Scott Woodward: Welcome to our final episode in this series, where we’ve been exploring all things related to the history of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Today on Church History Matters Casey sits down with Sam Weston, a docent at the Church History Museum, who has been seriously researching the martyrdom at Carthage Jail in meticulous detail for the last fifteen years. They discuss the event of the attack at Carthage from something of a forensic crime scene investigation perspective, with a fair amount of challenging prior scholarship on the topic. So let’s get into it. 

Casey Griffiths: This is Casey Griffiths, and I’m flying solo this week on the Church History Matters podcast. Scott is at a family reunion this week, and so he was unable to join us, but I’m more than thrilled to have with us on the podcast today Sam Weston, who is going to talk a little bit about Carthage Jail. So say hi, Sam.

Sam Weston: How you doing today, Casey? 

Casey Griffiths: Doing great, even better now that you’re on here, and this is kind of the grand finale of our series on Carthage Jail and the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Before we get into that, I just wanted to mention we’ve got all kinds of supplementary resources on Doctrine and Covenants Central and Scripture Central, including some of the things that Sam’s going to talk about today. If you want to read Willard Richards’ firsthand account or John Taylor’s account, we placed them both there. Go and take a look at them for yourself. And I also wanted to mention another program Scripture Central does, which is called A Marvelous Work, that talks about evidences of the Book of Mormon. There’s an episode that came out on June 14 that talks about the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, and so I hope you’ll go and take a look at that, too. That’s on YouTube. Now, back to you, Sam. I want to mention how you and I met, actually, which was, I went on a podcast, and I said something about the gun Joseph Smith fired in Carthage Jail, and I said it was about a .22 caliber bullet, and you got in touch with a mutual friend of ours to correct me and say it was a .32 caliber bullet, so that’s how specific you are about Carthage and all things related to the martyrdom. Tell us a little bit about your background and the research that you do and where you’re coming from. 

Sam Weston: Well, I want to thank you for having me on today. I’ve been listening to your podcast on the martyrdom, and I hope this doesn’t ruin it because it’s been really good so far, so.

Casey Griffiths: I don’t think it’ll ruin it at all, and can I mention here, Sam, that you and I did a session of the Mormon History Association two years ago where we talked about the martyrdom, and I was impressed by your research then, and I’m still impressed today. 

Sam Weston: Has it been two years already? 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, Summer 2022 was when we presented together, and that’s the only time I’ve ever presented an MHA to a full room.

Sam Weston: The only time I’ve presented ever, so . . . 

Casey Griffiths: That speaks to the well-crafted nature of your research. Usually when I present an MHA, it’s on a weird subject, and so nobody shows up, but when you were my wingman, we, you know, it was standing room only. In fact, I think people were sitting on the floor because what we had to talk about was so fascinating, so just thank you. Thank you for boosting me a little bit there. 

Sam Weston: Thanks for inviting me. 

Casey Griffiths: So tell us the nature of your research, what you do exactly. 

Sam Weston: Well, my research started probably back in 2009-ish. I’d just read an article by the Lyon brothers, it was published in BYU Studies in 2008. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. I’m familiar with that. 

Sam Weston: A crime scene analysis of the Carthage Jail.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: I read that and thought, “This is great. This is very interesting,” but didn’t think much more about it until later, in 2009, I became a docent of the Church History Museum, and my goal was to really know a lot about all the artifacts on display and know the story so I could sound like I was somewhat smart when I was talking to people, so one of the first things I decided to do a little more research on was the martyrdom. So I sat down one day, Sunday afternoon, said, “Okay, I’m going to spend two hours, and I’ll know everything there is to know about the martyrdom.” Well, that was roughly fifteen years ago, and I’m still learning. Once I started studying more, the Lyon brothers article came back to my mind, and I started going through that, and after I got done reading it several times, I found approximately fifty things that were wrong in their research and in the telling of the story, so I decided, “I need to redo this.” The word has to get out, because they had so much bad information. 

Casey Griffiths: We should mention, too, the Lyon brothers have both passed away, correct?

Sam Weston: Yes. 

Casey Griffiths: And so we’re not inviting them to debate with us or anything, and their research was—it pointed in the right direction, right? But you’re going to point out some of the things that were maybe wrong. 

Sam Weston: It gave a lot of people the desire to learn more about it. 

Casey Griffiths: And myself included. Yeah, I remember reading that article and being a fan of it.

Sam Weston: I credit them with that. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: I’ve always been into guns and collecting guns and having and shooting guns, but I never did any with black powder. So I thought if I’m going to talk about guns, I’d better know what I’m talking about, so since then I own quite a few black powder guns, replicas and authentic ones, and I’ve shot and shot and learned how to load, learned all about the ammunition from that time period, military use and all things like that. So one of the first things that struck me with the Lyon brothers account—and like I said, I never met the Lyons. They’re both dead. I did meet one of their brothers, and he made the comment that he didn’t like their article, either. He thought it was—he thought there was a lot of problems with it. So in my defense, I took from that. Anyway, one thing they totally ignored was Willard Richards’ account. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. Yeah. 

Sam Weston: And in one of your last podcasts, you read the entire Willard Richards account. 

Casey Griffiths: We did, yeah. 

Sam Weston: And there’s—it’s a quick read, you know, “Two Minutes in Jail,” but it gives a lot of detail that most researchers just overlook. They take into account a lot of other accounts, but they weren’t firsthand accounts, or if they were firsthand accounts they were written ten to fifty years later. So Willard’s was written and published within about two weeks, so I put a lot of trust in his account as being fairly accurate, and so my goal all along was to prove the Willard Richards account could have happened the way he said it happened. 

Casey Griffiths: Let me mention, too, Willard Richards’ account, we mentioned this on the podcast, was probably the earliest really complete account of the martyrdom. It’s written, like—what’s the time frame? How soon after the martyrdom does he write that and publish it? 

