EXHIBIT B: TESTIMONY OF ABEL CHASE

Statement:

"Palmyra, Wayne Co., N.Y., May 2, 1879

"I, Abel D. Chase, now living in Palmyra, Wayne Co., N.Y., make the following statement regarding my early acquaintance with Joseph Smith and incidents about the production of the so-called Mormon Bible. I was well acquainted with the Smith family, frequently visiting the Smith boys and they me. I was a youth at the time from twelve to thirteen years old, having been born Jan. 19, 1814, at Palmyra, N.Y. During some of my visits at the Smiths, I saw a stranger there who they said was Mr. Rigdon. He was at Smith's several times, and it was in the year of 1827 when I first saw him there, as near as I can recollect. . . .
"Abel D. Chase signed the above statement in our presence, and he is known to us and the entire communi-ty here as a man whose word is always the exact truth and above any possible suspicion.
Pliny T. Sexton
J.H. Gilbert" (citation #32)

Investigative Questions:

1. How reliable, or testible, or of value, is the brief and vague statement by Abel Chase when the only specific details regarding Rigdon's alleged visit to the Smith's are his name and the exact year (1827)?
2. Abel said that he saw Rigdon "several times" and "some time after the tales were circulated that young Joe had found or dug from the earth a BOOK OF PLATES." Since the so-called "tale" began circulating around September 23, 1827 (there are a variety of sources to confirm this, including, if memory serves me correctly, statements made by Willard Chase, Abel's older brother), wouldn't the "some time after" place the supposed sightings towards the end of year, which would put Abel's claim in conflict with both the Rigdon and Smith time-lines? Yet the Enigma authors went on to knowingly and falsely claim that "for in every instance without exception, where a witness or witnesses have claimed that Rigdon and Smith were together, a gap in Rigdon's chronology occurs which allows sufficient time for him to have visited New York. " As they have also said, "every liar slips up somewhere (see Enigma p. 490), and it appears that both Chase and the Enigma authors slipped up here.
3. Given that Abel's statement was made in regards to "the production of the so-called Mormon Bible," why did he disjointedly interject about the alleged visit from Rigdon in 1827, without explaining the relevance of this to the supposed "production" of the "Mormon Bible"? One wonders if he was just writing what he was told or asked to write (see more on this below)?

4. Is the reliability of Abel's statement (or at least the portion dealing directly with the alleged visit of Rigdon) diminished by the fact that after 52 years of silence on the matter, he would finally come forward at the time that he did--at a time when Gilbert and Cobb were attempting to make the pre-1830 Rigdon/Smith connection so as to under-gird a major weakness in the Spalding theory? Dale Broadhurst notes, "People like James T. Cobb seem to have solicited a rather narrow sort of testimony -- and when helpers like Gilbert entered into the process of compiling and recording such testimony, I suspect that the results were further refined -- and by 'refined' I do not necessarily mean 'made better' or 'more reliable.'"

5. Is the reliability of Abel's statement, which he admitted was "as near as [he could] recollect," diminished by other statements he is recorded to have made, such as:

   • "I am sixty-seven years old. Knew the Smiths; the old man was a cooper. I was young and don't remember only general character."(William Kelley Interviews, Saints Herald, 1 June 1881, p. 165)

   • "I was young, and never went where they were. Don't know anything about it but what I have heard. If you will see Mr. Guilbert [Gilbert] at Palmyra, he can tell you more about it than any person else; he knows it all, and has been getting everything he could for years to publish against them; he was in with [Pomeroy] Tucker in getting out Tucker's work." (This statement was made during an interview with Wm. Kelley, and it was made in specific reference to the so-called money-digging holes supposedly dug by Joseph Smith, but I believe it also has application here as well.)

6. Is the reliability of Abel's statement diminished by the following statement made by Lorenzo Saunders about Abel Chase: "Four years ago I went to Palmyra to see my Brothers, and I met Gilbert.  He wanted to know if I remembered seeing Sidney Rigdon in that neighborhood previous to 1830 when he come preaching the Mormon Bible.  He said Abel Chase testified that he thought he saw Rigdon before that time, but was not certain." (William Kelley Interviews, Saints Herald, 1 June 1881, p. 165)

7. What are the odds that you or I, at the age of 65, would suddenly recall a chance sighting, at the age of only 13, of someone we didn't know, who happened to be at a friends house--let alone remember the name of that person years after it was supposedly told to us?

8. Why did Abel Chase not mention the Rigdon sightings to anyone during all the previous years he lived in Palmyra--particularly when Howe and Hurlbut and other Spalding theorists were making their investigations during the early 1830's, or when he signed the general Manchester statement (a slander against Joseph Smith and his family) in 1833?

9. Dale Broadhurst asks, "Perhaps the biggest question in regard to Mr. Chase's credibility is how (and why) his statement ended up in Wymetal's book? That volume is certainly not regarded as anything like the epitome of objective reporting (though serious historions do occasionally quote selected portions of the text conditionally -- as I recall). Was Chase's statement a product of James T. Cobb's soliciting testimony in the later 1870s? Cobb was writing what he thought would be a grand anti-Mormon treatise -- but it was never published. His materials ended up with Charles A. Shook, Schroeder, Patterson, Wymetal, etc. and were published piecemeal. All of this breaks the chain of evidence gathering and may cloud certain issues here."