We’re going to be discussing Mormons and crime. Steve Mayfield passed away on March 30, 2024. This interview is from 2018 where we discussed his collection of Mormon crime, both good guys and bad guys. For example, did you know that it was a Mormon FBI agent who arrested Patty Hearst following her participation of a bank robbery? We’ll also discuss one of the most notorious spies in U.S, history, Robert Hanssen. Hanssen was also a Mormon FBI agent who passed secrets to the Russians. Of course, Steve also has a collection on the Mark Hofmann case, and we’ll discuss his work with George Throckmorton who discovered how Mark Hofmann was forging documents. The “Dead Lee Scroll” is also a forgery we’ll discuss, that hasn’t been definitively tied to Hofmann. Check out our conversation…

https://youtu.be/JzCO6LI5lXg

transcript to follow

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Gospel Tangents

All Rights Reserved

Introduction

I’d like to introduce Steve Mayfield.  We’ll talk about Mormon involvement in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case.  Did you know that it was a Mormon FBI agent that arrested Patty?  Check out our conversation…

GT:        00:01:01             Welcome to Gospel Tangents.

Steve:   00:01:03             Thank You.

GT:        00:01:04             I’m excited to have Steve Mayfield here. He is a documentation collector and we’re going to talk a little bit about Mark Hofmann. We’re going to talk a little bit about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We’re going to talk a little bit about the FBI and Mormons.

Steve:   00:01:31             Yes.

GT:        00:01:32             Which I think will be a lot of fun. So, Steve has some amazing stories and so why don’t you get us a little bit about your background?

Steve:   00:01:36             Okay.

GT:        00:01:37             How did you get involved in collecting?

Steve:   00:01:39             Oh, gee. Well, I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. For those interested in genealogy, I’m a seventh generation Latter-day Saint. So, my family history goes all the way back to Ohio in one family line and Nauvoo. And I’ve always had an interest in history. When I was in high school, my desire was to be a history teacher specifically, maybe teach seminary or institute. But when I was a senior in high school, this was way back in 1974. Most people weren’t even around. We had one of these field trips to San Francisco and it included Golden Gate Park, the Chinese Tea Garden, an unofficial trip to the Haight-Ashbury, for those who remember that area, and also tour the FBI office. And I just fell in love with what people in the FBI did, all that work that I wanted to become the next was Efrem Zimbalist Jr, who happened to be the star of the TV show FBI back during the ’60s. After I graduated from high school, I served my mission in Colorado-Nebraska. And in late 1972 I was assigned to way out east to Grand Island, Nebraska, which is kind of hard for person used to mountains when it’s all flatland and wintery. One of the members of the local LDS district presidency out there was also the local FBI agent. So, we had a number of conversations. I indicated my interest in working with the FBI. And so, he suggested, well, get hired on as a clerk or clerical position with the bureau and then get a college degree and then you might become an agent. So, we put the paperwork in. I came home in February of ’73 and then by July I had received my appointment to work as a file clerk in San Francisco.

Steve:   00:03:27             I was there for four years. Of course, all this time I’m worried. I love history, but yet I’m in law enforcement. How can I intermingle? Well, my whole working career has been in law enforcement, but I seem to have come across historical occurrences in each of the agencies I worked for. When I was at the FBI, I was there during the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford. But more importantly I was there during a very well-known case, this little kidnap case you might have heard of Patty Hearst. I wasn’t an agent, but I was involved in that in the fact that I was assigned to the Berkeley Office of the FBI where the kidnapping occurred for about three or four months. Then I came back to San Francisco. I was there the day she was arrested and brought in.

GT:        00:04:14             Ok, let’s back up a little bit. I’m not going to tell you how old I am. I am older than I want to admit, but even for me, (I’m sure some people think, wow, he’s an old man,) I don’t know the Patty Hearst story that well, so let’s, let’s back up and talk a little bit about that. Actually, I believe her father was actually more famous than she was.

Steve:   00:04:39             Yes, her grandfather–The Hearst Corporation, they are newspaper people. They owned one of the San Francisco papers, a very wealthy family. They have the Hearst Castle down in southern California, which is, you can’t buy it if you even tried. And she was a little 19-year-old college student.

