The Poet and the Murderer: A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery

The mention of Kenneth Rendell was reassuring. A tough, ambitious man, with showrooms on New York’s Madison Avenue and in Newton, Massachusetts, Rendell has built one of America’s most successful historical manuscripts businesses. His flair for self-promotion and his immense experience have made him the dealer of choice for some of the richest collectors in the world. Among them is Bill Gates, for whom Rendell is building one of the world’s most important collections of historical documents. When Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated notebook, the Codex Leicester, for $30.8 million in 1994, it was Rendell who was bidding for him. Rendell is also an acknowledged expert on forgery. His book Forging History is a classic. He has also testified in numerous high-profile cases. Indeed, it was Rendell who exposed another celebrated forgery case, the Hitler Diaries, and his testimony at Hofmann’s preliminary hearing in 1986 was crucial in establishing a motive for the two murders. Rendell was away in the South Pacific when Lombardo called, but his office in Boston said they would be happy to forward him a fax. A fax came back from Tahiti saying that he had declined to authenticate the poem for Sotheby’s. Later it would become clear that not only had Rendell never authenticated the poem, he had never even seen it.

Kiffer also told Lombardo that he had consulted a woman named Jennifer Larson about two questionable documents in the catalog for the May 1997 sale, which took place one month before the Dickinson poem was auctioned. Larson is a respected rare books dealer and former chairperson of the Ethics Committee of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. Since the late eighties she has also devoted herself to researching Hofmann’s non-Mormon forgeries to prevent his fakes from contaminating the trade she loves. According to Kiffer, Larson had not raised any concerns about the Dickinson manuscript. Of course. He had never asked her about it.

Lombardo tried to locate Larson in San Francisco, where she ran a store called Yuerba Buena books. She had moved. He made a follow-up call to the Gallery of History, in Las Vegas. Initially, Gareth Williams had told him that the poem had come from a dealer in California who had died. Now he claimed that he was ‘not familiar’ with a Dickinson poem at all. When Lombardo asked to speak to Tammy Kahrs, the archivist who had faxed Ralph Franklin the poem in 1994, Williams said she was dead.

A few days later, Williams called back, this time in an agitated mood. He said that maybe the Gallery of History had had a Dickinson poem, but he could not recall the details. He also made it clear that Lombardo’s inquiries were not welcome. When Lombardo asked him to check back through the records for any information about the poem’s provenance, Williams told him that he could not. The computers were down.

The next piece in the puzzle fell into place when Lombardo reached Jennifer Larson at her new home in Rochester, New York. The documentation she faxed Lombardo – documentation that she could have made available to Sotheby’s, if they had asked – was enough to make any reputable dealer not want to touch the Dickinson poem. Included in it was a copy of Hofmann’s travel records, which the police had put together for the trial. These placed Hofmann in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1983 and 1984. Perhaps Hofmann had traveled to Cambridge to visit the Houghton Library at Harvard, which holds the largest number of Dickinson manuscripts.

Larson also told Lombardo that she had spoken to a TV reporter from Salt Lake City named Con Psarris, who had made a number of programs about Hofmann’s forgeries. In October 1990, while researching a possible Emily Dickinson connection, he had sent Hofmann the text of the poem that had appeared in Axelrod’s book, querying whether it was a forgery. The poem began ‘That God cannot be understood,’ but Psarras had slightly misquoted the remainder of the poem. Hofmann had replied from his jail cell with the pedantry of a university professor. ‘The E. Dickinson item referred to is a forgery,’ he wrote via his lawyer, Ron Yengich. He then wrote out the authoritative version of the text, emending several points of punctuation and capitalization. It was the poem Daniel Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.

The evidence against the poem began look compelling, if not complete, but Lombardo had to be sure. He contacted Robert Backman, a clinical graphologist with twenty years of experience with the Department of Defense (during World War II he worked on forgeries that appeared as propaganda). Backman came to Amherst to examine the poem. One of the things that made it so hard to prove either way was that the poem was written in pencil. Ink can be subjected to cyclotron tests and chemical analyses. But there are no forensic tests for pencil.

