to anyone and they just shut you down as a troublemaker, a liar. You just got that from anti Mormon people. If I talked to anyone about this, it was. I was just lying. I'd tell them about David Whitmer's statement or Martin Harris statement on this, and all that's just lies. And besides, David Whitmer left the church, so you can't trust him on anything. It's all just lies. Now it's. And I'm thinking, well, no, all the documents seem to show this. Everything we have from that time period shows this. Oh, no, no, you guys are all lying. You can't trust anyone that's left the church.

John Dehlin [00:26:01] What about the. So with the. What about the newspapers, though?

Sandra Tanner [00:26:04] Because, well, you do one story and then it's gone. I mean, they aren't talking about it every week, and so you cover it once and gone. And it's out of public memory. But the magazine, the scholarly publications like BYU Studies and Dialogue would have an article at different times on these things, but their readership was so small at that time that the average person would never know about it. And Dialogue was suspect, always was. You know, we aren't really sure, you know, how much to believe these guys, but even with BYU Studies, but how many people read them

John Dehlin [00:26:45] and then what they're. And so I'm trying to think about, like, what made the CES letter or Mormon story successful. We tried to orient. To the extent they've been successful. I want to say they're like, summarily successful. But what we tried to do was target just the average person and to do it with the right tone and the right approach, where people won't discount it from the start as a non starter, but instead go, okay, these guys are trying to be fair. They're just trying to tell the truth. And the only other thing that I can think of back then that wasn't super scholarly was your newsletter. Right. Because your newsletter was just trying to publicly share to the general public the basic facts. Right?

Sandra Tanner [00:27:34] Yes, but we were apostates.

John Dehlin [00:27:36] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:27:37] Not only we were apostates, we were two dummies with no education or credentials. And so all you. I mean, wow, through the years, all you had to do was say yes, but they were excommunicated. And that's like, oh, my word. They were running the drugs. You know, it just. It just had such a bad connotation. And people would come into the store and ask me, is it true you were excommunicated? I said yes, because I resigned. I quit. And so they fired me.

John Dehlin [00:28:12] But it was for history stuff. It was.

Sandra Tanner [00:28:14] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:28:14] And Gerald, too.

Sandra Tanner [00:28:16] Oh, yeah. We both resigned. And so. But they had. We wanted our names removed. And the only way you could get your name renewed removed in 1960 was murder, adultery, or apostasy.

John Dehlin [00:28:31] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:28:31] My friends all kidded me. We picked the most boring of the three. And so our great sin was we told him we wanted to quit.

Historical Research That Informed Hofmann's Forgeries

John Dehlin [00:28:45] Okay, so you're saying, if I'm hearing you right, that because of this work from Wes Walters and others that Mark hoffman in the 70s could have. Could have learned about. Go ahead.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:01] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:01] Well, could have learned about this stuff. Yes.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:04] But all he had to do is read Fawn Brodie. I mean, you really got the groundwork in Fawn Brody. She gives you the money, digging the magic, the seer stone, all of those things. I mean, it was a starting point for us. We started with Fawn Brody.

John Dehlin [00:29:18] Yeah. So if. If Hoffman was just some studious, precocious kid, if he had gotten a hold of Fawn Brody's book.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:25] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:29:26] In his early teens, that's where he would have learned about all the problems.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:29] Right? He has the blueprint.

John Dehlin [00:29:31] Yeah, he has a blueprint. Some. Some have said that, like, everything uncovered, since no man knows my history is just kind of like after log or pro, you know, epilogue. Like, she basically did it all.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:46] She gave us the Outline. And one friend said to me after reading our Mormonism, Shadow or Reality? He says, I read Brody and that gave me the general overview. But then I read your book and that gave me all the details behind the overview.

John Dehlin [00:30:03] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ye. But she got a lot, right? Right?

Sandra Tanner [00:30:06] Oh, yes, absolutely. Yeah. It was amazing the job that she did. And I think her biography still stands up today as probably the best on Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [00:30:17] Yeah, I agree. Okay, so. So you. What did you think of when you saw this clip in the documentary about Mark Hoffman burying the jar and fooling his friends? Did you know that he had done that?

Sandra Tanner [00:30:29] I don't remember the story, so I don't know if it's told in one of the books or something, but it.

John Dehlin [00:30:35] But you saw that on the documentary.

Sandra Tanner [00:30:36] Yes, I saw it.

John Dehlin [00:30:37] But what'd you think when you saw that?

Sandra Tanner [00:30:38] Well, look, just like Joseph Smith. Yeah, that was first thing came to my mind. And, and Mark's life has a lot of similarities and parallels to Joseph Smith. Yeah, that's very odd that you do get that same. The 14 year old boy.

John Dehlin [00:30:56] Oh, right, 14, yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:30:59] Going on to fool everyone.

John Dehlin [00:31:02] What other parallels are coming into your mind?

Sandra Tanner [00:31:04] Well, the money digging stuff and then the ability to sell yourself to people that even when critics like us come out against him, he can still rise above it all. And Woody reneges on paying people for their documents and he has all these business problems he still can smooth over and promise them, oh, it'll be next week, let me give you another check or whatever. So it's that same sort of salesmanship that's able to keep it going even when there's questions and problems about what he's doing.

John Dehlin [00:31:45] Yeah. And. And also for Hoffman and Joseph Smith, the, the jig was up at some point and it all unraveled and he, it all caught up with him in the end, Right?

Sandra Tanner [00:31:53] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:31:54] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:31:54] And if Joseph hadn't have been killed, I think that the trials that would have come up at that time would have seriously challenged the future of Mormonism because Joseph was up on charge of bigamy and mishandling. Was it Partridge Girls Estate had messed up on some bankruptcy stuff. There would have been a indictment on counterfeiting because there was one later on. Brigham Young and John Taylor and different early church leaders for counterfeiting. Only reason Joseph isn't listed in there is because he was dead. But there would have been things like this that would have come up so that there would have been a day of reckoning for Joseph Smith. It just got cut short. By him being murdered.

John Dehlin [00:32:45] Right. Some, some would say that the, the ties between Hoffman and Joseph Smith are even more obvious, that Joseph Smith was a forger. Now I don't know if forger is or isn't the right word, but Joseph, if you don't believe he was translating by the gift and power of God, then he was creating documents through a scribe because he couldn't really write that weren't, that were fraudulent, that weren't, that weren't what they claimed to be. Do you think there's fair parallels there?

Sandra Tanner [00:33:19] Yes, I do.

John Dehlin [00:33:20] What are the parallels for you?

Sandra Tanner [00:33:21] Well, like when he claims to be translating a parchment of John that he claims John really wrote this document. I don't have it. It doesn't currently exist on paper. But God showed me in a vision that this actual writing of John is what I'm giving to you. So you have that same sort of manufacturing of historical documents that have no basis.

John Dehlin [00:33:49] What about the Book of Mormon?

Sandra Tanner [00:33:50] Well, the Book of Mormon, all of his scriptures fall into that same thing. To take the book of Abraham, where you have scrolls that he could show the public that, see, I've got these real documents and this is Abraham's signature and over here is Joseph's signature. And you pay his mom a quarter, you can come look at the mummies. And so then he invents this book of scripture that he claims came from the scrolls in front of him. So that would be another type of forgery that he's carrying on.

John Dehlin [00:34:27] Yeah, yeah. And one thing that was different, or maybe not so different between him and Hoffman, this is just my theory that from the treasure digging exploits of 1823-1827, he learned that he could convince people that he had special power. Right to find. So there's the, there's the element of claiming to have special power. But then by 1827, he's realizing that he's going to end up in jail for life if he keeps doing this. So how does he parlay? He. But he knows that this is, that even when he wasn't able to find the treasure, people would continue believing in him. So in my mind, whether consciously or unconsciously, he says, dang, how do I continue on with this skill that I've developed that clearly is effective? And so somehow he comes up with the idea to write a book. And, and you know, for Dan Vogel, it might have been piously fraudulent. For others it's just plain out fraudulent. But then he says, if I can create this document that people will believe as a divine origin, they'll also, this will also continue the perception that I have special powers. And then once you've created a scripture like book and everybody around you thinks you did it by the gift and power of God, well, that becomes the, the foundation of a religion or a church. How do you see it?

Sandra Tanner [00:36:02] Yes, and I think it's very similar to Mark's statement about if everyone accepts it as authentic, it is authentic. And that's Joseph Smith. I think he convinced himself that, well, the Book of Mormon is what would have been written if the Indians had kept a record. So it's true.

John Dehlin [00:36:23] Do you think you really thought he was channeling?

Sandra Tanner [00:36:25] I think by the time he gets to the end of his life, he's believing his own lies. At the beginning, he has to be aware that he's fabricating it. But he may come to really believe he's a prophet. Kind of like Elmer Gantry.

John Dehlin [00:36:40] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:36:40] Did I really do miracles? I guess I did.

John Dehlin [00:36:43] Right. So, so do you do. Just. Just to be clear, there's this theory, and I'm sure we talked about this in our interview, there's this theory that I think Maxine Hank shared with me, that like he believed that there were plates written at some point, but he didn't have them in his possession, so to speak, so he created fake plates. But when he was actually translating, I'm saying that in air quotes, he believed that he was channeling real stories from real prophets through the gift and power of God, such that when he was manufacturing the Book of Mormon, he himself didn't think, I'm creating this fraudulent book. He thought, I am channeling a legitimate history through legitimate prophets, through the gift and power of God. It's just coming through my, my brain and through the Spirit and through revelation. And I have to create these plates so that people will believe me, but the rest of the story is true. What do you think about that?

Sandra Tanner [00:37:47] I think that gives him too much credit for thinking and it really came from outside of himself. I think he has to know what he's creating. When you see the loss of the 116 pages, I think it shows that it isn't just. You can't just explain the Book of Mormon as a channeled book because when he recreates the first part of the Book of Mormon, it shows deliberate thought to cover his tracks in case those pages are found. So to me, that shows a deliberate fraud by someone who understands what he's doing. So when he goes back to redo the front of the Book of Mormon, he comes up with Nephi having Two sets of plates. And it gets into a very convoluted story. Why in the world anyone would make two sets of plates? I mean, it's not like you just went to the store and bought a ream of paper. You gotta hand make all these plates. They're out in the wilderness. It just doesn't make sense. Historically you couldn't do that. So I think there's. In the reconstructing of the 116 page replacement to me shows someone who is very aware of the problem he faced at the moment with his followers of trying to convince them that he had the power of God to bring forth this record even though he had lost those pages. He could duplicate them, but he can't duplicate them. Exactly. So he has to come up with some crazy story. Why as well. It's sort of like the same thing again, only this is bigger and better. I mean, yeah, now God's going to have me use the plates that got the spiritual stuff in. Why did God have you start with the ones that didn't? It doesn't make God look very smart. But, but to me it's all an excuse to cover himself. So to me that shows a knowing, cunning mind to set up a scenario to make his followers all believe that it was still the work of God even though the whole story got messed up.

John Dehlin [00:40:07] Yeah. Have you read William Davis's book about Joseph's ability to sort of dictate orally and that Methodist tradition?

Sandra Tanner [00:40:18] Well, sure, I think pastors use that kind of stuff today. An outline. I mean, don't most speakers, I think any of us that go out and speak publicly get an outline in our mind of what we're going to say? And if you speak a lot on the same subject, pretty soon you have that outline down in your mind. So I think he had been rehearsing his. Joseph had been rehearsing his story to his family for several years before he ever started the literal dictating of the Book of Mormon. So I see him practicing that outline for a long time. Now granted, I couldn't sit down and dictate a 500 page book to you on even my own. Well, maybe on my own life I could, but. But not about some other subject. But that doesn't mean someone else couldn't. We have all sorts of books that were written in very short periods of time. Authors that just say that, oh, the story came to me and I sat down and just wrote it out.

John Dehlin [00:41:20] Right? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so. So in your mind the Book of Mormon was a premeditated act of deception. Like Mark Hoffman.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:31] Yes. Right, right. I think that Joseph was an extremely gifted creative mind and he could retain trivia that he picked up. I think you see that in so much of Joseph's writings, the ability to maintain trivia. And it always reminded me of people on game shows.

John Dehlin [00:41:54] Ken Jennings.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:55] Yeah. That just remember the craziest little things. And it's hard to explain, but like Nephi comes from the Apocrypha and Lehi comes from the Old Testament. Moroni is the capital of Group Islands, the Comoros Islands off the coast of Africa. So how does he know about these things? He just stumbles across stuff and different names stick in his mind. And I think that you would have this trouble with a lot of books if you analyze them to try to figure out where did every single idea for this book come from? And I'm sure this happens in a lot of writings where people name characters in their books after just some random name they came across sometime. And you see that in the Book of Mormon we've been able to find a lot of those things to where. I mean, I can't prove that he saw a map with the Comoros Islands on it, but we do have a geography book of Joseph Smith's day that has the Comoros Islands in them, which was used in schools. Can't prove he read it, but it's a little suspicious.

John Dehlin [00:43:06] And that has the Moroni City in there with.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:09] Yeah. The Comoros Islands with Moroni as the capital.

John Dehlin [00:43:12] Yeah, yeah. Do we know where Nephi came from?

Sandra Tanner [00:43:14] Nephi came from the Apocrypha, King James Apocrypha, not the Catholic Apocrypha. And he had a Bible with the Apocrypha in it.

John Dehlin [00:43:23] Right. Okay. Yeah. So if we're talking parallels between Joseph Smith and Mark Hoffman, that's something that is said in the documentary that. That Mark Hoffman clearly had this ability to remember everything. There's that trivial. This is the celestial pursuit little sequence where. Where the guy says that Joseph never got one answer wrong.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:43] Right, right.

John Dehlin [00:43:44] Yeah. So those are important parallels.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:47] Right.

John Dehlin [00:43:48] Okay, so if we're going with this theory that. That he stumbled on to maybe Brody's book or these other articles or dialogue or whatever it was, and as a very precocious young kid, lost his faith around age 14, then he. Then you're saying that along with the dime story causes him to lose his faith, but he stays in the church.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:11] Well, I think it also the. I think the thing with the parents hiding the polygamy from him, I think was another disillusioning moment for him that his godly parents.

John Dehlin [00:44:23] What do you know about that story?

Sandra Tanner [00:44:25] I believe it's in Silato's book Salamander.

John Dehlin [00:44:29] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:30] I think that's.

John Dehlin [00:44:31] And what's the general.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:33] Well, that there was post manifesto polygamy

John Dehlin [00:44:37] in, in his family line, in his

Sandra Tanner [00:44:38] family, immediate family line, and that it was the big family secret. And when you find out that the church has been lying to you about Polygamy ended in 1890, and you find out in your own family they kept living polygamy way after the manifesto, then you wonder, well, what else did they lie to me about?

John Dehlin [00:45:02] Yeah. So one question that I wrote that I don't think you can know. And I wonder if anyone knows this, if he ever talked about this in any of his depositions or confessions or any of his writings, or if he ever told his. His wife this, but is there ever any indication that he expressed sadness or anger or disappointment at the church deceiving him and at the church deceiving others? Because that, that speaks to motive. I, you know, one of the things that I think is really important is to try and figure out motive. And some people want to say, oh, he just loved. He was just broken in the head and had no conscience and just loved to deceive people. I think what I want, I'm sure some of that's true at some point. But what I also want to know is did he ever, you know, because so many of us. What drives you, what drives me, it's. It's Jeremy Runnels, like so many people, Brett Metcalf, everyone. It's just like, oh, my gosh, I put my trust in this church. I gave it everything. I trusted it, like more than my own parents. I loved it, I sacrificed for it. And then it deceived me, like, isn't that all of us? And so, and so I want to believe that at least at some point Hoffman had those similar feelings and maybe he just went in the wrong direction. Do you have any sense, is there any indication that you're aware of, that he felt any of those similar feelings?

Sandra Tanner [00:46:35] I don't know enough about his story in his early life, but. So, no, I don't know of any time when he expressed that to anyone.

John Dehlin [00:46:46] He wouldn't have told Dori, his wife, that he had lost his faith, Right?

Sandra Tanner [00:46:49] No. He's living a lie for all of his Mormon community.

John Dehlin [00:46:56] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:46:57] So I don't see him being able to share anything that way with anyone. I mean, I assume if he did with anyone, it would have Been maybe Shannon Flynn, but I don't know that. That Flynn's ever talked about him showing anger about Mormonism being false. They may not have had that kind of a conversation.

John Dehlin [00:47:18] Was Shannon Flynn a believer at the time he was working with Hoffman. Do you know? Do you have any idea?

Sandra Tanner [00:47:24] Don't know. I would suspect not, but I don't really know.

John Dehlin [00:47:28] You're not sure? Okay, yeah, like. And so one of the things when I'm trying to, like, make sense of all this that I think of is if this. If you live it like, I was growing up in Texas, but anyway, I lost my faith in Seattle, like, far from the church, when I was working for Microsoft. What would it be like to lose your faith in the 60s and 70s in holiday or Mill Creek? Everyone around you believes you feel totally trapped, like you can't tell anyone. It's not like now you've got all these podcasts and blogs and Facebook communities to give you support. Other family members that have left, too. He must have felt super isolated, super alone, super trapped, super powerless, and super disappointed that this church held itself up to be the one true great church. And yet it was deceiving everyone, and Joseph was deceiving everyone. I wonder what that can do to your mind as a young boy when you have to. When you have to suppress all that and then you learn to lie from the guy held up as a prophet and from the church held up as the one true church by everyone around you. What would that do to your psychology to kind of be stewing in that?

Sandra Tanner [00:48:45] Well, it obviously messed up his mind,

John Dehlin [00:48:48] but it didn't do that to you, right?

Sandra Tanner [00:48:50] No. We had not had the years of investment that someone like yourself would have had in the church. And I think the longer you've invested in it, the more you struggle with that anger that way. So leaving earlier in our lives kept us from having as much of that bottled up inside of us.

John Dehlin [00:49:17] You didn't serve a mission.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:18] No.

John Dehlin [00:49:18] Did Gerald? Remind me. Oh, Gerald didn't either.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:20] No. No. Because that's what sent him on his quest was when the bishop challenged him to quit drinking beer and go on a mission. And so I thought, well, gee, do I? But do I believe this enough to go on a mission?

John Dehlin [00:49:36] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:36] And that launched him into his research. And I did not voluntarily set out to search for truth in Mormonism. It was forced on me by a mother who was questioning her faith, so. But we both had to deal with the disappointing of our families. We both had to deal with standing up to loved ones and defending ourselves that the emperor doesn't have any clothes on. And we were just two dumb kids and no one paid attention to us. You know, look at all the PhDs that believe the emperor's got new clothes on. Who are you to say he doesn't? Well, I got the proof.

John Dehlin [00:50:22] There was something that must have made Hoffman feel trapped. Like he couldn't be open and honest about that. That somehow you guys felt able to be open and honest. I wonder what that difference might be. Maybe it's personality. I don't know. Do you have a. Do you have a. I don't know.

Sandra Tanner [00:50:41] Gerald is unusual in that at such an early age that it mattered to him so much once it was presented to him whether it was true or not. And he seriously looked at it. I mean most 19 year olds aren't driving out to Missouri in their old beat up car to try to find answers. And launching into a publishing career to detail all his research as he went through the year. It's a. So yeah, the question with Gerald comes up too. Why? I don't know. He. He just had a driven personality. But it drove him in a search for truth. Mark switched and was driven to play the same game and to try to be a greater con than Joseph Smith was.

John Dehlin [00:51:33] And I actually thought about the parallel between you and Gerald and Mark Hoffman. It's almost like you guys had some similarities including the amazing ability to remember lots of details. You both have that.

Sandra Tanner [00:51:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:51:48] And the passion for the subject matter. You guys went on a path of truth at all costs. He went into a path of deception. But there's even parallels between Hoffman and you guys. Does that make you feel sad or.

Sandra Tanner [00:52:04] I don't know. I'm not sure. Whatever it would depend on. I'd have to see your list.

John Dehlin [00:52:11] But just uncanny interest in and ability to remember church details. Right?

Sandra Tanner [00:52:16] Yes. Gerald and Mark would share a lot of similarities in that sense of the ability to recall detail, to hold things in their mind. And I guess Joseph Smith too, to be able to just hold all that information in your mind and then put it to different uses. But Joseph and Mark turned to

John Dehlin [00:52:46] a

Sandra Tanner [00:52:46] way of manipulating people and dishonesty. For Gerald it was truly a quest for truth. And Gerald was about the most honest guy I've ever known. He just was. For whatever reasons he was driven for the honest story of Mormonism.

John Dehlin [00:53:13] Yeah. And part of me feels like you're kind of selling yourself short a little bit there because your memory of details also seems very extensive.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:23] Yes. But not like Gerald. Gerald just. He didn't have photographic memory. But it was close. I could ask him about contents of books that he had read 30 years before and he could just tell you right of oh yeah, it's in the middle of that book and go over and get it and, and find it. And I'm thinking, how could you do that? How can you remember that after that? I mean, I don't remember books like that. I have to make notes, I underline and everything to remember. Gerald just had it.

John Dehlin [00:53:57] If you had to compare what you know of Mark Hoffman's memory and Gerald's, would you.

Sandra Tanner [00:54:04] I'd say they probably were pretty equal.

John Dehlin [00:54:06] They were pretty equal, yeah. Okay, fascinating. Okay, so. So Hoffman, do you know anything else interesting about Hoffman before he goes on his mission that you remember?

Sandra Tanner [00:54:21] No, not before he goes on his mission.

John Dehlin [00:54:23] And then anything interesting about his mission that you say that you think it's.

Sandra Tanner [00:54:27] Well, even the documentary brought out that on his mission he was buying rare books and shipping them home. So he had already started an idea of doing something more with Mormon church history. And he may not have formulated much of a plan yet, but you see the growing interest in being informed and having all the books he can that cover the topic. Also the idea of making money off of it, that he's going to sell these to book dealers. So you have the seeds of his future life when he gets back from his mission, of the trajectory he plans on taking.

John Dehlin [00:55:21] Yeah. So when he's investigating things on his mission, buying books, I think I read that he buys this Bible that he ends up using for his first real forgery.

Sandra Tanner [00:55:32] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:55:33] Doesn't he buy that on his mission?

Sandra Tanner [00:55:35] I don't, I, I don't remember the details on that. But I mean, all he has to do is buy Ed Howe's Mormonism Unveiled. And if he has Brody's book, he's got everything he needs for that early period of Joseph's life. For the money digging claims the Salamander

John Dehlin [00:55:58] idea, why the Ed Howe book?

Sandra Tanner [00:56:02] Because Ed Howe's Mormonism unveiled, printed in 1834, has statements by the neighbors of the Smiths that all tell about the early Smiths money digging and magic involvement. So this, this gives Mark the foundational ideas for making up documents from that time period, what they were likely to cover, which was why the church leaders didn't immediately say, oh, your documents have to be a fraud. Because they knew if you found something from that time period, it probably would sound like this. It would probably would have magic material. That would be embarrassing.

John Dehlin [00:56:50] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:56:50] In fact, when the Salamander first letter was first publicly talked about and the church news comes out with defenses of it. I thought to myself, excuse me, if you had taken this to my fanatic Mormon grandfather and showed him this salamander letter, what would his response have been? His response, I'm sure, would have been, that's a big lie. That never could have happened. We know Joseph's story. And it would have just been full stop denunciation, because I had enough of those myself. With him, I had a pretty good idea what his response would be. Okay, that's the response of a true believer. Why don't you get that kind of response from the church leaders? Because they already know. If you found something from that time period, it very likely could revolve around magic and money digging. Hinckley would have known this. He did enough church history to know these things. And Dallin Oaks, too.

John Dehlin [00:58:03] Interesting. So that's not necessarily a claim that the. That the first presidency in the quorum of the 12 in the 70s and 80s didn't believe the church was true? Oh, no, it's. Go ahead.

Sandra Tanner [00:58:16] They probably believed it. I'm not saying that it shows the church leaders didn't believe Mormonism. I'm saying they knew the early church history was problematic,

John Dehlin [00:58:26] which also implies that they were hiding it.

Sandra Tanner [00:58:29] They were hiding it because they were afraid you wouldn't be able to keep believing. They've been able to rationalize to themselves that these things don't matter, that it's all true. But if you showed them to the public, they might not be able to bridge that problem.

John Dehlin [00:58:44] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So do you. Do you see any indication that. That Hoffman was planning forgeries and, you know, mapping kind of this all out on his mission?

Hofmann's Motivations and Methods as a Forger

Sandra Tanner [00:59:00] So that would be hard to know, but he's certainly getting informed because as he buys these different old exposes of Mormonism, he would be certainly building a picture of early Mormon and Mormonism in his own mind. Now, when we know in what would the time frame been sitting in 1978, that's when he came to our bookstore. I didn't know it was him, but he came with this second anointing document as one page handwritten document that he claimed was from the 1900 time frame from the Salt Lake Temple and shows it to me that this is this big find from his grandfather's attic and he can't tell me who the family was, couldn't tell me his name. Well, I didn't know it was Mark.

John Dehlin [00:59:56] It was about what again? The document.

Sandra Tanner [00:59:59] The document's about the second anointing Ritual in the temple.

John Dehlin [01:00:02] He comes to you with the document about that?

Sandra Tanner [01:00:04] Yes, in 78. And I think it's maybe the start of his business of trying to float documents out to the public.

John Dehlin [01:00:16] Now, why don't you remember that? Because he met with Gerald or.

Sandra Tanner [01:00:20] I don't remember that. It being. I didn't know Mark. Mark had been in the store before he'd bought our Mormonism shadow, our reality. Because he tells that in something might be in the Siloto book. But he said he had read our shadow and. But I don't remember meeting him. But when after the Hoffman murders and the detectives start putting all the pieces together, they find this Mark Hoffman document in the Utah State University collection that Jeff Simmons, their curator, had bought from Mark. The Salt Lake Temple document on the second anointing. Well, then putting it all together, we backtrack it all to my files. I have this document. He came to me first with this document, and I said, well, it's interesting, but I don't know anything about second anointing stuff. And he gave me a photocopy of it, and I just put it in my file. Well, then he took it up to Jeff Simmons and told Jeff Simmons, is

John Dehlin [01:01:28] he trying to sell it to you?

Sandra Tanner [01:01:30] Well, he never. Well, he knew we were poor as church mice, so he never mentioned a price. He just floated it by me, I think, to see if I would find a discrepancy and also to get people talking about it. One of the things you see in Mark's documents is that he always started rumors about the documents going around in the Mormon underground. Oh, did you hear the buzz? There's talk of a new document that's out there, you know, and it helps to build credibility for your document. If more people talk about it, then it must be authentic. Everybody's accepting that this document exists. So I think he was trying to start a rumor through me about this second anointing document. Well, we didn't do anything with it. He took it up to Jeff Simmons, and Simmons bought it.

John Dehlin [01:02:26] Did you get a photocopy of it?

Sandra Tanner [01:02:28] Yeah, I have my files.

John Dehlin [01:02:29] You have it right now?

Sandra Tanner [01:02:30] Not with me.

John Dehlin [01:02:31] Is that published in one of your books?

Sandra Tanner [01:02:32] It's in the Salama, in the tracking the White Salamander book.

John Dehlin [01:02:36] A photo of it?

Sandra Tanner [01:02:37] Yeah, so. But we didn't know it was a marked document until after the murders. I didn't put the two together. I didn't know that that was even Mark. Yeah, but we know in 78, and we know the date because of when he went to Jeff Simmons. And he tells Jeff Simmons that, oh, I showed this to the Tanner, you know, but after he showed it to me and left me with a copy, I started getting calls from different people. Oh, I hear you've got a copy of a second anointing document. Well, where would they hear this? They had to hear it from Mark because I wasn't telling anyone. Out of the blue, someone say, oh, can I get a copy of the second anointing letter? And I'd have to tell him, I don't know anything about it. I just know this guy brought it in and claimed it was in his grandpa's papers. So then we later find out it was Marx. But see, that's in 78.

John Dehlin [01:03:34] That's two years before he really breaks on the scene.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:37] Yes. And so I think he's, you know,

John Dehlin [01:03:39] how old he was in 80. I'm trying to.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:41] I don't remember.

John Dehlin [01:03:42] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:42] So he's just. But he's very shortly off his mission at 78.

John Dehlin [01:03:46] Okay. Okay. So it would have been 22, 23, something like that.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:50] Yeah. And so he's already started the idea of a forgery business, and he's trying his hand at things. But see, that's a late document, 1900, but it is handwritten and has a rubber stamp on it. Salt Lake Temple. I don't know where he been easy to have just bought a stamp made up to say that. But I don't know what other documents he made in between that time and when he went public on his fines that he took to the church. So he had a couple of years there to perfect his skills on doing things.

John Dehlin [01:04:36] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:37] It is really odd, though, when you look at Mark's handwriting, it's just terrible. It is juvenile. And it makes a real question of how can he write those documents in those smooth hands when he prints in such terrible printing. So I don't. His. Does he have a dual personality? Does he. Does somebody else show up and write documents? I don't know. But it is curious that the fellow that has chicken scratch printing is able to do all this 19th century handwriting.

John Dehlin [01:05:24] Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting. Okay, so. So let's just say he's planning this sometime between his mission and 1980, which is when he kind of breaks on the scenes. That's. I. I either forgot about or didn't know that about the second anointing. This gets to my. Again, my question that I'm most curious about his motive. I was listening to an interview of Richard Turley that he gave recently, and he gives some Motives for Mark Hoffman. He wanted money. He hated authority. He just wanted to stick it to the man. And then I think the third thing he says is he wanted to rewrite history. And I, I have a fourth motive that I think is most interesting to me, which is this. He was hurt and, or sad or angry about the church deceiving people, or he felt like the church was hypocritical and he wanted to do a long game of exposing. You know, my big two questions are, did he want to hurt the church or get back at the church for being so deceitful and dishonest? And did he want to take people out of the church because he would have known that they were under the church's influence and power, not from informed consent, but. But through deception? Do you have any thoughts about that? Any reactions, thoughts, feelings about that?

Sandra Tanner [01:06:49] I don't think he had enough emotional interest in people that he would have been concerned about other people being deceived or the future of harming people through deception by the church. But I think he wanted to force the church to own up to its problematic history. So, yes, I think he was trying to get back at the church, not necessarily to rewrite church history, but to make them face what he felt their real history was. But I don't think he cared about whether the church was deceiving other people. I think he was.

John Dehlin [01:07:30] Why not?

Sandra Tanner [01:07:31] Because I don't know that he had that kind of empathy for future believers. I think his anger at the church for his own family and his own life, but I don't know that how much he'd worry about other people being sucked in.

John Dehlin [01:07:49] When you, when you read about, like, and I'm kind of sketchy on all this, but when you read about, like, Jeffrey Dahmer, you know, you find out these tales of him. And I could have this wrong, but like dissecting live animals as a kid or just with, with kids in the neighborhood, super troubling kind of behaviors that with Hoffman. Do we have any accounts from anyone that would say, A, that he just didn't care about other people, all growing up teen, adult, young adult, or B, that he did show the capacity to care? I mean, because clearly his wife loved him, his family loved him, all his ward members thought he was great. So do we. Do you have any reason to believe that prior to 1980 he didn't care about people?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:45] No, I would say my feeling on that comes more from the fact that he could so callously kill his friend Steve and lace the bomb with nails, which deliberately was intended to shred the man's insides. And that he could so callously put a bomb at the Sheets home that killed Kathy Sheets. And then he could dismiss it so easily by saying, well, anyone could have picked up the bomb. I mean, he just showed a total callousness, at least after the murders, when he was asked by the parole board, I think, about Kathy Sheets death, it's like, well, she could have gone across the street, got hit by a car. So, I mean, a total disrespect for life or for people.

John Dehlin [01:09:38] Yeah. And I. That was a really. That was in part three of the documentary. And that was. It was Margi's most. Margi was most interested in part three. I think it was the most fascinating part. What I'm trying to tease out is, is that the sort of justification, desperation, kind of like twisted, motivated reasoning that he acquires once he gets too far into the conversation and too far at personal risk, in jeopardy, where he just starts to throw caring, concern about others out the window. Is that something he develops between 80 and 85, or do you. Do we have any reason to believe that that's how he always was?

Sandra Tanner [01:10:21] Oh, I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:10:22] You're basing on the 85, not on anything else.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:25] I'm basing it on the end of his life, not. Or the end of his career.

John Dehlin [01:10:29] Yeah. Who would know this question I'm asking about his show of empathy or caring or remorse prior to his forgeries.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:41] I, As I. It's been a long time since I've looked at the Siloto book called Salamander, but as I recall, I think they had a little more background on his early life.

John Dehlin [01:10:55] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:10:56] So that would be. If I were looking for that. That's first place I would go check.

John Dehlin [01:11:00] Okay. Okay. So what I hear you saying is you don't know about him care as far as a motive, him caring about other people in the church broadly being deceived. But you hold open the possibility that he could have been angry at having been deceived.