GT:        00:04:57             So let’s talk about that. So, William Hearst, is that what his name was?

Steve:   00:05:01             Yes, William Hearst.

GT:        00:05:01             He was kind of the Bill Gates of his day, right?

Steve:   00:05:04             Yes.

GT:        00:05:04             So, he was a super-rich guy.

Steve:   00:05:06             He had these newspapers.

GT:        00:05:07             He had a bunch of newspapers.

Steve:   00:05:08             Right.

GT:        00:05:09             And then let’s talk a little bit. Wasn’t it called the Symbian Lebanese Army?

Steve:   00:05:14             Symbionese Liberation Army.

GT:        00:05:15             So tell me about that first.

Steve:   00:05:16             They were a group of radicals that are organized out of the prison system back in the ’60s, into the ’70s, started by a black radical by name Donald DeFreeze. He incorporated some white folk around him who were radical. And this is a time when you had actual physical violence as a meaningful trade. A couple of these members of the SLA killed the school superintendent in Oakland, Marcus Foster. {He was killed by] a guy named Russell Little and Joseph Remiro, and they were caught. The SLA did a lot of other things, but they had a list of some violent acts they were going to do. One of them was to kidnap. Patty is living with her boyfriend in Berkeley, going to school. They show up one day and break into the house and kidnap her. Boom. Well, [they said] “We want money, we want reputation, we want notoriety.”

GT:        00:06:08             So this group, the Symbian Liberation Army, were they just like an anarchist group?

Steve:   00:06:11             Yeah just radical, you know, terrorists.

GT:        00:06:17             They just wanted to create chaos basically.

Steve:   00:06:18             Yes, terrorists.

GT:        00:06:18             They didn’t really have any strategic, big long-term goals.

Steve:   00:06:21             Well, political, you know, help for the poor, help for the minorities, but [they] just need to raise money. They were trying to overthrow the government. But he had a small group of maybe eight people: Donald DeFreeze and a whole bunch of these white kids, white, young folk. Bill Harris, there was back in February of this year, CNN did a six-day special.

GT:        00:06:50             I saw that.

Steve:   00:06:50             And so, one of the people we interviewed was William Taylor Harris. He was one of the people involved with that, that whole thing. He’s been to prison, out, and whatever. So, she [Patty] was gone for a good time.

GT:        00:07:03             So let’s back up. So, the idea was this is just the kind of a chaos group, right?

Steve:   00:07:08             Yeah.

GT:        00:07:09             And .they just wanted to sow chaos. How can we sow chaos? Oh, we will kidnap the richest man’s daughter in the world. That’s basically what happened.

Steve:   00:07:16             Well, a very rich man and a very well-known person and she would do these tape recordings that would go to the media, you know, mom and dad.

GT:        00:07:25             Who is she?

Steve:   00:07:25             Patty Hearst would do these tape recordings. At first, she’s a victim, but over time she started changing from being a victim. Now she’s joined up with them. Now they’re wanting money and they’re running around doing various things, doing bank robberies. Somebody was killed along the bank robberies, but now she’s part of the radical group.

GT:        00:07:46             And she’s part of the group that robbed the bank.

Steve:   00:07:48             Yes.

GT:        00:07:48             Okay. So she’s gone from victim to the perpetrator essentially.

Steve:   00:07:52             Yes, and now she comes up with, they gave her the name of Tanya. They all had their little names. So that’s why you have here. This is a copy of the Wanted poster.

GT:        00:08:02             A little higher. There’s Patty Hearst right there. I think she actually didn’t like the name Patty. I heard that on that CNN [show] you were talking about she likes to go by Patricia.

Steve:   00:08:11             Patricia. Yeah. But this is after she committed the bank robbery. So now we have a problem because she’s a victim from a kidnapping, but now she’s wanted for bank robbery and all these other things.

Steve:   00:08:23             So, they’ve committed some crimes. They decide to go down to southern California which was probably a mistake. If they had stayed in the Bay area where there was this radical movement, they had safe houses. They had friends that would support them. They went to L.A., a completely different environment, trying to get in down here and that’s when they got caught in one of the suburbs of L.A. and the police found him and they had the shootout where the house burned and killed everybody. Patty wasn’t with them. The Harris’s and Patricia Hearst were in L.A., but they weren’t there at that case, while these other members of the SLA were killed. And then Patty and the Harris’s went back east came back out and eventually the FBI and of course the FBI was criticized very harshly because why can’t you find her? Why can’t you find her? But the FBI just started connecting the dots: who we know, knew Donald DeFreeze? Who knew these other people? Who are their friends?