The pencil was first developed in the Renaissance, when artists began to use styluses made of silver or lead for ruling lines or drawing. The first mention of the lead pencil as we know it today came in a treatise on fossils published in England in 1565. A year earlier, in the village of Borrowdale, in Cumbria, a violent storm had uprooted a giant oak tree. Beneath it was found a vast deposit of almost pure graphite, and the pencil was born. At first, sticks of graphite were simply inserted in a wooden sheath. But by the middle of the next century these crudely made wooden pencils had been replaced by pencils made of ground graphite dust mixed with adhesives. Later, clay was added and the pencil leads were fired in kilns to increase their hardness and uniformity. Apart from manufacturing improvements the only development since then has been the introduction of the mechanical pencil in 1822. As a result it is almost impossible to date documents written in pencil.

Backman knew this. Even the phrase ‘Aunt Emily,’ which had been written in a different hand, on the back of the manuscript, in red indelible pencil – and not, as Sotheby’s listed it in their catalog, in red ink – appeared to be authentic. Like Franklin and Lombardo before him he concluded that the paper was right. The handwriting also appeared to be genuine. But when Lombardo told him that the document had once been in the hands of Mark Hofmann, Backman shook his head and said, ‘Well, that changes everything.’

If the experts could not tell a Hofmann forgery, how could Lombardo ever determine the truth about the poem? And if he could not definitively prove to Sotheby’s that the poem was a forgery, he would not be able to force them to return the library’s money. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested the poem was not authentic. But each time Lombardo looked at the poem he found it impossible to believe that a forger could have got inside Emily Dickinson’s mind, and simulated her handwriting, so seamlessly and completely as this.

Lombardo’s next call, to David Hewitt, a journalist with the Maine Antiques Digest who had written two in-depth features about the Hofmann case, confused him even more. Hewitt told him that Hofmann was a compulsive liar and a braggart, and that on several occasions, in an attempt to win favor with the parole board, had even confessed to forgeries that he had never executed. Was the Emily Dickinson poem one of his false claims? Where was the truth?

Both Dan Lombardo and Ralph Franklin had read the report of a forensic scientist named George Throckmorton, who had done extensive examinations of Hofmann’s forgeries at the time of the 1986 trial, using an ultraviolet lamp and a high-powered stereo microscope. The Beinecke Library had both. So, on a hot day in the middle of August, Lombardo packed ‘That God Cannot Be Understood’ into his briefcase, along with about $100,000 worth of other Dickinson manuscripts from the Jones Library’s collection, and set off in his car for New Haven.

Franklin and Lombardo worked in a darkroom in the basement of the Beinecke Library. As the poem had been written in pencil, there would be no telltale signs of chemical tampering with the ink. But there might be on the paper. Under ultraviolet light any attempt to age the paper artificially with chemicals would cause it to fluoresce. Would this be the proof they were looking for? It wasn’t. The paper did not fluoresce. When they looked at the poem under the ultraviolet lamp, they thought that they detected a slight opalescent blue smear, like a brushstroke, around the boss mark. Franklin was not certain, but he sensed that something was not quite right with the embossed image of the Capitol stamped on the top left-hand corner of the page. There were also splotches along the edges of the document in that area, as though some sort of chemical had been spilled there. Had Hofmann applied a chemical to the paper to make it ‘take’ the boss mark better?

Next Franklin examined the poem under a stereo microscope, with a powerful raking light shone from the side. This would show the boss mark in better relief. The roof of the Capitol building on the boss mark looked flat. In other examples of boss marks from Capitol stationery Franklin had brought for comparison, there appeared to be a cupola on the roof. On its own this might not have been enough, but in conjunction with the slight fluorescence this tiny flaw made Franklin and Lombardo suspicious. Or perhaps there was a Congress boss mark they did not know of. Perhaps it was the right boss mark, and the paper had simply not been impressed as strongly as usual. Was that why the cupola seemed faint? Every answer led to fresh questions.

Franklin also used the stereo microscope to study the capital E in the word Everyone, which he felt showed signs of hesitation. When we write, the pen or pencil moves fluently and unhesitatingly across the page, touching and lifting from the paper rather like a plane landing and taking off. We don’t pause to think about what we are doing. If we do, we usually make a mistake. Forgers are not writing naturally, however. They have to think about what they are doing, and they often give themselves away by making awkward pen-lifts or hesitating in the middle of a letter. Was the slight hesitation Franklin had detected the telltale sign that the poem was a forgery?