Sam Weston: Published in the Nauvoo Neighbor in early July of 1844.

Casey Griffiths: So we’re talking within weeks of the martyrdom. 

Sam Weston: Within weeks. And then in the Times and Seasons, I think maybe end of July, first of August, so. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. Okay. 

Sam Weston: It was published fairly early. 

Casey Griffiths: So just using sound historical methodology, there’s a good reason to go straight to Willard, because he writes it first, he’s an eyewitness, he’s there, and he sees everything, and so he’s probably the first person we want to talk to. 

Sam Weston: Yeah. So using his account I started to prove everything he said could have happened the way he said it happened, contrary to the Lyon brothers and other people who’ve been talking about this over the years, but one thing they stated that—and you see pictures drawn and photographs way back in the 1800s, and they show Hyrum’s face against the door when he was shot, and that just is totally different than Willard’s account. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, that’s not what Willard describes. 

Sam Weston: But Willard has Hyrum back into the room, about two-thirds away from the door, and so one of the first things I tried to prove was if Hyrum’s face was against the door there would be visible scarring and wounding and burning of the face from all that wood coming through the door panel. So I did shooting into ballistic gel heads. Obviously we don’t have pictures in this, but the pictures that I took after shooting, just massive wounds.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: You had a bunch of wood penetrating the face. There would have been huge burn marks, probably two- or three-inch diameter burn marks on his face that would have been visible, but none of that shows up in the death mask or any of the accounts of people who looked at the body, so I proved that was wrong, I believe, and the Lyon brothers, everything that was shot or used in that, the day at the jail was .69 caliber. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Sam Weston: The hole in the doors were .69 caliber. The hole in Hyrum’s face was .69 caliber. The holes in the clothes were .69 calibers. So the first thing I did when I went to Carthage back in 2012, I started measuring the hole in the door, and no way is it .69 caliber. I determined both the holes in the door were .54 caliber. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. Just by measuring the bullet hole in the door. 

Sam Weston: Measuring the bullet hole. I measured them, knowing that by shooting into a panel, a round ball will actually—I thought it would enlarge, originally: round lead ball would hit that, and the hole would be bigger than the ball—but the hole’s actually smaller than the diameter of the ball. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: But taking into account all the fingers that have been in that hole over the years. I’m assuming that hole’s a little larger than it was originally. I’ve determined the hole was a .54 caliber—both holes in the door are .54 caliber. 

Casey Griffiths: And that’s consistent with the type of rifles the militia at that time would be using, is that correct?

Sam Weston: Yeah. The research I was doing, the militia army-issued musket, for instance, was typically a .64 caliber. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: Smoothbore muzzleloader. Now, the Carthage Greys were a rifle unit, and so they had guns and the barrels were rifled rather than smoothbore, and a lot of those shot a .54 caliber, and some eyewitness accounts says there were smoothbore rifles and pistols—I mean, smoothbore muskets and pistols. There were rifles. There were also breech-loading guns, which was a unique gun at that time, but from what I’ve come up with there could have been a possibility of probably forty-eight plus or minus different guns there that day. 

Casey Griffiths: No uniform, “everybody’s using the same type of weapon across the board” here, either. 

Sam Weston: No.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: Take, for instance, the Nauvoo Legion: 3,000 to 4,000 members. When Joseph Smith was on his way to Carthage and bumped into Captain Dunn, who was going to Nauvoo to seize the government-issued guns from the Nauvoo Legion, what they seized that day was approximately 250, 275 guns is all the government had given the militia.

Casey Griffiths: Oh! Hmm. 

Sam Weston: But if you were a member of the militia and you didn’t have a government-issued gun, you had to carry your own. So the day that Governor Ford went and visited Nauvoo, after the guns were seized, he was amazed by all the weapons the Nauvoo Legion had, and it was made up of old hunting guns and all kinds of stuff, so every militia was pretty much the same. The government couldn’t afford to issue guns to everybody, so they had their own weapons. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay, so the group attacking the jail is probably equipped with all different kinds of weapons, and I want to just summarize for our listeners that might not have read the Lyon brothers’ article, their theory was that using the death mask of Hyrum Smith, which has a big bullet hole on its side—and we’ll try and put that photograph in the show notes—that Hyrum was kind of pushing against the door to hold it shut, and they fired into the door, and it hit directly into his face, but you’re saying that doesn’t fit what Willard Richards said, and it doesn’t fit the forensics from the case, either, based on your research. Is that correct? 

Sam Weston: Right. Right. Willard says after the first shot came through the door, which is in the lock area, the men in the room changed position. Hyrum jumped back. The other three men were to the left side of the door if you’re inside the room. Joseph had his pepperbox. Hyrum had a single-shot, both smuggled into the jail, and Willard says that Hyrum was shot in the face, uttered the words, “I’m a dead man,” and fell dead on his back. His body was shot several times more, mainly by accident, I think, because they were deflecting the guns that were firing through the door, knocking to the ground, so the bullets automatically hit Hyrum. But after the fact, and after Willard was taking care of everybody, they noticed that Hyrum was shot in the back also. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: He says the only time that could have happened is when Hyrum was standing up facing the door with his back towards the east window. So Willard concluded that Hyrum was shot simultaneously in the back and from the door. 

Casey Griffiths: So someone’s firing from outside the jail, and they hit Hyrum in the back. 

Sam Weston: Yes. 

Casey Griffiths: At the same time, they fire through the door, and Hyrum gets hit in the face. 

Sam Weston: The only thing I want to change about Willard’s story is if you’re shot in the face with a .54-caliber ball, you’re not going to be calmly saying, “I’m a dead man.” I think what happened is Hyrum was shot in the back first. As he fell, the ball hit him in the face, but before the ball hit him in the face, he said, “I’m a dead man.” 

Casey Griffiths: This all happened so fast, Willard probably just put it together with a slight inaccuracy. 