Steve:   00:09:19             And eventually they connected the Soliah family. They said, “We know where they live.” So, they do surveillance on these homes. And I saw the Harris’s and they saw Patty. Then one day they did the rush, they arrested them. Now my interest obviously because I work for them, but also because there is a Mormon connection with the FBI. And in this case, the supervisor of the squad that handled bank robberies and kidnapping was a guy named Brian Wheeler, who at the time of the kidnapping was a member of the San Francisco Sunset Ward bishopric. When they divided and made a special squad of agents just to work on that case, one of the agents was a guy named Jason Moulton. He is LDS and he is one of the agents that arrested Patty Hearst and on the CNN special, he’s the FBI agent they interview on it. Jason retired about 15 years ago. [He] was the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI in Seattle.

Steve:   00:10:14             About five years ago, he and his wife served a mission out in Kentucky, a short term mission. But you had a number of other agents in the San Francisco Division that worked on that case. Again, I had the involvement because I worked within the Berkeley Office. After she was arrested, myself and other clerks spent a whole week booking in all the evidence and all the materials they picked up and I had an opportunity on two occasions to go out up sit in on the trial. And I sat a couple of rows right behind Patty and her attorney F. Lee Bailey.

GT:        00:10:42             Oh really?

Steve:   00:10:42             Yes.

GT:        00:10:42             The O.J. lawyer.

Steve:   00:10:45             Yes! Which I learned that he was not much of an attorney at that time. I never had been impressed with him, but that was intimately involved in that thing. So, these historical events, I’m saying, well, my history. And of course, that’s what I started doing what you see around me. It’s being a documentation collector. I collect newspaper clippings and things off the Internet. I will tape record things off the TV and radio. That was a label that George Throckmorton gave to me. I’m not a document collector per se, dealing with old documents, but they’re connected because I collect these things now.

GT:        00:11:25             So you have a lot of newspaper clippings and things like that, and recordings.

Steve:   00:11:29             Yes, and recordings. A lot of this stuff that had been donated to BYU since 2004. I’ve been donating my collection down there and I’ll share with other people. We were talking about Matt Harris.

GT:        00:11:42             Well let me back up. Before we do that, I noticed that wanted poster you have is autographed it looks like. Can you tell us who that autograph is?

Steve:   00:11:52             Well, it says Patricia Hearst. The problem is, this is not an actual [poster.] Oh, this was an original one here. This one is a photo.

GT:        00:12:07             Oh, it’s a photo of the original.

Steve:   00:12:08             I don’t know if that’s a real autograph or not because there are some differences.

GT:        00:12:11             We have got to talk to George Throckmorton to figure out.

Steve:   00:12:13             Yeah, probably have to show it. I just bought it because I wanted a copy of her “wanted” poster, just her.

GT:        00:12:18             Ok, show us the other one that you’ve got there.

Steve:   00:12:20             Ok, this isn’t what, this is legitimate. This is one of the original, Wanted posters of the Harris’s and Patricia Hearst.

GT:        00:12:31             Wow. That’s cool.

Steve:   00:12:32             Again this was one of the things. Before I left the FBI in ’77, they were authorized to get rid of some old files. So, it became a kind of a free-for-all for getting things. They had copies of a Tokyo Rose’s tape recordings from World War II.

GT:        00:12:52             Tokyo Rose?

Steve:   00:12:52             She was this lady during World War II would send messages to the GI’s trying to convince them that they’re going to lose the war.

GT:        00:13:01             Oh she was a Japanese propagandist.

Steve:   00:13:03             Yeah. Yeah.

GT:        00:13:03             Okay.

Steve:   00:13:04             And it wasn’t on tapes. It was actually on records. That’s how they were recorded. They were going to throw it away. Well, then we started lifting these things, a Wanted poster. They had one Wanted Posters of some of the gangsters from the 1930s. They went in a hurry. And so I was able to snag a few things, but you know, people were making collections. I don’t know if that was proper or not, you know, but a lot of these historical things or being salvaged from the FBI files.

