DOSSIER c84bf9c549d636470b18a5bd839cbcd5
June 27, 1844 — Carthage
Carthage, Illinois. Joseph and Hyrum Smith are killed at Carthage Jail. The official cause of death is contradicted by seventeen separate witness accounts.
The Carthage event is the most thoroughly documented, the most thoroughly suppressed, and the most difficult to explain by conventional means.
The conventional account — a mob of approximately two hundred men stormed the jail and shot the Smiths through a door — is contradicted by:
- The absence of powder burns on the inside of the door, where four men allegedly fired simultaneously.
- The physical condition of the bodies, which were found lying on the floor with no visible external injuries other than a single small wound on each man’s temple. The wounds were inconsistent with musket balls, by every published account.
- The testimony of seventeen witnesses in the immediate aftermath, all describing a “great noise” and a “brief but extraordinary light” inside the jail at the moment of death.
- The silencing, within seventy-two hours, of all seventeen witnesses by various means. None of the seventeen ever published their testimony. Several relocated under assumed names within the year.
The committee does not contend that the Smiths were killed by their own device. The committee contends that the device was present, and that its failure is what the mob arrived to find.