Sam Weston: Well, you’ve got to realize the men standing at the door were staring at the door, not Hyrum.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: They’re expecting that mob to burst through any minute. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: Because they’re not watching Hyrum: They’re hearing what he says, and they probably don’t even hear the shot that hit him because that shot was possibly sixty to seventy, eighty feet away from the building. 

Casey Griffiths: So Hyrum’s hit from outside and then hit from the door. You think he got hit, said, “I’m a dead man,” and then was hit in the face from the door? 

Sam Weston: Yes. 

Casey Griffiths: Is it possible—because I know people bring this up sometimes—for someone shooting outside the jail, they’re on the second floor of the jail, to hit Hyrum or know what they were aiming at if they’re firing from down below?

Sam Weston: Okay, so the Lyon brothers’ account says, “You could not see. We stood there on June 27th, and we couldn’t even see into the room.” A lot of accounts says the windows were shut, and we could not see in the room. When I was there on two different occasions on June 27, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I could see into that room and see the people there as far back as a 100-plus feet, and my eyes aren’t that good. I determined it was very easy to see them, and the sill of that window to the ground is only about twelve feet. So as close as 60 feet you could easily make a shot and hit Hyrum where he was standing according to where Willard says he was standing. That was an easy shot. 

Casey Griffiths: So it’s pretty plausible, yeah, that a shot could have come from outside the jail, hits Hyrum just like the way Willard described it, the way you’re kind of putting it together here. 

Sam Weston: Yes. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. So what other stuff would you want to correct in the Lyon brothers’ article? 

Sam Weston: Well, since I’m defending Willard, I want to talk about Willard for a second. Everything I’ve found and seen, even church publications, always has Willard behind the door. That’s why he wasn’t shot. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. 

Sam Weston: He was hiding behind the door, or that’s where he ended up.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Sam Weston: But according to Willard’s account, he was—right next to the door jamb was Joseph with his gun. 

Casey Griffiths: Oh. 

Sam Weston: Then John Taylor, and then Willard Richards. 

Casey Griffiths: And that makes Willard’s story even more amazing, because he’s a big guy. He’s 300 pounds, and he’s the only one that’s not really hit by a bullet. 

Sam Weston: Yes. 

Casey Griffiths: But you’re saying he wasn’t over behind the door when the attack happened.

Sam Weston: So once Hyrum died, the door is still closed. Joseph reaches up to the door with his left hand, opens the door just enough to put his right hand around the jamb casing, and starts firing a gun into the mob. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Sam Weston: Misfires three times, but he has—gets off three shots and actually shoots three different people, and then he drops his gun, and now the door’s open. The mob gets—I’m sure the mob hesitated for a second because they didn’t expect to be shot at. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: But once the door’s cracked open, the mob starts firing, and that’s when John Taylor and Willard start knocking at the guns. I think John Taylor was hitting him first because he was the closest, but then when John Taylor made his retreat, Willard’s left there to defend and knock the guns down, so Willard’s out there defending everything. He wasn’t cowering ‘hind any—he was there trying to defend everybody. 

Casey Griffiths: He’s there in the line of fire the whole time. 

Sam Weston: Yeah. I have not personally seen it, but I’m told that Willard’s coat that he was wearing—he was the only one with a coat on that day because he was sick and feverish, and so—his coat is in the DUP museum up by the Capitol in Salt Lake. 

Casey Griffiths: Is that right? I didn’t know that. 

Sam Weston: Yes. And supposedly they—I don’t know if the story’s true. They could be moth holes, but supposedly there’s bullet holes in his coat. So I can’t defend that, but, you know, makes a great story, if it’s not true. Anyway, but he was in the line of fire. He was not hiding. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: He was miraculously spared. And so I want to clear that up because everybody has him behind the door, but no, he was not a coward. He was right there defending everybody. 

Casey Griffiths: He wasn’t stuck behind the door. He’s in the line of fire, and that makes his survival even more miraculous than—I mean, it would have been miraculous if he was behind the door to begin with— 

Sam Weston: Right. 

Casey Griffiths: —but you’re saying, no, he’s—that’s not what he says happened. 

Sam Weston: Nope. The only person that says he was out there behind the door was Thomas Barnes. He was the physician that took care of John Taylor, that dug the bullet out of his hand. Some people say he was the coroner, but he’s not the coroner. Stigall was the coroner, the jailer. 

Casey Griffiths: So George Stigall, who—he’s the jailer and the coroner.

Sam Weston: Yes. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: Thomas Barnes was not the coroner, even though he’s been identified as such. I have time period documents that state that Stigall is the coroner. So Thomas Barnes makes the comment in a fifty-year reminiscence. So fifty years after the attack, he says, I think Willard told me that he was behind the door. And so that’s where we get Willard behind the door. 

Casey Griffiths: Oh. 

Sam Weston: They ignore his own account and lean heavily on account that was written fifty years later. 

Casey Griffiths: And in your presentation that you gave at MHA, you actually showed a bunch of artwork of Carthage Jail, and a lot of those show Willard behind the door, meaning that, yeah, that account, which came out fifty years after, has actually affected some of the artwork we do today and in the 20th century, but that’s not an accurate depiction: Willard wasn’t behind the door. 

Sam Weston: I believe his accounts. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. Okay. 

Sam Weston: There again, I have to clarify: Anybody says “This happened for sure” can’t say that, because they weren’t there, and I wasn’t there. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: I’m trusting Willard’s account. I believe he tried to be as truthful and accurate as he could.

Casey Griffiths: Okay. All right. Well, what’s next on your list of corrections you’d like to make about common beliefs at Carthage Jail? 

Sam Weston: Well, you know, thanks to the Lyon brothers’ article and other people like Glenn Leonard, who questioned John Taylor’s watch, was it shot with a bullet or was it not? Probably to give a little background, John Taylor, after the attack, was moved several times from the room to the dungeon, to the head of the stairs, to a wagon, to the Hamilton house. He was moved several times after the attack, and probably carried each time because of his wounds. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. 