Steve:   00:13:30             So anyway, after I was there for four years, I came back. My folks had moved back to Utah and I moved back here so I could go to Weber State. I graduated in 1980.

GT:        00:13:39             Weber State! Weber State! Great! Great! Great!

Steve:   00:13:42             Wildcats, Yes.

GT:        00:13:42             There’s not many of us around.

Steve:   00:13:46             That’s a comment I made there in Boise at Sunday devotional.

GT:        00:13:50             Yes, Paul Reeve, we love Paul Reeve, but don’t be talking trash about Weber State.[1]

Steve:   00:13:55             That’s right. That’s what [Paul] had made a comment during his talk up there. Anyway, that’s another topic.

Introduction

In our next conversation with Steve Mayfield, we will learn more about his background.  It turns out he is a crime scene photographer, and we will briefly touch on some cases he has worked on.  Check out our conversation….

Steve:   00:14:01             I moved back to Colorado in 1981 and got on with the sheriff’s department. Hey, my degree is in law enforcement. [I got a job] in Jefferson County, Colorado, which is out of Golden, which is on the west side. Now during that nine years I worked for them, nothing too exciting [happened] except the fact that Jefferson County, after I left, nine years later in 1999, gave us Columbine.

Steve:   00:14:30             So that was my department. I used to work for and I knew a lot of the people involved. Again, I can get these newspaper clippings over there and like I told you earlier, that one thing I’ve been doing since I started doing this, whether I was in San Francisco or Denver or even Salt Lake, if I didn’t buy the paper, I could go to the library and get out of state newspapers. I think almost every other week I would go to libraries and spend [time.] In the Denver Library is [I spent] three or four hours just photocopying clippings. I fell in love with the New York Times. The New York Times is one paper that they have microfilm of all their papers from way back. From the start of 1850 to the present. So, I’d get the microfilm and go over all of the articles. I had a project. I was going to photocopy everything they had on the Mormon Church and I got halfway through it and I’ve still got more to do, but it’s amazing how, as they go over the years, these articles that they would have, like from the 1850s, where you’d see names like Grant or Sherman, or Custer, all these people. And Brigham Young’s getting just as much space in the papers as these guys are. They even had reporters in the 1800s out here doing stories for the New York Times. Of course, the New York Times, is the grand dame of all papers and in America. And there was one year, particular year, they had over 100 articles in one particular year on Mormonism.

GT:        00:15:55             Wow.

Steve:   00:15:56             That’s almost two a week.

GT:        00:15:57             What year was this, approximately?

Steve:   00:15:58             The 1880s.

GT:        00:15:59             Oh, so polygamy was big.

Steve:   00:16:01             Yeah. And when you consider the paper wasn’t the big paper it is. It may have been eight or 10 sheets, but that’s almost two a week.

GT:        00:16:08             Wow.

Steve:   00:16:09             There would be other years where there was none. And that’s not even talking about articles about Ezra Taft Benson or George Romney or politicians. And so it kind of back my mind is one thing.

Steve:   00:16:21             I’ve got boxes someplace of all these photocopies of their off their microfilm. But that was one of the things I loved to do, was going down, and going to the library. And of course, point [your camera] over here. I will buy papers and do it. When I lived in Colorado I had the major papers of Utah sent over to me. That was the Logan, Ogden, Salt Lake papers, the Provo, St. George papers were sent to me. I had subscriptions and, oh, and BYU, the Daily Universe, whatever. I came back here and I kind of backed off on the other papers, but I still get the local papers here.

GT:        00:17:03             So are you one of the biggest collectors of Mormon media stuff?

Steve:   00:17:06             Well, probably not as much as a church, but I do. And because of that I’ve collected–not just to kind of hide it for myself, but to share it. That’s why last number of years I’ve shared, for example, you’ve interviewed Matt Harris in Colorado. For the past year, I will pick up things. Because of his interest in the black priesthood issue, [I’ve given him] clippings. Now he says some papers he get on the Internet, but others he doesn’t. I’m picking things out. One of the things I’ve noticed is that on the church magazines: The Ensign, and The Friend, and whatever, the teeny bopper [magazine is.]

