Netflix’s ‘Murder Among the Mormons’: tale of a dark soul

Above: A recreated scene from the three-part Netflix documentary "Murder Among the Mormons" (Photo: Netflix)

Miniseries review: "Murder Among the Mormons," directed by Jared Hess and Tyler Measom, featuring Dorie Hofmann Olds, Shannon Flynn. Streaming on Netflix.

What with the recent death of Joseph Duncan, not to mention the various mass shootings that have occurred over the past few weeks, the question rises yet again of what motivates someone to commit murder.

For those of you who need to be reminded, Duncan is the guy who admitted to the 2005 killing of four people, including 9-year-old Dylan Groene, and of kidnapping both Dylan and his 8-year-old sister Shasta. Duncan, who ended up being sentenced to death, died March 28th of brain cancer in an Indiana federal penitentiary.

The larger question of why anyone would perform such an act – Duncan’s crimes being particularly heinous – has been explored in any number of psychological studies. But, too, it makes up a whole genre of movie projects, not to mention miniseries offerings from both cable TV channels and streaming services. Case in point: the Netflix miniseries “Murder Among the Mormons,” a three-episode study of the events involving a series of deadly Salt Lake City bombings in 1985.

That title, which is what co-directors Jared Hess and Tyler Measom gave to their project, is titillating in and of itself. As author Jon Krakauer and others have made clear, violence isn’t exactly unknown to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In his 2003 nonfiction book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” Krakauer focuses on two brothers who committed murder ostensibly because one of them had received a “revelation” from God. Krakauer also cites both the shooting death of Church founder Joseph Smith in 1844 and the infamous 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre in which a group of Mormons and Paiute Indians attacked a wagon train of non-Mormons and ended up killing between 120 and 140 of the travelers.

From this, one could conceivably expect that a miniseries titled “Murder Among the Mormons” would tie the church itself with the 1985 bombings that took the lives of two people and seriously injured a third. But the link turns out to be only tangential.

Instead, what Hess and Measom end up doing is giving us a lengthy, involved look at a man – some describe him as a genius, though it’s fairly clear that he’s somewhat of a sociopath – who found a way to take his talents and fool everyone around him, from his own family to LDS Church elders, in one of the cleverest con schemes ever devised. And it was only when he was on the verge of discovery that that same man turned to violence.

The man in question is Mark Hofmann. Raised in the LDS Church, Hofmann showed early promise as a Mormon scholar. He achieved fame for his ability to find ancient documents, many pertaining to early LDS Church history. And for a time, while carrying on a normal life – getting married, fathering four children – he made a living by selling such documents, a number of them to LDS Church elders.

Then, in October of 1985, the bombings rocked Salt Lake City. One killed a prominent rare-documents collector, and the other the wife of another collector. Shortly afterward, a third explosion seemed to target Hofmann himself.

At first, it looks as if the church itself was complicit in the bombings as some of the documents Hofmann had uncovered directly conflict with traditional LDS teachings. But, as it turns out, Hofmann had faked everything. His skills as a forger, many of which he developed by himself, had allowed him to create documents that fooled everyone who saw them. One was a fake letter from an early church elder that claimed Joseph Smith had been led to the famous gold plates he’d found in a field not by an angel – but by a white salamander.

In debt, yet on the verge of making a million-dollar deal, Hofmann was afraid that his life was crashing down around him. So he targeted the men he thought would discover his forgeries. He also considered suicide, though wasn’t successful.

Hess and Measom unfold all this in an intentional non-chronological manner. They begin with the bombings, then move back and forth in time to create a sense of drama, making Hofmann’s story a mystery that they crack over the three near-one-hour-long episodes. They interview a range of those involved in the investigation, from Hofmann’s wife and friends to the Salt Lake detectives and prosecutors who worked the case. And they augment all this with a lot of background footage of Salt Lake City itself, drawing the obvious connection between Hofmann and the church that he tried so hard to take advantage of.

Hofmann refused to cooperate with the filmmakers, so his motivation comes only in the recorded interviews that he gave, both at the time of his arrest and later. And it is through those alone that we get some sense of his purpose: He wanted to destroy people’s faith in the church, and he didn’t care who got hurt while he did it. The mystery of “Murder Among the Mormons” is no more complicated than that.

The mystery of Mark Hofmann, by contrast, remains locked deep within his own dark soul.