Sam Weston: But he could not make the trip back to Nauvoo the next day. So he had to stay there, but he told Willard, he says, I don’t dare being late. I’m left here among the murderers. Don’t leave me here. And he says, you have to stay. You won’t survive the trip. And so Willard reached into his pocket and pulled out his pocket, cut it off and took John Taylor’s money purse and his watch and some other items and sewed that up and took it back to Nauvoo. So when John Taylor got home about three or four days later, his wife says, I need some money, John Taylor says, go to Willard. He has my money. So Willard brings it over, and he opens it up, and the first thing he pulls out is his watch, and he says—and he notices the face is all smashed. The crystal’s smashed, but the hands are still on the watch, and he says, go get my vest, so they bring him the vest, and the vest, he says, it looks like the pocket in his vest was cut by a knife, but there was pulverized glass in there, and so he makes the comment, a bullet must have struck my watch and thrown me back in the room and saved my life. And so in the Lyon brothers article, this is—we had determined that the door was .69 caliber, the holes in the face of Hyrum are .69 caliber, .69 the death mask, all these. So the last bullet hole we had to figure out size was the watch. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. 

Sam Weston: So we called up and talked to Glenn Leonard at the museum, says, give us the size of the hole in the watch. He says, there isn’t a hole in the watch. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah. The watch is on display in the Church History Museum, and it’s not a huge watch, but everybody, when they see pictures of it, I think assume that it’s bigger than it is, and you can see kind of two little things that look like bullet holes, but those are actually the gears of the watch. 

Sam Weston: The pins that hold the gears push through the enamel face, yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: So because of that, they says, well, he didn’t get shot: he fell on it and broke it on the windowsill. And so I did my own testing. I had several watches. I didn’t go buy real expensive pocket watches, but I shot at them, and each time I hit them, direct hit, it would just pulverize, and so I agree with the Lyons that it did not take a direct shot. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: Something else broke it. John Taylor says he fell against the windowsill. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: Before he hit the ground. It could have broken then. It could have been broken when his body was being moved. It could have been broken when Willard had the watch. He’s a big guy. Maybe he sat on it. Maybe a wagon wheel ran over. I don’t know. There’s a lot of things that could have happened to it, but I don’t believe it was shot by a gun. And so I can talk more about our research with the Church History Department on that, or do you want to save that for later? 

Casey Griffiths: No, no. Let’s go, because the theory presented by the Lyon brothers, and by Glenn Leonard, I believe, was that John fell and hit into the windowsill so hard that it smashed the watch, and that’s contrary to what John says, though John—it happened fast. John could have misunderstood what happened. But you’re saying that there’s evidence that something else could have happened, too. Let’s go into that a little bit. 

Sam Weston: So 2021, I believe, I was asked to be part of a group put together by the church history department to determine once and for all what happened to John Taylor’s watch, and so there was about twelve of us on this group, several forensic guys, a ballistic expert, I believe he’s out of New Mexico, that the church hired, and the church actually bought twenty-plus vintage, correct watches from England from that time period, and we destroyed seventeen of them. Several of them we didn’t destroy, because once we found out what we had, we realized they were too valuable to break, but . . . 

Casey Griffiths: So you guys take these antique watches out. Where did you go to? 

Sam Weston: We went out to the gun range, the police gun range out by Tooele. 

Casey Griffiths: This sounds like the funnest job ever, by the way, too, is to get to do this Mythbusters kind of stuff as well. But tell us what happened. 

Sam Weston: So with our ballistics expert, he—this guy’s an expert. He travels the world and testifies as a witness in gun cases and stuff, so pretty sharp guy. So we had everything set up, and I built the props to hold the watch and everything, and so we shot with different caliber bullets, different loads and stuff, and every time the ball would make contact, it would just blow through the watch, I mean, a big hole, or just smash itself. Each watch was photographed layer by layer prior to the damaging them, then that we collected every single part, and they were photographed again after we shot them, trying to determine what happened to John Taylor’s watch. John Taylor’s watch was taken apart layer by layer and photographed. 

Casey Griffiths: Oh, wow. 

Sam Weston: And so we did shooting tests. I built a mock-up of the windowsill from the jail. We did smash tests, which I’m not really happy with what we did, but I think it proved the point. It was more likely, in my opinion, more likely smashed than shot. The closest thing we replicated is we did a ricochet shot, where the lead ball hit something, I think we used a piece of metal, and it fragmented the ball and particles of that hit the watch, like in a ricochet, like it ricocheted off the stone or a window casing or something. That was the closest thing. So after weeks of discussion and everybody—there are forensic reports. The ballistic guy submitted a report. We even had—tested the watch for different metal content on the surface, showed signs of lead on it, which—don’t know if that means anything or not. The determination was, after all this time, I don’t know how much money was spent, that we still don’t know. I told them before we started, there’s thousands of scenarios we could go through of what could have happened, but that’s kind of where we’re at. So what I tell people at the museum when they come today and they says, “Where’s John Taylor’s watch?” And so I show them the watch, and they says, “Oh, this is the one that saved his life.” And I says, “Well, I’ll let you decide. Come over here and look at Hyrum Smith’s watch. It’s in the case with his clothes.” And that watch is just smashed to pieces, and there’s a big, round dent in it approximately the size of a .69-caliber ball. It’s hard to determine. So the bullet that hit that watch went clear through Hyrum’s body and struck that watch in his vest pocket, but did not exit but just smashed the watch and left a big, round circle. I says, “You look at that watch. Now you come and look at John Taylor’s watch and tell me where it was shot,” and they says, ”It wasn’t shot.” I says, “We call it the miracle watch, but the miracle, I think, that happened in Carthage Jail that day was that John Taylor did not die. He was shot in the left thigh, below the left knee, the left hip, a piece of flesh the size of his hand was blown off and splattered on the wall, and then he was shot in the left arm. The ball traveled down his arm, through his wrist, and lodged between his finger bone. And after all this and not getting really any medical help for hours, He did not bleed to death, he did not die of infection, he did not have an arm or a leg amputated, which would—typically would have happened.” And so to me that’s the miracle of John Taylor surviving. It’s not the watch. 