GT:        00:17:44             New Era.

Steve:   00:17:45             New Era. [There are] a lot more photos of black members of the church in it. it’s just [happened in the] last couple of years, like the Conference issue. A number, about 20 pages, had black people in them. No, I don’t know if the Church magazines are trying to incorporate that in a show of that inclusiveness or what, but I just kinda noticed it. So, I will buy….

GT:        00:18:08             So you’ve noticed a change in church magazines where it was all white before and now there’s more color.

Steve:   00:18:13             Yes, there’s more diversity of minorities and things like that. And the same thing with the Church News and with this being the year of June 8th and things like that. So I’m just sending you a big packet one. Oh, I went up to Boise Mormon History Association, Matt was there. “Here you go Matt.” I had taped interviews off the radio. Again, I enjoyed doing this because I’m collecting it to help people who might be writing. Me, I have poor writing skills, so I’ll never write a book, but to share it with people. And I’ve done that with a number of other people who have presented too. My friend Craig Foster has written along with Newell Bringhurst, three[-volume] series of Persistence of Polygamy. Volume three has my photos in them of some of these communities.

GT:        00:19:00             Oh, yes. You’re a photographer.

Steve:   00:19:02             Yes.

GT:        00:19:02             Tell us about your photography.

Steve:   00:19:05             I grew up in a home where my dad was a camera salesman. [He] managed to camera store in San Francisco. I was lousy as a kid taking pictures. I had this little instamatic when I went on my mission. If I took more than one roll of pictures a year, I mean it was great. But I got here in Utah when I went to school and got myself a nice camera, the 35 millimeter. So, I started taking more. But 35 millimeter is expensive. A roll of film is 7-8 bucks just to get it developed. Well, they came up with a digital camera, thank goodness. Now one of my, which we haven’t gotten to yet, where I work now in law enforcement, was the Salt Lake City Police Department in the crime lab and that’s how I know George Throckmorton, but we’ll get into that. One of my things I do at crime scenes is photography, so that gets built right into it. And with digital you can take a thousand pictures and not waste a dime on anything. You just have to download it on a computer and you’re fine.

Steve:   00:20:05             Well, a number of years ago, maybe 15 plus years ago, I started taking pictures at the Sunstone Symposium and they appreciated that. So next thing you know, I’m now their official photographer. I go to the symposium and I just documented everything. I miss some of the sessions, but I just go around and taking pictures and they know it. I have fun with it because I catch people sometimes eating with their mouth open or sleeping or whatever. Then I got involved with doing it for the Mormon History Association, for the John Whitmer Historical Society, Utah State Historical Society when they have their conference, they have me come and do it. And they were very gracious about it because they’ll put my name up here, who does this because I’m willing to miss out some sessions or hearing the whole session, like taking photos of people who are speaking, what’s going on. And of course, you know why I go to things like Curt Bench’s book signing and take pictures and Curt is very good about it. Here’s a disk of my photos. Again, back in June we went up to Boise with a Mormon History Association. We had 1500 images I took.

GT:        00:21:13             Oh Wow.

Steve:   00:21:14             And I’ve got a back list of people, “Can lose sending me a disk? Can you send me a couple of my photos?”

GT:        00:21:19             I’ll say one of the first–I don’t remember. I think it was Mormon History Association. Usually I try to either sit in the front or the back, wherever the closest plug is because I was got to plug in my laptop. But I remember, they sent out a newsletter and I was in the picture. I was like, “Oh, nice.”

Steve:   00:21:36             And you got one of me too, a good one. But it’s fun too because everybody knows me after 20 years of doing this as “You’re the photographer.” I got to know Elder Jensen, the church historian and Elder Snow. They know I have a camera. I have people come up and say, “Where’s your camera?”

Steve:   00:21:53             “Well, here it is.”

Steve:   00:21:54             If I don’t have my camera with me, they say, “Well go get your camera. There’s something wrong. You have to have you camera.” But it’s fun and it’s enjoyable and I feel I’m involved in something. And again, it’s something that’s historical enough, but eventually these can go to BYU. And I get with digital where you don’t know how long the digital is gonna last. We’re finding out that negatives, if they’re not preserved, right, they start to fade. That’s why the fun part is going to BYU because the film negatives, they’re putting in a freezer basically and if you want to get it, you have to have a two-day notice because they have to bring it out, let it out.