Sandra Tanner [01:11:17] Right.

John Dehlin [01:11:17] Or that maybe some of his immediate family members were.

Sandra Tanner [01:11:20] Right. And then I think he also had the ego to think I can pull off the ultimate deception. I can deceive the guys that perpetrate the deception.

John Dehlin [01:11:38] So some ego there.

Sandra Tanner [01:11:39] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:11:42] Because if I'm thinking. And what I want to do now is kind of jump into his forgeries, but even I. The one I didn't have here is the. Is the second anointing one. But as we start looking at the forgeries that he picked, and by the Way I learned from Gerald's book, not all of them were faith destroying. He created some forgeries that would have been very faith promoting. But when I think about the topics he's generally addressing in the forgeries that I'm aware of, which starts now with the second anointing document. But then when you think about the Joseph Smith III blessing, the letter to Josiah stole, the 1825 letter to Josiah stole, the Salamander letter, you know, and then if you think about him ultimately shooting for the McClellan papers, documents and the 116 pages, he seems to be picking the some of the most volatile issues that would strike most at the heart of the Church's truth claims. Now, part of the motivation could have been just because these are documents the Church would have been motivated to care about and want to buy. But another possibility is it's like, no, once these documents get out there, and by the way, he made sure that they got out there, it's going to be a way to wake people up about troubling Church history when they were asleep about it or unwilling to face it by scholarly means or otherwise were asleep to or just didn't care. Does that make sense?

Sandra Tanner [01:13:27] Yes. But I don't know how much of that had been because he wanted to do something to help people as much as to embarrass the Church. I think it was more a matter of getting back at the Brethren to expose them as deceivers, that they don't really have the powers of discernment. They claim they can't even tell a forgery. So how can they have all this great knowledge about God and Joseph's visions and everything when I can make up documents that are just as good as Joseph's and they accept him as authentic? So I see it all as really getting back at the Brethren.

John Dehlin [01:14:06] Do you think he was motivated by that?

Sandra Tanner [01:14:08] Yeah, I think he wanted to embarrass them.

John Dehlin [01:14:13] Do you think he wanted to take people out of the Church, bring the Church down?

Sandra Tanner [01:14:17] Well, I don't know if bringing the Church down is the same as trying to take people out of it, because I think that implies more care for people than I give him credit. But I think he would have been happy to have been the cause of Mormonism's collapse.

John Dehlin [01:14:35] You think he did want that?

Sandra Tanner [01:14:36] Yeah, that's. He wanted to. I think he wanted to show the world that the whole thing was a fraud from day one and he could do it as good as Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [01:14:50] Yeah, because if, if we're trying to pursue this theory that he had some type of conscience, at least originally. And had his own emotional profile of sadness or anger or frustration. Then if he's trying to take the Church down for being deceivers, you have to answer the question. How could he justify being a deceiver to expose the Church as deceivers? It would show hypocrisy. Either hypocrisy and. Or cleverness thinking that he's being clever. Like I'll. I'll beat them at their own game.

Sandra Tanner [01:15:26] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:15:27] What do you do?

Sandra Tanner [01:15:28] I think it's trying to beat them at their own game. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:15:31] You think so? I didn't mean to plant that statement.

Sandra Tanner [01:15:34] No, I think that's true. That he was trying to. Yes. He was going to one upmanship on Joseph Smith. He could do it better than he did.

John Dehlin [01:15:46] Yeah, yeah. That if Joseph was deceitful and if the Church has been deceitful, what better way to expose them as deceitful than by being even better at them? I. Do you think that.

Sandra Tanner [01:16:01] Well, I don't think he wanted to be known as a deceiver at the beginning. I mean, I once the he went to prison, then he's glad to be known as the greatest forger in history. But I don't know that he early on was aiming for that reputation. I don't know if he wanted to be found out. I guess one could speculate that subconsciously maybe he wanted to be found out. But he seems to be just trying to keep a con going of. I don't know what he'd planned to do after the 116 pages, but obviously all the Martin Harris documents were trying to establish Martin's handwriting. So that when he finally came up with something that as a part of the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, that they would test it against the handwriting samples that Mark had given them earlier that he had written. So who knows what he would have tried after 116 page. That would have been a fascinating thing if he'd have really done that.

John Dehlin [01:17:05] Yeah, yeah. Like. And part of what gets this really mixed up is that he. It becomes his livelihood at some point. So he's got a wife, he's got kids, he's got to make a living. He takes that leap of faith at some point where he tells Dory, I'm going to do this for a living. And then once he's in. This is his reputation, this is his livelihood. And that can really change you when your livelihood and the livelihood that you're supposed to provide from your for your family is all wrapped up Together. And so I can see those five years as really being a lot of pressure on him to, to pull this off and make this all succeed and it becomes a Ponzi scheme at some point, you know?

Sandra Tanner [01:17:49] Yes. And that sounds very much like Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [01:17:52] Why?

Sandra Tanner [01:17:53] Because once he realized he had to support his family, he's got to keep coming up with something more to keep his church together, to keep it going. Yeah, you have to keep coming up with new scriptures, new claims, to keep the following. Because along the way he gets a lot of people mad and they drop out. But he finds himself in the same problem as Mark. You got to keep coming up with something exciting to keep the following and keep them to believe you when things don't work out. Just like Mark can't come up with the documents to supply all his claims, working himself into a financial hole. You have Joseph Smith coming up with all kind of claims and getting the church into financial difficulty. And then he's got to come up with more claims, more discoveries to get people re engaged and all excited. We're going to go build Zion. Well, we're going to do it in Independence. Well known that got scuttled. So we're going to do it in Kirtland. Scuttled. We're going to do it in Far West. No. Well, okay, we're gonna do it Nauvoo

John Dehlin [01:19:05] and then maybe Texas, right?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:07] Yeah, Texas or Oregon somewhere.

John Dehlin [01:19:11] Yeah. Okay. Okay. So if, if it's okay, let's talk about each of the, the big forgeries that were Mormon related because obviously there's a free man and what Emily Dickinson stuff and lots of things that he did outside of Mormonism, right?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:29] Yeah. Let's talk about what, just anything you want to share that you think is interesting about the actual forgeries that he did. Right. Is that okay?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:39] What are you thinking?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:40] I don't know how well I can remember them all.

John Dehlin [01:19:45] So the first one was the Anthon transcript, right?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:48] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:19:49] Didn't he break on the scene with, with that one?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:52] Yeah, it was included in the Bible. Yeah. And that was interesting, the documentary that they said that his wife and him opened the Bible pages at his house. Because I thought that it was done with Jeff Simmons up at the university in Logan. I hadn't heard before that it had been with Dory first. Now it could be in one of the early books on Hoffman and I've maybe forgotten it, but. But I don't remember that as being told before that Dory helped pry those pages open in her kitchen. So if that's the case. Then Mark glued it back together and took it back up to Simpson Simmons to make Simmons feel like he was part of the big discovery of opening the pages and finding this document. So the document itself is very clever. One of the things Mark did on some of his letters was try to recreate something that was mentioned at some time but wasn't preserved. And then he could claim that he found it like the Joseph Smith III blessing, you know, like something that historians knew supposedly happened, but no evidence. So he comes up with a document. And so with the Anton transcript, there was the question for years of whether the copy we have is actually the one that Martin would have taken to Professor Anthon. And we always knew that Anthon gave a little different description of the Anthon transcript than the one that's typically reproduced in the Church's books. So Mark capitalizes on the fact that there is this other description of the Anthon transcript, and there is a question as whether the Anthon script we always have seen is the actual original one or is Whitmer's copy just a copy of. So he makes up his own that would fit what Anthony says. He remembers to make it in the long columns with a circular object at the end that looked kind of like a Maya calendar or something.

John Dehlin [01:22:24] So did you say Whitmer? Did you mean Harris? Did you say Whitmer?

Sandra Tanner [01:22:29] Well, Whitmer owned the Anton transcript, and.

John Dehlin [01:22:33] Okay, okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:35] And so I was just distinguishing the Anthon transcript from Marx.

John Dehlin [01:22:39] Okay, okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:41] So Mark makes his. Like the one that's described in Ed Howes book where he has the letter from Anthon.

John Dehlin [01:22:53] Got it.

Sandra Tanner [01:22:54] And so Mark's clever in that way to make it sound like something that Anthon described so that everyone could say, oh, wow, we got the original. And so that would make it even worth more money that it was the original behind the one the Church had always printed.

John Dehlin [01:23:17] Yeah. And so the Anton transcript, as I. As I researched it, it's supposed to be in Joseph Smith's handwriting, and it's supposed to be. Let's see. It's supposed to be the document that Harris takes to. Takes to Anthon with the reformed Egyptian characters on it for him to demonstrate it.

Sandra Tanner [01:23:41] Right, Right.

John Dehlin [01:23:42] And the Church. The Church acquires this. Right. And they publish it. Am I right?

Sandra Tanner [01:23:48] Oh, yeah. I think it was a big color photo of it in the Ensign, I believe.

John Dehlin [01:23:53] So they didn't hide it and squirrel it away?

Sandra Tanner [01:23:55] Oh, no. This is faith promoting. Isn't this wonderful?

John Dehlin [01:23:59] Isn't that interesting?

Sandra Tanner [01:24:00] Yes, this is a very faithful promoting document.

John Dehlin [01:24:04] So we, we can see. We. That's an example of where when the church finds something that's faith promoting, they're super eager.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:11] Right.

John Dehlin [01:24:11] To publish it and share it with everybody.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:13] Right.

John Dehlin [01:24:14] That's interesting. Right? Yeah, yeah. And I even, I even read, I think, in Gerald's research of yours that Hugh Nibley said that it helped to prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. So that also shows how apologists are willing to take anything, even something that's fake.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:24:32] And use it to bolster their claims because they'll just. It's motivated reasoning. It's. It's confirmation bias.

Sandra Tanner [01:24:39] Right. And I think that Nibley and guys at the BYU were hoping the whole thing could be translated, and we're all excited about it. And I know a guy by the name of Barry Fell, who's another eccentric guy, not Mormon, but he even claimed to be able to translate the first lines of this and.

John Dehlin [01:25:01] Right. Yeah,

Sandra Tanner [01:25:04] yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:04] I was a BYU professor.

Sandra Tanner [01:25:06] Right. Yeah. So how do you translate a forgery? Of course that gets you back to Kinderhook plates, but that's another story.

John Dehlin [01:25:14] Yeah, it sure does. Do you, do you remember when the Anthon transcript came out at first and

The Anthon Transcript and Key Early Forgeries

Sandra Tanner [01:25:21] I don't remember the year.

John Dehlin [01:25:22] No, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry. Do you. Do you remember you and Gerald seeing it and reacting to it and what you thought about it?

Sandra Tanner [01:25:30] Oh, we were all excited. Oh, well, there were all of these stories that people trying to figure out what the writing was, what kind of characters were on there. And there were these stories that it was some Indian tribe in New York, and I can't remember now which one it was, that this was probably in their script or something. And so I go up to the library and I'm researching these Indian scripts

John Dehlin [01:26:02] because you're trying to find out where.

Sandra Tanner [01:26:04] We want to find out where this came from.

John Dehlin [01:26:06] Are the chicken scratch characters basically, or not?

Sandra Tanner [01:26:10] Is this an actual language? Is it copied from something? If Mark made it up, if anyone made it up, what were they using? What could the characters be? Are they a real language? And so there are all sorts of claims that it came from some early Indian script or something, or was it from a magic book or was it Masonic writing script? And I spent so many hours at the library looking up every kind of silly script that anyone even thought might have influenced it and was getting nowhere with the whole thing.

John Dehlin [01:26:52] Do you remember? So was, were you and Gerald in 1980, primed to ask as the first question, is this authentic? Was forgery even on your mind? Had you had enough Experiences in rare documents, in historical documents, to always sort of ask that as the first question. Or did you guys just kind of say, this must be true, this must be valid, this must be authentic?

Sandra Tanner [01:27:22] Well, we had had a situation back in, what was it, the 60s. We had quoted Oliver Cowdery on a pamphlet he supposedly wrote a defense and a rehearsal of my grounds from separating myself from the Latter Day Saints or something, some big long title like that. And we had printed up a pamphlet that had statements by the three witnesses. Of course, originally, when we left Mormonism, we still believed the Book of Mormon. And so we'd printed up this thing, the statements by the three witnesses, with one the Tiffany Monthly article with Martin Harris, and then David Whitmer's an address, all Believers in Christ and the Cowdery Defense. Well, Professor Richard Anderson came up from BYU to our little bookstore in our front room and challenged us on that publication and said, the Cowdery defense is not authentic. You guys shouldn't be publishing that. If you want to be really known for seeking out the truth, then you should discard that because it isn't factual. And we thought, well, that it never occurred to us that it wasn't because Cowdery's defense was quoted by B.H. roberts, it was quoted by Fawn Brody. Historians generally accepted it as real. So Gerald went on a big study trying to figure out if Cowdery's defense was authentic and also a supposed statement of Cowdery's when he came back into the church in Council Bluffs. So, end result, Gerald had determined by studying the wording of Cowdery's defense with early writings of Cowdery, that someone had fabricated this around 1900, using Cowdery's earlier writings that were published in, I don't know, messenger and Advocate or whatever, and invented this document. So Gerald had already been through this question of what's authentic? And it turned out that Cowdery's defense wasn't authentic. And we came out with a pamphlet stating that and telling why. And we got pushback on that. Fawn Brody and Wadita Brooks both wrote us and said they still believed it was authentic and they thought we were premature in declaring it a fraud and they were going to go on using it and.

John Dehlin [01:30:02] Wow, so you guys knew better than Fawn Brody and Juanita Brooks. That's. Not many people can make that claim. That's amazing.

Sandra Tanner [01:30:11] Well, yeah. And Gerald was convinced he was right. Well, of course, Richard Anderson was convinced he is right, too, because Richard Anderson, a believing Mormon, didn't want to believe the documents. But. But Widow liked them to be true. But Gerald said, no, they aren't authentic. I can't use them anymore.

John Dehlin [01:30:32] Wow.

Sandra Tanner [01:30:32] So he'd already looked at things that way, and there were some other things that came up after that, and I don't remember now right off, but yeah. So the question of forgery, of fabricated writings, false claims had been there. Not in a big way, but we were aware that not everything is what it claims to be. So.

John Dehlin [01:31:00] So in 1980.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:31:03] When. When the Anthon transcript comes out, did you guys. Did you remember trying to authenticate it or not? I know Gerald probably writes about this in his book.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:15] Well, we. We hoped that it was authentic, but we were trying to figure out Joseph Smith had to make it up. I mean, we weren't thinking that Mark made it up, but Joseph Smith had to make it up because we didn't believe that it was represented a real language. And so how did Joseph Smith make it up? So we're trying to figure out what he was looking at. The mother had bought tea from China. Did she have a box sitting on the kitchen table that had Chinese scratches on it that you know, what could have influenced him to come up with these particular characters? So we were trying to find out how Joseph fraudulently produced this, not how Mark did it.

John Dehlin [01:32:04] Interesting. So this, unlike the Salamander letter that we'll talk about later, that Gerald famously detected as a fraud. He. You. You were both sort of. Is it okay to say they fooled by them?

Sandra Tanner [01:32:19] Yes. We thought, okay, we accepted that as an authentic Joseph Smith production. We did not accept it as representing something truly copied off the plates.

John Dehlin [01:32:29] Okay. Okay, that's interesting. Anything else you want to say about the Enthon transcript that's worth mentioning?

Sandra Tanner [01:32:35] I don't know right off.

John Dehlin [01:32:36] So there's nothing controversial about it to believing Mormons? It was considered.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:41] Well, it would be controversial in the fact that any scholar looking at it would know it was not authentic Indian writing. So it would be critical. It would be another way of. For an outsider.

John Dehlin [01:32:56] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:56] To see that the Book of Mormon couldn't be true because this is no real language.

John Dehlin [01:33:01] Right, right, right. Yeah. Okay. And now do we know where Hoffman got those chicken scratches? Do we even know?

Sandra Tanner [01:33:10] Well, he could have used stuff from magic books. There were a lot of magic script in books of the day that wouldn't have necessarily been real popular, but they were out there. The. The Magus. I don't remember the different names of things that he could have seen. It could have been influenced by the Masonic Script. They had their own script.

John Dehlin [01:33:37] So just to be clear, we don't have any surviving documents that purport to show characters from the original golden plates that you're aware of. Am I right about that?

Sandra Tanner [01:33:53] Well, the anthem transcript that the church has always owned goes back to Joseph's day. Whether it's the Whitmer made a copy of it or whether it's the original one, one that went to Anthon. That is the script that the early church all accepted as the type of characters that would have been on the plates. Okay, so there's not a question that that was what in, for instance, in Nauvoo. That was the script that they all would have believed whatever form they saw it in. The kind of letters writing script is what's on the anthem transcript.

John Dehlin [01:34:35] Okay, I. I'm gonna ask my listeners to forgive me. I just want to make sure I understand. So there is an Anthon transcript separate from the one that Hoffman.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:45] Right.

John Dehlin [01:34:46] And tell me one more time what that is.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:49] It's a piece of paper that's oblong and has, I don't know, 14 lines or something on it of script. And it's printed in, like, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. If you look up Anthon transcript. Well, I'm sure on the Church's website, if you just type in Anthon transcript or the Joseph Smith Papers website, type in Anthon transcript. Wikipedia would have it the Anthon transcript. And it's an oblong piece of writing as opposed to Marx, which is. Goes up and down in columns. These are horizontal lines on the genuine anthem transcript. But there is a question amongst historians whether the Anthon transcript that the church has and publishes photos of, whether that literally is the piece of paper that was handed to Anthon.

John Dehlin [01:35:44] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:45] They think that.

John Dehlin [01:35:45] Do we know who wrote it?

Sandra Tanner [01:35:48] You mean originally or the one they have?

John Dehlin [01:35:50] The one they have.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:51] The one they have. I think. Think like, I believe they think it's one of the Whitmers.

John Dehlin [01:35:55] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:57] Hand that writes it out. And so they don't know for sure.

John Dehlin [01:36:04] It's just.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:04] It's just they.

John Dehlin [01:36:07] It's not a letter.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:09] No, it's just that chicken scratches across

John Dehlin [01:36:13] that page that they think the Whitmers wrote. And they're not sure if it was what was given to.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:19] They believe what's written on the paper, what was on the anthem transcript. They just don't know if it is a copy of it.

John Dehlin [01:36:26] Got it. I'm sorry. Thank you.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:29] No, if you question it, others would have the same question.

John Dehlin [01:36:31] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:33] So. But the characters themselves are reproduced in some church documents. I believe in the 1840s, we just don't know what the piece of paper looked like that was literally taken to Anthon. But evidently people made copies of the script. So we know the. What the letters supposedly look like.

John Dehlin [01:36:57] So did Hoffman just copy the characters from the Anthon transcript that we do have a copy of to his. His forgery? They basically mapped out parallel. Are they different?

Sandra Tanner [01:37:09] No, he's got. Well, he's got. Got. I think some of them. But he's got some other characters on it as well that we didn't know what to make out of.

John Dehlin [01:37:17] Okay, so he added to it.

Sandra Tanner [01:37:20] Yeah. It's like I'm posit.

John Dehlin [01:37:22] Interesting. Okay. Okay. So a second one that I have on my list is the Joseph Smith III blessing. And obviously this is relevant because it challenges the validity of Brigham Young as a successor to Joseph Smith. Saying that Joseph Smith intended that to me shows that Mark Hoffman's trying to fool with orthodox Mormon LDS Church members belief that the Brigham Young was the legitimate successor. And it's basically pulling in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ to sort of lend weight to their claim that Joseph Smith iii and there must have been. And I'm certain there were at least perceptions that or a general folk knowledge that Joseph had blessed his own son, Joseph Smith III to be a successor.

The Joseph Smith III Blessing and Other Documents

Sandra Tanner [01:38:23] Mark made up many of his documents on the basis of they could have been true because there's something that existed at one time.

John Dehlin [01:38:34] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:38:35] But weren't currently available. And so we didn't have a. An original document of Joseph Smith giving a blessing to his son. However, I think in such places as. I think it's the temple lot case which would be in the 18 what, 80s. I'm reaching back here people that in the temple lot case which was over the Reorganized Church and the. What was it? The Temple lot church Christ over who owned a piece of property. But the Mormon Church got called in to give testimony on different points as well. So in this temple lot case came up the question of the Joseph Smith anointing or designating his son to be a successor. And so you have testimony of people saying yes, this blessing was given and that it should be his son, but they didn't have an actual physical piece of paper that had this written on it. So there were people who said they remembered such a blessing being given, but they didn't have something where Joseph Smith wrote it down. So Mark fills the void. Ah, here's the thought. Now that'd be a good document to make up. Everyone already knew that Something like this event happened. What we don't have is a piece of paper from the time period where it's really stated. And if we had something like that, that'd be worth a lot of money because that'd be really embarrassing to the Mormon Church.

John Dehlin [01:40:24] Church.

Sandra Tanner [01:40:25] And if they didn't want it, the reorganized church probably would.

John Dehlin [01:40:28] Right. So do you remember how Mark shopped that around? Do you remember?

Sandra Tanner [01:40:33] No, but. Well, I don't remember how he showed it to people, but the, the gossip was going around through the underground that, oh, wow, there's this new document coming out, there's this Blessing that's been found, and we're all scurrying to try to. To figure out what's the historical background for the Joseph Smith III blessing. And we all had vague ideas that

John Dehlin [01:40:58] you thought something was coming down the pike. Yeah, he had probably planted.

Sandra Tanner [01:41:02] Oh, he always would leak stuff. And that's so funny because Mark could do it himself. I mean, we know now that he would make the leaks and then he would say, oh dear, things have been leaked, you know. Well, I wonder how that started, you know.

John Dehlin [01:41:19] Yeah,

Sandra Tanner [01:41:22] but it's. It's like a double whammy, I guess, at the church when they'd try to buy something to hide it up and that. But then he'd leak it out so people would know about it.

John Dehlin [01:41:35] Yeah, right. Well, that. Do you. So what I read just in my investigations preparing for this, that he, first of all, that this Joseph Smith, the third Blessing letter, had a cover letter that was allegedly by Thomas Bullock in 1865, where he's chastising Brigham Young for having copies of the Blessing destroyed. Do you know who this Thomas Bullock character is?

Sandra Tanner [01:42:06] Thomas Bullock was a secretary for Brigham Young.

John Dehlin [01:42:12] Okay. Okay. And so what Hoffman's doing is not only in the. In the original Joseph Smith, the third letter was supposed to be in whose hand, according to Hoffman, when he forges it. Do you remember?

Sandra Tanner [01:42:25] I don't remember. Now.

John Dehlin [01:42:26] Is it Joseph Smith saying his own son should be the successor?

Sandra Tanner [01:42:30] Well, yeah, it. It's supposed to be his wording, but Joseph very rarely wrote anything down. He had to be described.

John Dehlin [01:42:36] So, so the letter would have been Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith, potentially, with the scribe basically saying, my dear son, you. You will be my successor. Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [01:42:46] Right. Right.

John Dehlin [01:42:47] Okay. And then Hoffman includes with that a cover letter by this bullet guy chastising Brigham Young for destroying copies of. Of the original. And this is significant because it's Hoffman basically trying to signal to all of us that Brigham Young was destroying evidence and or keeping it from the members. That's kind of. That feels like kind of significant. Right? He's trying to. Basically,

Sandra Tanner [01:43:22] he builds more drama into the whole thing and tries to paint a picture of the early church leaders as deceptive in how they're handling things. And, I mean, people had problems with Brigham Young taking over. There would have been some pushback from some people that would feel he wasn't the rightful one to lead the church. So you could build in tension into your document that would fit what some people possibly could have felt. Felt. I don't know that Thomas Bullock would have felt that way. But Mark puts it in there to add drama to the whole thing. But it makes another level of forgery. You got to do two forgeries now. You got to forge that letter, and you got to forge the Blessing document.

John Dehlin [01:44:16] But I mean, the central issue for many of us that became radicalized or activated or became activists was are the brethren intentionally deceiving us?

Sandra Tanner [01:44:27] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:44:27] And so. So in this act, to me, as I'm looking back, he's like. He's seems to be thinking about this thing that all of us are wondering. I mean, I get kind of, you know, one of the number one questions. I always get two big questions. And you. You get questions all the time. My biggest two are, is the church in decline? You know, is. Is this. Is this the time where the church is really gonna be in decline? You know, ex Mormons and people who feel defrauded or just always eager for the church to have its comeuppance? Right. But then the second is, do the brethren know they're deceiving people? Are they intentionally deceiving people, either as non believers or as believers that are just okay with deceiving people? And I'm just saying that this appears like Hoffman is. Is trying to make that point to all of us, that the brethren, starting with at least Brigham Young, if not sooner, are intentionally destroying or hiding evidence so that the members won't know the true story?

Sandra Tanner [01:45:31] Well, yes, Mark's trying to do that. One of the amazing things to the church's credit, I guess, is that they don't seem to actually have destroyed that much, not in re since the 1900s. Now, maybe they did under Brigham Young, I don't know. But the amazing thing has been, for the historians, the church has preserved everything. So that. That's why we have all this great history now, is as the archives are open, they're finding all sorts of stuff that we didn't know about before. Because I have to take that back a Little sidetrack on that one. I think there's a problem with Mountain Meadow Massacre. I think there was some documents, I suspect, destroyed on that one that may have been a bridge too far that they may have had to dispose of some pages of diaries and things on that. But it is amazing how much the Church has saved that has turned out to be embarrassing to it.

John Dehlin [01:46:45] I mean, that's, that's Fairview to acknowledge. Of course, we don't know what's been destroyed because it's destroyed. Right. We, we. There is kind of the question of like the, the remaining missing pages out of the Joseph Smith 1832 journal that, you know, we know that the first vision account got pasted back, but I'm continually told that there are other pages still missing.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:11] Right. And they may be in some repository someplace else. I mean, maybe Joseph Fielding Smith had his own vaulted home or something, you know, who knows? But I think that on certain really sensitive things like Mount Meadow Massacre, I think there were things that were destroyed in the way of diaries or pages out of diaries.

John Dehlin [01:47:35] Yeah, but you're not aware of a lot of other things.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:38] But I'm not sure about other things.

John Dehlin [01:47:41] And the only deal is we would know. Would we?

Sandra Tanner [01:47:42] And how would we know? Unless you were looking at diaries and could show that pages were missing. Yeah, there's no way to know.

John Dehlin [01:47:52] But. But you feel it's fair to conclude that that Hoffman, through this Bullock cover letter, was basically trying to accuse Brigham Young of hiding and destroying information from the members.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:07] Right.

John Dehlin [01:48:08] I wonder why he would make that accusation. What do you think?

Sandra Tanner [01:48:12] True.

John Dehlin [01:48:13] What do you think?

Sandra Tanner [01:48:14] Well, it reminds me of when, when we questioned mark's documents in 84 and I passed out a pamphlet at Sunstone of Gerald's questioning of the Salamander letter. And Mark came back down to see me the next day and he was just so amazed that we would attack his documents because he thought we were on his side of trying to expose the church and that we would be putting the skids on his document deals to get more of this great stuff. You know, you don't want to hamper my efforts here to acquire all the true history. And then he gives me this big sales pitch about he was in touch with the descendant of the Thomas Bullock family and that Bullock had saved all kind of financial papers of Brigham Young and that this would show how the Church had misused funds and Brigham had spent all this money on his own personal pursuits and it would have all this damning evidence against the Church. And if I kept persisting in questioning his documents, the Bullock family might back out of the deal with Mark. And so I needed to lay low on any of this so he could get these Bullock papers. He was very good salesman. I mean, I just bought it, Klein and Sinker at that point. At that point, yeah, I thought, oh, wow, gee, there's gonna be all this great Bullock stuff. But see, who is playing to my interest in Brigham Young and the Brigham Young estate?

John Dehlin [01:49:51] Because you're a young.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:52] Because I'm a young. A descendant of Brigham Young. So he's trying to play to that interest.

John Dehlin [01:49:57] Did that make you back up? Did that make you.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:01] No, because Gerald came home after Mark left. And I tell this to Gerald, just so excited. There's going to be all this Bullock stuff coming out on finances. And Gerald's like, yeah, and I got a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you, you know.

John Dehlin [01:50:16] So were there no Bullock papers? No, he was making it up.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:19] He was making it all up. I don't know, maybe he's going to try to produce some. But. But no, he didn't have any line on the Bullock family, but he knew how to play to people's interests. Well, like, what is it? Brent Ashworth? He asked Brent one day, is there any documents you're particularly interested in? Brent gives him. Oh, he wants a particular thing. Was it a letter of Joseph Smith or something that he wanted? And. Oh, okay, I'll keep a lookout on that. And I think it's within the week that he calls Brent up and tells him, oh, hey, I got this great letter for you that is like, made to order document finding.

John Dehlin [01:51:04] That's sketchy. That's so sketchy. Did that make Brent wonder?

Sandra Tanner [01:51:09] Evidently not.

John Dehlin [01:51:10] Oh, no, no. Oh, that's just. That's so funny and tragic. Okay, so going back to this Joseph Smith III letter, what I read, you have to correct me, is that he. He tries to sell it to the LDS Church because obviously at this point, it's a document the church would want to own and potentially hide.

Sandra Tanner [01:51:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:51:34] The church apparently balks at the price, from what I read.

Sandra Tanner [01:51:37] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:51:38] So then he takes it to the RLDS Church and. And then starts, like a bidding war.

Sandra Tanner [01:51:44] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:51:44] Do you want to. Do you remember the story?

Sandra Tanner [01:51:46] I don't remember the story well enough, but I remember all of that back and forth between the two groups, and then finally the Reorganized church gets it. And then the Mormon Church buys it. No, the church gets it and they trade it back to the Reorganized Church. And the reorganized church has to give the church a book of commandments. And which would have been worth a lot of money at a bunch of different documents.

John Dehlin [01:52:11] I read there was an original Book of Mormon in there. Was there first edition Book of Mormon. But. But did Hoffman, did Hoffman get paid? What did Hoffman get for giving up that? Do we know?

Sandra Tanner [01:52:24] I don't remember what he got paid, but he had to get paid some bucks for it.

John Dehlin [01:52:28] So the church, your memory is the church did pay him for that.

Sandra Tanner [01:52:32] Well, the question would be whether the church paid him or. Or was it some member that the church got to buy it for them. Yeah, they would often have a front buyer so that they had deniability, which I think shows some funny aspects of the church that they can't buy stuff outright. They have to have a front buyer. So they have deniability that, that. No, we don't have it. We didn't buy it. They did this on, in a sense, on the Joseph Smith papyri when they got it from the Metropolitan Museum. The museum in the 60s, right? Yeah. Back in, what, 68, 67. The church wants to acquire the papyri that the Metropolitan Museum has, and the Metropolitan Museum turns it over to them. But then in dialogue, they have an interview with the curator at the Metropolitan Museum and they asked him, well, is this typical, that you just give stuff out? Oh, no, no. The. There had to be a trade. And so a. The Mormon Church tapped this mission president in the East. In fact, I think his last name was Christensen. But they tapped this mission president who buys a couple of statues that he donates to the Metropolitan, which makes it possible for the Metropolitan to gift the papyri to the church so the church can say we didn't buy it.

The Church's Use of Front Buyers and Document Suppression

John Dehlin [01:54:18] A lot of people ask me, in connection with this documentary, why does the church use front buyers? What would be a charitable explanation and then your most cynical or realistic explanation for why the church uses front buyers.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:37] They would not want to have the publicity of them spending all this money on things that members might question or wonder why the church was acquiring things.

John Dehlin [01:54:48] So they don't want tithing funds.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:50] Church members might be upset that their tithing money was being spent to find, to purchase all these different kind of documents and things.

John Dehlin [01:55:00] Also, they get someone else to pay for it. Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:02] Potentially. Well, so then this mission president, I assume, gets to claim on his tithing that he donated all this money to the church or something. So it protects the church. And then if it's a document they don't want to own up to, they have deniability. And I think they did that with with Mark Hoffman stuff. And that's why I like on the McClellan collection that they're trying. Mark's trying to broker a deal where the church will buy the McClellan collection sight unseen, and Mark will be the holder of the documents, not turn them over to the church. So then the church would have deniability. We've never seen the McClellan collection and we don't have it. But that's why they wanted Steve Christensen to see the collection. He was to verify there was such a collection before the Church would pay for the documents. And unfortunately, Christiansen was getting leery of Mark's financial dealings. And Mark couldn't produce enough documents to satisfy Christensen that he had the kind of collection that he had told the church he had. And so that sealed Christensen's fate, which is real unfortunate thing. He just was friends with the wrong person.

John Dehlin [01:56:35] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:56:37] But it shows the Church's to me effort at hiding their transactions, hiding the documents, not having to go public to explain all these things that the fact that they wanted Mark to keep the documents says they weren't interested in preserving their history. They're interested in preserving the history away from their files.

