Simon Worrall - The Poet and the Murderer - A True Story of Verse, Violence and the Art of Forgery

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.

One of the people who had nearly bought the Hale document was the well-known New York book dealer Justin Schiller. Schiller had almost been bankrupted by his dealings with Mark Hofmann in the 1980s, something that was well known to everyone in the trade. But during a phone call to Selby Kiffer at Sotheby’s a week before the May 19 auction, when Schiller had made known his interest in acquiring the document and sought to find out its provenance, Kiffer had made no mention of a Hofmann connection. ‘When you buy from an auction house like Sotheby’s, you assume that there is a legitimate title, and that everything else has been validated by the auction attorneys,’ said Schiller. ‘So unless I had been alerted by the auction house that there could have been a problem, I would not have suspected anything. I trust the system.’ In this case his trust was misplaced. For by the time he called, Sotheby’s had received enough evidence from Jennifer Larson of a Hofmann connection to make even the rankest amateur not want to touch the Nathan Hale Reward of Merit. Larson had told Sotheby’s, for instance, that in an interview with Mike George, Hofmann had stated that he forged two printed documents by Hale: Rewards of Merit with Hale’s inscription on them, signed to the better students he was teaching. Larson also alerted Sotheby’s to the fact that a similar Nathan Hale document had been sold at auction by Charles Hamilton in August 1983, and that among the evidence seized by Salt Lake City police was a record of a registered shipment from Mark Hofmann to Charles Hamilton dated July 13, in other words three weeks before the auction. Finally, she enclosed a letter written to her by Hofmann from jail, on June 29, 1990. ‘Your note reminded me of the Nathan Hale “Reward of Merit” which I failed to mention in my letter of June 25,’ writes Hofmann. ‘It is, indeed, a forgery.’

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