Casey Griffiths: And one of those bullets, my understanding is, he carried in his body until the day he died. 

Sam Weston: The one right below his knee was always there. He says his grandkids would come over and say they want to feel and could feel the ball in there, so . . . 

Casey Griffiths: I want to tell a John Taylor story I found. It was in Samuel Taylor, who’s a—he’s a descendant of John Taylor. He also wrote the script to The Absent-Minded Professor, but this story appeared in a church periodical. It’s that John Taylor was giving a speech, and in the audience was a representative from the U. S. Army. This was when Johnson’s army was coming to Utah to, you know, remove Brigham Young or whatever, and their supply sergeant had traveled ahead of them, and John Taylor was talking about persecutions and getting really animated, and Brigham Young reached up and tugged on his coat because he’s, you know, don’t do this when the army guy’s here, John, and John Taylor paused at the stand and turned around and said, “Brigham, let go of my coat. The bullets in me still hurt.” And at that point Brigham Young just kind of lifted up his hands and said, well, I guess he’s earned the right to say it, and he goes right back to his speech. So, oof, you’re right. The miracle here is that John Taylor lived. 

Sam Weston: Yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: He shouldn’t have, but he survived and became one of our most vital, important witnesses of the martyrdom, but I think you’re getting to a point we want to make, which is there’s all kinds of sources about the martyrdom. We shouldn’t commit too strongly to one theory or another about something like John Taylor’s watch because some of the stuff is unprovable given the current techniques we have. 

Sam Weston: Right. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. So John Taylor’s watch could have been hit by something, maybe a ricochet, maybe a fragment, but right now we don’t know.

Sam Weston: John Taylor’s watch was probably damaged in the attack. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. That’s the best thing to say. 

Sam Weston: It’s a good symbol of what happened in that jail that day. Brings back memories, and it’s an artifact from that day, but to say how it actually got damaged, I don’t think anybody will ever know— 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah.

Sam Weston: —in this lifetime.

Casey Griffiths: Until we can go back and view it in our own time and eternity, we probably won’t be able to know. 

Sam Weston: When we get to that point, we probably won’t really care, so . . . 

Casey Griffiths: We’ll have better things to do, huh? 

Sam Weston: Yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: Well, let’s keep going down the list. So we’ve talked about how Hyrum Smith was killed, where Willard Richards was in the room, John Taylor’s watch. What’s next that you’d want to talk about? 

Sam Weston: Well, I’ve got one other thing I want to do. I haven’t done it yet, but I think it needs to be done, and I’m just trying to get permission. I’ve got to find the right person to give me permission. I want to study Hyrum’s clothes closer. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay, so Hyrum’s clothes, just for our listeners, are on display in the Church History Museum, but they’re relatively new. I think they were owned by Eldred Smith, who was the presiding patriarch in the church, and he used to go around and do firesides.

Sam Weston: Yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: With the clothes. The shirt, at least, still has bloodstains on it, and— 

Sam Weston: Yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: —you can see the bullet holes, and anybody that’s near Salt Lake, go to the Church History Museum, and you can see this directly for yourself. It’s in a little glass case on the main floor. 

Sam Weston: In fact, you can get the Church History Library and pull those pictures up.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve got pictures. I put them in a book that I wrote, but what would you like to do? What kind of investigations would you like to carry out? 

Sam Weston: Well, a lot of—the Lyon brothers, for instance, says, you know, there was no blood on Hyrum’s back. He was shot in the back and laid on his back. Supposedly he’d laid on his back until his body was removed. There should have been blood in the shirt, but there was no blood. So their theory was that after the attack, the mob came back upstairs after Joseph was killed and after Willard and John Taylor hid in the dungeon cell, the mob came back, and to make sure Hyrum was dead they rolled his body over and shot him in the back.

Casey Griffiths: Oh. And that doesn’t fit with what Willard Richards or John Taylor says. 

Sam Weston: Why would you roll somebody over and shoot him in the lower back to make sure they’re dead? That doesn’t make sense, but John Taylor, in his statement, says he was moved out of the dungeon and sat at the head of the stairs, where he had full view of the patriarch, Hyrum, laying where he fell. Hadn’t moved an inch. And even in death, he was a mighty man, or something to that effect. So even John Taylor’s account says his body was never moved. And so some people say, well, they rolled him over, shot him in the back and then rolled him back again, but there’s no bloodstains. The stains on the shirt do not match the wounds per se, and there’s no stains whatsoever on the vest or the pants, at least stains visible to the naked eye, and so I would like to test the shirt, the pants, for any type of blood stain that’s not visible to the naked eye. You know, luminol test or whatever they can. I’ve talked to forensic guys, and they says this test is possible, but my theory for no blood—the clothes were washed. According to the curators at the museum, these clothes have been washed, but there’s no blood at all. If there was blood on the shirt and John Taylor had a vest on, there’d have to be blood on the vest, but there’s no sign of blood on the vest, and that’s a problem with me, but. . . 

Casey Griffiths: Now, just to clarify, you said John Taylor, but you mean Hyrum Smith, right? 

Sam Weston: Yeah. Sorry. Hyrum Smith. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: Thank you for doing that. Keep an eye on me. I’m getting old and forgetful. Anyway, I don’t know if you know Joseph Johnston, historian back lives in Nauvoo area. 

Casey Griffiths: I know of him, yes. I don’t know if I’ve met him personally. 

Sam Weston: He’s a great resource for anything Nauvoo, and talking to him, he found out that Artois Hamilton, the owner of Hamilton’s Tavern, Hamilton Hotel—

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. 