John Dehlin [01:57:07] Right. Well, this. And, and I'll just say just to close out the discussion of the Joseph SWEITH the, the third blessing, that apparently when, when Mark gives up the Joseph Smith the Third Blessing and, and gives it to the Church, he also made sure the New York Times knew about it. And, and, and so it wasn't until the New York Times runs the story that then the church acknowledges that, that they in fact knew about or had this document. Is that, is that what. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:57:44] So that's what Mark was famous for, was always letting the cat out of the bag. So even though originally things were supposed to be done secretly, they end up publicly leaked somehow. And so the New York Times ends up with stories on his documents that the Church had not thought would be made public.

John Dehlin [01:58:08] And that also it makes me question, makes me wonder about his motives because as I'm thinking of, if I'm Mark Hoffman and I've got this document that no one else has, and I know that the church will pay big bucks to hide something, then what I would want to do is not tell anyone, sell it to the church for a crapload of money and then never tell the media because then the church will be like, oh my gosh, this guy's supplying us with all the damaging documents. We can trust him. He's keeping it secret and we'll want to work with him more because we'll know that whatever we gobble up, he will keep our confidences. And so it seemed like him dribbling out the evidence of these documents to the New York Times and others, in some sense, number one, potentially put a jeopardy. His credibility with the church as being trustworthy. Does that. Does that make sense?

Sandra Tanner [01:59:14] Right. He's risking losing his main buyer. However, if it's just as satisfying to him to embarrass the church, he can always leak them out himself. When he sells them to some other buyer, he just doesn't get as much money for it. But he can still accomplish the same goal by just going to some other buyer.

John Dehlin [01:59:38] I guess I'm just saying that if he was just looking for money alone.

Sandra Tanner [01:59:42] Right.

John Dehlin [01:59:43] He would have never wanted these things ever be leaked. He would have maybe been motivated to make sure they never got leaked. Am I making any sense?

Sandra Tanner [01:59:50] Right.

John Dehlin [01:59:51] Do you think that that logic.

Sandra Tanner [01:59:52] Yes. If. If your only goal was to make money on the deals, you wouldn't leak out the transactions and what the documents were. The fact that he does leak things out shows that part of the motivation was to embarrass the Church, not just to get money from them.

John Dehlin [02:00:11] Yeah. And I just think that's important because I. I want to see. I. I want to think that. I don't know why I. I mean, he's a murderer, so, like. And he's a liar. Like.

Sandra Tanner [02:00:23] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:00:23] This is weird. I'm just. I'm. I'm like on the fly inspecting my own motives. But I guess. I guess I've seen so many people get hurt and so many people be deceived. So many suicides, so many broken families, so many divorces, so. So many lives misled under false pretenses that I. I want to think that people in this game at their core are. Are upset about that. That, that, that, that there's somewhere. And obviously there's some people, even friends that I have are activists that go too far. Right. But I want to think that something that we all kind of have in common is sadness of betrayal and. Or outrageous. And I want to think, as I'm trying to explore his motives, I keep wanting to think about whether that was at least part of what he was doing. I'm coming back to something we've already covered.

Sandra Tanner [02:01:23] Yeah. So it's half greed and it's half vindication.

John Dehlin [02:01:27] Yeah. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [02:01:28] Vindictive storytelling.

John Dehlin [02:01:30] Yeah. And I'm returning to it because I'm trying to think about the evidence along the way.

Sandra Tanner [02:01:35] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:01:36] And I'm not trying to like, like, use motivated reasoning to just Prove my thesis. I'm really trying to be fair about it, but anyway. Okay. So. I was wondering whether the church, once this, you know, he gives them the document, then it comes out in the New York Times. Would that have been something that made the church go, we don't want to deal with this Hoffman guy anymore. Everything he shares with us gets leaked. Do you know what I'm saying?

Sandra Tanner [02:02:05] Well, yeah, you'd think that they would be leery, but then they're also worried about what he might turn up. So they're caught in the horns of a dilemma of what if he found some more stuff that we wouldn't want out there, we cut off our chances of containing.

John Dehlin [02:02:26] He's too powerful.

Sandra Tanner [02:02:27] Yeah. So Mark can embarrass us a lot with bringing out his documents if he doesn't go through us.

John Dehlin [02:02:34] And I wonder if Mark was careful to, like, let them know people know about this one, you know what I mean? So that they wouldn't be surprised when it came out. Or maybe he would have told them that other people leaked it to the New York Times so that. Because I. I would think he would want to make sure he wasn't suspected as the leaker to the church.

Sandra Tanner [02:02:57] Right. Well, I didn't suspect him at first of being the leaker.

John Dehlin [02:03:01] You didn't?

Sandra Tanner [02:03:02] No, I just thought, oh, he's shown the document to somebody else and they've told their friend, who then told their

John Dehlin [02:03:08] friend other people are the leakers.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:10] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:03:10] Would he tell you when he showed you stuff? Don't tell other people. Keep the secret.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:14] Well, we never got the first round of talking with him. He went more to the inner group

John Dehlin [02:03:25] of his associates, which would have been Metcalf and.

Sandra Tanner [02:03:28] Yeah, those. And different researchers that he would have known from PYU contact that he had to develop. And Brent Ashworth or whatever, who are

John Dehlin [02:03:37] his closest confidants, do you think?

Sandra Tanner [02:03:41] Well, the. His closest one that never got mentioned in the video was Lynn Jacobs. And Lynn was quite a fascinating guy in his own right. In fact, I thought after the bombings and everything came out, I. I wondered if Lynn had maybe helped Mark with his forgeries. But I talked to the detectives about him when they're trying to look into the whole case. I said, well, have you looked into Lynn as a possible collaborator with Hoffman? And the detective, Ken Farnsworth, said, yes, they looked very hard at Lynn, but they couldn't find a money trail that they felt was significant to show a sharing of the wealth from the documents so that they didn't see anything that would suggest that kind of involvement. He had helped Mark front a couple of documents for sale, but nothing that. That the investigators felt would indicate that he had helped to make them. Unfortunately, Lynn died a few years later, and so we don't have him to.

John Dehlin [02:05:09] Do we know how.

Sandra Tanner [02:05:09] Ask about it.

John Dehlin [02:05:10] How did Lynn die?

Sandra Tanner [02:05:12] I believe he died of aids.

John Dehlin [02:05:16] Oh, I don't know anything about Lynn.

Sandra Tanner [02:05:23] He was. He always reminded me of a Shakespearean actor. He had a very dramatic look. Striking look. Dark, curly hair, dark mustache, beard thing that just made him look theatrical. Very smart, very intelligent guy. And of the two, Mark and Lynn, I would have said if I were looking for a forger, I'd been looking at Lynn because Lyn came across as smart and cunning and with a flair that I could have seen writing these early documents. Mark came across as just this nondescript, mousy guy and. But then I guess that's Mark's genius, that he didn't look like he could perpetrate something like that. But I always wondered about Lyn, but he may have been a victim like everyone else. I don't know.

John Dehlin [02:06:36] So this is. You know, these days, these questions are always kind of fraught or complicated to ask. But if. If Lynn Jacobs died of aids, one would assume that he might have been gay.

Sandra Tanner [02:06:48] Yes, he was gay.

John Dehlin [02:06:49] Okay. I just. I. I had this question not knowing anything about Lynn, and I don't know why, but. But hearing. I think. I think it was hearing Mark Hoffman's voice when. When they played. When they played recordings of his voice in the documentary. His voice sounded really weird to me, and I thought, is that an actor or is his voice distorted? Did you. Do you have any thoughts about Mark Hoffman's voice?

Sandra Tanner [02:07:20] Well, it was. Yeah, it was a little high and odd. One of the recordings they had on the video, though, I felt, was played at a little higher pitch. And. And as soon as I heard it, I thought, I don't think that pitch is quite right. But most of them that are at a slightly lower pitch rang true to me that that's what Mark sounded like and whether that's an affected type of speech he had for whatever reason. But that's what he sounded like.

John Dehlin [02:07:59] Yeah. Had you. Have you ever heard any speculation or rumors that Mark Hoffman might have been

Sandra Tanner [02:08:06] gay back when the whole thing was going on, even before the documents, even before the murders? There. Yes, there was speculation around the investigation that it seemed like there were a number of gay people in the mix with Mark, and so there was some speculation. Now, this would be partly coming from our talks with the detective, Ken Farnsworth. We got to be kind of friends with him. But there. Who is dead now. But Ken was asking questions about all the gays that seem to be around Mark that was this some sort of gay retribution against the church, Some sort of gathering of disgruntled former members that had an axe to grind over their treatment of being gay. And so there was questions about the. So the guys around Mark all got this questioning look from people, you know, are you part of the gay crowd that's friends with Mark?

John Dehlin [02:09:36] So it was your. It was your understanding that there was many of his associates. Mark's associates were gay. Gay.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:43] Some thought they were. I don't know how many of them actually were.

John Dehlin [02:09:46] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:46] But there was this question in straight people that I talked to.

John Dehlin [02:09:51] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [02:09:52] That were wondering. It looked like there were a bunch of gay friends around Mark. So was this a gay reaction against the church? And of course, the other side was. Well, look at the different ones that are married in the group, you know. Well, we know in Mormonism, that doesn't necessarily mean anything because a lot of the gays got married back then and still do. Yeah. And so that wouldn't solve the issue. So it was a question that was discussed at the time. And. I don't know. Was Mark K. I have no idea. But he was married and had kids, so who knows?

John Dehlin [02:10:31] Did investigators ever. Are you aware of any conclusions that they drew looking into that?

Sandra Tanner [02:10:36] Well, I think they dropped it because they couldn't make any conclusions on it. And it looked like more and more like Mark was just working alone and that the people that were around him were just victims that got sucked into his lies and really thought that his documents were authentic. So it just. I think it became a dead end for the investigators. They didn't see what they could make out of it.

John Dehlin [02:11:04] Did you draw a conclusion in your mind about Mark work?

Sandra Tanner [02:11:07] No, it's just one of those questions that sits back at the back of your mind. I mean, we knew that Lynn was. But I didn't know what to make of any of the others,

John Dehlin [02:11:21] because that would be another. If that were true, that would be another level of anger or frustration. And. Yeah, I don't know why I even had that thought, but. But there must.

Sandra Tanner [02:11:35] It was a question at the time.

John Dehlin [02:11:37] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [02:11:37] And who do we look at? If we're looking at Mark, did he have help with the documents? If he had help, who would have been the helpers and what would have been their motive?

John Dehlin [02:11:47] Yeah. So I got. We got. I thank you for sharing about Lynn Jacobs. And we got there by asking who the people were that were closest to him. Who else would you list as the people closest to him, including the obvious?

Sandra Tanner [02:12:04] Well, Shannon Flynn and Brent Metcalf. I don't know who else would be in his close in circle. I mean, obviously he had a lot of dealings with Kurt Bench, but I don't know if I would list him as necessarily a friend of Mark's.

The Josiah Stowell Letter and Folk Magic Revelations

John Dehlin [02:12:24] Okay, so the, the next letter, and the one that I think is potentially the biggest smoking gun as it relates to an instance where it appears as though the church literally purchased, scooped up a document, hid it, lied about it, and then only made it available once it got called out on it was the 1825 Joseph Smith letter to Josiah Stole. Now do you. I can. I can give my best description of the letter. Or do you. Do you want.

Sandra Tanner [02:13:06] You give your description of it and

John Dehlin [02:13:07] you can correct me. Okay. So apparently this is a letter. It's one page. It's supposedly written in Joseph Smith's hand in. It's dated June 18, 1825. It's to Josiah Stole. And those who are into Mormon history will know that. That when Joseph Smith ends up going to the Susquehanna area, boarding with Isaac and Emma Hale.

Sandra Tanner [02:13:33] Not the Hales. Oh yeah, the Hales. Okay. Sorry.

John Dehlin [02:13:36] To. To. To dig in the silver mine for Josiah Stole, you know, and that's where he ends up getting really in trouble and getting the reputation making Emma's dad hate him. But it's also where he meets Emma and ends up eloping with her like. So this is that Josiah stole. It's the guy that Joseph Smith. Smith and his dad end up doing treasure digging with to find the silver mine. So Mark Hoffman knows about that story and so he thinks, huh, I'll write a letter that's supposedly from Joseph Smith to Josiah Stole. Sort of pre. Counseling him about tips and tricks on how to treasure dig. And it mentions treasure being guarded by clever spirits. It mentions the use of a hazel stick as kind of a treasure detector that you cut it and cleave it and then somehow it responds to treasure, that it finds a dousing rod, so to speak. And it has Joseph basically saying something to the effect of, if I have time, maybe I'll come out and help you later. Okay, so those are my memories of kind of what the document says. Anything else you want to add to that from your memory?

Sandra Tanner [02:14:50] No.

John Dehlin [02:14:50] Does that sound right? Does that sound right?

Sandra Tanner [02:14:51] Yeah. On the letter? Yes.

John Dehlin [02:14:53] Okay. And then what's. So, so do you remember when that letter comes out? And do you remember what. What you and Gerald might have. Might have thought of it? Anything you remember about that?

Sandra Tanner [02:15:08] Well, when it came out, we were all excited because this would fit right in with what we knew about Joseph Smith and his magic involvement. And the details in it would certainly sound historically accurate. In documents that Mark would have had available to him, he could have found quotes from the Wayne Sentinel, the newspaper in Joseph Smith's area that had published articles about which hazel rods and about money diggers, seer stones, guarding spirits and that type of thing. And I don't remember specifically, but I imagine they're probably referenced in Brody and they're referenced in our material. So Mark would have been aware of that kind of activity that could be shown in Joseph's neighborhood that he would know the church would also be privy to, so that he knew it would fit what they could imagine could have been in a letter at that time, because they would be equally familiar with the sources that Mark is using to draw on to write the letter up. So it's fulfilling the church's worst nightmare to have this come out because they realize it is plausible for Smith to have written such a letter as this. The only question would be whether it's authentic. But the subject matter would have been common for his. For Joseph Smith's day and it would so directly tie him to it, to magic. Because if it's just Martin Harris, you can always just dismiss him as just kind of a flake and it doesn't affect the restoration claims. But if Joseph himself is.

John Dehlin [02:17:17] We want it both ways with Martin Harris. We want him to be a credible witness because he's one of the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [02:17:24] Right.

John Dehlin [02:17:25] But then. And when I say we, I mean the church, they also need him to be a fool because he was a fool and he did. He had so many crazy beliefs. He went off and followed the Strangites and. And became a witness for Strang's book. The church needs to have it both ways with Martin Harrison.

Sandra Tanner [02:17:42] But it's much more problematic to have your prophet saying those things and tied so deeply into the magic world scene. So that would have been very troubling for the Church, which also meant that we were more excited about it because it directly tied to Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [02:18:02] Yeah, yeah. And I help us understand the context at the time because on the one hand we've got Fawn Brody's book published in 1945. Right, right. And we also had Dialogue and Sunstone and you know, your friend publishing and you guys publishing stuff about folk Magic and treasure digging.

Sandra Tanner [02:18:25] Right.

John Dehlin [02:18:26] But we didn't have Michael Quinn or Magic in the early Mormon worldview, or whatever it is. What was the church? What was the church. How was the Church dealing with the allegations of folk magic around 1983, when Hoffman would have come out with this

Sandra Tanner [02:18:44] letter that you remember, the historians in the Mormon Church, we're all familiar with the same early stories that we were, that I wouldn't have said anything in 1980 about our research that would surprise a church historian. They just had a way of discounting them as irrelevant to Mormonism's truth claims. And somewhat they're still doing it today that now that they admit he had a seer stone. Oh, isn't that wonderful? It works just like a cell phone. Well, they weren't telling people that in 1980. So they were aware that all of that type of claims of seer stones and rod working and all were going on in Joseph's day. And that the Smiths probably were involved in quite a bit of money digging, imagination, magic. But they always wanted to cast it in Joseph Smith's teenage folly and that he outgrew it all and that it was just. It was just garden variety folk magic stuff, like playing with a Ouija board, like it wasn't serious, that he didn't really believe that there was magic stuff. But when you look at Mother Smith, we know it was. I mean, she talks about the family following the faculty of Abrac and Abrach would be a magic spirit. And so, I mean, they knew about the Smith family involvement, the Hyrum Smith magic papers, Patriarch Smith, the descendant of Hyrum, he had the magic papers of Joseph Smith and. And the Hyrum Smith's papers. And the church would have to have been.

John Dehlin [02:20:47] Which would have said what? Which said what?

Sandra Tanner [02:20:49] Wouldn't have said anything. It was these magic papers, that little parchment pieces of paper that if you followed folk magic, you folded up and carried in a little pouch on you, and they gave you special blessings powers, like having a rabbit's foot. What. That you carried around or something. You know, they had special powers. And Joseph and Hyrum Smith had these magic papers.

John Dehlin [02:21:19] Did he carry around where.

Sandra Tanner [02:21:21] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:22] Hiram Smith.

Sandra Tanner [02:21:22] Hiram did, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:21:24] So Joseph's brother wore a little pouch

Sandra Tanner [02:21:26] with like magic papers in them.

John Dehlin [02:21:28] Magic papers.

Sandra Tanner [02:21:29] And they had a magic dagger. Oh. And Joseph had his Jupiter talisman, which is what? It's another amulet, magic piece that gives you power and money and success with women or something. But. So the family was deeply involved in magic. This wasn't just like Playing with tarot cards in your front room just for fun or something. These guys were seriously seeing these as sources of power. That doesn't mean they saw them as demonic, but they just saw them as part of the way of harnessing the powers of the universe and would not have seen it as contrary to the Christianity. They could hold it within their Christian framework of these magic powers, the good forces, the bad forces and how you make them work and be very similar to Mormon's view of the power of the priesthood today, that there's the evil powers and the good powers and the priesthood power triumphs. And so the early Mormons, the Joseph Smith family and all would have had a very. That's why Quinn calls his book Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview. There was a magic worldview of many people, not everyone, but many people were following these kinds of things. Many people in Joseph's neighborhood. That's why when they talk about all the persecution that Joseph had in his early life, what really was happening was the money digger company that him and his dad were a part of were trying to get the gold plates from Joseph because the Smiths had signed an agreement what stolen these different people looking for treasure that if anyone found a treasure, they were going to split it in this money digging company. And when the Smiths claimed they had found gold plates, then the money diggers felt that the Smiths owed them part of the booty. And so here the Smiths are hiding these gold plates and that should be partly ours. And that's where you get the persecution stories. Not on his religion. So it was common, but not everyone engaged in that sort of thing.

John Dehlin [02:23:53] Right. And I guess if, if we're gonna believe that Joseph and Hyrum and others in his family believed in folk magic, it kind of means that they probably believed in religious stuff because. Because it believes in it. It's not a purely secular worldview. It's kind of a supernatural worldview where you believe in, in spirits and special powers that you can't see. So in a weird way, it's. It feels like to me an acknowledgment that Joseph and Hyrum believed in superstitious folk magic stuff also inclines you to believe that they really did believe in angels and in God and, and maybe in a lot of the central tenets of Christianity.

Sandra Tanner [02:24:40] Right. Their magic is, is kind of an extension, outgrowth of their Christianity that the Jupiter, I mean the magic papers that Hyrum had, they had like Jehovah Elohim and different things, Christian words on them like that. But in a magic sense that you're using this as spells to get the powers of the universe to work for you. So they wouldn't have seen it as like black magic, devil stuff.

John Dehlin [02:25:10] Yeah, yeah.

Sandra Tanner [02:25:11] This was some sort of Christian power, the way of that a Christian could tap into the powers of the universe.

John Dehlin [02:25:18] Interesting. So their folk magic was sort of tied to their Christianity.

Sandra Tanner [02:25:24] Yes, yeah. The people that were in the money digging group, a number of them were churchgoing people. But the rank and file leadership of the churches would not have accepted this. That's why when Joseph tries to join the Methodist Church in 1828, that they won't let him join because he hasn't repented of his magic involvement. And Emma's cousin says, what a thing to have a practicing necromancer be a part of the Methodist Church. Church. So he was dropped from the membership roles. So not everybody was on board with this kind of magic bunny digging stuff.

John Dehlin [02:26:12] Right. So when we go back to what the church. So we know that the church historians, and probably by extension high level church general authorities, they all knew Joseph was involved in this treasure digging stuff and, and folk magic, they would have known from the 60s and 70s and just all the stuff coming out. Would they have been honest and open with the church membership about this stuff in the early 80s? And then how much would the church membership on average have known about this kind of stuff?

Sandra Tanner [02:26:42] Well, the church was still denying all that sort of thing. I mean the official church, officially the church was downplaying anything that you brought up about the magic involvement. They would just make it. Oh well, yeah, there were people of the day that did that sort of thing. Thing, but it wasn't the Smiths. But Hinckley, for instance, had written the little pamphlet Truth Restored, which kind of a little summary history of the beginnings of Mormonism, which was one of the

John Dehlin [02:27:10] books we were allowed to read on our mission. So it's like Miracle, Forgiveness, Jesus the Christ, Articles of faith, marvelous work and a wonder, and Truth Restored. I forgot about that little book.

Sandra Tanner [02:27:19] Yes, well, Truth Restored is a very sanitized telling of the church history. And Hinckley would have known more than he tells in that little book. So you see the control of dissemination of information by someone who knows better by how he frames the story at that time. In that little book, Dallin Oaks wrote the book on the enemies of Joseph

John Dehlin [02:27:54] Smith or the Carthage.

Sandra Tanner [02:27:55] The Carthage conspiracy.

John Dehlin [02:27:57] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [02:27:58] So to, to research that, he had to be very informed in Joseph Smith's life. So he had to be aware of those things as well. They would have. All those that had paid attention to history would have all been aware of Fawn Brody's book which lays all this out in there. I mean, from 45, they all knew the story laid out in Fawn Brody's book.

John Dehlin [02:28:26] If they had read it, I mean, it's possible that Hinckley and Oaks never read no Man Knows My History because they believed, like many of us, that it was anti Mormon. Isn't that, is that possible? They wouldn't have read it.

Sandra Tanner [02:28:38] I think they had to have read it because they were writing defensive books for the church. And I think that they would have read it to have known how to frame the story away from.

John Dehlin [02:28:51] Away from.

Sandra Tanner [02:28:52] Do it, away from the things that Brody brought up.

John Dehlin [02:28:56] Okay, but we're speculating a little.

Sandra Tanner [02:28:59] We're speculating, but I think they, I think they knew enough of the early documents to realize that the things Hoffman was bringing up could potentially exist and would be a problem for them.

John Dehlin [02:29:16] Interesting. So the fact that, okay, what I hear you saying again is that if the general authorities in 80, 1983 were interested in a Hoffman document, the fact that they were interested and might want to scoop it up is it is extra evidence that they knew that, that it was. There were credible problems behind the document. Otherwise why would they even bother with the document? And oh, this is just silly, specious, anti Mormon made up stuff.

Sandra Tanner [02:29:44] Right, Right. They knew church history enough that Mark's documents had the potential of being authentic. They would fit what they knew of some of the documents from the time period.

John Dehlin [02:29:56] Interesting. Okay, but you're saying that overall the church was officially was hiding, downplaying or dismissing any talk about folk magic tied to Joseph Smith or the Smith family, Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [02:30:11] Right. Yeah. They, they had to know about Patriarch Smith having those magic papers. Although to give them credit on that, I think they thought they were Masonic. Which raises a whole other question. Why would the Smiths be keeping these odd Masonic documents?

John Dehlin [02:30:35] But so Patriarch Smith had these documents and what was he doing with them or how do we know about him?

Sandra Tanner [02:30:41] He would show them at different fireplaces, firesides, firesides of a different group, little meetings. Elder Eldridge Smith, was that his name? He would show and tell. You could have him come to your fireside and he would get out the family heirloom of the Smith family and have these magic papyri things that he would have. And another guy that we haven't mentioned, well, he doesn't come into the Mark story, but fellow by the name of Wilfred Wood he was a furrier in Bountiful and he had gone back in the 50s, I guess it was 40s and 50s. He had made trips back east and had helped the church acquire a lot of the property that had been involved with Mormonism and wasn't owned by the church anymore, like their property in New York and in Nauvoo and Susquehanna area and that. But he went around different areas buying up artifacts of the early Mormonism and trading fur coats to people to get documents and artifacts of Joseph Smith and even has a. Well, he's dead now, but his family has had a museum up in Woods Cross for years where they displayed these things and they're the ones that own the original Jupiter talisman, the little magic medallion of Joseph Smith. Although they may have passed that on to the church at this point, I'm not sure who currently owns it, but Mr. Wood was one that acquired that Jupiter talisman from I believe the Bitumen family.

John Dehlin [02:32:40] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [02:32:41] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:32:41] That would have been Emma's second husband, right?

Sandra Tanner [02:32:43] Yeah. Right.

John Dehlin [02:32:44] The descendants of that.

Sandra Tanner [02:32:45] Yeah. But there was. So there was information out at the time that there were magic things around, but you had to be in the right circles to hear about them. They weren't in the improvement era or the ensign. They just things that people talked around about. Oh, I went to the museum up at the Woods Cross and I saw this and that artifact. Oh, I heard Eldridge Smith talk at Fireside and he showed us these ancient artifacts of Joseph Smith's and stuff. Stuff.

John Dehlin [02:33:18] And then there was Joseph. There was Richard Bushman's first biography called Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Early Mormonism, which did acknowledge the folk magic, treasure digging stuff and provided an apologetic kind of explanation or excuse. Do you remember when that book came out? I don't expect you to remember.

Sandra Tanner [02:33:37] No, I don't.

John Dehlin [02:33:38] I know that was written as part of Leonard Arrington's intended multi volume history of the church that got scrapped and then Bushman publishes that.

Sandra Tanner [02:33:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:33:48] So I, I wish I knew what year that book was published. Anyway, so. So the church. So when Hoffman comes up with this 19 with this 1825 letter to Josiah Stole, it was in the context of the church knowing about the problematic history around treasure digging and folk magic, but not acknowledge denying it and. Or hiding it from the church membership. Correct.

Sandra Tanner [02:34:13] Right. If you had asked the average member if Joseph practiced magic, they'd have said, you've been reading anti Mormon literature. There's no truth to it because who would you have brought up as proof? Ed Howe's book Fawn Brody, the Tanner, I mean, we're all a bunch of liars. You can't trust anything we say. So without knowing any of the early history of Mormonism, the average member would have thought they all sounded like terrible slander against Joseph Smith.

John Dehlin [02:34:47] And when people are looking to gather evidence around the church, misleading people, I think you have to mention the excommunication and smearing of honest researchers and critics because that's. It has to be. At some point they're like, whoa, this information is really damaging. So we have to always smear and excommunicate and damage the messengers because that's the only way to taint the information that could ever be passed on. I mean, that must have been part of their playbook from Brody to now.

Sandra Tanner [02:35:23] Right? Right. Like I don't remember what year it was. Stan Larsen worked at the church as a church translator and he had degrees in biblical studies of some kind or other. Anyways, he was working as a translator for the church, but then he started looking at the Book of Mormon account of the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus gave supposedly here in America. And he wrote up a private paper on this showing that the third Nephi Sermon on the Mount is copied from the King James and in fact would follow the King James in problematic areas that show it can't be an independent document. It has to be from the King James, not just some other language version or something of the Sermon on the Mount, but the King James Version and

John Dehlin [02:36:33] maybe even the one Joseph had a copy of.

Sandra Tanner [02:36:35] Yeah, right. I don't remember if he directly addresses that. He may, but anyways, showing that there was a problem with it being so dependent on the King James text. And he shared this with a colleague

John Dehlin [02:36:48] for the listeners who are new to this and don't understand why that's a problem. Connect the dots and tell listeners why that's a problem.

Sandra Tanner [02:36:55] Well then it would mean the Book of Mormon can't be an ancient document. It has to be a modern day fabrication. Which is why, because it's using the Joseph Smith has to be using a current Bible to put words into Jesus mouth here in America that he couldn't possibly have said because it's dependent on a text from the King James authors that everything isn't, every word is not exact. It's the way it copies the King James that shows it's a modern day fabrication. It can't represent a translation of an ancient text.

John Dehlin [02:37:36] So I'm fuzzy on Book of Mormon, but third Nephi would have been written by someone named Nephi, right? If Third Nephi was written by a prophet. Correct.

Sandra Tanner [02:37:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:37:45] Okay. And if that's true, then if Jesus came to America and gave the equivalent of a Sermon on the Mount talk, it would have been in his own words with whatever he was experiencing at the time. It wouldn't have been in King James English, but it also would have had differences or anomalies or peculiarities, but it certainly wouldn't have had had direct copied text from the King James Bible, because the King James Bible would have been written much, much, much later, like what, 14, 1500 years later. And it certainly wouldn't have included errors that somehow got into a certain version of the King James Bible. And so it would indicate that it wasn't Third Nephi, whoever that prophet was, Nephi, that wrote about an authentic account with Jesus in America, 33 A.D. but instead Joseph would have just been saying, okay, I need the Sermon on the Mount, as I'm, as I'm filling in the words for what Jesus said when he was in the Americas, as I'm making all this up, let me just pull out the Bible and start copying my King James Version right into the Book of Mormon. And I did a worse job of explaining it than you. But that's my attempt at explaining it.

Sandra Tanner [02:39:09] Right, right.

John Dehlin [02:39:09] And that's a problem.

Sandra Tanner [02:39:10] Yes, a problem. And so Stan shares this paper with a colleague at work, never making it public, but just shared it with this, I think it was a woman. Anyways, someone in the department became privy of the paper and saw it as threatening to the truth claims of the Book of Mormon and turned it into a higher up, which got Larsen in trouble and he was forced out of the department. He was given an ultimatum of if you resign, we'll give you a severance from employment. If you'll resign from church employment, we'll give you a severance package. If you don't resign and we have to fire you, you get nothing. And Stan was financially in a position where he didn't feel that he could afford to stand his ground and fight him on it. So he took the severance package and then he got a job at the University of Utah in Special Collections over there. But stands an example of the Church's fear of church history, of analyzing the documents and looking at whether things really were supported by history. The Church had that kind of control on things that scholars.

John Dehlin [02:40:47] What decade was the Stan Larsen thing? 60s, 70s?

Sandra Tanner [02:40:51] No, it'd be, I don't know, late 70s, early 80s. Oh, late 70s, maybe 70s now, I'm not clear on that.

John Dehlin [02:41:04] So he Wasn't excommunicated, but he was forced to quit.

Sandra Tanner [02:41:07] He was forced out of his job. Yeah. Out of the church historian, the church translation department. And then since then, there have been other scholars that have been forced out, fired or whatever. BYU professors that have either lost their job or been forced out. Some that I've talked with that once they figured out there were problems, they transferred to another university before the church could catch up to their questioning of the church. But the church was never there.

John Dehlin [02:41:42] Was David Wright that inspired Brett Metcalf.

Sandra Tanner [02:41:44] Right, right, right.

John Dehlin [02:41:46] If I'm remembering that. Right.

Sandra Tanner [02:41:47] Yeah. New Testament studies. And he ended up writing some very important papers. Yeah. So the church does not have a good history with honest, straightforward historians. If you're going to work for the church, you have to come up with something that aligns with Sunday school material. They don't want anything surprising coming to the membership, which put them in the problem of being able to be blackmailed, in a sense, by Hoffman with the documents because they had so tried to control the narrative that when he came along with documents, it threatened that narrative. And thus we have the whole.

John Dehlin [02:42:39] They created the environment that would make Hoffman and, you know, exist and. And eventually lethal.

Sandra Tanner [02:42:47] Right.

John Dehlin [02:42:47] By always dismissing and denying and hiding and lying about documents.

Sandra Tanner [02:42:52] Right, right, right. So,

John Dehlin [02:42:58] yeah. So, I mean, this is what I think about a lot because, you know, again, I told you the two big questions people ask. Is the church on its way down? And then do the brethren know or really believe, or are they just intentionally deceiving us? And none of us can know for sure whether the brethren actually believe in God, actually believe in Jesus, actually believe in the church's restoration, the truth claims, the Book of Mormon, you know, divinity. Although most of the people I know that are close to them, including my own brother who spent. Spent years with these men, they all say that these are sincere believers. So whether or not there's. There's fraud going on at the highest levels of the church in terms of them not being sincere believers, what this story about Stan Larsen and the one we're about to tell about the 1825 letter to Josiah stole. What they seem to prove beyond a shadow of doubt is that the brethren have known about these problems and intentionally hid them, misled the members about their truthfulness, and punished anyone who dared talk openly as a way to keep them silent and. Or smear them or take away their credibility so that they would never be believed. Is that a strategy?