GT:        00:22:31             Thaw it out.

Steve:   00:22:31             Thaw it out to use it. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the disk. Putting it on a computer saves them, but on the disk itself, we don’t know yet when they will disintegrate or not.

GT:        00:22:42             Put them on the Internet and they will last forever.

Steve:   00:22:46             Yeah, exactly. Like I said, it’s been one of the things. Besides some criminal historical events I’ve had pictures on. It’s the LDS stuff. I’m proud to say that in 2008, the Mormon History Association Conference in Sacramento, I was given a special award for my contributions to Mormon History because of what you’ve seen here, the collection, the photography and things like that, which I’m very humbled at because it was such a sweet thing to have happened. So, I got to stand up there and get my little certificate. So, it excites me when I go to these things because of this stuff, you know, and get away from what I do for a living.

GT:        00:23:30             Now you mentioned you were a crime scene photographer.

Steve:   00:23:34             Or a crime scene investigator. A crime lab tech. These are all titles I have.

GT:        00:23:39             So, especially here in Utah, can you talk about your participation in some of the more famous or infamous crimes?

Steve:   00:23:49             Not presently, as long as I’m employed. I will say in the 25 years I worked with Salt Lake Police Department, I’ve been involved in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping. I did some photography and work on that; Lori Hacking murder; the little girl that was kidnapped and killed Destiny Norton. One of the things I’ve done for about 11 years was to document the activities of the protesters at General Conference.

GT:        00:24:16             Oh, Kate Kelly?

Steve:   00:24:18             Yep. Just the street. Preachers and things like that.

GT:        00:24:23             Oh, the street preachers.

Steve:   00:24:23             Because of the lawsuits that these folks have had against the city and the police department, it became necessary for us to document their activities to show that as a city, as a police department, we’re following federal guidelines of free speech and city ordinances. They were taking pictures of us and we would take pictures of them. And for 11 years I did it every Conference. So I don’t know what went on inside Conference Center, but I was out there with all the various groups and things. It was important enough that when they had the federal lawsuit here, my photos went to the federal court and they also went to the appeals court in Denver. They used my photos and defending the city.

GT:        00:24:57             Which federal lawsuit? I’m not familiar with that.

Steve:   00:24:59             The federal courts here in Salt Lake, on the lawsuit. The street preachers sued the city for violating their rights of free speech.

GT:        00:25:07             What year was this?

Steve:   00:25:07             Oh this was 10 years ago, something in the past. Because I started in ’95 and went to about 2006 or so. Then we stopped doing it because it became unnecessary, but they were saying that–see, we had free speech zones where these people could stand as long as they weren’t blocking people walking across the crosswalk or blocking entrances. Sometimes you might have a little–I call them push and shoves, you know. Somebody didn’t like what you’re doing and push and shoved. We had to control it.

GT:        00:25:39             Yes, some of those can be not very nice people.

Steve:   00:25:41             Yeah. Sometimes they get mentioned. There was some fun stuff other times because you’ve got the street preachers and anybody who had something. Sometimes they’d have protest marches, you know, it was almost like it was conference, and then there was a circus going on outside. Even Mormon people do their thing.

Steve:   00:25:59             There was one lady came from Idaho and she had a sign that said, “If you’re a Mormon, I’ll give you a hug.” And she was hugging everybody. It’s like, “Whoa!” So that was interesting seeing that and it usually had media coverage sometimes. “Well here they are out there protesting.” Again, Craig Foster and I, a couple of years ago at a FAIR conference did a presentation, at Mormon History and at a FAIR conference about the history of protest around Temple Square. And just some of the stuff, it’s just crazy. I mean when the day comes when there’s nobody out there, I’m going to worry because they’re going to be there. They always have. I saw that when I first attended a General Conference in April 1970 when I came back with my stake president and they were passing stuff out. What’s all this?

Steve:   00:26:41             And that’s how I came across Jerald and Sandra Tanner, because someone was passing out their newsletter, Utah Lighthouse Ministry, or Modern Microfilm Company at that time. So that’s why I found out about them and all these people pamphleteering out there. Now it’s even gotten bigger because they’ll have signs and whatever and you’ll have marches. I mean it’s part of the environment in Salt Lake and in other places because they’ll also do it at Temple Pageants, temple open houses.