Sam Weston: —the guy who made the oak boxes for the bodies to be shipped from Carthage back to Nauvoo? 

Casey Griffiths: Oh! So he makes the boxes that Joseph and Hyrum are taken back. Okay. 

Sam Weston: Yeah. He makes those boxes, and he owns an ice house, and so we believe now that from Joseph Johnston’s research, that the bodies were packed in ice until they got back to Nauvoo.

Casey Griffiths: Oh, okay. 

Sam Weston: Well, if Hyrum was on his back the whole time after the attack, his body was moved most likely always on his back, laid in a box on his back, and then the box was filled with ice, the blood never dried on the back of his clothes, which would easily be washed out at that time. I’m not saying you can’t wash out dry blood, but it’s harder, but it is possible, but if he was laying on his back the whole time until his clothes were removed, they were probably always wet, and the blood could have washed out easy, so that’s one thing I want to check and see if—there’s got to be blood stains visible there. 

Casey Griffiths: That theory would explain why there’s blood on the front of the shirt, which, you know, many people have seen and that Eldred Smith used to display at his firesides, but why there’s not blood on the back. There’s a bullet hole in the back, right, of the shirt? 

Sam Weston: Yeah. Bullet hole in the shirt, the vest, the pants. I’m assuming the underwear—we have his underwear, too, but . . . 

Casey Griffiths: That’s fascinating. 

Sam Weston: That’s one thing I’d like to do a little more research on. I’m also working on another program at the museum, if I can get it through, on coffin making.

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: And actually build replicas of Joseph’s coffin. We have a lot of detailed evidence of it, and that’d make it easy to explain the mock burial and everything because Joseph was buried in a walnut coffin. It was lined with fabric, but that coffin was put into another pine box, like a double coffin, which was common. The one outer box was of lesser-quality wood, and the nicer coffin went inside that, and so for the mock burial, after the 10,000 people walked by and looked at the body, they took that walnut coffin out, put sand in the pine box, nailed it up, and that’s what went to the cemetery. 

Casey Griffiths: Oh, okay. So the original walnut, which would have been a lot nicer—pine’s kind of the cheaper wood, right?

Sam Weston: Right. 

Casey Griffiths: Pine doesn’t last very long, either, is my understanding. It was probably what was buried publicly, and then the walnut coffin was what Joseph was in when he was actually buried. That’s where the body actually was. 

Sam Weston: Yeah. We even have an invoice from the lumber company charging Emma for the pine for the box.

Casey Griffiths: Oh, really? Okay. 

Sam Weston: I’m thinking, why didn’t somebody come forward and just pay for that, or why did somebody didn’t donate? But she had a bill for the pine box. The bill was made out on the 29th to Emma Smith. 

Casey Griffiths: So she’s charged two days after their death. And by the way, I was surprised this time to read through the sources that the death happens on the 27th, and then two days later, they’re buried. Like, it all happened very quickly here, where in our time, it could be, you know, a few days or a week until somebody’s buried. 

Sam Weston: Well, you gotta realize the bodies weren’t embalmed. It was hot and humid. If it wasn’t for the ice, the bodies would have been in terrible shape by the time they got back to Nauvoo. The bodies were laid out in their coffins with glass lids on them. There’s a lid over their face, and they closed those lids partway through the viewing because of the stench. Hyrum’s face was turning black. The bodies were dripping on the floor. They were burning sugar in the fireplace, and so that’s—I mean, they want to get those bodies in the ground as quick as they can, so . . . 

Casey Griffiths: That’s a major difference between now and then. And let me use that to kind of talk about another thing that we brought up in an episode, which was the death masks. So if ice is available at the Hamilton house, and they’re packed in ice, how accurate do you think the death masks are of Joseph and Hyrum, and what do we know about them?

Sam Weston: I think they are quite accurate, but on the other hand, they’re dead. They died in a tragic death, so there had to be some swelling or distortion, especially to Hyrum’s face, but all the evidence shows that the bone structure and everything looks pretty close, and you compare the death masks and some of the paintings—they’re pretty close, so that’s another thing I’ve worked on a program at the museum—is the making of death masks. And so I wanted to know how hard it is to make a death mask. How accurate are they? And things like that. And I think they’re pretty accurate, to be honest. If they were made a couple of days later, it’d be a whole different story, but I think they’re pretty accurate. 

Casey Griffiths: Because people don’t realize how big a thing death masks were before photography. Like, we have a death mask of George Washington. We have a death mask of Abraham Lincoln. Even though there was photography—I’ve seen Brigham Young’s death mask. That’s in the museum collection as well. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned about death masks and how they’re made.

Sam Weston: Well, the death mask would have been made in less than twenty-four hours after they’re dead. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: They were made when they’re brought back to Nauvoo. 

Casey Griffiths: And the timeframe is the murders happen about 5:14 p.m. Thursday, June 27th, which is actually the day we’re recording this, I should mention. 

Sam Weston: 180th anniversary today. 

Casey Griffiths: 180th anniversary. And then, it’s the next morning, I believe, right? Willard Richards sets out with the bodies for Nauvoo, because there’s all those issues we brought, to decomposition, it’s hot, it’s humid, people are going to want to see the bodies before they bury them, but they don’t have a lot of time given the conditions they’re in, so keep going. Keep going. 

Sam Weston: They arrive in Nauvoo approximately 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and the bodies were laid out and dressed and prepared for the family to view, like, around 6 o’clock. So sometime between that 2 o’clock and 6 o’clock period, the death masks were made. And so from my experience, the death mask has to be—the negative you make that’s on the face has to set and dry for at least an hour, and then you have to be very careful when you’re pulling it off, or it can be distorted by pulling up. I mean, they would have greased the faces down. The death masks would have made with the body sitting upright— 

Casey Griffiths: Oh, interesting. 

Sam Weston: —to give you a more lifelike appearance. Because when you lay down your face doesn’t look the same as if you’re sitting up.