Sandra Tanner [02:44:29] No, I think that's true. And. And I don't know whether they sincerely Believe or not, I will grant them the possibility that maybe they really do have a belief in that Joseph Smith's call was authentic. But they also know that there are a ton of problems with that claim, so that now they have to wrestle with problems of. Is the Book of Mormon an actual record of real people or is it some sort of divine allegory or something? Were there really gold plates or was this something Joseph just saw in a dream? You know, they're trying to find some way to frame the story that gets them off the hook of looking like Joseph Smith made it all up. As a con man, he has to come out sincere. So the name of the game is no matter what you write, it has to end up with Joseph being sincere. He can't be a known deceiver. And the historians now are struggling with how to frame this story because the documents show that it didn't happen the way we've always been told. The Book of Mormon is not the historical record we were always told. So how do you frame that in a way that keeps people believing Joseph Smith, but not destroyed by finding out the Book of Mormon can't be history. So it's a. It's a tough game to try to recast it all in a new way of talking about it. I think the church historians really believe, even though they know all this material.

John Dehlin [02:46:18] Turley, for example.

Sandra Tanner [02:46:19] Turley. I assume Turley really believes it. My Cousin, Mark Amherst McGee, I think he really believes it is Ashurst.

John Dehlin [02:46:29] Amherst.

Sandra Tanner [02:46:29] Amherst.

John Dehlin [02:46:30] Okay, okay.

Sandra Tanner [02:46:31] Mark Amherst McGee. He's involved in the Joseph Smith Papers project. And I assume he really believes it all, but he some way has to find a way to marry Joseph Smith's divine call with a very problematic history that has all sorts of things that look like fraud.

John Dehlin [02:46:53] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And this is a little bit of a side trail, but we'll come right back to this letter. But in my mind, just doing the math and connecting the dots, you get enough of the brethren with enough exposure to the problems, with enough time, you have to think that there are points where they're like. That we all arrive at right before our big faith crisis, which is, what if this isn't true? What if this isn't true? You have to think that at least Hinckley or Oaks or. Or Benson or. Or McConkey or Joseph feeling Smith or Joseph F. Smith or one of these dudes, one of them at least reached the point that all of us reached who have lost our faith, which is whether we're willing to say, what if it's not all true. And then once you're willing to ask yourself that question, then oftentimes you're, you're it. The. The rabbit hole opens up and you go down it.

Sandra Tanner [02:48:09] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:48:10] And then there are some that I guess can put that genie back in the bottle. But you have to think that at least a couple of these brethren at some point realized that it wasn't true.

Sandra Tanner [02:48:22] You would think, but I don't know who to say it was.

John Dehlin [02:48:27] You don't know?

Sandra Tanner [02:48:28] No.

John Dehlin [02:48:28] Maybe Hubie Brown. Possibly.

Sandra Tanner [02:48:32] Possibly. Maybe BH Roberts maybe with Brown when he talked with Ferguson. See this goes back long time ago. Tom Ferguson was a lawyer from California that wrote church books to defend the Book of Mormon and was getting money for the church to run expeditions down in Guatemala area to try to prove the Book of Mormon. And he came up to talk to Brown Apostle Brown and trying to get some more money from the church for his expeditions. And Ferguson told us about Brown and seeming to indicate that the Book of Abraham wasn't true. And well, that all leaves you with the question, well, what do you do with that?

BH Roberts, Book of Mormon Historicity, and Church Doubts

John Dehlin [02:49:27] You're saying Hubie Brown indicated to Ferguson.

Sandra Tanner [02:49:31] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:49:31] You're saying Hubie Brown indicated to Ferguson that the Book of Abraham might not be true?

Sandra Tanner [02:49:36] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:49:36] According to.

Sandra Tanner [02:49:38] Well, the problem of the translation of the like the facsimiles.

John Dehlin [02:49:46] Right.

Sandra Tanner [02:49:46] That they were on the horns of a dilemma with that stuff.

John Dehlin [02:49:48] Stuff. Brown acknowledges this to Ferguson.

Sandra Tanner [02:49:51] Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:49:52] Which questions. Which, which raises the question, is it possible that Hubie Brown didn't believe the Book of Abraham was a translation?

Sandra Tanner [02:50:01] Right. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:50:02] Okay, really quickly, where do you come down on BH Roberts losing his faith in Book of Mormon historicity by the end of his life?

Sandra Tanner [02:50:11] I think he has to know the Book of Mormon is not actual history or the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [02:50:17] Okay, okay.

Sandra Tanner [02:50:18] I think the BH Roberts knew the Book of Mormon wasn't actual history. He may have been able to rationalize that way in some way still hold on to a belief of Joseph Smith's divine calling. Maybe he is the original one to come up with this allegory explanation to his mind or something. But I think he knew there was no real gold plates. There was not Nephites.

John Dehlin [02:50:46] What's your evidence or indication that BH Roberts lost his testimony in Book of

Sandra Tanner [02:50:50] Mormon historicity when in his studies of the Book of Mormon he had done a manuscript where he raised questions about the Book of Mormon. Could it have been put together by someone who read View of the Hebrews, which was early book 1823, reprinted 1825, speculating on the American Indians, whether they were from Israelites, and there's similarities in the book to Book of Mormon ideas. So PH Roberts does this study, and it wasn't published during his lifetime. It came out, published later. But in Robert's statements, he will make a little speculations. Was this particular item, in view of the Hebrews, sufficient to suggest to the author of the Book of Mormon this particular idea, whatever it was, and there would be these different questions all through his manuscript that say, to me, Roberts realized that the Book of Mormon did not have historical standing. Now the Mormons look at his manuscript and they say, oh, he was just playing devil's advocate. That wasn't Robert's real feeling. He was just telling the church this is what an outsider could raise as an objection to the Book of Mormon. Well, yes, one could say that, but I think the questions, the way he poses them, I would suggest, were his own questions. Not just that he was playing devil's advocate, but they were really his thoughts. Thoughts which would say he saw the problem of it. But being a historical book,

John Dehlin [02:52:39] are you. Are you familiar with Shannon Caldwell Montez's research of the past few years where she actually finds a source or two late in BH Roberts's life who. Who claim to have spoken with BH Roberts where he had indicated a loss of faith in Book of Mormon historicity?

Sandra Tanner [02:52:58] No, I haven't read that.

John Dehlin [02:52:59] You haven't read that?

Sandra Tanner [02:52:59] No.

John Dehlin [02:53:00] Would you be interested in reading that?

Sandra Tanner [02:53:02] Well, yeah, I would put on my shelf of things to read. But is it a book or just a pamphlet or What?

John Dehlin [02:53:07] It's a M.A. it's a master's thesis.

Sandra Tanner [02:53:09] Oh, a master's thesis. Yeah. No, I'm not familiar with that.

John Dehlin [02:53:12] Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's really good. I'd be curious to hear your reaction to that. Okay, well, back. Back to The Josiah stole 1825 letter. And I really appreciate your generosity of your time. So now that we've kind of dug deep into the historical context, let's talk about Gordon B. Hinckley. So. So this letter comes out purportedly of. Of. In Joseph Smith's handwriting, writing to Josiah Stole, giving him tips about folk magic and spirits and dousing rods and treasure digging, saying, hey, maybe I'll come later and help you find a buried treasure. This document comes out. What's your memory of how. Of Gordon B. Hinckley's response to the document coming out?

Sandra Tanner [02:54:08] Oh, I can't remember what the Church said about it, but I knew we were pretty excited about it because, I

John Dehlin [02:54:16] mean, what he tried to do, what Hinckley tried to do. You don't remember? Okay, I. I'll tell you what I remember. Okay? So in my readings. And this is from your book, by the way. Buy everything the Tanner have ever published. Go to UTLM right now. Buy books, buy reward. Give them donations, reward Sandra Tanner. She's got staff. She's still doing this work.

Sandra Tanner [02:54:39] 60.

John Dehlin [02:54:39] How many years?

Sandra Tanner [02:54:41] 60 years.

John Dehlin [02:54:42] 60 years later. So send her money. Give her money. Supporter for this work. Okay, so reading from Gerald's research in yours, what is indicated is that Gordon B. Hinckley. And I'll put a link to this article. Gordon B. Hinckley apparently purchases Hoffman, lets Gordon B. Hinckley know that this letter exists before it gets published to the world. Right.

Sandra Tanner [02:55:08] Okay.

John Dehlin [02:55:09] Hinckley is alarmed by this letter. And so he pays Hoffman, by some reports, out of his own pocket, somewhere between 15 and $25,000 for this document. Now, that begs the question, number one, where's Gordon B. Hinckley getting between 15 and $25,000 of his own money? And then why is he buying it? And. And, you know, that's a question. But then it appears as though when Hinckley or the church was asked soon after Hinckley buys the document whether this document exists or whether the church had it or whether Hinckley bought it, it appears like there was a period of time where the church and or Hinckley were denying that Hinckley had purchased this document. And then it isn't until the church realizes that again, Hoffman leaks to other sources that this document, in fact does exist and that Hinckley or the church did purchase it, that then the Deseret news is forced. May 12, 1985. Two full years after Hinckley apparently purchases the document that the Deseret. That the church admits through the Deseret News that this document does exist and does publish it. And this is the game that the church seems to play where they deny, deny, deny it until they're forced to admit it. Then they publish it and admit it only after they're forced. And then later apologists can say, see, the church is transparent. You see, it published all these things. Now, that's what I have read. I want to. To really get clear on this evidence. Now that I've said all that, is there anything you remember?

Sandra Tanner [02:57:01] Couldn't give you any more than that. I just remember.

John Dehlin [02:57:03] Does all that sound right?

Sandra Tanner [02:57:04] Yes, that's. It all sounds right. Yes, that does seem to be the way they were operating at the time.

John Dehlin [02:57:14] Yeah. And so do you.

Sandra Tanner [02:57:16] Operating for years.

John Dehlin [02:57:18] Decades.

Sandra Tanner [02:57:19] Decades, yeah.

John Dehlin [02:57:20] So. So is it your memory that Hinckley was in fact involved in trying to buy up a letter with his own money to hide it, that he denied it and then the church only fessed up to it after they were exposed?

Sandra Tanner [02:57:34] Yeah, that's my understanding of the situation.

John Dehlin [02:57:37] Okay, and what do you think about that?

Sandra Tanner [02:57:40] I think it just shows the church knew they had a problem with their history and they were trying every way they could think of to try to keep the real narrative from coming out because it does raise questions about Mormonism's validity. If you see all of. If. If you were to accept all of Mark's documents on the magic stuff, it looked pretty bad. So at the time, it was heyday for the anti Mormons. They. Everyone was gleeful that we had all these documents that. That questioned the church. However, we felt there was enough evidence before Mark to establish all of that. But it would have been more evidence if they had been authentic. And because Gerald wanted to have his case built on things that were actually true, not just stuff that would support his cause, he was able to question the documents, allow himself to question them and to look into it. It that he didn't want to accept them just because it helped his cause. But he didn't want to be surprised years later when someone came along and said, these aren't authentic. He didn't want another situation like the Cowdery defense where he had used something. And then later some Mormon comes along and says, oh, we've proven the Cowder defense isn't true. He didn't want someone come along later and say, well, we've proven moral, Mark. Documents aren't true. So he wanted to be sure if he was going to use them, that they were authentic.

John Dehlin [02:59:21] Yeah, that shows a lot of integrity. And I think that's a. That's a real, you know, for any activist today in Mormonism, you know, progressive Mormons, post Mormons that want to, you know, wake orthodox Mormons up to the truth about the church, that want the church to be held accountable. I love that example of saying not by any means necessary, not by means of fraud, not by means of deception, and instead with as much allegiance to the facts and the truth as possible. To me, that makes you and Gerald kind of heroes.

Sandra Tanner [03:00:04] Right? Well, Gerald was not perfect, but he certainly was committed to being honest.

John Dehlin [03:00:14] Yeah. Yeah. So why isn't this like all the hubbub around Mark Hoffman is around the Salamander letter, But in my mind, this Josiah stole 1825 letter seems more damning and condemning of the church than even the Salamander letter. Because you've got Hinckley, this beloved prophet, buying it, hiding it, denying it, and then only admitted to him when it fell. It's got it all right there. Why isn't the 1825 letter the scandalous letter that Hoffman, that is remembered in association with Hoffman? And why isn't this something that we all know about, like even you, when I first asked you, you were fuzzy on the, the details. Why isn't it the 1825 Josiah stole letter that's remembered as like the smoking gun of the whole Hoffman thing? Does that make sense?

The Salamander Letter Emerges

Sandra Tanner [03:01:10] Well, because so much of the, I don't know, the books that came out at the time focused on the Salamander letter. Well, and Gerald's questions for authenticity started with the Salamander letter. So I guess it becomes foremost in discussions because of that reason.

John Dehlin [03:01:35] It leads to the discovery of the fraud.

Sandra Tanner [03:01:38] Right? Yeah, it's the first document that Gerald starts raising questions about. And so it becomes a focal point. And besides, Salamanders makes a crazy story. So that catches your attention.

John Dehlin [03:01:52] Okay, so but you agree this 1825 account with Hinckley, it's kind of, it's

Sandra Tanner [03:01:58] very damning, isn't it?

John Dehlin [03:02:00] Yeah, I think so, yeah. And the COVID up, it would have

Sandra Tanner [03:02:03] been damning if it had been true. And it's even more damning that it isn't.

John Dehlin [03:02:08] Right. Although everything in it could have happened. This is definitely plausible, right? Yes. Okay, let's jump to the Salamander letter now.

Sandra Tanner [03:02:19] Okay.

John Dehlin [03:02:19] And I'm guessing your, your memory is going to be more fresh on that one. So when this letter comes, like I have so many questions about it. Okay, let's start. Give people a background if you, if you can or want to, on what it, what it was, who supposedly wrote it, what it supposedly said.

Sandra Tanner [03:02:38] Well, you have Martin Harris writing this kind of introductory letter on Mormonism. And in it he recounts Joseph going out to the get the plates and when he opens the box, this salamander jumps out, turns into a spirit and what is it? Knocks him down. Can't remember all the details of the letter now, but it casts it all in this magic folklore which we now know was suggested to him by statements by letters in the Ed Howe Mormonism Unveiled book.

John Dehlin [03:03:29] So you're saying Hoffman, Hoffman would have

Sandra Tanner [03:03:32] gotten the ideas, got his idea for the white salamander from one of the people in Howe's book, talking about a toad like creature that jumps out of the hole. And so Mark spins that then to salamander.

John Dehlin [03:03:50] So there's actually some, there's a basis for the story.

Sandra Tanner [03:03:54] Yeah, yeah. He just enlarged on it from just being a toad like creature that becomes a spirit to this salamander that becomes a spirit.

John Dehlin [03:04:08] It.

Sandra Tanner [03:04:09] So it makes it a little more colorful.

John Dehlin [03:04:11] So there's the salamander, which is colorful. There's the tying it to the folk magic.

Sandra Tanner [03:04:15] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:04:16] Which the church obviously doesn't want Right. To, you know, let. Let out of the bag. But then there's the fact that Martin Harris is one of the three witnesses. Right.

Sandra Tanner [03:04:24] Yes. And Martin is such an odd guy anyways that it's all believable that Martin could write a letter like this. He wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but you know, I guess it's hard to pick your witnesses. But Martin tried to test Joseph at different times, but he wasn't very deep thinker on what he thought would prove Joseph was a prophet like Joseph. Like Martin dropping his toothpick in the straw and asking Joseph, Joseph to find it. And Joseph supposedly puts a stone in his hat and he bends down and reaches in the straw and picks up Martin's toothpick and hands it to him. And Martin takes this as proof that the seer stone really works and Joseph's a prophet. And I'm thinking, well, he just saw where the toothpick fell, you know, so I mean you could envision Martin Harris writing a letter like this and, and not seeing this as being detrimental to his faith that a guardian spirit was as good as an angel.

John Dehlin [03:05:44] There's also. Tell me if I'm wrong. There's also some suggestion of incrimination amongst the Brethren or some motive for deception. As I think about Joseph's evolving narrative about the emergence of the Book of Mormon. Wait, Was it the 1820 version? Was it the Lord? Was it God and the Lord? And then was it Nephi that appeared to Joseph or Moroni? Like you would think that the Brethren by the 70s and early 80s would know that the story is so all over the place in terms of the founding of both the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's history and the Church that they would be open to all sorts of crazy versions. Because in fact the historical record isn't the emergence of both Joseph Smith's first vision story and the Book of Mormon all over the place in terms of different accounts. Or do I have that wrong?

Sandra Tanner [03:06:41] Yeah. And they would have been aware of this. Like I say, when our friend Wes Walters did all this study on the revivals in New York and on the 26 trial documents. And that had been a launching pad for the church historians to go back to New York and do all sorts of research through the different repositories and people that could have had any document. So the church in the 60s and 70s was very intent on trying to understand the early history which set up the market for Mark's documents. Because the church already was aware that they had to figure out how the story really happened and figure out ways of softening the blow to the membership as they found out about these things, that the church had answers. So by the time Mark comes along, the Hinckley and company are already somewhat practiced in getting their story together to explain these problematic parts of church history.

John Dehlin [03:07:58] Yeah, so this document comes out, the salamander letter comes out. Was it leaked? Do you remember if it was leaked first? Do you remember any Hoffman's, you know, shenanigans in terms of trying to sell it to find a buyer?

Sandra Tanner [03:08:14] I don't know about the selling or buying of it, but the. At first there was rumors going around about possibly a collection of material in Texas. And this is the start of the McClellan stuff. There might be a collection in Texas and there might be something connected to McClellan. And then there was stuff about some stuff that might relate to magic. And then you start getting rumors of the Martin Harris letter. And so evidently Mark's just throwing out all kinds of little suggestions of different things. And so gradually you get more specific rumors about the Martin Harris letter and that it's got magic stuff in it. But then no one has a copy of it. Well, so, and so had someone read them a part of it on the telephone and someone else had talked to someone else. And so, you know, you keep getting these different things brought up. People calling, want to know what, what we do you know about this? What do you know? Oh, geez, I don't know. Nothing, you know, like, well, tell me more. So then we got more specific information fed to us about the Martin Harris letter and the magic and the. And I don't know how early we heard the word salamander, but the general outline of the ideas of the letter were being spread around. And I think finally someone read part of the letter to Gerald on the phone and it would have been the part that had the salamander word in it. And want to know what Gerald thought of it. And he said, I'd have to see the document. I've got to see the whole thing. And finally he was able to get a typescript of the letter, which started his study on the wording that he compared with Ed Howe. And then it was some time before we actually got a photo of the handwritten document itself. See, and right now I couldn't even tell you what years and time frame for this.

John Dehlin [03:10:45] Well, it definitely would have been between night, you know, 1983 and 1985.

Sandra Tanner [03:10:49] Right, right. Yeah. So it must all have been in 83.

John Dehlin [03:10:52] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [03:10:53] That all that was going on.

John Dehlin [03:10:54] Yeah. Okay. And so what? Okay, so really quickly, there's. There's kind of that iconic photo. I think Oaks is in it. Is there a press conference?

Sandra Tanner [03:11:08] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:11:08] What can you tell us about that? You know, what? You know about Hoffman and the church and Oaks or Hinckley or Pinnock or whoever the lawyers were, and Hoffman.

Sandra Tanner [03:11:20] That photo is of the Antha transcript though, isn't it?

John Dehlin [03:11:24] Okay, you would know.

Sandra Tanner [03:11:25] You would know. Yeah. Antha transcript has Mark presenting it to the church and he's there with. Who is the prophet then? Kimball? Wasn't he the prophet?

John Dehlin [03:11:37] Okay, yeah, that sounds right. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [03:11:38] Kimball, prophet was in the picture. And then Hinckley and N Eldon Tanner. I don't remember who else is in the picture, but there's several general authorities along with the prophet standing there. But Kimball is front and center with a magnifying glass examining the anthem transcript. And Mark's there pointing his finger at showing him the document. This was in the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune and everything. It might even have been in the New York Times. Probably. Everyone had this great photo of Hoffman with the prophet and the apostles with this great new find on the Anthon transcript, which of course in hindsight looks pretty damning to the claim of these men having been ordained prophets, seers and revelators. Especially when you realize the prophets prophet is supposed to have Joseph Smith's gift mentioned in. What is it? Section 1 of the Doctrine and Covenants, that he's a prophet, seer, revelator and translator.

John Dehlin [03:12:52] That's right.

Sandra Tanner [03:12:53] And so here's the prophet. Suppose the mantle of Joseph was supposed to have fallen on Kimball. So how come the prophet, seer, revelator and translator can't look at the anthem transcript and see? That is nonsense. It doesn't translate anything. Why isn't he able to discern this?

John Dehlin [03:13:18] Yeah, it's a good question.

Sandra Tanner [03:13:20] And I know in the video they have. What is it Turley saying? Oh, well, people expect too much. The prophets are human and they're just like everybody else. You know, the God gives free agency and whatever, and you Just go on your own power sort of stuff. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. Section one of the DNC gave me the idea this was going to have a lot more power in this job than just like the rest of us. Then why did we need him, if he's no more divinely guided to determine a fraud on the church that will eventually lead to murder? I would have thought God might have thought that was important. When does he use his prophetic gift if not for things like this murder

John Dehlin [03:14:10] and the church's reputation and being fooled and. Yeah, yeah, when does that kick in? If not, then when? Okay, so what do we know about Hoffman? What do you remember about what we know about Hoffman? The Salamander Letter and the church selling it to them, Them buying it, hiding it. Do we. Do you. Do you know?

Sandra Tanner [03:14:38] Oh, it's been too long. I don't remember how that went.

John Dehlin [03:14:41] That's fine. Okay, so this letter, at some point, what is it that made Gerald. What is it that started bringing up the question of authenticity for the Salamander Letter specifically? And I just want to say that this is one of my favorite stories in all of Mormon history is the fact that a, you know, you guys are known as the world's greatest, you know, anti Mormons, that you would have had every motivation to use confirmation bias and motivated reasoning to just rubber stamp the Salamander letter and say, yep, up another damning evidence that the Church is false. But then not only were you not, or you and. Or Gerald weren't operating under that mindset, something would have made Gerald ask the question, is this authentic? And then something would have then made him investigate it. And then something would have led him to conclude that it wasn't authentic and have the courage to say that publicly. So can you just tell us that whole story?

Gerald Tanner Questions the Salamander Letter's Authenticity

Sandra Tanner [03:15:56] Well, Gerald was so anxious to get this copy of the letter to see the actual wording, assuming it was true. Up to this point, we're thinking that Mark's on the level and his documents are true. And so when he finally gets the typescript to prepare for when he would get the typescript, he had gone back and reviewed the neighbors of Smith's statements in Ed Howe's book so that he was aware of what people had said that had talked to Joseph Smith or Martin Harris or whoever. And like the BYU studies article that had been a few years before on Joseph Knight, a family friend at the the Smiths, his recollection of things, Gerald had reviewed different documents of the time so that he could better Evaluate when he finally got a copy of the Salamander letter. So as soon as he gets the typescript and he's reading through, he goes back to Ed Howe's statements to try to see how it stacks up against the memories of the people giving statements in 1832, 33 time period. So they're just a few years removed from the events. And how do those documents stack up with this new document? And as he's pouring through comparisons of these different early sources with Mark's document, certain phrases start to pop out to him. And he would say to himself, wait a minute, that I've read that. That sounds familiar. Where did I see that? And he'd go back and forth and back and forth and looking at the phraseology and realizing someone composed this letter, looking at the early documents that I'm looking at, someone's looking at Ed Howe and someone's looking at this BYU studies article on Joseph Knight and using this as source material for phrases for Martin Harris, because that's what he. These are people's recollections of what Martin Harris told them. So the person making up the Salamander letter is using these early phrases that supposedly reported things that Martin Harris had said to make up this letter. And so Gerald finally comes to the awful realization that he thinks he's looking at a forgery.

John Dehlin [03:18:49] Why did Gerald even. What was making Gerald even question the authenticity of the letter?

Sandra Tanner [03:18:58] Well, he thought, were there.

John Dehlin [03:19:00] Were you starting to. Was anybody starting to be suspicious at the time of Mark Hoffman? Or were people just starting to get suspicious? What was making him even want to spend his time this way versus just celebrate and do a spike the football and do a victory dance, you know.

Sandra Tanner [03:19:17] Well, the Mormon scholars were all critical of all of this stuff that. Trying to downplay the magic stuff and trying to find explanations for everything. And. And of course, they were doing all sorts of articles on how salamanders were wonderful. And apologists, apologists would find some way of spitting it all to be a beautiful confirmation of Joseph Smith's claims. But Gerald's work that he had done in the 60s on the cowdery defense played into this because he had seen how someone had used phrases from Oliver Cowdery's letters to compose a document supposedly written by Cowdery. So he wanted to make sure it wasn't another situation like that where someone was using supposed phrases of Martin Harris to build a letter and claim it was from him. Just like someone had made up a Cowdery defense, relying on early Cowdery letters to get the phrases so that people would accept it as authentic. Gerald wanted the document to be authentic. He did not start looking at all of this to disprove Hoffman. He started out to build a case of why it was authentic. And it was only as he pored over the older sources compared to Mark's documents that it started dawning on him that it looked like it was going the other way. That this looks forced to sound like Martin Harris, not a natural flow. The specific word similarities rang a bell. Like the Cowdery thing that this is being built off these other documents.

John Dehlin [03:21:24] 1. One quick question I have is, did he apply the same level of scrutiny to the Hoffman forgeries that he didn't know were forgeries, but to the. To the letters ultimately forged by Hoffman prior, The ones that we've already talked about, The Joseph Smith III letter. Again, the, the Anthon, you know, letter. Had Joseph, had Gerald applied the same level of scrutiny to those documents and found them authentic, whereas this was the first one he either investigated fully and. Or investigated fully and decided wasn't authentic. Do you understand my question?

Sandra Tanner [03:22:03] Well, up until this point, I don't think it had raised that question of forgery to his mind. The Joseph Smith III blessing was certainly something that could have been. And I guess it didn't. It didn't do Gerald. It didn't look as damaging to church claims because we already knew that Joseph had.

John Dehlin [03:22:42] You'd already know it wasn't new.

Sandra Tanner [03:22:45] It wasn't new. It was something that had been talked about before that he may have appointed his son. So it didn't raise the same question. And the anthodranscript? We spent so much time trying to figure out what script Joseph Smith used to bring out the antitrans script that it didn't occur to us that it was Mark making it.

John Dehlin [03:23:07] And what about the Josiah stole letter? Had he given that scrutiny that you're aware of?

Sandra Tanner [03:23:17] Well, again, it was something that could have been.

John Dehlin [03:23:20] It wasn't super scandalous. It wasn't new information. Right.

Sandra Tanner [03:23:23] Well, I don't know if he knew a way to. I don't know if he'd thought yet about checking the phrasing and that.

John Dehlin [03:23:31] Oh, I'm actually remembering some of the stuff I read. I think I read Gerald's commentary that it seemed to be better writing than Joseph Smith was capable of, based on what we know about Joseph's penmanship, that there weren't. I don't know if you said this earlier, but there weren't things crossed out that, that it, it seemed like it just had better handwriting than Joseph Smith was capable of to have been written, written from his own hand in 1835. Now, I'm not sure if that was Gerald's analysis. I can't remember after Hoffman was discovered. A frauder is before.

Sandra Tanner [03:24:08] Yeah. If you really want to know, you'll have to read his book.

John Dehlin [03:24:11] Buy the book.

Sandra Tanner [03:24:11] Buy the book.

John Dehlin [03:24:12] Buy the book and read it. Okay, all right. So anyway. But, but, but. Okay, you answer the question. Because you're saying that he tried to prove the White Salamander letter as true, as authentic, so that it could be defended, but he was willing to follow the evidence where it led.

Sandra Tanner [03:24:31] Right.

John Dehlin [03:24:31] And you're saying the evidence led him to conclude that it wasn't authentic. Really quickly, this idea that the phraseology seemed borrowed from a few sources, one could just as easily say, well, that was all in the air. And so, yeah, that's what I said to him. Tell us what you said.

Sandra Tanner [03:24:49] I said, well, Gerald is. If this guy in Howe is reporting his conversations with Harris and the Joseph Knight material is recounting what Harris told him, then maybe Harris just has common phrases he always uses to tell the same story.

John Dehlin [03:25:12] See, I have the same thought as you. So even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Sandra Tanner [03:25:17] Charles says, no, I'm telling you, it's the other way around. And I never could exactly see how he was so sure, but he was absolutely adamant that, no, the borrowing has to be the other way. Someone saw the ed. How. Which anyone could have seen that. But he says they also had to have seen the BYU article on the Joseph Knight material, which. Who had even remembered the article, you know, but Gerald had dug it out. And he says, I'm telling you, someone saw this article. And so I know the Salamander letter. I'm speaking for Gerald. I know the Salamander letter could not have been written before that BYU studies article came out, which was in 78. 1978.

John Dehlin [03:26:06] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [03:26:07] And he says, no, it had been written after that. Someone's used how and Josiah stole.

John Dehlin [03:26:14] This is Mark Hoffman meeting his match.

Sandra Tanner [03:26:16] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:26:17] Right. This is really. This is two brilliant people.

Sandra Tanner [03:26:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:26:21] There needs to be like a drama or a documentary series about this story because as everyone wants, you know, the beginning of the, you know, Hess Meesom Murder among the Mormons documentary is about how brilliant, you know, Mark Hoffman was. And you've got that famous opening quote by. By Shannon Flynn saying, don't make me. Don't make me answer that. Don't make me answer that, because he was brilliant. You know, just. But so was Gerald right?

Sandra Tanner [03:26:57] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:26:57] Or maybe even more so.

Sandra Tanner [03:26:59] Yeah. Well, I don't know. More so, but maybe. But they were. They both had fantastic memories.

John Dehlin [03:27:07] No, but. But more than that.

Sandra Tanner [03:27:09] Yeah. Very creative. Well, I don't know. Gerald had a sixth sense on language, on. On the phrasing stuff. And like, even going through the Book of Mormon and all those things. He just had an insight on those things. It. It's very hard to be married to someone that's almost always right. And it's right. Right. You know, so, man, we had arguments on this Hoffman stuff.

Going Public With Doubts About the Salamander Letter

John Dehlin [03:27:43] So what happens when. When he concludes for himself that it's not true? Take us through the conversations of, like, do you be honest about it? Do you tell people? Do you not. Do you confront Hoffman? Are you arguing with him? Are you trying to tell him he's wrong? What are you. Like, this isn't going to help our cause. Like, talk us through all of those conversations and deliberations.

Sandra Tanner [03:28:06] I was afraid we were going to get sued. I said, gerald, he's going to sue us for libel. And you can't go around claiming people are frauds. And. And all you got is the. It looks like the phrases are borrowed from this other document. I mean, is this enough? And I was pleading with him, I said, gerald, please don't lose our house. Now, we were just coming off from a lawsuit with a BYU guy at that time who had sued us for. That's another long story, the Clayton diary extracts. And this man, Andy Ehat from byu, had sued us for printing his copy of his notes, of the extracts from the Clayton diary. And the notes were all authentic. They were from Clayton's diary. They just happened to have been typed up by Mr. E. Hat. And he was claiming copyright.

John Dehlin [03:29:00] Andrew Ehat.

Sandra Tanner [03:29:01] Right, Andrew Ehat. He was claiming copyright interest in him. So it was a copyright lawsuit, which is a whole. Another just fantastic story.

John Dehlin [03:29:09] You do tell that story in our. Our earlier interview. Maybe a little.

Sandra Tanner [03:29:13] A little bit of it, but you'd have to read the whole thing. We had all the church historians and taking depositions from them. I'm surprised more people haven't been interested in reading about that trial because it's got fascinating comments by the different historians that we took depositions. Anyways, we were just finishing up on this one, and I could just envision us going into another very expensive, long lawsuit. And I said, please don't lose my house. And Gerald says he's not going to sue us. He. They aren't real documents. And I says, gerald, everybody says they're real. I mean, the church historians don't want to accept these if they aren't real. They had to have done some kind of tests and they. They're convinced. I mean, here's Dean Jesse, the church historian. This, the famous one that knows all the handwritings, knows Joseph Smith's handwriting, and he's not going to want to accept these as if they aren't real. What they are. And Gerald says, I'm telling you, it's not what anyone says. They aren't true. Well, so Joseph writes up, Gerald got all these J's mixed up. Gerald writes up his thing on the Salamander letter and wants me because Gerald's a shy introvert that doesn't do things publicly. And so he wants me, as the front person to take up this pamphlet he's written up on why the document the Salamander Letters of Fraud and take it up and pass it out at the Sunstone Symposium.

John Dehlin [03:30:57] Do you remember the year 83? 84.

Sandra Tanner [03:31:00] 84.

John Dehlin [03:31:01] 84, yeah. So I just want to. Just let me connect the dots. This is before the bombings, before all the investigations. This is a true prophet, seer and revelator, right?

Sandra Tanner [03:31:16] Yeah. This, this.

John Dehlin [03:31:20] Show us.

Sandra Tanner [03:31:21] I don't know.

John Dehlin [03:31:22] What is it? Read it to our audience. What you're showing them.

