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

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.’