A few days later Lombardo reached a man named Shannon Flynn. Flynn, a jovial Irish-American from Salt Lake City, had negotiated many of Hofmann’s business deals and acted as his courier. Flynn was also a crack marksman and firearms expert. When Hofmann was arrested, the police had found a cache of weapons at Flynn’s apartment: a lugged rifle, a Magnum .357, and an Uzi that had been converted to fully automatic status.

If anyone had told Lombardo when he became curator of Special Collections at the Jones Library that he would one day be making phone calls to a man in Salt Lake City whom the police had questioned for ten hours as a suspected accessory to a double murder, he would have laughed. When he reached Flynn at a Salt Lake City gun shop named Pro Arms and Ammunition, he also realized, for the first time, that he was frightened.

As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. All charges relating to the murders had eventually been dropped against Flynn, and since Hofmann had gone to jail, he had made it his policy to be completely transparent with both the media and the DA’s office. To Lombardo he confirmed that, in 1985, he had flown from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas, on Mark Hofmann’s behalf, to deliver what purported to be a poem by Emily Dickinson to Todd Axelrod, of the Gallery of History.

Lombardo now felt he had enough circumstantial evidence to prove the poem was a forgery. Though David Redden of Sotheby’s had said there was no connection, direct or indirect, to the Gallery of History, it now seemed to Lombardo almost certain that the poem had indeed come from Las Vegas. He knew that Axelrod had bought it from Hofmann. Ipso facto, unless Axelrod had not told Sotheby’s where he had originally obtained the poem, they must have known of or suspected a Hofmann connection.

Lombardo faxed David Redden, at Sotheby’s, a one-page letter detailing his suspicions. Redden did not even bother to return his calls. Instead he had an underling, Kimball Higgs, respond. ‘It certainly looks like a forgery,’ Higgs said offhandedly. ‘It’s our problem. Please send the poem back.’ And the $24,000? Higgs told Lombardo that there should be ‘no problem’ about that. But when Lombardo asked for Sotheby’s agreement in writing that they would return the library’s money, Higgs declined.

Six days later Lombardo met with the board of trustees of the Jones Library in Amherst. It was a moment he had been dreading. He had kept his doubts, and all the research he had done, secret. Now he was about to tell his community and the world that the Emily Dickinson poem was a fake. The members of the board of trustees reacted with a mixture of shock and sympathy. One person burst into hysterical laughter at the sheer absurdity of what had been done to them. ‘I was heartbroken,’ recalled Lombardo, ‘just completely heartbroken that I had let so many people down.’ But this was no time for self-pity. Lombardo notified Sotheby’s that in forty-eight hours he would be issuing a press release stating that the poem was a forgery, and that he would like by that time their assurance in writing that the Jones Library would receive a full refund. A few days later, Sotheby’s complied with his demand. ‘There was no apology. No embarrassment,’ said Lombardo tartly.

‘It was as if this was just a little blip in their daily business. Just routine.’

CHAPTER FOUR Auction Artifice

Though Sotheby’s counts among its board of directors two lords, an earl, a marquess, and Her Royal Highness the Infanta Pilar de Bourbon, duchess of Badajoz, it has, since its foundation in London in 1744, auctioned numerous works of art, and manuscripts, that have turned out to be forgeries.

The small print in their catalogs does include a guarantee of authenticity, albeit one limited to five years. But if anything proves to be ‘wrong,’ Sotheby’s (and this applies to all the auction houses) can always say, as they routinely do, that they are merely the agents for the sale and, therefore, not directly responsible. The onus is on you, the purchaser, to satisfy yourself that the article you buy is genuine. The codes of secrecy by which auction houses conceal the identity of both consignor and purchaser add a further level of obfuscation. Caveat emptor.

It is a familiar ritual: a stolen painting, or a fake Chippendale chair, passes through the salesroom. Doubts are raised. The auction house returns the consignor’s money, disclaims its responsibility to police the market, then six months or a year later the same happens all over again. In 1997 an exposé by Channel 4 actually showed a Sotheby’s employee in Milan smuggling an Old Master painting out of Italy: one instance of a cynical and widespread pattern of abuse by which unprovenanced art from Italy and India, much of it stolen by organized gangs of grave robbers, had been, with the full knowledge of Sotheby’s, put under the hammer at its UK auction house.