Sandra Tanner [03:31:25] I'm showing the March 1984 Salt Lake City messenger, which is on our website. You can go to utlm.org and can

John Dehlin [03:31:34] they buy this from you? If they want to throw you some

Sandra Tanner [03:31:36] money, well, then no. It's how to print. It's just our newsletter.

John Dehlin [03:31:39] I just want to get you some money.

Sandra Tanner [03:31:40] Okay, well, they can send a donation.

John Dehlin [03:31:42] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [03:31:43] But if you go to the website and look under your newsletters, you have to go back to issue number 53. And it has this. All the content there. Moroni or Salamander was the title.

John Dehlin [03:31:58] Why is that the title?

Sandra Tanner [03:32:00] Because who's the who? Who's the guy that shows up when Joseph gets the plates out of the hole? Is it Moroni or a Salamander?

John Dehlin [03:32:09] Why doesn't it say Gerald Tanner declares Mark Hoffman's Salamander letter fraud?

Sandra Tanner [03:32:14] Well, the first heading says, is it authentic?

John Dehlin [03:32:18] Oh, okay.

Sandra Tanner [03:32:19] So this is where Gerald brings up this problem of the story. And it's not very. It's only a couple of pages throughout, three pages of it. And so that doesn't have the example of the phrase borrowing that comes out in, I think, our next newsletter. But I mean, That's March of 84.

John Dehlin [03:32:50] He makes the statement he thinks it's not authentic in that. In that.

Sandra Tanner [03:32:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:32:54] Can you. Do you. Do you have the.

Sandra Tanner [03:32:57] Yeah. He says at the outset we should state that we have some reservations concerning the authenticity of the letter. And at the present time, we are not prepared to say that it was actually penned by Martin Harris. And it goes on about that. So Gerald's question.

John Dehlin [03:33:16] Casting doubt.

Sandra Tanner [03:33:18] Casting doubt on a. But then Gerald does this study of the phrases which comes out in the next newsletter, which you can go on our website and sequentially follow our newsletters as we progress through this examination of Mark Hoffman and his documents. And we. It must be the next newsletter. I think. Think we have kind of a split statement where Gerald gives his reasons for thinking it's all a fraud and me giving a short little defense of saying, well, all the historians accept it as genuine. So we don't know for sure yet. People, you know, and at the time, people criticized us by saying, oh, you're just playing both sides of the road so you're protected no matter how it turns out, because each took a different side, as though this was some sort of planned scheme of ours to always be right. No, we really disagreed, and my heart was not in it to take that study of Gerald's up and pass around at Sunstone. But as a dutiful wife supportive of my husband, I went up and passed it out. And of course, that's what brought Mark Hoffman down the next day, wondering why we would question his documents with his whole Bullock story that he conned me on.

John Dehlin [03:34:49] And say again, the argument.

Sandra Tanner [03:34:52] The argument was he was about to close a deal on Thomas Bullock papers. Embarrassing. On Brigham Young and

John Dehlin [03:35:02] about his financial dealings and other things.

Sandra Tanner [03:35:05] If I kept questioning his documents, it could end the process.

John Dehlin [03:35:08] It could. It could. It could foil his attempt to get the Bullock papers.

Sandra Tanner [03:35:14] Right, right. Foul the whole thing.

John Dehlin [03:35:16] Was he also just mad? Was he like, stop this.

Sandra Tanner [03:35:19] No, no. He was all just so, like a wounded friend. How. How could you do this to me? How could you, of all people? I thought you'd be supportive. You'd be so excited with this. Fine. How could you bring up questions? Don't you realize how this hurts the document business? And I've got fingers in the pie to all these other great things I'm going to get. And people might not want to do business with me if you raise questions about what I'm doing.

John Dehlin [03:35:51] What'd you say? How'd you respond? Was it to you and Gerald?

Sandra Tanner [03:35:55] No, just to me. Gerald wasn't home.

John Dehlin [03:35:57] Oh, so you're meeting alone with a future murderer.

Sandra Tanner [03:36:01] Yes. Who is there to Find out why I'm questioning his document.

John Dehlin [03:36:05] Oh, my goodness.

Sandra Tanner [03:36:07] And, well, and I suppose the thing that saved us from getting bombed is no one believed us. So.

John Dehlin [03:36:15] Okay, so you. You. Okay, what did you tell. What did you tell Mark when he gives you this sob story, tries to gaslight you, make you feel terrible, what did you tell him at the moment?

Sandra Tanner [03:36:28] I said, okay, where's the provenance for the document? Who did you get it from? And he couldn't explain the. The steps of, well, who's owned it all this time? Where did it come from?

John Dehlin [03:36:43] What'd he say?

Sandra Tanner [03:36:45] Oh, well, that's all in a, you know, agreement with the buyer, and I'm. Or the seller, and I'm not at liberty to discuss all those matters.

John Dehlin [03:36:55] He's claimed confidentiality. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [03:36:57] And all that.

John Dehlin [03:36:59] That's sketchy.

Sandra Tanner [03:37:00] Yeah. And it was troubling. And I says, well, Gerald has sincere questions about it, and we just don't seem to see the answers. And so it was an amicable discussion. And that's when he launched into this whole big Bullock thing to divert the question from the providence of the document to how I was hurting his business. And now I'm going to love it because it's going to expose Brigham Young on finances.

John Dehlin [03:37:31] Oh, right. So he's trying to. He's trying to manipulate you in whatever

Sandra Tanner [03:37:36] way he can get me over on his side some way.

John Dehlin [03:37:39] So what was. You already mentioned this, but what was the. What was the reaction of Sunstone? What was the reaction among the Mormon historical community? And then what was the church's reaction to your newsletter? And then what was the general membership's reaction? Like, what were all the reactions? Because this is funny.

Sandra Tanner [03:37:59] Well, the church never says anything, so, no, we don't have any idea what their reaction was. The historians would talk to each other about, what do you make out of Gerald's questions and all of this? And it was sort of like, oh, well, Gerald's always been kind of a loose cannon. You just don't know. And it's all been authenticated, so, you know, it was just all dismissive.

John Dehlin [03:38:26] Interesting. And what about the Mormon people as a. As a.

Sandra Tanner [03:38:32] Well, nobody read our stuff, so the Mormon people were. Anything the Tanner said was suspect. And if it had our name on it, you just passed it by. It didn't matter what side it was on. We. We were just non trustworthy.

John Dehlin [03:38:47] Because excommunication and smears work.

Sandra Tanner [03:38:51] Yes.

John Dehlin [03:38:52] So was anybody else mad at you saying, sandra, Gerald, cut it out. You're hurting the cause. Any other people express anger Frustration, unfortunately,

Sandra Tanner [03:39:03] the Christian community that write books and pamphlets to try to get people out of Mormonism into Christianity. We're all upset at this.

John Dehlin [03:39:15] Decker.

Sandra Tanner [03:39:16] Well, probably. I don't remember specifically Ed Decker, but different ones like that were like, how could you guys do this? Why would you put a fly in the ointment? I mean, everything was going so well. And. And these all have been authenticated, and you bring up these questions. So we were seen as traitors to the cause because we had brought up these questions when everyone of the authorities said they were authentic. So here was the Christian community down on us for making waves over stuff that was going to end the Mormon Church. And Gerald's like, but if it's not true, it's not true. I'm not going to use something fraudulent against the church. That's just playing the same game. It's got to be real material. But yes, we had a lot of pushback from other people that wanted the documents to be true.

John Dehlin [03:40:26] From Christians.

Sandra Tanner [03:40:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:40:28] Were there any other. Were there any other people that were known as being kind of open, outspoken critics of the church? In 83 to 85, were you guys, like, the only game in town, or were there. Did you have kind of collaborators, partners, friends, allies, other people that were trying to expose the church as being fraudulent or not true? Were there. And who else were your partners in crime?

Sandra Tanner [03:40:57] Well. Well, I don't know when you phrase it like that, who to say.

John Dehlin [03:41:11] Phrase it your own way. Rephrase it. Rephrase it.

Sandra Tanner [03:41:16] Gerald talked a lot with Mike Marquardt about research and. And they shared a lot of research and contact. Mike wasn't trying to disprove Mormon claims. He was just trying to do historical research to figure out how the story really happened. And so even though they shared information, Mark wasn't trying to prove anything one way or another on truth claims. He was just trying to get out the history. And in fact, along the way, Gerald and Mike didn't share as much information as the years went by because Mike told us one time that he could have more access to research by different historians if he wasn't so closely tied to our name.

John Dehlin [03:42:19] I relate to that. I relate to that. There's a lot of people that stopped going on Mormon stories as soon as I got excommunicated. Richard Bushman and Claudia Bushman wouldn't come on anymore. Terrell and Fiona Givens wouldn't come on anymore. And there's a lot of, like, aspiring Mormon studies historians that ultimately want a job at Claremont or a job at Virginia or job at byu. Matt Bowman was one of these people that's like, I can't come interview with John because I, I want to get the right, you know, faculty appointment someday and it'll look bad if I do an interview with you. And that's part of, again, that's why they excommunicate people so that everyone who wants to. And sometimes it's even people that don't believe. Like there's plenty of totally non believing, even ex Mormon historians that still want to be in the good graces of the Mormon history community or want access to church archives. And so they keep distance from truth tellers, public truth tellers and speakers to be able to manage their political capital, to be able to have access to documents or stay in good graces of members of the community.

Sandra Tanner [03:43:30] That's the story of my life.

John Dehlin [03:43:33] How do you feel when you hear me talk about that?

Sandra Tanner [03:43:35] What comes I identify with this story.

John Dehlin [03:43:37] Has it ever been discouraged for you? Because for me, yes, whenever I get turned down, talk about that discouragement.

Sandra Tanner [03:43:46] Well, through the years our research has been used by many other authors and they just don't say that's where it came from. Because through the years you had to kind of distinguish yourself by who you were or weren't associated with to prove you're a good guy. And so like I mentioned earlier about saying that Joseph was sincere, that seems to have been an unwritten rule in Sunstone dialogue, BYU studies, anyone's book that came out dealing with these issues, you could say anything about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon first vision or whatever, raise all kind of questions about any of it. As long as you ended with Joseph Smith was sincere, the cardinal's sin was to end up saying it was deliberate fraud. And that's how you divide the camp. And if you're going to conclude that he was a fraud, you're part of the others. And part of the others is where the Tanner land. And so you distance yourself to prove you're a good guy by not giving any credit to the Tanner or mentioning them or footnoting their book because that shows that you're part of the bad guys. Good guys don't quote the Tanner. So but you can use our stuff, but you just don't attribute, but don't attribute it to us.

John Dehlin [03:45:47] So then you've got all these Mormon historians that are basically plagiarizing, not citing you as a source. Well, some stealing, stealing your good work and not giving you credit. That's dishonest.

Sandra Tanner [03:46:00] Well, a lot of it they would have found themselves eventually, but I think they would have found it all. But it's. Yeah, it's kind of. I mean we were talking about problems with blacks in the priesthood and Elijah Abel and all of that in the 60s.

John Dehlin [03:46:22] So before the 73 dialogue article by. Who wrote the number now?

The Tanner' Relationship With the Mormon Scholarly Community

Sandra Tanner [03:46:28] But yeah, in the 60s we were doing that. What's another example? The. I mean Gerald. What he did on the book of Abraham and one of the early issues of Dialogue, which was wonder they.

John Dehlin [03:46:44] Oh, Lester Bush. So it's Lester Bush that's attributed by people like Greg Prince and others as like this landmark article in 1973 where in dialogue he. He tells everybody that, look, Elijah Abel and all these other people had been ordained black men have been ordained in the priesthood prior to the black priesthood ban. And everybody likes to make a big heralding of that as being groundbreaking scholarship. You're saying there's a chance that Lester Bush might have been tipped off about some of that from you guys in the. In the 60s? Possible.

Sandra Tanner [03:47:18] I. I don't know what he had seen. But we were talking about all of that already. Yeah, publishing on it already.

John Dehlin [03:47:28] Okay. And then you were going to talk about Book of Abraham.

Sandra Tanner [03:47:30] You're saying Gerald and a friend, Grant Hewitt, did an article on when the papyri were found on showing how the facsimiles on the hypocephalus did disc. How the writing was filled in on the printed hypocephalus disc. The round illustration in the book of Abraham. The obviously when Joseph got wasn't complete, parts had broken off and they filled it in to make the facsimile picture for the pearl of great price. And so they were showing how it was filled in using material from the sense and text, which none of this makes sense. Do you read the book? But they showed how this was filled in using other parts of the papyri that had to be done by Smith and Associates for the times and seasons. It couldn't have been what was originally on the document. And this was groundbreaking research. And, and that's not where you're getting all this stuff on credit for what Gerald did on very early on the book of Abraham.

John Dehlin [03:48:46] 60s.

Sandra Tanner [03:48:47] Yeah, yeah. 60. What was it? 68, 69. I don't remember what the year was on the dialogue article, but it was groundbreaking research on the facsimile and nobody mentions that. And there's just stuff that we did on the first vision. Of course, Wes Walters did all the stuff on the 1826 trial and the revival. Now he does get mentioned by people. Later on, he finally gets referenced by different people. But again, Wes was established minister with a degree, master's degree and had more credibility in historical circles. I mean, Gerald and I have no education. We're just a couple of dumb kids that checked out the story. But we were right and we were doing all this very serious research. We didn't have any money, so we're just doing it on a mimeograph machine. And it does look childish. It is very amateurish productions. That's all we could afford. But the research is solid. If you look at our Mormonism book in, well, what do we do at 72? And then we do an enlarged one in 83.

John Dehlin [03:50:26] This is shadow reality.

Sandra Tanner [03:50:27] Mormonism, shadow reality. You look at our early books and all the important topics are covered there.

John Dehlin [03:50:36] And still hold up.

Sandra Tanner [03:50:37] And still hold up.

John Dehlin [03:50:38] Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [03:50:39] Yes. Yeah. Go read our Shadow last edition 87 and you'll find it covers all the stuff you're reading about today.

John Dehlin [03:50:47] Yeah, yeah. And it. First of all, I was just going to say it's almost as if, if you want to know what really happened in Mormon history, find out who got excommunicated.

Sandra Tanner [03:51:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:51:00] And read their stuff.

Sandra Tanner [03:51:01] Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:51:02] And you're probably going to get all the important stuff there is to know. Is that, is that fair to say?

Sandra Tanner [03:51:06] I think that's fair.

John Dehlin [03:51:08] Okay. And then the other thing I was going to ask is how did Eugene England Dialogue and then the Sunstone people, how did they treat you? Did they treat you as anathema? Did they treat you as damaged goods? As. As. Or do they treat you like, kindly in private, but then in public they didn't want you around? You know, how were you treated by Eugene England Dialogue, Sunstone and kind of that middle ground progressive Mormon, you know, studies crowd that still lives on today. By the way, how are you treated by them?

Sandra Tanner [03:51:44] It changed after Hoffman.

John Dehlin [03:51:48] How were you treated before? Well, like Eugene England is in dialogue.

Sandra Tanner [03:51:56] It's like the crazy uncle that showed up for Thanksgiving that everyone hoped would have stayed home. We were politely treated, but not, not. We didn't have friends there. I mean, I went to the different meetings and I was just, just there by myself alone. No one to talk to or sit with or anything.

John Dehlin [03:52:24] They would kind of ignore you.

Sandra Tanner [03:52:26] Yeah, It. I wasn't someone people wanted to be seen with. There was guilt by association. We tried at different times to have a book table. This is way back then, before Hoffman. We asked at times about having a book table with Sunstone. With Sunstone who was already being cast As a dangerous crowd.

John Dehlin [03:52:54] This is Peggy and Albert. Peggy Futzerstack and Albert Peck.

Sandra Tanner [03:52:59] Right. And we couldn't have a book table at their place. And for years, I mean, I don't think that would be the case today. I just haven't asked. But for years, they could have polygamous guys that believe in flying saucers, whatever you want, could have a book table at Sunstone, but not us. So it was. They were under suspicion of being subversive and being charged with being apostate. So one of the ways you established you weren't apostate, you weren't dangerous, is you didn't have anything to do with the Tanner. And if. And so even though some of them would have been friends with us and welcomed us to their session or whatever, there's this fear of guilt by association. And so they can't look like we're kosher. We are not acceptable to be publicly acknowledged as legitimate enough to have a table, because that would solidify in the church's mind that, see, they're really promoting apostate positions. And so there was this distance to the whole thing. But after Hoffman, we got some credibility because Gerald was right. And all the books you read on Hoffman, I'll say Gerald was first to question the documents, and after that there was sort of a begrudging acceptance of, oh, hi. And people got more friendly. I think also by the time of Hoffman, they realized that we weren't. We weren't belligerent people that were going to be disruptive. I think at first there was a fear that, oh, well, if we're anti Mormon, we're going to be obnoxious and interfering in their meetings and standing up and asking bad questions. And I have to say, I admitted I asked a few questions of Quinn and during the salamander stuff of pointed questions, but we weren't trying to make a scene in any of the things that we attended. But there was this fear of us that, are we going to make a shambles of things? Would we some way disrupt stuff? And they have to keep this separation of being on the side, on the good side of the team, not the opposition. Joseph was sincere. As long as you can end all your articles with he was sincere, you can say whatever you want. And I wouldn't end anything with he was sincere.

John Dehlin [03:56:12] And other than Ed Decker, I'm just trying to think of who else would have been walking in these shoes. And I can't think of anybody like even Michael Quinn when he starts coming out with books and articles, even to this day, he still maintains to be a believer, so. Not him. Yeah. Like, who else would it have? You were the only game in town, it seems like.

Sandra Tanner [03:56:33] Well, I mean, Mike and Wes were

John Dehlin [03:56:36] doing things, but, yeah, they weren't the sincere thing.

Sandra Tanner [03:56:43] Yeah. So I don't know.

John Dehlin [03:56:44] Yeah. How did that feel? Like there are a few people in the world that I can talk to who have had an experience like mine, and I've been excommunicated, and I know what it's like to be treated like a pariah. I know what it's like to be viewed as dangerous and radioactive. And since my excommunication, you know, Radio west one really have me on the podcast or, you know, know. And I don't know why, you know, but Peggy Fletcher Stack doesn't ask, you know, BBW source anymore. There. There became this kind of drying up of you as someone that people would, you know, they won't even want to like. Like a Facebook comment or friend you on Facebook. It's a. It's a. There's two parts of the sadness to it. One is that the church does it, and then the second is that so many people in the progressive and sometimes even post Mormon community buy into it and follow those rules. Right. And it's. It's. It's sad, it's hard. And I'm just wondering, were there times where you and Gerald, just for decades, being held at arm's length, being plagiarized from without credit, not being friends with these people, being viewed as the crazy grandma and grandpa, was it ever discouraging or sad or hard or what was that like emotionally for you and Gerald?

Sandra Tanner [03:58:14] We had developed a community of friends outside of that circle in our Christian community. And so it wasn't as lonely as it could have been if we hadn't have had a separate community that was totally divorced from Mormonism? And through the years, as different family members left Mormonism, then the feeling shifted on a lot of things that way. So. It's not been as hard as it might have been because of our faith community that we developed outside of Mormonism.

John Dehlin [03:59:00] Your church, basically, your church community.

Sandra Tanner [03:59:03] My church community, yeah. And not just my church community, but just Christian community of people I know around the United States that have read our writings that are Christians and that I've become friends with. I mean, outside of Mormonism, that we've just become friends. So that helps on a lot of that stuff. But. But it doesn't take away from the sense of loss from the ones you started out holding dear to you. And Being distanced from them.

John Dehlin [03:59:33] That happened to you people?

Sandra Tanner [03:59:35] Yes. And. Well, I think I've told before, but, like, early on, when my sister, who's now left Mormonism, said to me one day, I finally able at Relief Society to admit that you're my sister. And she says that so sweetly, like she really accomplished something. And, I mean, what do you say to that? Oh, thanks.

John Dehlin [04:00:01] What did that make you feel?

Sandra Tanner [04:00:03] Well, it was very sad and hurtful that she feels that kind of shame of having me for a sister. And it's all changed now. But early on, when people say those kind of things to you, it just kind of takes your breath away. That, wow, is that where things are at? I didn't realize that I was that big an embarrassment to you or that it was that big of a deal.

John Dehlin [04:00:38] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [04:00:39] But there have been times, like when I've been at the mall and I see someone I know, like a man that's come in and talk to me about Mormonism, and he's walking with his wife, and I see him take a step back from his wife and shake his head to me, no, like, don't acknowledge me. And so I just walk on by. But there were years of that type of thing where there would be signaling out in public, don't acknowledge me. I don't get that anymore. But back in prior years, those sorts of things were common for me here in Utah.

John Dehlin [04:01:21] I've had that happen.

Sandra Tanner [04:01:22] No.

John Dehlin [04:01:23] Yeah. And so what kept you going? What kept both of you guys going?

Sandra Tanner [04:01:34] Well, it just seemed that God had put us in a direction of research, that some documents just seemed to. People would bring them to us or things would come up that would pull us back into more research.

John Dehlin [04:01:54] So part of it was your belief in God?

Sandra Tanner [04:01:55] Oh, absolutely, yes. And I know a lot of the Mormon stories crowd don't believe in God anymore, but a lot do. But, yes, we felt that. We felt that God had brought us together. I mean, God delivered me to Gerald's doorstep, and it just seemed like things came about that God was directing it. And there were times, though, as the years went by, that one of us or the other would feel, okay, that's it. We're done. We've accomplished what we wanted to do. We got out our 72 mimeographed Mormonism book. We're done. And then more stuff comes out, oh, well, no, now we got to do a new edition. So you can't do a new edition. Well, you keep doing new additions. And Gerald would keep saying to me, well, this is the last book. See, we Gotta keep going on this because this is the last book. I gotta get this one done. And one day it dawned on me. There's never going to be a last book. We're gonna do this forever.

John Dehlin [04:03:12] And you still are.

Sandra Tanner [04:03:13] And here I am. And I still am.

John Dehlin [04:03:15] So for ex Mormons that don't like that Sandra Tanner still believes in God and Jesus, be grateful that she still, she and Gerald both still believed in God because you would not have gotten their amazing research and publications and knowledge and commitment, including the revealing of the Salamander Letters of fraud, without their belief in God and Jesus. How's that?

Sandra Tanner [04:03:40] Amen.

John Dehlin [04:03:43] Okay, I have to just ask again. Did you ever have interactions with Eugene England or kind of that Dialogue crowd at all? I mean, I know you talked about the letter between.

Sandra Tanner [04:03:56] Yeah, no, not on any kind of personal level. Anyone. They, they had their own lives and it was separate from ours. And we. The only time our circles would have crossed would be like a Mormon history association or something that way, which they weren't going to come up and talk to me, so.

John Dehlin [04:04:19] And as all these articles come out in dialogue in the 70s and 80s about B H Roberts, about the Book of Abraham, about the first vision, all these things that you guys kind of really broke the ground on, would you, would you wait eagerly for the newest edition of Dialogue or Sunstone to come out, read it and then would you say, hey, wait a minute, they're getting that for me. They're getting that for me here and there. Were you following Dialogue in Sunstone to see whether they were either breaking new ground and. Or borrowing your stuff and maybe not giving you credit?

Sandra Tanner [04:04:51] Well, we didn't follow it for those reasons for whether they gave us credit or not, but we did follow it all very closely there for many, many years. I don't know at what point Gerald started into his Alzheimer's, but by 1990 Gerald was becoming less engaged in his research. So that's why there was never another edition after the 87 Mormonism Shadow reality is because he was past the ability to do that. But yeah, up till then we were following all of the different magazines to see what they said, how, what more they had found and see what things they said that we already said. Yeah, it was fun to try to track them and see where all they were getting their information.

John Dehlin [04:05:49] Yeah. Okay. Anything else about the Salamander Letter really quickly before I just ask you a couple more? No, you're good.

The McLellin Papers and Hofmann's Escalating Scheme

Sandra Tanner [04:05:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:05:57] Okay. There were there, there are other forgeries that Hoffman is, you know, credited with, with letters from the three witnesses from Harrison Whitmer about their visions. They say that was faith promoting. Do you remember anything about. About those letters?

Sandra Tanner [04:06:14] Not right off.

John Dehlin [04:06:14] Okay. And then there's this contract, I guess, the Grandin Press printing of the Book of Mormon contract between Smith and Grandin. Anything noteworthy about that that you remember?

Sandra Tanner [04:06:26] I can't remember.

John Dehlin [04:06:27] Okay. And then there's a letter from Smith, Lucy Mack Smith, on the origins of the Book of Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [04:06:36] Yeah, it was interesting, but not as earth shattering as the other things.

John Dehlin [04:06:39] Okay. Okay. And then there's the McClellan papers.

Sandra Tanner [04:06:45] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:06:46] Anything you remember about. About that?

Sandra Tanner [04:06:49] Well, the McClellan, this guy gets back to this guy named traubers that knew McClellan.

John Dehlin [04:07:00] And this is a historical figure from.

Sandra Tanner [04:07:03] Yeah, a historical figure from way back when. And I think Hugh Nibley had tried to look for Trauber and his collection. I mean, I think there was some knowledge that this guy had some material and had some McClellan stuff. In fact, I think that's how they. The church historians, well, the church leaders, whoever it was, had been in touch with Trauber, I believe, back in the like 1910 time frame, something like that, and had bought a McClellan diary way back at that time. I think Trauber may have been trying to sell his collection to them. They bought the McClellan diary, locked it in their vault and forgot about it. So as the decades go by and no one does an inventory on the First Presidency's fault, the knowledge of the McClellan diary sitting on the back shelf gets forgotten. Okay. So when Mark comes along, he's aware of this Trauber and maybe some Trauber papers in Texas that might have some McClellan stuff in it. So that evidently gives him the idea of claiming he came up with this big collection because there could have been such a thing. It just not as big as he was claiming. So when he pitches it to the church, he says it also contains the McClellan diary. That's just one of many things in the collection it's supposed to have. Had the church not hid away McClellan's diary, they would have known they already had it. And if they would have remembered that they already had it, they would have known to been suspicious of Mark's collection that he called the McClellan Collection. And so they don't become aware that they've already bought it until after the bombings. And the detectives want to know, we want an inventory of everything you bought from Mark. So then the church trying to go through doing an inventory, and someone they are asking about, well, what's in The First Presidency's vault. Do you have material from Mark in there?

John Dehlin [04:09:35] Wow.

Sandra Tanner [04:09:36] Evidently no one knew about an inventory for the place. So the staff, someone's told we got to inventory everything in the first presidency's vault. Now this is a big walk in vault, as I understand it, so you'd have room for a lot of stuff. A little diary could be easily lost in this place. So they do an inventory and they discover, ah, by darn, we already have the McClellan diary. Now, this doesn't come out until Turley does his book on Hoffman victims. And so when Turley's book, victims comes out, this is a few years after everyone else's book has come out. I can't remember the time frame, but it's. It's a few years after the initial three paperbacks that came out. Well, there was sort of a ho hum attitude in the historical community. Oh, Turley's gonna do church spin. And I'd ask different people, have you read Turley's book? No, no, I haven't bothered. I know enough about Hoffman stuff. And then suddenly someone calls me on the phone, hey, have you read page such and such of Turley's book? And I said, no, I haven't even bought it. Well, you got to buy it and read whatever page it is, like 263 or whatever, you know, you got to tell what is on this page. So we go get the book and it's the page that tells they found they had the McClellan diary. Oh, the book came out more than five years after the Hoffman case. Our cynical assumption was they waited till after the investigation. Term of limitations.

John Dehlin [04:11:30] Statute of limitations.

Sandra Tanner [04:11:31] Statute of limitations thing that you couldn't be guilty of harboring information on crimes.

John Dehlin [04:11:39] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [04:11:41] So they wait till after they're past that point to print their book that tells they already had the McClellan diary and they never came forward with it because they found out before the deal with Mark to get his life sentence. Before the deal, they found they had the diary and they never, the church never came forward to the detectives, to the prosecutor. We found the McClellan diary.

John Dehlin [04:12:06] How would that have been helpful?

Sandra Tanner [04:12:08] It would have gone to motive for the murder. One of the problems they had in the trial for Hoffman is that was connecting the documents to the motive for the murders. This would have proved motive for the murders because he was trying to sell the McClellan collection. That was the immediate Steve.

John Dehlin [04:12:31] To Steve Christensen.

Sandra Tanner [04:12:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:12:36] Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [04:12:37] No. The church was going to buy the McClellan collection. Steve was going to verify its contents.

John Dehlin [04:12:42] That's Right.

Sandra Tanner [04:12:44] And if the church had come forward that we found the McClellan diary, it proved that Mark's collection was fraudulent because he was trying to sell them the diary. So it would have gone to proving he was doing a con game of some sort, that they already have the diary. So they never. They didn't come forward to the detectives and say, oh, by the way, here's something that would help you in your prosecution of Mark. This proves he was had a fraudulent collection he was trying to sell us because he couldn't have had the McClellan diary. And they don't tell about this. The church doesn't tell about this until at least five years after the whole thing.

John Dehlin [04:13:34] And you know, one motive is they're just incompetent, didn't know what they had. And another is that they intentionally withheld the information.

Sandra Tanner [04:13:41] Well, they did both. At first they just didn't know they had it. But when they found out they had it, they didn't want to bring it forward because it brings up the whole question of why did you hide it in the first place? And what does it say?

John Dehlin [04:13:54] Why did anyone know about it? Right.

Sandra Tanner [04:13:55] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:13:56] So that's important that they had the McClellan diary.

Sandra Tanner [04:13:59] Yeah, they had it. They had it and didn't know it. And then when they did know it, they didn't bring it forward to the prosecutor. That would have helped improving the motive for the killings because it would show the McClellan collection wasn't authentic.

John Dehlin [04:14:13] Well, certainly it wasn't hard to convict Mark Hoffman. Was his conviction ever really in jeopardy?

Sandra Tanner [04:14:18] The problem was the motive for the murders. You can have the documents be fraudulent, but that doesn't prove why he killed Christensen.

John Dehlin [04:14:30] Right.

Sandra Tanner [04:14:31] It's to the motive of Christensen's death that you had a problem for them to prove and.

John Dehlin [04:14:39] But ultimately they proved it without the knowledge of the McClellan diary.

Sandra Tanner [04:14:44] Yes, but they didn't go for the death sentence. They made a plea bargain. Now the question of course comes up

John Dehlin [04:14:53] because they weren't as confident in their case as they could have been.

Sandra Tanner [04:14:56] Yes, they would have been more confident in the case if they could have known that.

John Dehlin [04:15:00] Oh, that's kind of serious.

Sandra Tanner [04:15:03] Yeah, well, we thought it was. Yeah, evidently the church thought it was because they waited five years before they published it.

John Dehlin [04:15:11] So now do we have the McClellan diary?

Sandra Tanner [04:15:13] Yeah, it's been published.

John Dehlin [04:15:14] Is it interesting at all?

Sandra Tanner [04:15:16] Well, it. Yeah, it tells about all. Why he didn't believe Joseph Smith, why he left the movement, what, in 37 or 38 or whatever. His dissatisfaction with things in Kirtland and stuff like that. So. So yeah, it's an interesting part of church history, but it's. The church had already dealt with McClellan's arguments and claims because he had printed other things. It's not like we didn't know what McClellan's thoughts were. He had published other material.

John Dehlin [04:15:49] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And if I remember, you did. Did you say that Hoffman had struck a deal where he would keep the McClellan? He would. Once they were authenticated by Christensen, he would keep them. So the church would have plausible deniability. Did you say that earlier?

Sandra Tanner [04:16:08] Right. And I don't know that the church would have phrased it that way, but the point was the church could then honestly say they don't have those documents and they didn't buy those documents because if they buy them from Mark and Mark hides them away, then they can honestly say, I don't know what you're talking about, we don't have them. But they wanted Steve Christensen to verify the collection was really what Mark said it was.

John Dehlin [04:16:42] I wonder why they didn't agree to have some other more trusted individual, third party keep possession of them versus Mark.

Sandra Tanner [04:16:52] Well, they might have if they'd got down to actual transfer of money. They may have said, no, we want Steve to keep him.

John Dehlin [04:16:59] Right.

Sandra Tanner [04:17:00] I mean, I would have. I wouldn't have just trusted Mark, but.

John Dehlin [04:17:04] Okay. But it was the McClellan papers that were probably Hoffman's undoing because he had

Sandra Tanner [04:17:10] over why he had oversold them. He had worked himself into debt and he needed a big sale to help him. He was waiting for the oath of a Freeman to sell. That would have solved a lot of his financial problems, but it was lagging and he needed money right away. So if he could sell the McClellan collection, he could get a bunch of money for that. But to get enough money to help him financially, he had to claim it had all sorts of material in that he didn't have time to fabricate. So he can't have Steve verify the whole collection. He could show Steve a few things, but he couldn't show him a total collection.