Casey Griffiths: Oh, geez. I didn’t know that part of it. 

Sam Weston: I’m just assuming this. This is how they typically made it. I’m assuming if they had any knowledge at all of death masks, which I’m sure they did, the bodies would have been sitting up— 

Casey Griffiths: Okay. 

Sam Weston: —when they made them.

Casey Griffiths: Thin layer of grease applied to the face. 

Sam Weston: Yeah, then plaster of Paris and then layers of gauze or cloth to give it strength, and then that has to set for at least an hour, pulled off, and I don’t think they poured the death mask that day. Plaster of Paris would have been poured into that, but my experience is that has to cure for a good day, or it gets too soft, too fast, pouring it in. So I think the death masks were made after that day. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure they would have been, so. 

Casey Griffiths: Some people have speculated that the death masks—like Hyrum’s chin might not be original, or something like that. 

Sam Weston: Both those death masks have had repair work done to them. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah. 

Sam Weston: I’m working on an article on the death masks to get more detail because there’s a lot of questions, but sometime after the death masks were made, copies were made. How many copies were made, I don’t know. One of those copies was—they call the pedestal masks. They’re copies of the death masks of Hyrum and Joseph, but rather than just be the mask, they’re cast with a little pedestal on it, so they stand upwards. 

Casey Griffiths: Oh. 

Sam Weston: And this was made before the repair work to Hyrum’s, so you can see that Hyrum had a cleft chin in the pedestal masks.

Casey Griffiths: Oh, okay. So Hyrum might look different than we imagined based on the death mask. 

Sam Weston: Some detail was lost in those repair. I don’t know who did the repair, who authorized them, but some of the detail was lost. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: But there’s quite a few death masks out there. There were copies of copies of copies, and I’m trying to run them all down. John Taylor took a copy of the death masks to England with him and had the busts of Joseph and Hyrum made. French sculptor, I can’t remember his name, made them using the death masks that John Taylor took and also John Taylor’s reminiscence of what Joseph and Hyrum looked like. And so these small busts of Joseph and Hyrum, according to John Taylor, is what Joseph and Hyrum looked like. They’re the closest thing to what they looked like. 

Casey Griffiths: You know, when you talk about copies of copies of copies, I’ve got a copy of the death masks that my friend Anthony Sweat got a mold from a sculptor that was working for the church. 

Sam Weston: Yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: Anthony and I both took Plaster of Paris and used the mold and made our own death masks, and then I handed my death masks over to the BYU library, and they did a 3D-printed death mask and then uploaded the patterns online, so if you’re into 3D printing and you want to print the death masks, as ghoulish as that might sound—I used to keep the death masks in my library, but my wife told me it was too creepy, and so I moved them down here to my office. 

Sam Weston: I have to keep mine in a box covered up so nobody can see them because of my wife.

Casey Griffiths: My wife was unnerved by walking in and seeing Joseph and Hyrum right there, but that’s a whole fascinating history, where death masks come from and how they’re made. 

Sam Weston: Still a lot to be learned there, so. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, I’ll look forward to your article on that, too, and I hope you’ll share some of your research with us if you’re willing.

Sam Weston: Yeah. 

Casey Griffiths: Okay, so boy, we’ve covered a lot of stuff from Hyrum’s death to the death masks to the burial. What are some other common things about Carthage Jail that maybe were misunderstood or were wrong in the Lyons’ article? 

Sam Weston: I think we pretty much covered all of it. We’ve probably done all the damage to the Lyons that we ought to do, but that was most of it. What I think—in their research, they put a laser in the door, the bullet hole in the door, and they shot lasers so they were showing the bullet trajectory. I started using that originally, but then I realized that these balls do not go in a straight line. Especially if they go through a hard object like a door, the balls could be anywhere in the room, and the same in the body. The eyewitness account says Hyrum was shot in the face, and after he was on the ground he was shot in the neck again. And so he had two shots into the head. And some people theorize, well if he was shot in the head, the bullet had to come out the back, or if he was shot in the neck, it had to come out the top of his head. I’ve done a lot of research on bullet trajectory once it enters a human body. A round ball—not a bullet: we’ll say a round ball. 

Casey Griffiths: Mm-hmm. Because that’s the word most of them use, is John says, I received— 

Sam Weston: It was a ball. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, a ball in the wrist and a ball in the leg. That’s the common terminology of the day.

Sam Weston: We didn’t really start talking about bullets until, like, Civil War time. These were lead balls, but when a ball goes into a human body it travels in multiple directions, rarely ever takes a straight line, no matter where it hits. The earliest research done that I could find on a lead ball in a human body was done during the Civil War, and they talked about one—this is a medical journal—a lead ball what entered one of the soldier’s face in the eye, went around the back of the skull, and came out the other eye, so to try and show trajectory of a ball in a body would be almost impossible. A lot of people are doing it today and saying if he was shot here, had to go straight through and come out here, but that’s what the Lyon brothers are trying to show, but it’s just not feasible. The Lyon brothers tried to show the shot into Hyrum’s face came out his neck.

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: And his head had to be tilted at this strange angle by the door for that to happen. It’s not physically possible to stand with your head tilted like that, to start with, so that’s—I think that’s a big one. The other big one is when the door opened up into the jailer’s room where the prisoners were. They opened up with such force, it turned Hyrum around, and then they shot him in the back. One of the Lyon brothers’ theories, but anyway, I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen either. 

Casey Griffiths: Now, we talked about this a little bit before we started recording, but the reason why we did our session at MHA was because a theory was going around that John Taylor and Willard Richards were involved in Joseph Smith’s death, which is strange, to say the least. That’s kind of like saying Mary Todd Lincoln assassinated Abraham Lincoln based on the sources, but I thought maybe briefly, can you comment on that theory, that John Taylor and Willard Richards played a role in the death? 

