Mark Hofmann was trying to sell the McLellin collection to the LDS Church and Al Rust at the time the bombs exploded in 1985. It turns out they weren’t the only offers. Brent Ashworth tells us that the collection was offered to him as well!
GT: Steve [Christensen] was trying to get the McLellin Collection for the Church. Right?
Brent: Right.
GT: And so he was saying, “Look. Hugh Pinnock has already giving you $185,000. We need the McLellin Collection. We need it now.”
Brent: Mark was also offering the collection to me, and that part’s never really been discussed. But he was offering the collection to me. I know he offered at least parts of it to Curt [Bench] too, like Facsimile One, Facsimile Two. I think we got up to Facsimile Three at one point, that he was willing to [sell.] These were all in the McLellin Collection. See, McLellin, when he left the church, Joseph Smith wrote a couple of things in his history: one of them that is important, I think. One of them is “That old apostate,” I’m paraphrasing Joseph’s history. “That old apostate McLellin, I heard ransacked my office and stole some my papers.” So there you’ve got the McLellin Collection right in the prophet’s own words, basically.
GT: Yeah, we don’t know what’s in it, but McLellin….
Brent: We don’t know what’s in it, but Hofmann will supply that, right? I asked Mark. I said, “What’s in the McLellin Collection?” when he offered it to me. And he says, “Oh, there’s six little journals/diaries that go from this year to this year. There’s a lot of really damaging stuff about the Prophet Joseph Smith, and there were other things.” Obviously, the McLellin Collection started out as the Texas Collection when I first met him. He had already kind of devised this idea that there’s got to be a wastebasket collection where everything comes from I think, before he even met me. Do you know what I mean? And that was 1981 and the Texas Collection, it was talked about by Mark several times with me and I’m sure others. It became the McLellin Collection.
Check out our conversation….