John Dehlin [04:17:57] And is it, is it fair to say that. That the first murder of Steve was because Steve was set to expose Hoffman as a fraud? Like. Well, we don't know why would. What pushed Hoffman to want to kill Steve versus some other method, do we know?

Sandra Tanner [04:18:17] Well, I assume Steve. Well, we know Steve was upset about Mark's handling of money and he was having bounce checks with different people, not giving a document to someone that had paid him for a document. There Were starting to be rumblings in the document community that he's kind of squirrely on his business deals. And so I think Steve had started to see a pattern that it was getting him concerned with. Not that the documents were authentic, but that mark. Mark might have been some sort of shyster. On selling documents to several people and not paying his bills and stuff. I think it was more that way. And probably demanding some sort of evidence from mark beyond what mark could supply. Just to have him question mark, to seriously be putting him on the spot, Just was a breaking point for mark. It was all going to unravel. So he had to get rid of steve, and then he had to kill someone. He didn't have to kill someone. He just had to have a diversion to make the police think it had to do with christensen's business dealings, Investments that had gone bad, that it was an investor, not anything to do with mormonism. That's why the bomb is put at the sheets residence, because it's a former business partner of christensen's. And it didn't matter who picked up the bomb. It didn't matter if the bomb went off. It could have just been found there and not gone off. But it still would have pointed to something between sheets and christensen's, which shows the callousness of mark, that he didn't care. I mean, some kid could have just come and picked up the box. They didn't care who picked it up.

John Dehlin [04:20:22] And in the documentary, he basically says that he. He didn't care who picked it up.

Sandra Tanner [04:20:26] Right, Right. It didn't even have to be picked up. It just had to be found.

John Dehlin [04:20:29] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [04:20:30] At the sheets home.

John Dehlin [04:20:31] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [04:20:33] But then the church still wanted to go. He wanted. He calls the church and want to still go through with the mcclellan collection, but they want to have some other guy come in now to verify the collection. Well, you're back to game one. He can't have anyone verify the collection. And, of course, brent ashworth's pressing him for paying bills to him. And so I think he tended to blow up brent ashworth when that didn't work. I think it was an accident. The bomb goes off in his car. I don't think it was suicide attempt.

John Dehlin [04:21:07] Who do you think the third bomb was intended for?

Sandra Tanner [04:21:09] Brent ashworth.

John Dehlin [04:21:10] You think it was brent ashworth?

Sandra Tanner [04:21:11] Yeah. The document dealer that he usually met at the mall on what was Wednesdays. He always met him at the mall.

John Dehlin [04:21:18] So, yeah, I'm sure it was that a mall downtown. Because he was downtown, right?

Sandra Tanner [04:21:22] Yeah, the mall directly south of temple Square.

John Dehlin [04:21:25] Was it? Oh, ZCMI Mall.

Sandra Tanner [04:21:26] Not zcmi. It's the one across the street. Crossroads. Is that what it was called?

John Dehlin [04:21:32] Okay, so is that generally understood that Brent Ashworth was the target of the third bomb? Because I've heard people say they don't know.

Sandra Tanner [04:21:41] I think the. I think the investigators thought it was for Brent, and Brent, I think things that it was for him.

John Dehlin [04:21:50] Did they have a meeting planned that morning?

Sandra Tanner [04:21:53] They met every Wednesday at Walden's book at the mall. And after the Christensen Sheets bomb, Brent Ashworth's wife asked him not to go to Salt Lake on Wednesday. And so he didn't go. But Mark went because there was a receipt in his car for Walden's books for a New York Times that showed Mark had been there just, what, 20 minutes before that or something. So Mark had gone there to meet Brent. Brent didn't show up. Mark went back to his car and picks up the bomb. We assume he was going to try to undo the wires to dismantle it. Well, when he goes back to his car is interesting. In the preliminary hearing, when he went back to his car, he fumbled in the trunk for a while. He picked open the trunk, fumbled with some stuff, closes the trunk before he tries to get in the car. I think he was trying to see how sensitive the bomb was. And so when he opens and closes the trunk, nothing happens. And so I think he thinks, well, it's not as sensitive as I thought it was. So he opens the driver's door, and he puts his right knee on the driver's seat, but his leg, left foot's on the cement, and he leans into the car and picks up the bomb. And might have been trying to undo the wire for it, but he must bump the package on the center steering column and makes the bomb go off. The forensic guys know the bomb went off just above that central column between the two seats. And the fact that it blew Mark across the street told the detectives that he can't be sitting in the car. He has to already have the door open. He has to be leaning into the car, or it would have killed him. And they find him on the other side of the street because the door was open. Well, when he gets to the hospital and the police finally are able to ask him questions, he says he got in and sat down in the car and then noticed the box and picks it up and it blows up. Well, then they immediately knew his story didn't match the forensic. I mean, they knew immediately with that day, they knew Mark was involved in the bombings. He has to be at least a party to the bombings because his story doesn't match what they knew had to have have happened. His injuries were such that couldn't have. They couldn't have happened the way he describes. So he was immediately a suspect. But then how do you prove all of that? Who all was involved? Did he have partners and leads to a big investigation.

John Dehlin [04:24:59] Right. Okay. So that's the third bombing. Oh, I was going to ask you. If he thought he was meeting Brent Ashworth at the bookstore. How is he going to deliver the bomb at the bookstore or get it to Brent in a way that wouldn't expose Mark?

Sandra Tanner [04:25:26] Yeah. I don't think he carried the bomb with him. I know somebody. I've heard a couple of people say that he was carrying the bomb. No, I don't believe he took the bomb to the mall. The bomb was in the car the whole time. I think Mark was going to tell Brent one of his great stories and say I've got this great find that's on the front seat of my car and here's my keys. I need to go talk to Hinkley a minute or whatever. And you go down and look at the document and see if you want to buy it and I'll be there in just a minute. And he could have sent Brent to get the box. Box and open it at the car.

John Dehlin [04:26:06] That would have ruined his car.

Sandra Tanner [04:26:08] Sure. That's okay. Because he could show he was a victim. It would help Mark prove he was a victim. That he wasn't a party of it. He wouldn't blow up his own car.

John Dehlin [04:26:20] But that would tie him to these bombings. You're saying is a victim. But that's not bad. But then why did he go after Sheets? To implicate. To implicate the financial dealings. If he's going to then try and tie it to Mark Hoffman which would have made it be about church history and not about Steve Christensen's financial dealings. Does that make sense?

Sandra Tanner [04:26:43] I think he realized that the sheets diversion wasn't going to make it. That that wouldn't solve it. That there already were questions by the police that. That weren't sure that that was an end to the. An explanation for the whole thing. And he still had the problem of not having the money or the documents that he could settle things with the church. He owed all this money to these different people. So now what do I do? What's next? What's the next step I could take? Since the sheets diversion doesn't look like it's going to be Sufficient. And so he thinks, well, if he can make himself and the documents the object of some crazy person out there, because he tells the police at the hospital, oh, there was some white van that had been following me around and try to make it sound like he had been being tailed by some sinister person and trying to divert things to make it seem like someone was trying to stop his. His transactions.

The Bombings and Hofmann as the Suspect

John Dehlin [04:27:58] I wonder if. If he intended Ashworth to go to his car, pick up the bomb and have it be detonated. I wonder what story he had planned to tell the police about why how a bomb got in his car in the first place.

Sandra Tanner [04:28:18] Oh, someone was trying to stop him giving this great collection of the McClellan collection to the church. And he was probably hoping that more of the stuff in the trunk would have burned up. But see, some of that stuff was in the trunk that he was claiming part of the McClellan collection. The pieces of papyri that he had got on loan from New York that were of the same time frame as the Joseph Smith papyri that he was claiming as part of the McClellan collection were in the back of the car. I think he would have claimed, oh, shucky darn church. The McClellan collection went up in smoke, and we only have these few shards left after the fire.

John Dehlin [04:29:01] And how would he have explained how a bomb got there that then killed him?

Sandra Tanner [04:29:05] Well, because there's some sinister mob out there that's trying to get rid of

John Dehlin [04:29:08] that would have planted that bomb there.

Sandra Tanner [04:29:09] Yeah, they would try to get rid of people doing church history and documents and whatever. Whoever he would have spun as the evil guy.

John Dehlin [04:29:18] And how would he have explained why Ashworth was going back to his car without him being there?

Sandra Tanner [04:29:25] Well, he could have just said, I sent him out to check. He was going to look at the McClellan collection. He could spit. He could easily come up with story why he sent Mark first to the car. I mean, Brent first to the car.

John Dehlin [04:29:38] Okay. And that takes the heat off of him for not being able to produce the McClellan papers. Also adds drama to his life that allows him to get. Make more excuses for any deadlines or financial things he's not able.

Sandra Tanner [04:29:55] Yeah, because he's got a stall. If he can sell the oath of a Freeman, it'll solve everything. He just got to stall till that sells.

John Dehlin [04:30:03] Yeah, and maybe garner sympathy for him.

Sandra Tanner [04:30:06] Oh, sure. He becomes a hero.

John Dehlin [04:30:08] He becomes a hero.

Sandra Tanner [04:30:09] Oh, he's a great dog. He's the great document dealer. That's. That's finding all these wonderful things.

John Dehlin [04:30:15] And so someone's trying to kill him.

Sandra Tanner [04:30:18] He's pathetic. Oh, poor Mark.

John Dehlin [04:30:20] Right. Sympathetic. Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [04:30:22] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:30:22] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [04:30:22] Well, Brent was still feeling that after the bombings. He thought that it was all aimed at Mark and that he was a target of some sort and couldn't let himself believe that Mark could be the one responsible.

John Dehlin [04:30:39] Yeah, right.

Sandra Tanner [04:30:41] And if it's your trusted friend, I mean I sympathize with Mark and those Kurt Bench and those around him that had fully trusted this man that how hard it would be to believe that of someone no one wants to believe their best friend was a cold blooded murderer.

John Dehlin [04:31:01] That was one of the chilling parts of the document. When Kurt Bench says he called Mark Hoffman to say, be careful, they're coming after people like us. So he's calling the murderer to tell him to be careful. You could get hurt. Yeah, A little bit sad.

Sandra Tanner [04:31:20] Yeah.

John Dehlin [04:31:22] Really quickly. Something that I'd either forgotten or didn't know. And I think there are other people that didn't know this, even informed people. Like I think I talked to Radio Free Mormon the other day. He didn't know this. That the documentary Murder among the Mormons brings out that Hoffman's ultimate kind of like coup de grace or like biggest con or whatever was to produce the 116 pages. And I think I've heard Jared Hess or Tyler or both talk about the fact that they were able to see some sort of like sketching or outline in Hoffman's hand of kind of. I think he said Ashworth might own this, of kind of the document that sort of showed his initial thoughts about what, what the 116 pages would say. Yeah, but, but did you, did you know that. That Hoffman at some point was planning on doing the 116 pages? What do you know about that and what are your thoughts about that?

Sandra Tanner [04:32:24] In hindsight? That's obviously what he was building up to. We didn't know it to begin with, but he was inventing handwriting samples of Martin Harris with his different documents he's selling to the church. And it didn't matter if they're faith promoting or not faith promoting, he was building an collection of Martin Harris handwriting which is all his. And so when he eventually would come forward with 116 pages and he wouldn't have to do the whole 116 pages, he'd only have to do a few pages and claim they were part of that manuscript and the other pages lost, I mean that'd be believable that you'd only find a few of the pages. But then Martin Harris handwriting on that document would be compared With Mark's other forgeries of Martin Harris handwriting and ta da. They would be authentic. They were the same hand for both documents.

John Dehlin [04:33:25] So we have no evidence, we have no samples of Martin Harris's handwriting.

Sandra Tanner [04:33:29] Right now I think there's a signature. I don't know that there's much more than just a signature.

John Dehlin [04:33:35] Okay, okay.

Sandra Tanner [04:33:36] They may have one or two documents now. I. I haven't kept on what the Joseph Smith papers has been able to come up with, so I don't. I'm not sure.

John Dehlin [04:33:46] Well, that suggests some pretty. The potential of some pretty serious premeditation if he. If he breaks onto the scene in 1980 with. With the Anthon document in Harris's handwriting and that was all a setup for the 116 pages, however many years later. That shows that a lot of this might have been mapped out and premeditated.

Sandra Tanner [04:34:10] I think the Martin Harris thing had to have been. He seems to have had this trail of Martin Harris signatures, documents, with that end game in mind. So, yeah, looking back at it now, I would say when he first came up with the first sample of Martin Harris handwriting, he already had in his mind where it was going to.

John Dehlin [04:34:40] Yeah. And have you ever tried to kind of fantasize what would have happened if he had been successful, what he would have put in there, what would have been devastating and how that might have been received? Could that be a game changer?

Sandra Tanner [04:34:54] I imagine the story of the Liahona would have been much more magical. There would just have been more of that kind of magic tone to the story.

John Dehlin [04:35:08] Would it have been less religious? Would it have been more of a fanciful tale?

Sandra Tanner [04:35:13] Yes, it would have been less scriptural. Yes, because he came up with more spiritual stuff as a filler. I mean, Joseph did. So Mark would have probably had it be less of any kind of normal Christian spirituality in it and more maybe Christian magic, but the casting spells, kind of variety that the early Smiths were involved in. So that, I mean, because I think the lion itself is kind of a funny magic deal, but he could have cast that in a much more magical framework. I think there would have been more of that type of thing in it.

John Dehlin [04:36:05] Yeah. That's interesting to think about what, what he might have done with 116 pages with. With that mischief. Interesting.

Sandra Tanner's Reactions to the Netflix Documentary

Part 2 of 2 · Ep. 1406

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to part two or three, depending on how we cut this up, of my interview with Sandra Tanner about Mark Hoffman, about her and Gerald Tanner and their experiences together. And now, finally, because I go as deep and as long as my interviewees will let me, now we're gonna finally actually get to Sandra's reactions to the amazing, groundbreaking Netflix documentary produced and written and directed by Jared Hess and Tyler Misa. My dear friends, Murder among the Mormons, about the Mark Hoffman. We've just spent several hours talking to Sandra about her knowledge of Mark Hoffman and her life with Gerald and everything leading up to the bombings and all that other sort of stuff. We've talked about the documentary here and there along the way, but what we haven't actually done is gotten Sander's reactions to the documentary, or at least in any consolidated way. So, Sander, you've been super generous with this so far. You're a true warrior. Thank you.

Sandra Tanner [00:01:00] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:01:00] How are you doing?

Sandra Tanner [00:01:02] Well, losing my voice, but I'm doing pretty good.

John Dehlin [00:01:04] I am cruel and inhumane sometimes, but only with the best of intentions. Okay, so we've talked all a bit around Mark Hoffman and everything in the documentary. Let's just jump right in. What'd you think of it? And I could ask more detailed questions, but do you have any, like, collected thoughts on high level reactions, things you like, things you didn't like, your favorite parts, things you hated, things you wished had been in it, things you wished you hadn't? Where do you want to begin?

Sandra Tanner [00:01:32] Well, first, reactions. I was very pleased to see that they were able to pull together so much TV footage from the time period and the news reports to give you a better flavor of the people and what was going on at the time. I'm sure that in their interviews with the different ones like myself that they did, which they did hours with all of us, they would have had a lot of that same information from the people they interviewed, which they didn't use. And. But I thought it was very powerful to actually have the newscasts of the day. It made it all seem much more real and engaging. So I thought that was wonderful that they were able to pull that much footage together.

John Dehlin [00:02:26] And my understanding is a lot of that came from ksl, which means that the church would have had to cooperated, would have had to cooperate in.

Sandra Tanner [00:02:35] They would have to have given approval for that footage to be used. Yes.

John Dehlin [00:02:39] Which is to their credit for. For. And I'm just guessing and speculating, but it would be to their credit to. To have managed things in A way to where the church would have felt comfortable cooperating with them to give them that footage.

Sandra Tanner [00:02:54] Yes, I'm sure that there had to be assurances made to the church that it would be as fair as possible to them for them for the church to give that kind of access. Yeah, so I thought that was very impressive. I was surprised at some of the footage they were able to recover because I just didn't know there was would at this date that there would be that much archival material that you could pull together to tell the story. So I thought that made it very interesting. They, because of the way they framed it, they had to exclude a lot of the story because they were trying to build a case of these documents gradually coming out and no hint of any question of their authenticity building up to the surprise to everyone when the bombings came that oh my goodness, why would this happen? And oh, we never suspected. Well, there were some that didn't suspect, but there were some of us that had. And so I was a little disappointed that they didn't use any of my discussion of how Gerald had questioned the documents a year before. But from their production, from their point of view, I can see why they didn't. If you're trying to build to the outside audience who doesn't know anything about the story, that you just build this case of suspense, no one had a clue and then bam, suddenly you have these explosions and it all comes out. But the story was a little more complicated than that. But that's tv. When you're dealing with any kind of documentary, docudrama kind of story, the producers have to frame it in a compelling way that they think will keep the audience engaged to the end. So I mean, I understand why they had to do it that way, but. But it leaves you with just 2/3 of the story. There's other parts of the story that never got explored or came out.

John Dehlin [00:05:19] I mean, I know, I think, and I'll ask them this, I think they'd propose like a six hour, six part segment. I think they only got approved for three. That's just my memory. And that really cuts down on what you're able to tell. But I was sad that your story and Gerald's story wasn't told. Not in a judgmental way of them, but just like I think that's one of the coolest things I've ever heard in Mormon history. So the fact that it was left out of the treatment on Mark Hoffman made me a little bit sad.

Sandra Tanner [00:05:49] Right too.

John Dehlin [00:05:50] So you were a little bit sad about that?

Sandra Tanner [00:05:51] Yes, I Would have liked Gerald. Joe got the credit he deserved for that one.

John Dehlin [00:05:56] Yeah, I'm sure they are sad about that too. Yeah, I, I, I don't want to disrupt your review but I just, I didn't ask you this. In the last segment you. Did you ever suspect Mark Hoffman in the bombings. Before, you know, once the bombs went off? Did, did before he was ever fingered as a suspect. Did you and Gerald ever think that suspect that.

Sandra Tanner [00:06:23] We suspected right off that it had to do with the documents. We didn't have it in our mind yet necessarily that Mark would have set the bombs but that it related to that when the first day they were trying to give news reports on all this may have had to do with some business deal of Sheets and Christensen's. I'm saying no, no. It you don't get there with that story. I don't think that's. We've, we felt it had to do with Christensen's involvement in the documents.

John Dehlin [00:06:58] Did you have a theory about what

Sandra Tanner [00:07:00] it could be of who or and no.

John Dehlin [00:07:03] With what motive?

Sandra Tanner [00:07:05] No. At the time I suppose our thoughts would have run more to the end of thinking of some devout crazy Mormon that was upset that all these embarrassing documents were coming out.

John Dehlin [00:07:17] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:18] And that someone's trying to stop Mark from bringing all these documents out because

John Dehlin [00:07:25] he's like a champion. Maybe people saw him as a champion.

Sandra Tanner [00:07:28] Yeah. So of course the Mormons, they would have had the opposite view that it's the anti Mormons trying to kill off all the people that are trying to do true Mormon history for the Mormons, you know. So it all depend on your point of view. But we thought it had to do with the documents. But I wouldn't have fingered Mark as setting off the bombs on that first day.

John Dehlin [00:07:52] Okay. And I didn't ask you this either. Once Gerald decided that the Salamander letter wasn't authentic, did that make him want to question other documents that had been associated to Mark prior to the bombing? Does that make sense?

Sandra Tanner [00:08:08] Yes. And that's why Gerald and I had many discussions about which is more probable. That a young man for five years could find every important document on Mormonism or that a young man in five years could invent every major find on Mormon documents. And it didn't matter which way you played the scenario. Neither one seemed plausible. And yet here we have the situation. So what's the answer? But we would have had even more questions if we'd have known how many documents he had. We didn't know about a lot of them yet, but just the Ones we did know about were incredible. Like our friend Wes Walters that did the research on the 1826 trial. That's one major find in a lifetime. Document dealers or document historians looking for stuff were not turning things up every month, so we asked different people. Well, doesn't that raise a little question about how does it get so many. Oh, well, he does it full time, though. See, everyone else just does it on their vacation and he does it full time. So that's why he can come up with so many. And you know, really, I mean, Wes has spent so many hours, done so many travels back to New York to try to find things, and it. It just doesn't seem plausible that he could find these. But then we didn't think it was plausible. He could have made them up.

John Dehlin [00:09:43] Yeah. Okay, so you. You debated about it, but in the end, Gerald didn't.

Sandra Tanner [00:09:49] Like we didn't know how to resolve it.

John Dehlin [00:09:51] Yeah, but it sounds like you even. Even determining the Salamander letter was not authentic. That didn't taint Mark. That didn't end up really tainting Mark in your eyes.

Sandra Tanner [00:10:05] Functionally, it tainted Mark. We just weren't sure that it would tainted all the documents because he was doing business like with Brent Ashworth and Benchmark. Well, it wasn't Benchmark yet anyways with Kurt Bench on real documents. So some of the documents were real that he traded around because he'd get him in trade. So we didn't think it tainted everything he brought out and the idea of him. But it raised the problem.

John Dehlin [00:10:38] The idea of him being a forger. Did that occur to you? Him being a forger?

Sandra Tanner [00:10:42] Well, Gerald certainly, certainly was running down that track.

John Dehlin [00:10:45] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [00:10:45] Yeah. And. And I was hoping he was wrong.

John Dehlin [00:10:49] Right. Okay. Okay, that's interesting. Okay. Okay. So you would wish that the documentary had told Gerald's story and your story. You always downplay yourself. And I think that might be a Mormon part of you. The kind of the patriarchy. The man is the presider.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:06] No.

John Dehlin [00:11:07] I wonder if there's a little bit of Mormon patriarchy still in your blood.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:11] No, it's Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:11:11] You are a legend and a hero, Sandra Tanner. And you don't want to that. It seems like.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:17] No. Well, I mean, honestly, it was the early on, all that research was Gerald's. I was his helper, but he was the brains and he was the researcher. He wouldn't have got it done without me, but I would have never done it myself.

John Dehlin [00:11:37] So it was a team effort.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:38] It had to be a team.

John Dehlin [00:11:39] It was like Samwise and Frodo together.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:42] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:11:44] Frodo could have never destroyed the Ring without the help of Samwise.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:49] That's right.

John Dehlin [00:11:49] So you are essential.

Sandra Tanner [00:11:51] Yes, I'm essential, but I wasn't the main force.

John Dehlin [00:11:54] I don't know. Okay. Anyway. All right, so you were sad that story couldn't get told. Other reactions. Sorry to take you away from your reaction.

Sandra Tanner [00:12:04] It was interesting how they put together the different pro and con statements along the way, because it sort of left the viewer with determining whether it was supportive, helpful for the church or not, I think depended somewhat on your own perspective, what parts you focused in on. Because I think that Turley gets to say his part about, well, we can't expect the prophets to get everything, and they're only human and, you know, da, da, da, and that kind of thing. And yet, on the other hand, they'd throw in stuff that would be critical of the church. So it raised both questions, and you as a viewer have to decide which of the different statements you found more compelling. I thought a genius part was putting in that one man saying he commanded Mark to live in giving him the priesthood blessing. Well, so much of how they put the thing together was kind of classic. Taking the early videos the Mormon Church made about the angel Moroni appearing to Joseph, even though it's Mormon archival material, I think it came across making Mormonism looking kind of cultish and kind of weird, and even that one fellow.

John Dehlin [00:13:38] But they did it with. I guess what I hear when you say is the genius of that. And I'm not saying that what is intentional, but it's using the church's own material to make the church potentially look a little bit weird. But they can't be accused of trying to make the church look weird because it's the church's own material. Is that what you're saying?

Sandra Tanner [00:13:57] Yes. And so having this fellow say he commanded Mark to live because he saw he had the garments on to the outside world, looks like the most outlandish, naive sort of statement. But to a Mormon, I could see them all saying, oh, yes, isn't that wonderful? So. But I thought they pulled a lot of the different elements together that way in a. In a very good way that had both the positive and the negative on the situation and left you as the viewer to decide if you thought the total film was helpful or not helpful to the church's image. I felt it didn't help, but a Mormon might view it and think, oh, that was very nice. They were so fair.

What the Documentary Got Right and Left Out

John Dehlin [00:14:47] Okay, let's talk about that for A second, because a lot of ex Mormons who are in their angry phase wanted it to be just this hit piece that takes the church down.

Sandra Tanner [00:14:58] And it could have been. They. They could have focused on the church's duplicity on the documents. They're lying to the detectives. I mean, the detectives came out later and said that they knew that the church leaders were not being forthright with them when they went and interviewed them. So there's a lot of those elements kind of obstructing justice, obstructing their investigation.

John Dehlin [00:15:27] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:29] Hoffman meeting with Hinckley and Hinckley denying that, oh, I never met with him kind of stuff.

John Dehlin [00:15:35] They did mention Hinckley saying that he did never take notes. Do you think Hinckley is lying when he says he never took notes?

Sandra Tanner [00:15:44] Well, he may have it recorded. He may not have taken notes.

John Dehlin [00:15:48] So you're saying he might use this parcel. Parceling, legalistic language to have deniability.

Sandra Tanner [00:15:54] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:15:55] Because is how believable is it that such an important meeting would take place and there'd be no record?

Sandra Tanner [00:16:00] I would suspect it was taped.

John Dehlin [00:16:02] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:16:03] So he could say he didn't take notes.

John Dehlin [00:16:05] And you think Hinckley would do that? Lie in that sort of legalistic way?

Sandra Tanner [00:16:08] Oh, yeah, they've done, yes, because he's done it in other transactions where he has. Like the church did not buy the doc of the papyri from the Metropolitan Museum. But they don't elaborate usually and tell you, well, the gift was made possible because they got a Mormon mission president to make a donation to the museum to get the things so that they can always have distance between them and spending money and all. So there's not a question of, oh, how did you use tithing money? You know, so I see them. Yes. It's very clever that way of how they would structure stuff.

John Dehlin [00:16:48] Yeah. And you, you, if you want to keep people from knowing you even have it, and then, you know, you don't want to give people the impression you're hiding things or suppressing them at all.

Sandra Tanner [00:16:58] Right.

John Dehlin [00:16:59] You don't even want people to know the document exists.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:01] Right.

John Dehlin [00:17:02] And so all that is a. Is a pattern of deception.

Sandra Tanner [00:17:07] Yes. They would see it as justified in helping you to maintain faith because you may not have as much faith as them. So to support the weaker brother, we just would be better to keep that out of their knowledge and they won't have to grapple with that little bit of history.

John Dehlin [00:17:28] Right. Still in their minds, maybe good intentions. Yeah, yeah. So that decision to not make it a hit piece, there's I, I can speculate as to different reasons why one may be they don't want to offend believers. Maybe they've got family and friends that are believers still. Maybe, you know, they don't want to hurt their reputation for whatever things they may want to be able to do in Utah or with Mormons. And then there's also the idea that it's just strategic, that, that it's just smart to not create something that can so easily be branded as anti Mormon that the church won't feel like it needs to attack but that it's neutral enough and fair enough to where then members feel like it's safe enough to watch. And I have no idea. I don't. I think Tyler and Jared just want to tell a good story. But if we're talking about, let's say that you and I have the intention of as many Mormons as possible learning as much of the true history as possible so that they can come to the come to accurate conclusions about what the church is and isn't so that they can then make more informed decisions about their life. Let's say that that's my motivation in yours. Is it smart, smartest to do a neutral objective documentary or is it smartest to do more of a hit piece? Do you have an opinion on that?

Sandra Tanner [00:19:07] I think it would help to neutralize the effectiveness of Mormon missionaries. I think that the average non Mormon watching it would have sufficient reason to think that the Mormon Church looked like kind of a kooky outfit that, oh, that's all interesting but view them as like the Amish or something. They're oddballs out there in the desert and not something I'd want to talk to the missionaries about joining. So

John Dehlin [00:19:40] you're saying if it had been harder hitting.

Sandra Tanner [00:19:42] I think that that's what it accomplishes where it's at that, oh, now I've lost my thought. Okay, if you make it too hard hitting, it's obviously just slanted and people can easily dismiss it by having it be neutral. It still has the effect of keeping people from being interested in joining without it being blatant about it. I think the only ones that are come away from it, excited in a positive way from it would be a Mormon that has no clue what the documentary was really about. They just saw people say it's all true and just say okay, that was interesting part of church history and just move on. But I think the average person with no history of Mormonism viewing it would not be drawn to invite the missionaries in to think of joining The Mormon Church.

John Dehlin [00:20:47] Right. Okay. And. And what do you. What do you guess? Let's say the average. Let's just say thoughtful, educated Mormon along the Wasatch front or elsewhere, who you know is believing, and they're just curious, and so they start watching it. Do you feel like potentially poses some challenges to their faith?

Sandra Tanner [00:21:11] It could, depending on how. How important it is for them for Mormonism to be true. Depending on how important that is. It's going to depend on what parts of it you pick up on. I think if you're. If you've had any doubts, if you'd been exposed to some friend that had some problem areas, even if there'd been just little bits here and there, I think it would be enough to make you want to know more and go Google Salamander Letter or something like that, and could easily open the door for reading further books and taking you down that trail to apostasy. If you really want to believe Mormonism, I think you'll just pass it off as an obscure part of our history. Too bad. Couple people died. Blip in the screen and move on.

John Dehlin [00:22:19] Yeah. Were you surprised to see Turley interviewed for it?

Sandra Tanner [00:22:25] Oh, no, not when I saw they used so much KSL footage.

John Dehlin [00:22:29] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:22:30] Because I think that would have made Turley feel safe. I don't know which came first, but I would assume that Turley would feel safe and being interviewed if the church had given them the okay to use footage from their own broadcasting system. So, no putting the two together, I thought, okay. I don't know what kind of deal was worked out on this, but obviously the church feels comfortable having him interviewed.

John Dehlin [00:23:01] What were your reactions to Turley's parts in the documentary?

Sandra Tanner [00:23:06] Well, the one I remember is him saying why we didn't need to think that the prophet could discern this. I don't remember the other parts he said, but Charlie said, real nice guy. His job is, is to defend the church. And that's been all the historians. That's your job, is to put the story out in a way that the members feel comfortable with it and can accept it.

John Dehlin [00:23:38] I would never want to be one to correct Sandra Tanner. And I'm not actually correcting you, but I'm just going to say something that I just learned that I think is really interesting, and that may be obvious to everyone who's listening, but I don't think it is to everyone. I was listening to Turley being interviewed recently on a podcast called all in, which is this podcast put out by the church to promote faith, and they interview Him. And they talk about how he became church historian. And he tells the story of how he was always interested in church history, but how he didn't think there was money in it. So he went to law school and he graduated from BYU law school and was working for a law firm. And when totally out of the blue, Oaks reaches out to his law firm and says, hey, we, we need to meet with Turley. Oaks and Turley meet, I think over soup. And Oaks says, I want to bring you on as like assistant church historian when he had no formal training as a historian at all. And that what, that reverb, what that sort of like made me realize again in my mind is he's not really historian. Now, of course, you could say you and Gerald weren't historians or Juanita Brooks weren't historians because you can do good history and not have that training. What are you wanting to say?

Sandra Tanner [00:25:05] I know you're wanting to say no, that's true, but.

John Dehlin [00:25:09] But we should. It should be a huge red flag to Mormons everywhere. Turley, Marlon Jensen, Elder Snow, former heads of the Church history department. What do they all have in common? What are they? Sandra Taylor and what are they? Not now, say it again. What are they?

Sandra Tanner [00:25:31] They are lawyers.

John Dehlin [00:25:32] And what are they?

Sandra Tanner [00:25:33] Not official historians.

John Dehlin [00:25:36] Like, what does that mean? Think about that, dear Listener. That when the church wants the head of its history departments post, Leonard Arrington, it's choosing lawyers and not historians. Think about that. What does that tell you? What does that tell you, Sandra Tanner?

Sandra Tanner [00:25:55] That you have to know how to defend your client and frame everything in the best possible way to get an innocent verdict.

John Dehlin [00:26:07] Yeah, I mean that's, you know, there's this book I read once called Mistakes Were Made, but not by Me. Have you heard of that book?

Sandra Tanner [00:26:14] I've heard the title and it's.

John Dehlin [00:26:15] And it, it basically makes this argument, and I'm sure this isn't original to the book. It makes this argument that there's no correlation between high intelligence and whether you believe or not. And in fact oftentimes having a high intelligence because we arrive at our conclusions emotionally and then just use. Unless we're Gerald or, you know, others and then use. What we most often do as humans is we arrive at our decisions and conclusions emotionally and then we just use the evidence to support our position. And lawyers are a type of person that are just extra good at justifying whatever needs to get justified. So it's not a matter of. Sometimes intelligence can make you more likely to. To believe because you're more skilled at justifying and that's why the church hires lawyers as the heads of their history department. What would your. That's my little theory. What do you think about that?