GT:        00:27:11             Yeah, Manti, I’ve seen them there at Manti Pageant.

Steve:   00:27:12             Manti, up at Martin Harris [Pageant.] Every temple-opening they will be there. Again, in Denver, in the ’80s when we had Denver Temple opening, we had three weeks and they were out there and like I said, there was always somebody every night, for those three weeks lecturing about the church someplace in Denver. And they had the one Protestant church where they had their own little visitor’s center where you go to the temple, and then you go over there, and they can have their little thing too.

GT:        00:27:44             A protestant visitors’ center?

Steve:   00:27:47             It was a Lutheran church, but a number of Protestant churches, evangelical churches that kind of joined up together to present that stuff. The thing about history that church leaders say, there’s nothing new with this stuff. We’ve had it from day one. I jokingly say that the minute Joseph walked out of the grove, we’ve had it. We’ve had our critics both secular and religious and nothing’s new. It’s the same thing and like I said, the day comes when they don’t do it, I’m going to be worried. It’s just part of the environment and you go with it. I know one of the things I try to tell people down there, because people would come and say, “Well, can we stop them doing it?”

Steve:   00:28:23             “No. They have a right to be out here on the sidewalk and do it. Just ignore them. Don’t get involved with them. We don’t get into fight. Just ignore them.” Sometimes they will go way overboard what their insults. They used to stand out before they were removed from the Main Street Plaza and stand up there near the gate of the east side of the temple and yell and call the brides sluts, whores, and prostitutes.

Steve:   00:28:45             The most important day of your life, and your family filming and taking pictures and these guys are yelling this stuff. And they would taunt. Sometimes they would wear temple outfits. That’s another thing. They were wearing temple outfit outside, wave the apron at people, wave the garments at them. They had one case way back in ’94 before I started doing it where this gentleman, member of the church from Provo area came up got in the way and grabbed the garment out of the guys hands. The Guy said, “Well, he assaulted me. He touched me.”

Steve:   00:29:22             You know, this poor guy had to go to court. And they basically said, well, “you really didn’t attack him,” but he did. So he was given a year’s probation and they said, “if you keep your nose clean, we will wipe it off with books.” But it’s this taunting that you see sometimes. And sometimes the best thing is just ignore it.

GT:        00:29:38             Which is very hard to do sometimes.

Steve:   00:29:40             Sometimes.

GT:        00:29:41             They can be very offensive. I’ve heard some.

Steve:   00:29:43             And of course like I say, you’ve got to be careful because they’re filming. I’ve seen on some Facebook pages my picture shows up and “Oh, there’s the guy taking our picture of me taking a picture of them taking a picture of me.”

GT:        00:29:59             So let me back up. There’s nothing, you can’t really talk too much about the Elizabeth Smart case or Mark Hacking?

Steve:   00:30:06             You know, just I was involved. I’ve been in the Smart house on a couple occasions, well in fact a number of places. My job was just take pictures or process for fingerprints and things like that. That was a part of what I would do. The same thing with the other cases. I was just involved with them to some degree with what I do, photography or collecting evidence or so forth. Like I said, I missed out on Trolley Square.

GT:        00:30:38             That was horrible.

Steve:   00:30:39             But I did do all those things.

GT:        00:30:42             Some people might not know what you were referring to with Trolley Square. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Steve:   00:30:47             Yeah. It was 2007. A gentleman walked in to Trolley Square in Salt Lake.

GT:        00:30:53             Which is a mall.

Steve:   00:30:53             Yes, on the east side there and opened fire and killed five or six people before he was killed by an off-duty police officer on scene. It was one of those just random mass shooting type of things. And that comes right after Elizabeth Smart, so it got a lot of national publicity.

GT:        00:31:17             It was Valentine’s Day, or the day before I think it was.

Steve:   00:31:17             Yes, something like that because I remember I was on the phone talking long distance to a girlfriend and I’m watching TV and all of a sudden I was like, “Oh my God.” Because they’re right there live. And I said “That’s Trolley Square, what’s going on? But, I never got