The Dispatches program and the subsequent media exposure – a headline in The Times read, ‘Sotheby’s and the Art of Smuggling’ – seemed to have a sobering effect on the company. In March 1997, with much fanfare, Sotheby’s announced a $10 million inquiry to be run out of the New York office, under the direct supervision of its glamorous new chief executive, Diana D. Brooks.

Only later would it become clear that just as Ms. Brooks was asking the world to believe that such cases of malpractice were isolated, not systemic, Sotheby’s was being shaken by allegations that its chairman, Alfred Taubman, had negotiated a commission fixing deal, with Christie’s in London. Those charges led to Ms. Brooks’s resignation and charges of fraud and malpractice being leveled against Taubman, for which he would face a possible term in jail.

Taubman’s attempt to fix commission fees was motivated by naked greed. By the mid-nineties Sotheby’s – and Christie’s – had turned what in the eighteenth century was regarded as a rather grubby and dishonorable trade into a multibillion-dollar industry. Like owning a Porsche or a house in the Hamptons, raising a paddle at an auction had come to be regarded as an essential rite de passage of the very rich. And as the longest bull market in history began its vertiginous climb, prices went through the roof. In 1996 a pretty enough, but not great, John Singer Sargent painting called ‘Cashmere’ sold in New York for $11.1 million. In the same year a sculpture by a minor French artist, titled ‘Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans,’ sold for $11.9 million.

The rare books and manuscripts department is the poor cousin at Sotheby’s. The big money is in fine art and jewels. Rare books and manuscripts also take a long time to catalog. As a result there is enormous pressure to turn over as much volume as possible. ‘Everything is hype these days,’ said Justin Schiller, a well-known dealer of antiquarian books. ‘In the old days you would collect things with true value. Today people don’t know what to collect, so you have things like Diana’s dresses selling for $250,000 or a Honus Wagner baseball card for $500,000. It’s not what the auction houses are making on these things. The real value is in the publicity.’ Splashy, one-of-a-kind items like an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem are worth far more than the commission. They generate headlines. And bring in the punters.

The hunger for hype, combined with a captive clientele, has created the perfect environment for what Samuel T. Coleridge called, in a different context, the willing suspension of disbelief. This operates just as powerfully with the purchaser.

‘There is an incredible desire on the part of people to believe that something they have purchased is real,’ Jennifer Larson said. ‘It is what you think you have and want to believe you have – not what you really have – that matters.’

Mark Hofmann knew this too. He once said of his Mormon forgeries that they were documents he felt could have been part of Mormon history. He also said that deceiving people gave him a feeling of power. More than greed, this hunger for power – the power to shape and change history – seems to be ultimately what drove him. His forgeries found willing buyers because they told stories people wanted to hear.

The auction houses also tell stories, in the form of the narratives they publish in their catalogs. The most appealing stories of all have an element of mystery and romance: like the elderly woman who cuts the back off an old picture frame and finds a John Singer Sargent painting; or the bank clerk who stumbles on a priceless Washington letter while leafing through a dusty archive during her lunch break. The public loves these stories as they love stories of buried treasure. They appeal to the side of us that wants to believe in Lady Luck, in coincidence, and serendipity.

Facts that might take away from the attractiveness of a painting or manuscript, raise suspicions about its authenticity, or comprise the owner’s desire for anonymity, are carefully excised from the stories that the auction houses tell. The catalog for the auction at which the Emily Dickinson poem was sold, for instance, cited august individuals and institutions like Randolph Hearst as consignees. It did not mention the Gallery of History in Las Vegas.

Something similar had already happened. When Hofmann was arrested in 1985, his possessions were seized to pay off his creditors. Hofmann was not just a forger. He was also a serious book collector. And when police raided his house in Salt Lake City, they found a magnificent collection of antiquarian children’s books. The person chosen to dispose of Hofmann’s children’s books was a book dealer in California named Mark Hime. From him the books found their way to a well-known New York collector by the name of Richard Manney. A few years later Manney consigned his collection to Sotheby’s for sale.

The books appeared in Sotheby’s October 11, 1991, catalog as the Richard Manney Library. Detailed provenance was given to reinforce the importance and legitimacy of the collection. But one name was missing: Mark Hofmann’s.