Sandra Tanner [00:27:22] Also along those lines, in my younger years, I thought lawyers were all trained to tell the truth. And what I have come to realize, no. Lawyers are all trained to how to frame the argument for their truth. And these men are trained to construct an argument for their case, not necessarily laying out neutrally all the evidence.

John Dehlin [00:27:58] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:27:59] And if you're good at how to put together your pieces of evidence, and that's what gets you to be church historian, not the fact that you know all the evidence.

John Dehlin [00:28:11] Exactly. And another instance of this, as I was studying again, one of Gerald's books was Dallin H. Oaks's justification for why the Salamander Letter was not a problem. Like he, he just very quickly was able to give some type of talk, I think, to church educators where he's like likening Moroni to an angel that has protection that wouldn't be burned by fire. And a salamander is like an angel. And so it could have been replaceable with Moroni. And it's this huge construct of Oaks using his brilliant lawyerly mind to frame all the evidence in a way that would still be able to sustain faith when literally he's, he's making it up against a bunch of stuff that had been forged and faked. And it's just, I think it's, it's along with that 1835 Josiah stole Joseph Smith letter that Oaks justification of the Salamander letter to me represents one of the most important. Smoking guns, along with Hinckley, buying and hiding and lying, you know, about the 1835 document. Do you have any thoughts about Oaks, another lawyer? Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:23] And, and if I was on a criminal case, I'd want him for my lawyer.

John Dehlin [00:29:29] Even if you were guilty? Guilty.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:31] Especially.

John Dehlin [00:29:32] Especially if you were guilty. So. But, but doesn't, doesn't Turley come off as like Guy Smiley, happy guy?

Sandra Tanner [00:29:40] Oh, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:29:40] Is super friendly and warm and.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:43] Yeah. And, and I think he probably is, but he also has to come up with a certain answer and his job is to make all those square pegs fit in those round holes.

John Dehlin [00:29:57] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:29:57] And if we stamp hard enough, they're going to go in.

John Dehlin [00:30:02] Yeah. Well, all of this was to explore the question, you know, a lot of. On ex Mormon Reddit, I saw these things that are like, I'm not going to watch the Mormons because Jared Hess is an active believing Mormon and these guys were bought off by the church. And it's not a truly historical thing, like putting aside Tyler's faith or Jared's faith or even, you know, the church's involvement. The big question I'm asking you is was it smart for them not to do a hit piece, all with whatever goals people like you and I might have. Was it probably smart for them to do a balanced, non hit piece of a work? In Sandra Tanner's opinion?

Sandra Tanner [00:30:46] That's a good question because I think a stronger piece would have gotten them more viewership,

John Dehlin [00:31:00] a more hard hitting piece.

Sandra Tanner [00:31:02] A more hard hitting piece I think would have got more viewership, but it also would have got harsher criticism from the media and news makers, the filmmakers, and that would have seen it as a certain type of film, as a more sleazy kind of way of doing legitimate theater or, you know, a real documentary. There's a certain elitist kind of approach to mine as a ballast film as opposed to these guys are just doing a quick hit piece. And so I mean, I think the sensational sells well, but I think in the long run they've made a piece that has longer shelf life, that in the long run it will have more credibility, more people will watch it because people aren't sure if it was good or bad. But I think they brought out a lot of good points, even though it wasn't as harsh as I would have liked to have seen it.

John Dehlin [00:32:20] So whether or not it was as harsh as you would have liked to have seen it, you're acknowledging that there is, there, it's, there's a smart. Not that they're conniving at all. I think, honestly, I just think Jared and Tyler like to tell good stories. But. But you're saying that it's a fair, a fair argument can be made that even if they wanted to, you know, awaken people more or educate people more, or even harm the church or take the church down, whatever, there's a case to be made that a smarter decision is to write a more neutral piece. You're saying that's a reasonable case can be made?

Sandra Tanner [00:32:54] Right. I could have probably been able to justify a little more hard hitting.

John Dehlin [00:33:02] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [00:33:03] It still accomplished the. What I'm hope the current one does. But they wouldn't have got KSL footage.

John Dehlin [00:33:11] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:33:12] So I think there was a trade off there, that to get all that footage you had to be more neutral. And I think the piece as a historical preservation of the story, it's important to have those news clips. So if it was me making it and I had to make that trade off, I would have thought, yeah, we probably want the news clips.

John Dehlin [00:33:37] Okay. All right, well, that's Sandra Tanner's endorsement of your approach. Whatever your motives were, Jared and Tyler, that's Sandra Tanner's endorsement of your approach. Somewhat.

Sandra Tanner [00:33:49] I liked it.

John Dehlin [00:33:50] Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, so other, other reactions to the documentary.

Sandra Tanner [00:34:02] Well, I've had different people already texting me and saying, oh, I was watching that the other day, and all of a sudden Sandra Tanner popped up in there. I didn't know you were part of that story. So that's been kind of fun. Even at church Sunday, I had some people come up to me and say, I had no clue that you were going to be in that. I was just watching that. And people that, from my Christian audience. There are people out there that I go to church with that have no idea what I do. I have a little bookstore that talks about Mormonism. I mean, they just have no clue about what we've been involved with. So they were real surprised to suddenly see me pop up. I've had people that I haven't had contact for a long time write me and say, what a shock and voice from the past to suddenly see their old friend on this TV series. So it's brought me in contact with people that I wouldn't have had contact with probably otherwise.

John Dehlin [00:35:05] How's that been for you to have people reach out to you?

Sandra Tanner [00:35:08] That's been fun. It's been good to connect with different ones that I knew back in the 80s that I've lost touch with that said, oh, my goodness, I remember that I was there that day the bomb went off or whatever. So. And I would say that most of the people that have emailed me and written to me have had a positive response to the video. Trying to think, I don't think I

John Dehlin [00:35:32] had, in terms of liking it being entertaining, finding it interesting, as far as,

Sandra Tanner [00:35:38] like, not feeling it hit the church hard enough. Anything and no, just most of them enjoyed the video.

John Dehlin [00:35:43] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:35:44] And we're happy with it and satisfied with the telling of the story.

John Dehlin [00:35:49] Yeah. Like, and again, I'm not, I, I, this is just my opinion, but if I'm thinking about Jared and Tyler. Yeah, you can write a documentary for, like, ex Mormons or liberal Mormons, but how big is that audience? Like, if you want to, like, if I'm a filmmaker, I want to make a piece of art that reaches the most. If I'm a storyteller, I want to, I want to reach as many people as possible and who really cares about whether the Mormon Church hid documents or obstructed a case a little bit when he still got convicted. Like, I could see a lot of the stuff that ex Mormons or progressive Mormons would want to see in the documentary. Feel like insider baseball, not interesting. Prolonging the story, not really contributing to it in significant ways. And sometimes the art of a good story is more about what you cut out than, than, than what you leave in. And so I could see that the story could easily get bogged down with stuff that ex Mormons want that would prevent it from being an interesting, compelling, gripping story for everyone else in the world. Can you see that? You probably made that point earlier.

Sandra Tanner [00:37:08] To bring out the different points that I would have liked to have seen mentioned would have extended it another hour, another session. And I'm not sure that a four part series would have been as popular. I don't, I don't know that the outside world would care four sessions worth for the story.

John Dehlin [00:37:33] Yeah, right. Yeah. And Netflix only approved three hours and they probably did that because it's smart. And so, you know, there's wisdom. I think there's probably a lot of wisdom in that.

Sandra Tanner [00:37:44] Right?

John Dehlin [00:37:45] Yeah. And I bet, I bet Tyler and Jared had to show a lot of restraint to tell a good story at the expense of whatever personal agendas they may or may not have had. And. And they're different people too, you know.

Sandra Tanner [00:37:56] Well, I think they would have felt bad because they had so many great interviews with everyone that I'm sure they felt bad they had to cut out. I mean, you can't take hours worth of interviews with all the people that surrounded Mark Hoffman and not feel bad and not being able to use them.

John Dehlin [00:38:14] How many hours were you interviewed?

Sandra Tanner [00:38:15] Oh, I don't know. Several. I'm not sure. I lost track.

John Dehlin [00:38:19] More than this interview

Sandra Tanner [00:38:22] at this point? No, probably not more than this.

John Dehlin [00:38:25] It's hard to be John Dehlin in length of interviews. Jared and Tyler, I got you at least on one score.

Sandra Tanner [00:38:31] But they would have done hours. I think Shannon Flynn said they did a lot more hours with him.

John Dehlin [00:38:39] How do you know that? How do you know that?

Sandra Tanner [00:38:42] It was on the Sunstone panel discussion last night. Last night that they did. Shannon mentioned he wasn't on though.

John Dehlin [00:38:53] Shannon wasn't in that panel.

Sandra Tanner [00:38:55] Well, where would I have seen him interviewed? Huh?

John Dehlin [00:39:00] It doesn't matter.

Sandra Tanner [00:39:01] Anyways, it seemed like that Shannon somewhere said that he was interviewed for hours.

John Dehlin [00:39:07] Okay. And you were interviewed for hours?

Sandra Tanner [00:39:10] Yeah, isn't it?

John Dehlin [00:39:11] And I've already heard them answer this question. But isn't it a super Bummer that whenever some documentarians interview 20, 30, 40 people for hours and hours that all that footage gets thrown away and never used or archived. Wouldn't it be amazing if from now on all documentarians both published their final cut, but then for the geeks and the fans, even sold access to all the original interviews or just made transcripts of the original source interviews so all of those amazing interviews don't get wasted and lost and thrown away and never accessed.

Sandra Tanner [00:39:55] Well, I would like to see them donate the, at least audio of the recordings of all of the people they interviewed to, like, the University of Utah Special Collections. I think all of those interviews are valuable and I would hope that they would be preserved somewhere. I mean, we're all getting to a point where.

John Dehlin [00:40:21] Yeah, we're.

Sandra Tanner [00:40:21] We're dying.

John Dehlin [00:40:22] How old are you? How old are you?

Sandra Tanner [00:40:23] I'm 80. You're 80? Yes. And so all. I mean, how long are the rest of the people besides me going to be around? Even though, like, Shannon Flynn's younger than me? I don't know just how much. But

John Dehlin [00:40:40] Brent.

Sandra Tanner [00:40:40] But Shannon has bad health.

John Dehlin [00:40:43] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:40:43] And Brent's had some surgeries lately, so you don't know how long any of us are going to be around. They need to preserve those interviews. They're valuable pieces of history. So shout out to them. Save them somewhere. I hope they're donated to the University of Utah.

John Dehlin [00:41:01] I'll ask them. Donate footage. Even just the, Even just the transcripts.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:08] The audio of the recordings. Well, yeah, minimum a transcript, but I would think the audios would be so important historically.

John Dehlin [00:41:20] I wonder if Netflix owns all that and, and basically would say that's ours because we paid or BBC or whoever it was. I wonder if.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:30] Yeah. Depend on who paid for the interviews,

John Dehlin [00:41:32] I guess, because I. I asked for the same thing with Helen Whitney when she did the. The PBS series on the Mormons.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:38] And I got the sense she didn't own her own footage, that PBS owned it or whoever.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:43] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:44] So she couldn't use it.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:45] Might be. That would be a shame if it's not saved somewhere.

John Dehlin [00:41:49] Yeah. Can you imagine all those stories that, that.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:52] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:41:52] We're on the cutting room floor.

Sandra Tanner [00:41:54] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:41:56] Okay. Other reactions. So. So you, you. So overall, you've appreciated this kind of revival of a story and your part in it and the feedback you've heard. That's all been fun and positive.

Sandra Tanner [00:42:08] Yes, that's all been positive and a little bit validating.

John Dehlin [00:42:11] Do you feel a little bit vindicated?

Sandra Tanner [00:42:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:42:14] Talk about that.

Sandra Tanner [00:42:15] Well, I'm glad to have the story Revived because we've got all these people that have born since 1985 that don't even know who Mark Hoffman is.

John Dehlin [00:42:26] I know.

Sandra Tanner [00:42:27] And so they have no idea about the story at all or the framework of the thing. So I thought it was good to reintroduce the story and to revive the knowledge of how Mormon history has been handled in the last 50 years. It gives some context to the. People have no idea today what it was like before the Internet.

John Dehlin [00:43:01] What was it like, Sandra? Tell us.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:03] Well, you know, when I had to ride my donkey to church. But to be without the Internet and without cell phones or any of that kind of thing, to how the world worked at that time, how hard it was to do investigative reporting, how hard it was for the police to do the investigations they were doing to try to piece together the story, to find the sales receipts and all these things that are part of the Mark Hoffman evidence. In a day when you didn't have electronic capturing of all the data.

John Dehlin [00:43:46] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:43:47] To find out where he traveled when you don't have cell phones, that you can trace the locations and pinging off the towers and all those things, the cross point where he parked his car. That it was a lot more intensive to do research then. And the whole police investigation would have been slowed down because of that lack of technology. I mean, in today's world, so much of that could have been done faster.

John Dehlin [00:44:17] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:18] They would have loved to have our technology at that time. But to their credit, they got the job done. And I am amazed at what they were able to put together before technology.

John Dehlin [00:44:30] Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Okay, so other reactions. Other reactions?

Sandra Tanner [00:44:39] I guess not.

John Dehlin [00:44:40] No, that's it. Wait, I've got a couple questions. Okay. Ask you some questions.

Sandra Tanner [00:44:44] Okay.

John Dehlin [00:44:45] Okay. So I'm going to just name. Okay. You do feel like the church got off easy. That. That they could have. I think I heard you already say this, that the church could have. They could have covered more. The ways the Church hid information, lied about things, tried to buy things off and obstructed the investigation.

Sandra Tanner [00:45:07] And I would have liked to have seen a little more of that because I think it was part of the story. And you couldn't just say it was an attack on the church. I think it was an important part of telling the story. So I felt bad that wasn't explained better, but with a constraint of three hours. I understand what they're up against, but I would have liked to have seen more clarity on how the Church reacted to the documents and how they dealt with them.

John Dehlin [00:45:38] Any other Big, big parts of the story that you think were really missing, other than what you've mentioned so far?

Sandra Tanner [00:45:46] Oh, probably my mind's gone blank.

John Dehlin [00:45:50] Okay. No big emotional. Were there. Was there anything about it that made you, like, angry or really sad? Like when you're thinking about your emotional reactions to the documentary, things that made you angry or sad or really happy?

Sandra Tanner [00:46:06] I felt the ending interviews with While Shannon, Brent and Brent Ashworth and Kurt Bench, all of them. That to bring in the personal touch of them being friends with Mark. And although not much was said about Kathy Sheets, but to make the victims more a part of the story, I thought was good and to see the impact the whole thing had on these people personally, I thought was very moving.

John Dehlin [00:46:55] In what way?

Sandra Tanner [00:46:58] Well, how they were betrayed and used by a trusted friend and what they went through and trying to reconcile all of that afterwards. And Brent's struggle with feeling personal guilt because he had introduced Mark and Steve Christensen to each other and feeling, in a sense, that he felt some sort of guilt in leading to Christensen's death, that it wouldn't have happened had he not introduced him to Mark, I thought gave a personal feeling of focusing the crime back to what it cost in human lives, not just whether a church bought some documents or whether they were authentic or not. I thought that that was very good to pay homage in that sense to the victims because they are an important part of the story. And I think it's easy to get focused on the mechanics of the documents and all of that and forget that it did cost two people their lives. So I thought it was a very powerful ending. And I think everyone walked away feeling great empathy for Brent in his struggle.

John Dehlin [00:48:20] Brent Metcalf.

Sandra Tanner [00:48:20] Brent Metcalf, yeah.

John Dehlin [00:48:22] What did you feel towards Brent specifically?

Sandra Tanner [00:48:24] I felt very sorrowful for him. And I didn't know Christensen at all and never met Kathy Sheets and only knew Mark in a very limited way in the bookstore discussing church history. So it was not any personal struggle for me on who was guilty or not guilty. I think adding the human dimension to it all was needed for respect for those that died.

John Dehlin [00:48:57] Yeah. And the victims of, like you said, the friends who were betrayed and used that some of them have probably were never the same right after that.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:10] Yes. Well, they said in the video, I think some of them said that it's. Well, maybe it was Brent last night on the interview he did, talking about it was very hard to trust anyone again. That the long period he went through of ever trusting again after that, to be so betrayed by a close personal friend to such a degree just was shattering for him.

John Dehlin [00:49:37] Yeah. Okay. So that made you feel moved and said.

Sandra Tanner [00:49:42] Oh yeah. It just brought me to tears watching Brent give those closing comments

John Dehlin [00:49:48] at the

Sandra Tanner [00:49:49] end of the doc, at the end of the documentary. And, and it was good for me because I needed to be reminded that these things affect people personally. It isn't just academic.

John Dehlin [00:50:01] Yeah. Other emotional reactions. Anything made you angry or happy?

Sandra Tanner [00:50:10] Well, I was really take it back with the young man saying he gave Mark a blessing and commanded him to live. And I thought, oh, that is so Mormon.

John Dehlin [00:50:22] Yeah. And kind of sweet, right? Yes.

Sandra Tanner [00:50:27] But sort of naive in a sense. But yeah, yeah, heartfelt.

Heroes, Villains, and Lingering Questions From the Hoffman Case

John Dehlin [00:50:39] This is a really sensitive question, I think, and it's one that I want you to just say, I don't want to talk about that or I don't want to answer it, or I don't like the question. But I know that some of the listeners would have been thinking these questions and so I just want to see if you have any reaction to it. There, there has to be listeners or viewers of the documentary that are wondering who else could have been an accomplice, if anyone else could have been an accomplice to Mark. And I think probably of all the characters, Shannon Flynn maybe evoked in the viewers that kind of question because the documentary's got Mark and Flynn. It's got Flynn with the Anarchist Cookbook, you know, a bomb making book. It's got Flynn and Hoffman going off and shooting Uzis in the desert, blowing things up. And it kind of leaves you wondering. And also, I guess Shannon Flynn is saying in the documentary, I don't remember if I saw him that the night before or not. And you're like, really? You don't remember? And of course, memory, we all forget stuff all the time. I don't remember what I did this morning. So like, I'm not, I'm not condemning anyone, but I'm just saying there, there are probably people wondering what Shannon Flynn's involvement could have been with some of the more sinister stuff or if there were other potential accomplices. Do you have any thoughts or reactions on that?

Sandra Tanner [00:52:09] Well, this is one part of the film, that of the story that was left out of the film, and that's Mark's associate, Lynn Jacobs.

John Dehlin [00:52:18] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [00:52:19] And we talked. He never gets mentioned in the film at all. And Lynn was a close friend of Mark and helped him with selling some of his documents. And Lynn to me came across as very shrewd, intelligent, creative. I could easily have seen Lynn as a co conspirator with Mark, the police never found a direct link of anything that would lead them financially to see Lynn as helping Mark. Lynn's now dead, so we can't ask him anything.

John Dehlin [00:52:58] But Shannon and listeners, if you didn't listen to my first part with Sandra, apparently Lynn Jacobs died of aids.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:06] Yes.

John Dehlin [00:53:07] And. And that's why he's not no longer with us. Yeah, yeah, but you can hear more about Sandra, talk about Lynn Jacobs in the previous interview, if you haven't listened. But keep going. I just.

Sandra Tanner [00:53:17] So, so then when you have Shannon Flynn, that's another one that was very close in. Yes. It raises the questions, could he have been a co conspirator? I see Shannon as more of a wannabe. He wanted to be in a part of something exciting and so joined a joiner, not a leader. So I don't know that I would have seen him as the creative co conspirator on inventing the documents. So no, I never thought of Shannon in the sense of helping create the handwriting, forgeries, that type of thing. Maybe I'm selling him short, but he just didn't impress me as someone who was shrewd enough or informed enough for that job.

John Dehlin [00:54:14] Maybe more of a stooge.

Sandra Tanner [00:54:17] No, just a. A groupie.

John Dehlin [00:54:21] Yeah. Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:54:22] He want to be part of the group.

John Dehlin [00:54:23] Right. Yeah. It gives that impression a little bit that you just wanted to be cool.

Sandra Tanner [00:54:27] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:54:29] Do you see the Hoffman story having kind of good guys and bad guys, heroes and. And villains. And if so, who are the heroes and who are the villains?

Sandra Tanner [00:54:42] Well, Mark's obviously the villain. I mean, Gerald was, I guess, one of the heroes and then he questioned the document. But I guess the real heroes of the story are the detectives that just. And the forensic guys that they just kept at it. And we haven't even mentioned much of Throckmorton, the document guy that figured out the. The ink was artificially aged because it cracked under high magnification. That was an amazing find and that broke the case. To prove the frauds, I think that Throckmorton was convinced all along the documents were forgery. Since the bombing, since he was brought in to examine them, I think he was sure they were frauds. But how do you prove it in court? And Mark was very shrewd. He would go to the libraries and cut out end sheets of old books so that the paper would be from the right time frame. And I think he even checked where they were published to make sure the endpiece would be paper that could have been had in New York. And then he made up ink according to old ink formulas. So those things all checked out initially. So Throckmorton had to find some way to test his documents. And beyond the obvious of the ink and paper, because Mark had thought that part through and it. What got him was artificially aging the documents to make them look old was finding out that the ink cracked when you did that. So in a sense, Throckmorton is the hero. If he hadn't of been able to proven to a court the documents were frauds, the whole thing would have just passed over the documents, they would have just been left as genuine and Mark would have just been a murderer that killed because he couldn't produce as much of a collection to people he owed money to.

John Dehlin [00:56:46] Right.

Sandra Tanner [00:56:47] And so in that sense, Throckmorton is the hero because we had to have that last bit of proof that forensically the documents were not what they claimed to be.

John Dehlin [00:57:00] Yeah. Any other heroes come to mind?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:06] Oh, that's main things that come to my mind.

John Dehlin [00:57:08] Okay, how about villains? Any other villains?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:13] Well, the Church, I guess, in the sense that.

John Dehlin [00:57:15] How so?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:16] If. If they hadn't been trying to control their history, all of this would have never happened.

John Dehlin [00:57:25] Yeah. How so?

Sandra Tanner [00:57:26] Well, if they'd have been telling the truth all along, they wouldn't have had documents to hide. They wouldn't have had given Mark an incentive to create false documents. He created them because he knew the Church was controlling their history and not fessing up to the early, embarrassing the slaying people. So they created the environment that made Mark's documents possible.

John Dehlin [00:57:55] They provided Mark with a motive to do the forgeries.

Sandra Tanner [00:58:00] Right.

John Dehlin [00:58:01] And, and, and with an environment that would value and purchase documents, you know, the whole market.

Sandra Tanner [00:58:12] Right.

John Dehlin [00:58:12] They. They would have created if they just had a history of just publishing any historical document, you know, that comes out. There wouldn't have even been a market for it. So Mark wouldn't have had any incentive to forge and then try and sell.

Sandra Tanner [00:58:28] Right.

John Dehlin [00:58:28] And make a living off of it. I also, I mean, you've already talked about the front, you know, the Christian sin and others as the front person. You want to talk about that and how it. There's some culpability there that ends up costing Christensen his life. I'm not trying to lead the witness. Well, I guess I'm just saying that we've already discussed in the prior episode the Church's habit of. Of number one, giving everyone the impression that they have the gift of discernment. So it makes people feel safe.

Sandra Tanner [00:59:00] Right.

John Dehlin [00:59:01] But then also never wanting to be the ones that are investigating and purchasing the documents.

Sandra Tanner [00:59:09] Right? Yes. The church has traditionally used front people to buy documents for them to either donate them or keep them in their own possession, but to keep them out of the public eye and to give the church deniability of ownership. So there. Yeah. So like with Christensen on the McClellan Collection, they are trying to keep everything out of the press, to keep it as hush hush as possible. So they call in a trusted person to authenticate the documents that will not tell about seeing them, that will keep the secrets of what's in the box. And they felt they could trust Christensen to do that.

John Dehlin [01:00:03] So in that sense, I interpret that as putting Christensen in harm's way. Not intentionally, but.

Sandra Tanner [01:00:08] But yes, they did. Right. When they made him be the one that has to verify the collection, that made him be the target for Mark.

John Dehlin [01:00:20] And then when you add to that the fact that they're supposed to have the gift of discernment. Yes, they're working directly with Mark. They should have known.

Sandra Tanner [01:00:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:00:29] And then they put Christensen in harm's way with Mark. I mean, I don't want to be the one that's always trying to like stick it to the church and make them look bad, but is it fair, do you think it's fair to say the church has, I don't want to say blood on its hands, but culpability here?

Sandra Tanner [01:00:45] Yes. They set up a scenario for the whole frauds to even happen. But then they were responsible for the way it played out. Their own actions created a situation and environment where Christensen was put in harm's way. And I fault them for claiming the gift of being prophets and yet not having the ability to see through Mark at the cost of two people's lives. That had they had the gift of discernment, those two people would still be alive today.

John Dehlin [01:01:24] And also just having other people do your dirty work for you. If you're going to do dirty work, do it yourself and own up to it. Don't get other people to do your dirty work. Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:01:32] Right.

John Dehlin [01:01:32] Is that fair?

Sandra Tanner [01:01:33] I think so.

John Dehlin [01:01:34] Okay. And then. And again, I'm not trying to pile on the church, but then there's the obstruction of the investigation. Non cooperation with and. Or obstruction. Anything you want to say about that?

Sandra Tanner [01:01:45] Well, yes, they. They could have made the whole thing easier on the prosecuting attorneys if they had been more open with their own research of their vaults and their information. We know Hinckley misrepresented things to the investigators about his meetings with Mark and what they had purchased. So all along the way there were cases of obstruction of justice, from my point of view. And there was at least one of the detectives that lost in faith his faith in Mormonism because of being involved in the interviews of the general authorities and realizing he was being gaslighted, that they were not telling him the truth. They were holding back information. And here he had trusted these men as prophets of God. And then to realize they were holding back information on a murder investigation was just totally disillusioning to him.

John Dehlin [01:02:46] Where do we read more about that and who that was?

Sandra Tanner [01:02:51] You? I don't know that it would be written up in any of the books. Might be in Gathering of Saints by Lindsay.

John Dehlin [01:03:05] Who? Lindsay.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:08] That's last name. What was his first name? Robert Lindsay. He was New York Times reporter for the religion department here in the West. And he wrote the book Gathering of Saints, I think was the title.

John Dehlin [01:03:22] And there he talks about Hoffman.

Sandra Tanner [01:03:24] It's all on Hoffman. And I think in his book he tells about one of the detectives losing faith. But we also probably got some of that from Ken Farnsworth. One of the detectives who didn't have faith in Mormonism was exactly Mormon. He's now dead. But we had a lot of conversations with him afterwards, and it may have partly come through him. But I think that in Lindsay's book on Mark Hoffman that he might tell some of that.

Recommended Books, Gerald's Legacy, and Closing Reflections

John Dehlin [01:04:00] What are the books that you're aware of about the Hoffman bombings and which ones do you like and really recommend?

Sandra Tanner [01:04:06] The three main ones is Salamander by Sillitoe and Roberts, which has a lot of the forensic stuff by Throckmorton at the back.

John Dehlin [01:04:16] So that's good.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:17] It's a good story. Then Robert Lindsay's Gathering of Saints.

John Dehlin [01:04:24] So that's one of the three main ones.

Sandra Tanner [01:04:25] Yes, one of the three. I liked it the best and it had the least distribution. I don't know why their publisher didn't do more editions of it because the other two stayed in print more. But Gathering of Saints I thought was really good. And then Nafey and Smith did the Mormon Murders, and they were two New York attorneys. And theirs is a little more sensationally told. And so it has a little more of the, I don't know, anti Mormon flair. But did you like that book? I like Lindsay's book better.

John Dehlin [01:05:06] Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:05:09] I think that the Mormon Murders by Nathan Smith is more exciting to read.

John Dehlin [01:05:16] Like Brody?

Sandra Tanner [01:05:17] Well, no, not like Brody, like. Like Ed Howe or whatever.

John Dehlin [01:05:22] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:05:23] No, it's. It's more the popular kind of book. You'd get it the grocery store or airport it was. I think it was big seller at the airports because it's engrossing telling of the story. Very dramatic and all. It's a little grittier, a little more critical. So it's. A lot of historians didn't like it because it was hyperbolic or sensationalistic. Too sensationalistic, they felt.

John Dehlin [01:06:04] What did you love about Lindsay's gatherings?

Sandra Tanner [01:06:06] I felt he was very fair and yet critical of the church for its handling of things. I thought he was a little more direct on some of the problem areas the church posed in the whole thing. I thought Robertson Siloto were a little kinder to the church, but very good book. But I thought Lindsay's was a. Dealt a little more with the duplicity of the Church.

John Dehlin [01:06:38] Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:06:38] So if you're grading them, the Silatos, the. I guess would be considered the most favorable to the church, if you can call it that. And then would be Lindsay's book. And then the Mormon Murders was the famous paperback.

John Dehlin [01:07:02] And then of course, we're not mentioning Turley's victims.

Sandra Tanner [01:07:06] Right, The Turley's victims book that came out later. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:07:09] And you thought about that book?

Sandra Tanner [01:07:11] I felt the whole point of that book was to in the middle, tell you that they already had the McClellan collection to get that out so that the church would say they printed the information before it came out in some salacious thing by the Tanner.

John Dehlin [01:07:27] No, literally. You think that's why they did the book?

Sandra Tanner [01:07:31] Yeah, I think that they wanted to get in print that they owned up to having the McClellan McClellan diaries, so that when it came, if it came out later, that they had it, that they went on record saying they had it so that it couldn't be written up later as a proof of them hiding documents. But of course, and Gerald did. I mean, as we did, Tracking the White Salamander, which never gets listed by anybody as one of the books on Mark Hoffman. But we did our book first before anyone did.

John Dehlin [01:08:09] Is that a good one?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:11] I think it's good. Yeah. You can read it right online free. Tracking the White Salamander.

John Dehlin [01:08:15] Is it still in print?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:16] Yeah, it's still in print too.

John Dehlin [01:08:18] How do you get it?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:20] Yeah, order it from Utah Lighthouse Ministry. Just Google.

John Dehlin [01:08:25] We have printed copies of it right now.

Sandra Tanner [01:08:27] I got one right here of the.

John Dehlin [01:08:30] Of the book. Show it to us.

Sandra Tanner [01:08:35] Tracking the White Salamander.

John Dehlin [01:08:37] And people can buy that from you right now?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:39] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:08:40] How do you make new ones if you sell them all out?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:44] We print up some more.

John Dehlin [01:08:45] You print them yourself?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:46] We got our own press. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:08:48] Where is it?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:49] In the back room at the ministry.

John Dehlin [01:08:51] Really?

Sandra Tanner [01:08:52] Yeah. We do all this ourselves, so that's

John Dehlin [01:08:55] one way people can support Sandra Tanner freaking. By tracking the White Salamander and give her money because she deserves support. Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:09:05] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:09:06] Yeah. Okay. So those are five books if people want to read more.

Sandra Tanner [01:09:11] Right.

John Dehlin [01:09:11] I wish. I wish all these books had audiobooks because that's my preferred way of consuming a book. And none of these books, as far as I know, have audiobooks. And including yours.

Sandra Tanner [01:09:22] Oh, our stuff would be so hard to do audiobooks. So you got all these long quotes. It would take forever to read them.

John Dehlin [01:09:28] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's really. That's really good to. To get your review on those books. I think for future historians and researchers, that will be useful. So if we had to kind of bring this to a close, is there anything else you want to say about Ashworth or Metcalf or. Or Bench or any of the other players that were mentioned?

Sandra Tanner [01:09:57] No, I feel sorry for all of them because the whole thing was costly to each of them in different ways. For Gerald and I, it was just a part of our historical research. It didn't impact us personally like the rest of these people. And I thought the video was good in that it brought out the human element, that this crime was not just a matter of paper documents, that it. That the personal side of the story was very tragic.

John Dehlin [01:10:33] So if you had to kind of conclude with your assessment of the legacy of Mark Hoffman and the bombings, what its impact has been on the church, its members, you know, in history, how would you summarize that?

Sandra Tanner [01:10:51] I think the Mark Hoffman story, as it was written up in the paperback books that came out in the late 80s, had a major impact on people leaving the church.

John Dehlin [01:11:06] Really?

Sandra Tanner [01:11:07] Absolutely. After the different books came out on Hoffman, we had people just pouring into the bookstore, calling on the phone, writing us letters that when they read those books, that they just felt so betrayed and angry, hurt that they had invested all this time, energy sacrificing with their families to live Mormonism, only to find out that the brethren had been deliberately withholding information from them. So, yes, it was a major watershed event, as far as I was concerned, of people flooding to our doors, people that said to me, I never paid attention to you before. I always thought the church was right. You were just a couple of angry apostates making up lies against the church. And I suddenly realized that it was the other way around. So I think it was a major factor in Mormonism through that period. Now it's died off now by this

John Dehlin [01:12:13] time, isn't that amazing how it can die off and now be forgotten?

