Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case

Richard E. Turley Jr.'s Victims is an academic monograph from the University of Illinois Press documenting the Mark Hofmann forgery case, the 1985 Salt Lake City bombings connected to it, and the criminal investigation and trial that followed. Turley wrote the book while serving as an official historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, giving him direct access to the Church's own internal records of the affair, a genuine strength for documenting how the institution itself was drawn into and responded to the forgeries. That same institutional position is also its limit, since an in house historian's account of an episode that embarrassed his own employer benefits from being read alongside independent journalistic and legal sources on the case, which exist in quantity given the scale of the criminal proceedings, rather than treated as the sole account of the Church's own conduct in the affair.