These were not the first Hofmann items that Sotheby’s had sold either. In October 1985, only two weeks after he was arrested for murder, a Daniel Boone letter, supposedly written during the Indian Wars in Kentucky, was put under the hammer for $31,900. It came with a wonderful story of Boone’s heroism on the American frontier. But the manuscript was consigned by a Salt Lake City businessman named Kenneth Woolley, who had in turn bought it from his cousin, Mark Hofmann. If anyone had looked closely they might also have noticed that the letter was dated April 1.

Ken Farnsworth, one of two lead investigators for the Salt Lake City DA’s office, had called Sotheby’s at the time, to warn them about the Boone document. Hofmann was already behind bars. But having seen numerous lives shattered by Hofman’s forgeries, Farnsworth was determined to get as many of them as he could off the market. He contacted antiquarian book dealers all over America. He contacted the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society. He visited the British Library. He even went to Paris and alerted one of France’s leading historical documents dealers.

All these institutions were extremely cooperative. But when he contacted Sotheby’s he was met with a wall of silence. At first he was told that the auction house would provide the name and address of the consignee of the Boone letter if he (Farnsworth) provided a written account of his findings. When he forwarded a letter detailing his suspicions, he was told that Sotheby’s would only comply with a subpoena from a court. Mike George, another Salt Lake City investigator who worked on the Hofmann case, remembers similar problems. ‘At Sotheby’s we were met with “Don’t want to talk to you, don’t care what you have to say.”’

One person did care, it seems. Mary Jo Kline, the Sotheby’s employee who handled the sale of the Boone letter, informed the head of the the rare books and manuscripts department that in the future she would never again catalog anything that had passed through Hofmann’s hands. Her boss acquiesced and, as far as Kline was concerned, agreed to a larger policy decision: never to handle anything with Hofmann provenance. Three years after that, in a move that shocked the closely knit historical documents world, Kline’s boss thanked her for her pains by terminating her. His name was David Redden. Redden was still at the helm twelve years later when, a month before Sotheby’s auctioned the Dickinson poem, they advertised two other Hofmann forgeries in their May 1997 catalog. One was a minor Daniel Boone autograph. The other was a sensational item: a Reward of Merit, ‘one of only three ever discovered,’ signed by Nathan Hale.

When he saw the Hale document in the catalog, Brent Ashworth, who would later alert them to a possible Hofmann connection with the Dickinson poem, called Selby Kiffer and told him that he had seen the Hale manuscript in one of Todd Axelrod’s stores and believed it was also a Hofmann forgery. As he would a month later with the Dickinson poem, Kiffer denied that the document came from Las Vegas. He seemed to have taken Ashworth’s warnings seriously, though, for on May 2 Kimball Higgs contacted Jennifer Larson by fax. ‘Here are two lots that Brent [Ashworth] brought to our attention as possible MH [Mark Hofmann] originals. He felt sure about the Hale and less positive about the Boone. If you have an opinion we would love to hear it.’

Larson faxed back a raft of documentation. The first item read: ‘Appears on Mark Hofmann’s holographic list, “Forged Non-Mormon Autographs.”’ This was the list found in Hofmann’s prison cell in Draper, Utah, in 1988.

Both Daniel Boone and Nathan Hale were on the list. So was Emily Dickinson. Sotheby’s withdrew the Boone document but kept the far more valuable Hale autograph in the auction. It was put under the hammer for $27,000. After the sale, as doubts about it began to multiply, Selby Kiffer told the Maine Antiques Digest that Kenneth Rendell had ‘authenticated’ the Hale document. When Rendell learned of this, he was incensed. ‘I am meticulously careful about not expressing opinions on things we do not sell,’ insisted Rendell. ‘It was totally inaccurate.’ In a letter to the Maine Antiques Digest, Marsha Malinowski distanced herself from Kiffer’s assertion that Rendell had ‘authenticated’ the Hale manuscript, and Kiffer would later apologize to Rendell for misusing his name. (No such apologies were made to Daniel Lombardo, however, even though Malinowski had claimed to him that Rendell had also authenticated the Emily Dickinson poem.) Not only had Rendell never authenticated the Reward of Merit, he had found it highly questionable when he had seen it at Sotheby’s public display before the auction. ‘There was a coloration I didn’t like about the document, a shifting of the ink that reminded me of some of the Mark Hofmann stuff.’ Rendell said nothing to Sotheby’s. But having spotted the effect on the Hale manuscript, he decided that, however cheap it would be, he would not bid on it.