Sandra Tanner [01:12:17] Yeah. 35 years later and it's almost forgotten. But at the time, it was like an earthquake. It really had an impact on the Mormon community when. Not just the bombings that had an impact, just the events of the day, but when the story was written up and people read about it, they were just appalled that they never knew this part of church history. They never knew why someone would make up documents like that until they realized the church had been hiding its history, and it was devastating.

John Dehlin [01:12:54] Yeah. I'm just really curious about this, now that you mentioned it. As I think back of just my. My lifetime, I'm. I was not paying attention to the Hoffman stuff because I was still in high school and I was in Texas and I was not plugged in. But since going to BYU, I lived through, you know, the September 6th. I lived through, you know, Gail Houston and. And David Knowlton and Cecilia Farr getting kicked out of byu. I lived through, You know, my own excommunication, obviously. Jeremy Runnels, the CES Letter, the Emergence of Mormon Stories podcast, obviously the emergence of the CES Letter. And then the Madsens, Hans Mattson, Hans Zimbaba Madsen. Thank you. Of course. And then Kay Kelly and ordained women. And there's Prop 8, and then there's the November 2015 policy. And the reversal. Is the Hoffman. The biggest watershed moment you ever saw?

Sandra Tanner [01:14:02] Yes, but absolutely. Compared to all of those, really. Yes.

John Dehlin [01:14:07] In terms of flooding people to your doors.

Sandra Tanner [01:14:09] Yes, it was. It was a very tumultuous time, and it reverberated for years after the bombings. As long as the different books were available, it just was a continual rolling flood of people, letters, emails, whatever, of people putting the pieces together and realizing that the history of the church was not what they were raised to believe. And I still get people now writing me letters apologizing for saying bad things about me back then that say, sorry, you were right. I want to apologize.

John Dehlin [01:15:00] And they mistreated you at the time or.

Sandra Tanner [01:15:02] Yeah. Said bad things about me.

John Dehlin [01:15:05] Yeah. How does it feel to be vindicated?

Sandra Tanner [01:15:07] Oh, well, it's fun to get the letters. It's nice to have someone write and say, I'm sorry I called you a harlot.

John Dehlin [01:15:18] Well, that's. That's, you know, it's. It's weird because, like, I, I, you know, Marlon Jensen was quoted, and I actually, you know, had the recording get made that recorded Marlon Jensen saying, at Utah State University, where I was living at the time that the church was going through its greatest apostasy then, you know, and this would have been in 2012, 2013 time frame that the church was experiencing its biggest apostasy then than since Kirtland. He didn't mention the Mark Hoffman bombings as that time. He said it was kind of 2013, 2014 time frame.

Sandra Tanner [01:16:05] So what he. He would have the stats from the church to look at. I'm talking about what came in the papers, that it was just month after month of stories on Hoffman and the whole case and the books and all. It just generated talk and publications for years afterwards. So that at least my contacts would say that was a more important event than any of the other events,

John Dehlin [01:16:44] at

Sandra Tanner [01:16:44] least in my experience. But I don't have their stats to compare the 85 to 90 time period as opposed to the 2010 to 2015 numbers. So I don't know what the percentage was would show.

John Dehlin [01:17:03] Yeah, like, I have so many questions. So, like, so when you think about the church eventually, you know, denouncing Dialogue and Sunstone, taking its CES people out of those forums and then excommunicating the September 6th, do you feel like those things that the Hoffman in some way, the Hoffman stuff leads to the church cracking down on intellectuals and Sunstone and Dialogue?

Sandra Tanner [01:17:33] Sure.

John Dehlin [01:17:34] They got tougher about all that.

Sandra Tanner [01:17:35] Well, yeah, they had such a. I'm sure a huge amount of people contacting them about what is the problem here on church history, why did all of this happen? Why didn't I know about these things? That they're trying to figure out how to put the feathers back in the pillow. And we don't want any more feathers coming out of that thing. So they're kept getting rips in the fabric and they were sewing them up as fast as they found them. But at this point, there's so many feathers out there, there's no way to pull it back. That's why now we get this spin that. Well, it. That doesn't have to be plates. That can be revelation. And, you know, he didn't really need the papyri. It was just a catalyst to getting a revelation on the book of Abraham. On the book of Abraham. And so they're stone in the hat, you know, guess where we're so proud. I don't know if you've seen Nelson's little video with the lady that's. What is she the head of primary or whatever interviews him and he's sitting there in New York proudly pointing to Joseph Smith's hat on the table. And he Even picks it up and shows us how he put it up to his face to get the translation of the Book of Mormon.

John Dehlin [01:19:08] See, the church is transparent.

Sandra Tanner [01:19:11] They don't show him put his head in the hat, though. They cannot bring themselves to get that strong on the illustration. They've gotten to where they can show the hat and Nelson came the closest by pulling it up towards his face. But he didn't really put his face in the hat. They're not quite to that point yet.

John Dehlin [01:19:30] When apologists now point to the Church's recent conversion to transparency, whether it's rough stone rolling or the Joe Smith Papers project or the essays or, you know, even Russell M. Nelson's acknowledgment of a stone in a hat. When apologists point to that and say, see, the Church is transparent. You having been in this business 60 years, what's your reaction?

Sandra Tanner [01:19:53] They've been drug to the point by the hair. All the way uphill to get them to come to the top of the hill and say, okay, we're going to tell the story like it really happened. But I don't think they're at the top of the hill yet. I think they're still being drug up there and they're getting more transparent and more open, but they just, they keep holding back. They can't quite get the, you know, it's like holding on to all the money in the cookie jar and you don't want to let go of the money because to get your hand out, you know, because you lose it all. So they've, they've come a long way. It's amazing what they had.

John Dehlin [01:20:40] Are you proud of them for doing that?

Sandra Tanner [01:20:42] I don't know if I'd say proud. I mean, it's, it was a lot of sweat and tears to get them to the point of admitting all those things, but they aren't there yet and they want to make it out like they're so open. Well, I think the publishing of the Joseph Smith Papers is a wonderful thing and I think that's to their credit. I'm glad to see them putting all the documents out there. Not all, but what they have put out has been very praiseworthy. However, most Mormons don't know there's the Joseph Smith Paper project. They don't even know that's the church site. If I give a Mormon a photo off the Joseph Smith Papers, they want to ask me if it's church approved. Yeah, they don't accept it as being. Well, well, it's just the historians. That doesn't prove it's official. I mean, who do you think owns the Joseph Smith Papers Project? So the fact that it's a different set of people and website than the church official site gives a Mormon the ability to distance themselves from it. If they didn't read about it in the Church magazine, it's not true. I even have pushback on showing people the essays because it didn't come from the President of the Church and they aren't even sure that's authentic. It's. But even when the Church does the essays, there is a holding back of full disclosure. There is 2/3 disclosure, but not full disclosure. They just can't quite bring themselves to just say things straight out unadorn the way it happened.

John Dehlin [01:22:43] Yeah, it goes back to that framing, that lawyerly apologetic framing, but it really goes back to this idea of the, the, the third rail. The, the, the line that's too far is admitting fraud, right?

Sandra Tanner [01:22:56] Yes. But Joseph Smith set the agenda and showed them how to do it at the very beginning when he told his own story. And he did that himself. Yes, I worked for Stoll, but I was only pushing the shovel. Yeah, I worked for that guy. But no, I wasn't really doing the magic stuff down there for him, you know, I mean it was, it's. He's framing everything in a way to excuse his actions and not give a clear story of what's really happening.

John Dehlin [01:23:29] Joseph did that.

Sandra Tanner [01:23:30] Joseph Smith set the agenda of lying for the Lord, of selective evidence, of framing the story in a way that leads to faith, not to question, so that he all his life lies about polygamy. And now the Church has had to own up to all of that. But they still can't quite bring themselves to even face what all of the story is for the polygamy, the way the essays do, a softer telling of the story that obviously he's grooming these young girls and then proposing them and putting spiritual manipulation, friendship manipulation to get these girls to submit. And yet they can frame it in this supposed faith promoting way. It just troubles me on Joseph's telling of his history, the Church is telling of his history. Everything is sugar coated now. They aren't putting quite as much sugar on it as they used to, but there's still a veneer of sugar on there.

John Dehlin [01:24:52] Yeah. And so on the one hand you could say it's Joseph's fault. He set up the, the practice of deception.

Sandra Tanner [01:25:00] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:25:01] And so the Church is just. They, if, if he's of God, then deception must be justifiable. But you have to think that some of these historians at church headquarters would say at some level, this is not honest, this is not fair. Or even some of the general authorities would say, this is not ethical. And yet we almost never have defections of. Of insiders. How do you make sense of that?

Sandra Tanner [01:25:27] Because you don't get your retirement if you defect. And unfortunately, that is one of the holds they have on people. If you work at byu, if you drop out of the church, you lose your retirement. If you're church historian and you apostasize, you lose your entire.

John Dehlin [01:25:48] Can they do that? Can you take. Can they take it?

Sandra Tanner [01:25:50] Well, not after you ret, but up to the point of retiring, they can fire you and you don't get anything right. And so that has to hang over your head. I had friends that worked at byu. This is before they passed the ruling that you had to have a current recommend to work at byu. Before that ruling went into place. I had friends that worked there. That man and wife both worked for byu, both figured out they didn't believe it anymore. And yet they had five years to go till retirement. And they had to. I mean, they felt they had to play the game of posing as a supporting Mormon for five years till they could get the retirement. Because if anyone knew that ahead of time, they would have been fired and lost all that money and they. They would have had no savings, no nothing to live on had they sacrificed their pension from byu. And it was very tough. The wife worked in the mission training center, and every once in a while, the rhetoric at the mission center would get too much for her. She would make some statement to one of the kids. You know that's not true. And then she'd have to smooth feathers over, you know, but they came close to not making it. Nowadays they have the restriction where you have to have a temple recommend to keep teaching at byu. Well, you can imagine the stress this puts on someone that figures out late in their career. They don't believe anymore. If they want their retirement, they've got to keep the temple recommend to keep working there, which means a life of deception for whatever years they have left. I feel sorry for the church employees that are faced with this conundrum of how much is honesty worth to me? Can I afford to walk away?

John Dehlin [01:27:52] And then we have the example of Grant Palmer that just waited till he was kind of retired.

Sandra Tanner [01:27:57] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:27:58] To then become honest and come clean. I wonder why we don't have more of those people once they're retired.

Sandra Tanner [01:28:08] Well, because even when you retire, you still have more. Your family is still all Mormon. And you sacrifice your family connections. If you leave the church, if you've been an active Mormon and for years, and then leave, it's going to have a heavy cost for you, family wise. You may have secured your retirement, but there's going to be many in your family that can't handle that. I think that the Matsons experienced this when they left, that it cost them a lot of friends and family to make that decision. I think everyone that's walked away has had to pay a cost, a heavy cost. A heavy cost because of family alienation. Gerald and I were very fortunate that our families were mixed enough that there weren't an overwhelming number of fanatic Mormons in our families. And our immediate families were more tolerant of us, that we didn't pay the price that I see some other people pay. I don't think I could have done it alone. I needed Gerald strength, especially as a young person. I mean, I look like a strong person now, but I mean, as a, as an 18 year old raised in Mormonism, it was not within my nature to challenge authority. And it would have been very hard for me to lose all my friends if I hadn't had Gerald, because it does make you lose your whole social network, even the ones that are kind to you, and that it just. You can't connect on the same way when they know you've left the church. Their lives revolve too much around Mormonism to be a part of your life.

John Dehlin [01:30:24] Yeah, and I'm aware of at least one. You know, Grant Palmer often wrote about a general authority who was emeritus, that he had interacted with, who had lost his faith. And before Grant Palmer died, he made sure that I knew who that general authority was. And it was Elder Busha from Germany who was a predecessor to Elder Uchtdorf from Germany. And I know for a fact that even though he had his full retirement and didn't believe and even hung out with Grant Palmer, he did not want it known publicly that he had lost his faith. He was concerned about his wife and what that might do to her and concerned about extended family and his reputation and his children. And I would not be talking about it except for the fact that he passed away. And so now he's not around to kind of. But I think it's important that these stories get known that we're not just theorizing here. There are general authorities that are on the payroll that do have pensions that still, even if they have the pension and they've retired, feel that for family reasons they can't Be open and honest. And it really is a form of coercion and societal pressure and manipulation that keeps the truth from, from coming out.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:50] Right.

John Dehlin [01:31:52] Yeah. So that's why we don't have more, more of that.

Sandra Tanner [01:31:58] So.

John Dehlin [01:32:01] Yeah. So I mean we've covered, we've covered so much today. And the legacy I get, I guess I'll, I'll end with this. Other than just to say thank you. Like it does make you wonder if there's anything that could ever, you know, that's. Again, I've talked about the two big questions I always get. And one is, is there anything that's going to come that's really going to take the church down, that's really going to make a difference? And is the church now hitting this tipping point? And all these ex Mormons want the church to hit this tipping point where they have this mass exodus. And as someone who you. Who's lived through probably the biggest earthquake to ever hit Mormonism, which is the Mark Hoffman scandal, which literally is only 30 years. 30, 40 years ago. Right.

Sandra Tanner [01:32:47] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:32:48] And now everyone's forgotten it. It begs the question, could there ever be an event that's big enough or catastrophic enough to really torpedo the church? Or is the church just here to stay and more resilient than ever?

Sandra Tanner [01:33:05] I think there's a potential that something could hit that hard. I'd have to be something like some big financial scandal. But it's amazing the Mormons ability to dismiss problems. They seem to be able to excuse anything when it comes to whether you stay faithful to the church. Things that never excuse in anyone else that somehow church leaders can get a pass on because, oh, it's just him. You expect too much. We're all human. We all have failings, you know, and they make excuses for things. So boy, what would it take to rock them? One of the problems is they're also old. I don't know that you could get much of a sex scandal out of them.

John Dehlin [01:33:58] Yeah. And they. And they're financially taken care of.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:03] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:04] So like that, you know, as long as they're taken care of till they die, do they have to worry about getting rich? You know.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:09] Yeah, right. No.

John Dehlin [01:34:11] Sex and money are taken out of the equation.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:13] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:34:14] All you have is fame and power left and they've got that right.

Sandra Tanner [01:34:18] And they lose all that if they leave. So I mean, theoretically, yes, something could break that would be devastating for them. But my assumption is they will just gradually morph into looking more like just some sect of Christianity and just gradually fade into a lesser known group. That'll just lose meaning to people, though. I think there'll always be people that will join it. But I think they've passed their peak on being able to sweep in all

John Dehlin [01:35:04] these major converts, unless in Africa, you know, or the developing world.

Sandra Tanner [01:35:12] Yes, but Mormonism is so much an American religion. Can they really be a church with

John Dehlin [01:35:24] all

Sandra Tanner [01:35:26] Filipinos and Africans with only white guys running the show? And, and if you put blacks in leadership at the top of the church, how does that change Mormonism? Does it become more and more an African church? For instance, maybe someday move their headquarters to Kenya, Nairobi or someplace, you know. Yeah, Ghana. So they'll, they'll have some growth, but I think it'll just become a lesser factor all the time to where you just won't hear about them.

John Dehlin [01:36:15] Yeah, but they're richer than God right now. They've got.

Sandra Tanner [01:36:19] Oh well, they'll keep going financially, but the membership isn't going to be as impressive. So I think that it's just a dwindling collection of people with the top guys holding a bag of a lot

John Dehlin [01:36:33] of money and it's gonna, they're gonna go from a 3,400 billion dollar church to a trillion dollar church within the next 20 to 30 years. Have you thought about that?

Sandra Tanner [01:36:43] No.

John Dehlin [01:36:43] Just the way entra, just the way compound interest works. If you take the fact that Ensign Peak now has probably 130 billion, and that's just cash and stock and investment real estate, then you add in all the operational funds, cash, real estate holdings of the operational church, plus all the stuff we don't know about the church is clearly worth 2 to 300 billion right now, at least. And then if you just say 7% interest, money tends to double, you know, every seven years at about 7% interest or something like that. You've got the church being a trillion dollar church within 20 to 30 years. What do you think about that?

Sandra Tanner [01:37:26] Well, that's going to be a very rich church of 1 million people.

John Dehlin [01:37:33] You think it's going to shrink at some point?

Sandra Tanner [01:37:36] I think the percentage of the world population is going to get less and less number wise. They might keep the same number of people. There may always be 15 million people on the rolls.

John Dehlin [01:37:53] We're having a hard time surpassing 16 million. Have you noticed that?

Sandra Tanner [01:37:56] Yeah. And only half of them go, so no, one third. Oh, I was being generous.

John Dehlin [01:38:04] Oh, okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:38:08] So they may be able to maintain about a 15 million-member church.

John Dehlin [01:38:14] Well, I think you're, what we're Saying is a 5 million member active church.

Sandra Tanner [01:38:18] Active church.

John Dehlin [01:38:19] Because I think we're losing more than we're baptizing in that remain. And the only thing that keeps us from literally shrinking in number in active membership is the birth rate, which is still three kids per family instead of two. Right. But the birth rate's in decline. So as soon as the birth rate declines to below two, then. Then you actually see the active membership shrinking and it's all right. Now it's at like less than 1%. So we're soon going to see a shrinkage rate. Right?

Sandra Tanner [01:38:54] Right.

John Dehlin [01:38:54] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:38:55] So I don't see anything that's going to make the church suddenly have people flocking into it.

John Dehlin [01:39:01] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:39:02] The potential is there for things to cause them to flee out of it.

John Dehlin [01:39:06] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:39:07] So I see it as becoming less and less an important missionary organization, but it has enough money to always stay viable as an organization. It's just amazing to think that a few people are going to end up with a lot of money. I want to be a general authority,

John Dehlin [01:39:32] A Mormon general authority.

Sandra Tanner [01:39:34] Yeah. There you go.

John Dehlin [01:39:36] Okay. Last, last thing is I. Some birdie told me that. That someone's doing a biography of you and Gerald. Is that right?

Sandra Tanner [01:39:45] Yeah. Ron Huggins, who's written articles in dialogue and presented papers at Mormon History in different places, a friend of ours and a fellow Christian, never been Mormon, is doing our biography and Signature Books is going to be the publisher and it's taken several years and I didn't know it was going to take this long, but anyways, they keep saying they're going to print it, so hopefully by the end of the year.

John Dehlin [01:40:22] Is Huggins a good biographer? Is he a good historian, do you know?

Sandra Tanner [01:40:26] Yes. Yeah. He. In fact he wrote one of the articles on Captain Kid and money digging and stuff on Joseph Smith. It gets quoted a lot in different sources years ago. Years ago. Yeah. So yeah, he's a good writer, good researcher and we spent days and days going over material. He. I gave him access to all our files and whatever he wanted to see. He dug up all kind of stuff I'd forgot about. Now the question is going to be how long a biography Signature is ready to print Because I don't think they're ready to print Ron's to.

John Dehlin [01:41:19] So do you know who's editing it? Is it Laina?

Sandra Tanner [01:41:22] No, I can't think of his name

John Dehlin [01:41:27] right off, but DE Anderson? No. Okay.

Sandra Tanner [01:41:33] So hopefully.

John Dehlin [01:41:35] Have you read it?

Sandra Tanner [01:41:37] I read Ron's long version and when I read it I thought there is no way Signature is going to publish thousand page biography on the Tanner.

John Dehlin [01:41:48] What was it? Right. What Was it like to read a thousand page biography on your life? What was that like?

Sandra Tanner [01:41:55] Well, it was amazing how much you could put together on all of it. So I was encouraged that of all of the stories he was able to pull together because we're lousy record keepers. In starting out, we had no concept of us ever being important. Only thing that was important was the documents, not our story. So we didn't save stuff, we didn't file stuff. So I'm amazed at what Ron was able to pull together. Yeah, so it was, it was very fun for me to read through it because living, reliving all of those Sherlock Home move moments in our lives was fun to go back through. But the average person, I don't know that they're sufficiently interested to want every detail of all of those things. So we'll have to find a happy medium somewhere. That signature can get their 250 page book or whatever they're planning on out of this. But it'll be a lot shorter than what Ron turned in. So you won't get all the goodies.

John Dehlin [01:43:24] I mean, we can always publish the PDF, right?

Sandra Tanner [01:43:27] Oh, there you go.

John Dehlin [01:43:27] Yeah. The reason I heard about this is somebody got access to the manuscript and this just made me personally happy. Told me that I appeared in it briefly only because it mentions, it seems to mention a resurgence of interest in UTLM and you after my interview with you.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:49] Oh, yes.

John Dehlin [01:43:49] Is there any truth to that? Did we help generate some interest?

Sandra Tanner [01:43:54] Yes.

John Dehlin [01:43:55] You haven't told me about that. Tell me about that, come on.

Sandra Tanner [01:43:59] Well, yes. When you did your. When you called and asked me about doing the interview, I seriously had reservations of doing this because I didn't know what kind of an audience would be listening to this and how you would be framing your questions. What would be your motive or agenda and what you wanted to get me to say that I'd be embarrassed about later.

John Dehlin [01:44:32] Okay. And sounds like you didn't think much of me, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner [01:44:35] Well, I was afraid you were gonna go after me.

John Dehlin [01:44:44] I adored you.

Sandra Tanner [01:44:45] Oh, well, thank you, but still do. Anyways, I wasn't sure where it would all go and so I really prayed about it and I felt led to go ahead and do the interview with you. And I think thank you, Heavenly Father

John Dehlin [01:45:06] for telling Sandra to do the interview with me. Keep going, keep going.

Sandra Tanner [01:45:11] And I'm glad I did do it because it opened up.

John Dehlin [01:45:15] Did I do gotchas? Did I try and embarrass you?

Sandra Tanner [01:45:18] I think there were a few gotchas in there, but intentional, like I set you up or. No, but the hard questions, I mean, the hard questions about my faith and my feelings on gay rights and the Bible and all those things that.

John Dehlin [01:45:39] You've got some heat for those from you. Okay, okay. Sorry, but I wasn't trying to do a gotcha.

Sandra Tanner [01:45:49] No, but a lot of. A lot of people that get interviewed aren't asked as detailed questions about their faith. If they still believe some part of Mormonism, you wouldn't ask them the same questions you asked me of, why do you still believe? And so I knew that going into it that I would be asked questions you would not ask someone that still believed Mormonism anyways.

John Dehlin [01:46:20] Yeah, it's just the Christians that I ask those questions like Kathleen Melanakis and Paul. I just recently interviewed Paul. Anyway, keep going.

Sandra Tanner [01:46:35] So I went ahead and decided to do the interview and I'm glad it did.

John Dehlin [01:46:40] Why?

Sandra Tanner [01:46:41] It opened up the world of the Internet and podcast, Facebook, and suddenly I had 3,000 people that wanted to be my friend on Facebook. And by the way, don't ask to be my Facebook friend. I am inundated with too many people. Anyways, it turned out to be a very positive thing and it brought awareness to our research that had been forgotten. Just like with the Mark Hoffman case. After so many years, people move on to the next thing that's going on. And so Jeremy Reynolds comes along with a CES letter and everyone thinks all this documents and problems came about at the time of his letter. And I'm reading his letter and it's like, ho hum. Yeah, that's good. That's interesting. You know, but we talked about this 30 years ago.

John Dehlin [01:47:47] Yeah, right.

Sandra Tanner [01:47:48] So it continues to help us in bringing people to our. Us. To their awareness. And so I'm so glad I did it.

John Dehlin [01:48:04] Is that why you were willing to come do.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:06] That's why I was willing to come do this one? Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:48:09] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:09] Since I had nothing else to do today.

John Dehlin [01:48:11] Right. So. So people did. Did it help with donations or, you know, financial support at all? I really.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:18] Oh, yeah. Yes, it did. We got people, we picked up people that were concerned to make sure that we kept in business and kept going. So yes, it has helped.

John Dehlin [01:48:29] Well, that was a major motivator for me because I. You could accuse me of all sorts of things people do. You should be able to relate to that because people have done that to you and Gerald. Right?

Sandra Tanner [01:48:40] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:48:41] So a lot of. Sometimes a lot of the. The bad reputation comes from smears and slander, but you can accuse me a lot of things, but I feel like I respect My ex Mormon forefathers and pioneers. Whether it was Grant Palmer.

Sandra Tanner [01:48:57] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:48:58] Or the September Six, or you and Gerald, I feel sincerely indebted to and grateful for you guys. And it has always been a goal of mine for whoever's willing. Carolyn Pearson, you know, the Toscanos, whoever's willing. I want to let the world know that we are all stand on your amazing shoulders and that we owe you guys a huge debt of gratitude because there would be no Mormon stories without the Tanner and there would be no CES letter without the Tanner.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:33] Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:49:34] There might not even be a sunstone or, you know, or dialogue without the Tanner.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:38] Who knows?

John Dehlin [01:49:39] And. And so, you know, I am just so delighted to hear that I could play a small role in A, helping you stay alive financially and B, bringing more awareness to you and Gerald.

Sandra Tanner [01:49:52] Yep. It's working. Thank you.

John Dehlin [01:49:55] Okay, this is literally my last question. Anything you want to say in your reflections about Gerald as you were watching this movie, as you've been thinking more towards the end of your life, Messages for Gerald, thoughts about Gerald, reflections on Gerald. I want to end with that. If you want to share, there's anything you want to share.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:16] Well, it was a lot of good memories with Gerald. I'm like Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

John Dehlin [01:50:29] I was going to say that.

Sandra Tanner [01:50:30] And so it brought back a lot of great memories of our times of researching together and discussions and all that. It. I think the video has been good for my son who lives here in town. He was real excited when he heard about the video coming out. He says, I just remember that as a kid of, wow, there was a bombing. Wow. Mom and dad are talking to the reporters or, you know, and it just. He says, I want to know it from an adult, not just as a kid. So he really enjoyed this series and a lot of people that have known us through the years didn't know about that period of our life because it's 35 years ago. So that's been really fun to have different friends say, oh, wow, I didn't know you then, or I knew you then, and I didn't know you were going through that then. And so, yeah, it's all been good.

John Dehlin [01:51:41] And what. What are our. I imagine you're still hoping to see Gerald someday, is that right?

Sandra Tanner [01:51:49] Oh, absolutely. Yes. It's getting closer. Yeah. I believe that I'll see Gerald again, and I believe that I don't believe in marriage in heaven.

John Dehlin [01:52:01] But the Bible kind of doesn't let you believe.

Sandra Tanner [01:52:03] No, it says, we're going to be brothers and Sisters and. But I. I'm assuming there will still be memory of your time together on earth and those things. So I'm expecting there to be an association with Gerald, just not in the same way. But I'm looking forward to it.

John Dehlin [01:52:26] Yeah. You want to see him again?

Sandra Tanner [01:52:28] Yes, I want to see him again and give him a hug. I'm. I still miss him. Other as grief mellows through the years, but there are still those moments of when you feel the loss and the nights when you wake up feeling alone in the bed, but the memories get sweeter and. And you forget when you used to have arguments and why you were mad at him because he left the milk out. And, you know, those things aren't important anymore. And so a lot of good memories. And I'm looking forward to giving him a hug.

John Dehlin [01:53:08] Yeah. And hanging out. Hanging out and talking Mormon.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:10] We can share stories. Oh, Gerald, did you see what happened after you left?

John Dehlin [01:53:18] And then you guys will be able to. Then you guys will be able to, like, look back at the, like the. The whole history of humankind and you can all know where exactly you got it right, where you got it wrong and how it all fit.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:31] Yep. I hope there's some sort of, like, instant replay where we could press it. I want to see 1970 again.

John Dehlin [01:53:41] And. And when that instant replay happens, my prediction is the Tanner will have been accurate or right about 98 to 99% of the time.

Sandra Tanner [01:53:51] Well, I hope so.

John Dehlin [01:53:52] Well, what rating would you give yourself?

Sandra Tanner [01:53:55] Oh, I don't know. I think we got pretty high marks, but I don't know that we're perfect. I wouldn't say 100%.

John Dehlin [01:54:03] 98. I said 98.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:04] Yeah, well, maybe 90. I don't know.

John Dehlin [01:54:07] 90 is still pretty good. Well, Sandra Tanner, I hope it comes across that I adore you. I hope you didn't feel like there are any gotchas today.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:15] No, no, it's all fine.

John Dehlin [01:54:16] And I hope, you know, on behalf of my listeners, you for sure are a top five interview of all time. And I want to communicate to you, on behalf of all my listeners, how much we love and appreciate you and Gerald and your contributions. And I want to have an event when Covid's over where I invite all the listeners and viewers that love and appreciate you to the church of your choice. And I want to have an evening where we honor you and people can just give you a standing ovation for all that you've done. What do you. What do you think about that? Will you do it? Would you come to It.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:55] Well, no. Maybe.

John Dehlin [01:54:58] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:54:58] Yeah. No, I. I have thought about when I retire or when our biography comes out of at some point, of having some sort of open house somewhere and just to meet everybody that. Whose life I've touched through the years to have a chance to say hello again. It would be fun to have a meetup of some kind.

John Dehlin [01:55:23] Well, I'm offering to get the word out and to be whatever, play whatever role in that open house that you would like me to play. No pressure.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:31] Okay. Well, I have to keep that on the drawing board.

John Dehlin [01:55:35] Is there anyone else alive who's interviewed you for more hours than me in total? Oh. Huh.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:39] No. No. You're the winner.

John Dehlin [01:55:41] Yes. Did you hear that?

Sandra Tanner [01:55:43] I won something.

John Dehlin [01:55:44] I won something. Yeah. No one's interviewed you more than me. That makes me really happy.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:49] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:55:51] All right, Sandra Tanner, we love you. Thank you so much.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:53] Okay, thank you.

John Dehlin [01:55:54] And final words to Jared and Tyler about their documentary.

Sandra Tanner [01:55:58] Thank you for all your effort and good luck. I hope it shows a lot of years on Netflix.

John Dehlin [01:56:06] All right, thanks. Sandra Tanner, we love you. Thanks so much. Thanks, listeners. Hope you've enjoyed this. Email us@mormonstoriesmail.com Please donate to Utah lighthousemistryutlm.org Support Sandra Tanner, because she has at least 20 more years to go. That's my prediction. Do you like that prediction?

Sandra Tanner [01:56:26] 20 years. Okay.

John Dehlin [01:56:27] Can you give us 20 more years? Good years.

Sandra Tanner [01:56:29] My aunt lived to be 100. She just died a couple of months ago during COVID and had all of her faculties.

John Dehlin [01:56:39] And you're still coaching.

Sandra Tanner [01:56:40] She couldn't walk good, but she remembered everything.

John Dehlin [01:56:43] So maybe I'm going to try and persuade you to do more. Do more podcast episodes about content, not necessarily about your story, because maybe you've still got more contributions.

Sandra Tanner [01:56:52] Oh, who knows?

John Dehlin [01:56:53] Are you still writing?

Sandra Tanner [01:56:54] Well, the newsletter.

John Dehlin [01:56:55] You still do the newsletter?

Sandra Tanner [01:56:57] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:56:57] Why don't I know that?

Sandra Tanner [01:56:58] I don't know, because I don't do it very often.

John Dehlin [01:57:01] Okay. And what's. What's it about?

Sandra Tanner [01:57:03] The newsletter. This next newsletter. Oh. Is going to be on Joseph Smith's calling as a translator.

John Dehlin [01:57:12] Oh.

Sandra Tanner [01:57:13] What does it mean to be a translator?

John Dehlin [01:57:16] Yeah.

Sandra Tanner [01:57:17] What's that word mean in. In Mormon parlance? It doesn't mean what Webster said.

John Dehlin [01:57:24] Yeah. Especially now.

Sandra Tanner [01:57:25] Yeah, right.

John Dehlin [01:57:26] Especially now. It means nothing like the word translating. But that's how apologetics works.

Sandra Tanner [01:57:31] Yep.

John Dehlin [01:57:32] All right, so donate to utlm. Buy books and everything from utlm. Go visit Sandra at her store. Support UTLM and Sandra Tanner.

Sandra Tanner [01:57:43] Okay.

John Dehlin [01:57:44] And support Mormon stories if you appreciate this episode. If you like this type of content. The more we're around, the more we can support others as well. So go to MormonStories.org, click on the donate button. Become a monthly donor. Less than one out of a thousand of you actually donate. If you know double of you donated, we would exist until I'm dead, which hopefully will be at least 50 years.

Sandra Tanner [01:58:09] There we go.

John Dehlin [01:58:10] And so please support us. And thanks for all your support. I love you guys. Shout out to Jared Hess and Tyler Meesum for your wonderful documentary, for bringing all this to the surface. Thanks, guys. I can't wait to have you on. And I'm looking forward to all the other people and to be interviewing, too. Thanks for your support, you guys. Take care. Thanks to Brooklyn Alden for her editing, Gerardo for the cinematography here. And everyone who supports us, our board, Clint Martin and Carrie. Carrie Whitback. My brain's fried just like Sandra's. Thanks to everyone who makes this all possible. Tune in again soon for more episodes of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care, everybody. Thanks again, Sandra.

Sandra Tanner [01:58:54] Thank you.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.