What Latter-day Saint history experts thought of Murder Among the Mormons msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Mark Hofmann’s notorious and deadly legacy will always be inextricably tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but the impact of his machinations spread far outside of Utah and the church. The new documentary about the case,
Murder Among the Mormons, was one of the most-watched shows on Netflix the week it dropped. The three-part series explores how Hofmann fooled a nationwide community of scholars, investigators and collectors, the bombings that killed two people and, finally, the mistakes he made that led to his capture.
The documentary makers, Jared Hess (
Napoleon Dynamite) and Tyler Measom (
An Honest Liar), interviewed former LDS Church Historian Richard Turley for the true crime series. When I spoke to him following its release Turley described himself as a “fly on the wall” during the Hofmann bombing and forgery investigations. He later wrote a book detailing his observations called
Don Verdean, which starred
Sam Rockwell as a phony “Biblical Archaeologist” was “100%” inspired by the Hofmann case. For Measom, a documentary filmmaker whose films include
Sons of Perdition, this project was right up his alley.
“I caught wind that Jared was interested in it as well,” Measom says. “So we had a sushi lunch, and right there at that time, we said, ‘Let’s do it together.’”
The filmmakers wanted to tell the story of
Murder Among the Mormons from the point of view of those who were there. “That was the most important aspect,” Hess says, “being able to interview the people that were there on the day of the bombings, that lived and worked with Mark, in the years before, just explain how they were deceived and they were affected and how their livelihoods were destroyed.”
Murder Among the Mormons : What the Mormon Church Has Said About the Netflix Doc
On 3/8/21 at 9:26 AM EST
Murder Among the Mormons is streaming now on Netflix, and tells the story of forger Mark Hofmann, known for creating fake documents purporting to be from the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) as well as a series of three bombings that killed two people.
As a Vox review of the Netflix true crime series points out, [
Murder Among the Mormons] wants to portray Mormonism as an intimidating shadow that loomed over the events that unfolded in Salt Lake City in 1985, when the two deaths occurred and when the church was embroiled in controversy over the events surrounding the crime.
A handheld camera wobbles and zooms in on Mark Hofmann sitting on the floor of his 1985 living room, bouncing a baby on his knee as he watches a news story about himself. We hear the voice of longtime Utah TV news anchor Randall Carlisle delivering the headline, “the police theory that Mark Hofmann was forging documents was a real surprise to the community of scholars and collectors who worked with Hofmann.”
The Netflix documentary series
Murder Among the Mormons includes the scene from one of Hofmann’s many home videos. The three-part series reached the top 10 on Netflix this week. Through interviews and news reports, the documentary unfolds the rise of Hofmann as a prolific purveyor of rare historical documents, the subsequent bombing that killed two people and his ultimate exposure as a forger and fraudster.