Sam Weston: Well, the evidence that some of these people are bringing up just does not fit. They’re making stuff up. Instead of having two guns in the room, there’s all of a sudden four guns, and most of them are single-shots, and to have, what, four, twelve, thirteen—thirteen or fourteen shots shot in that room by those four guns is impossible unless they stop to reload them every time. And they also—why would the mob wait outside while you’re in there shooting? 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. 

Sam Weston: If the mob—we know the mob was there. We have so many details account of the mob there. Why would they wait for all this to take place? Why wouldn’t any of the mob mention this? Especially the mob members that were on trial for the murder, why wouldn’t they say, well, we didn’t do it. John and Willard killed him. There’s just so many flaws in this. It’s just—they’ve got an agenda, and it’s—you can poke holes in it all day long. It just doesn’t work. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. The biggest hole, really, is that idea of the mob just has to disappear for something for this to occur, and the mob just kind of conveniently is gone when Willard says the whole thing happens in two minutes. Like, it was very quick. 

Sam Weston: Oh, just, just wait a minute. We’re going to kill these guys, but then you can come in and do what you want. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. Well, let me ask you one more thing that just came to mind: One of the persistent stories told, and I think this comes from the trial, is that after Joseph fell out the window, what happened to him there? And it ranges from really wild stuff, like a guy went to decapitate him and a beam of light appeared and froze him, to more mundane stuff, like Joseph smiled at the mob before he was killed. What do you know about what happens to Joseph after he falls from the window? 

Sam Weston: Well, I don’t think any of us really know, but there’s conflicting accounts. Some accounts says he jumped out the window. Some accounts said he hung on the window ledge for a while. Other accounts say he was dead when he hit the ground, and other accounts says he was alive, picked up, leaned against the well, and then he was shot execution-style. Some say somebody came in to try and put a bayonet into him, then pulled the gun away and left the bayonet sticking in him, and—but a lot of the—like, the flash of light that, comes from William Daniels’ account, The Most Correct Account of the Murders of General Joseph and Hyrum Smith. 

Casey Griffiths: Right, and you’re not saying it’s the most correct: That’s the actual title of the pamphlet.

Sam Weston: That’s the pamphlet. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah, The Most Correct Account. 

Sam Weston: That came out in 1845, and it was published under the name of John Taylor, which is not—he had nothing to do with it, I don’t believe. William Daniels, in his account, says after Joseph fell and was laying there by the well, a guy came out of the crowd with his sleeves and pants rolled up with a pewter fife and was going to hit Joseph in the head, some say he was going to decapitate him, until this flash of light came out and stopped him. The men in the firing squad were like statues, and they had to be carried away from the scene. So according to William Daniels, who was a witness for the prosecution—they tore his booklet apart, his eyewitness account. They tore it apart. But even William Daniels says—the William Daniels account was actually written by another person, and his name will come to me in a minute, but he says, this person took it. Most everything’s true, but he embellished it a lot. And so as far as the flash of light, we have a lot of early paintings from the 1800s that show this flash of light at the jail. There’s even people in their diaries and journals says there was a flash of light that happened at that time. Whether it was lightning, we know it was raining and storming that day, or it was light, most early members of the church believed that story up until the early 1900s. It kind of went out of fashion. I don’t know. I could believe it. I could see the Lord trying to preserve Joseph’s body from mutilation, but I don’t know. 

Casey Griffiths: So there were people besides William Daniels who said that that happened, or were any of them actually there? There were eyewitnesses? 

Sam Weston: Yeah, there was a young boy by the name of Owen Grafton who was sitting on the fence, and he watched this whole thing. He says, I left before Joseph’s body was shot or killed. I was there when he fell out of the window, but he remembers a single flash of light shortly after he left. 

Casey Griffiths: Huh. 

Sam Weston: And I think there’s some other diaries. I can’t put my name on the person that wrote them, but there’s other diaries that mention that. 

Casey Griffiths: So that’s one of those things that we can’t for sure say didn’t happen, but it doesn’t seem likely, given the timeline that Willard Richards and John Taylor lay out. 

Sam Weston: I think about this person that comes out with a fife and tries to hit Joseph in the head and claims he’s the son of Lilburn Boggs. He’s defending his father’s attack. I don’t believe that kind of stuff. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Interesting. Well, I want to thank you for putting this all together, and obviously you’ve done some great research, and I just appreciate you. You’re the guy I call when I have questions about Carthage Jail, and I’ve asked you some pretty specific questions. Maybe we could just finish by me asking you, you’ve done some intensive study of the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum. How has this affected your testimony of Joseph and Hyrum as prophets of God and witnesses of Jesus Christ?

Sam Weston: You know, studying the life of Joseph and Hyrum and everything they went to, I think—what is it? Joseph endured, what, 250 trials or legal actions in his lifetime? I’ve been sued once, and it lasted nine months, and it was like hell. I can’t imagine him going through this if he didn’t believe what had happened to him was true. I could just see him say, yeah, I made it all up. I’m out of here. And even in the jail that day, he knew he was going to die. Why would he go through all that if he just made this up? It’s increased my testimony immensely. Joseph and Hyrum had to seal their testimony with their blood to make this whole story believable, I think, you know? If you were a fraud, you wouldn’t die for that. Joseph wasn’t a rich man. He didn’t have a lot of things that—he wasn’t living the life of leisure because of this. You know, he struggled every minute of his life. 

Casey Griffiths: Yeah. Well, thank you for that, and thank you for your great, great work, and thanks for joining us.

Sam Weston: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. 

Scott Woodward: Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. This concludes our series on the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. We hope you enjoyed it. And if you’re enjoying Church History Matters overall, we’d appreciate it if you could take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, and comment on the podcast. That makes us easier to find. Today’s episode was produced by Scott Woodward and edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. And while we try very hard to be historically and doctrinally accurate in what we say on this podcast, please remember that all views expressed in this and every episode are our views alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Scripture Central or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.