Murder Among the Mormons (2021): Diving Headfirst Into the Psyche of a Monster
Yeah, we know we said “amongst” in the episode, shush.
So here we are; another day, another beautiful opportunity to watch a docu-series about the absolute worst of humanity. And when I say the worst, I absolutely mean the worst. Murder Among the Mormons, a brand new series on Netflix created by Jared Hess (Napoleon Dynamite) and Tyler Measom (Jesus Town, USA), hones in on the nigh-unbelievable case of Mark Hofmann and his place in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I’ll stop here and urge you to watch the documentary if you haven’t already. The three-hour series is very much designed for a “big reveal” moment, so I encourage you to experience it for yourself. If you’d rather not, then, well, spoiler alerts galore ahead.
What’s the deal with Mark Hofmann?
The documentary first details Hofmann’s career in rare document procurement, for which he seemed to have an uncanny talent. Over the course of his career, he unearthed dozens (hundreds, even) of rare documents allegedly penned by the likes of George and Martha Washington, Emily Dickinson, Betsy Ross— the list goes on. But his claim to fame was nestled within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church.
His “big break” into document dealing came in 1980 in the form of the Anthon Transcript, which was thought to be the earliest known Mormon document written in founder Joseph Smith’s own hand. From there, his star continued to rise with each high-profile document, diary, and book he found.
Okay, magic historical document man. Got it.
What could possibly go wrong?
Turns out, a lot! Controversy found Hofmann in 1984 with the apparent discovery of what would later be known as the Salamander Letter, a document written by Martin Harris documenting the discovery of the golden plates that contained the original text of the Book of Mormon. In the letter, Harris recounts the event as substantially different from Joseph Smith’s version of events: instead of the Angel Moroni, a white salamander led Smith to the plates. It was also implied that Smith was forced to perform a ritual with the remains of his brother to collect the plates. The letter suggested folk magic rather than divinity in Joseph Smith’s foundation of the church, and the consequences were severe. The church, which had a history of collecting and archiving “sensitive” documents, feared that public knowledge of the Salamander Letter would lead to loss of faith in the church and its teachings.
Steve Christensen, a church historian who felt that Mormonism sorely needed intellectual transparency, purchased the letter from Hofmann for $40,000 and donated it to the church. In turn, Gordon B. Hinckley, the president of the church at the time, released the letter to the public with the caveat that it could have been forged to hurt the church’s reputation.
He had also been fortunate enough to come across a treasured document known as Oath of a Freeman, the first document ever printed in colonial North America. After testing the document’s paper and finding it to be authentic, he began negotiating its sale for well over a million dollars.
Not quite a year later, Hofmann made another discovery which, to many, threatened the church far more than the Salamander Letter ever could. It was a group of documents and journals called the McLellin Collection, allegedly written and kept by William McLellin, an early leader in the Latter-Day Saints movement. Hofmann claimed that the collection included a letter from Joseph Smith’s brother, who claimed that he was the one who was visited by the Angel Moroni and led to the golden plates.
This was, obviously, devastating to the church’s credibility. Joseph Smith was (and is) the bedrock of the Book of Mormon and Mormonism as a whole. Though the church wanted to keep the information within the McLellin Collection a secret, word inevitably got out and ended up crumbling a good number of people’s relationship to Mormonism. The situation was quickly unraveling.
Let me guess - the church bought the collection?
We have a winner! Sort of.
Steve Christensen once again reached out on behalf of the church and arranged to buy the collection from Hofmann and Alvin Rust, a rare coin and document collector who had a fairly close business relationship to Hofmann. Rust had fronted the $185,000 Hofmann needed to purchase the McLellin Collection initially, so he remained involved in the interest of reclaiming that incredibly substantial loan.
Christensen, acting in the church’s interest, offered to buy the collection for $300,000. The church later claimed that Hofmann had offered to donate the documents, which may or may not be true. In the end, it didn’t matter.
On October 19, 1985, two bombs were detonated in Salt Lake City, Utah that killed Steve Christensen in his office and Kathy Sheets, the wife of one of Christensen’s business associates, outside her home. The bombs had been disguised as packages, each wrapped in nails to ensure the victims would not survive. The following day, another bomb was detonated, this time in Mark Hofmann’s car. He was extracted from the wreckage alive, but severely injured.
Who would want to kill Mark Hoffmann and other known Mormon historians?
What an interesting question. It happens to be the same one investigators had in mind!
With Hofmann alive and recovering, investigators began searching for links between the victims and for potential motives. The investigation remained disappointing and frustrating for them as each lead turned into a dead end. The case may have never been solved at all if it hadn’t been for one eyewitness who saw the bomber in Steve Christensen’s building, holding a package bearing Christensen’s name and wearing a green letterman jacket.
Immediately, friends and associates of Hofmann connected the jacket to Hofmann himself and reported their suspicions to authorities. A search of Hofmann’s home revealed very little, but a receipt under a pseudonym led investigators to an engraving shop where they found Hofmann had commissioned engraving plates for Oath of a Freeman. The investigation pivoted toward a possible forgery case, and Hofmann’s house of cards came fluttering to the ground.
How did he manage to forge these documents? Weren’t they pronounced genuine?
They were, indeed. Amazingly, Hofmann admitted that most of his document “discoveries” were forgeries (with a few genuine finds here and there).
His system was, in a word, ingenious. Hofmann harvested blank sheets from books within the age range of the document he was forging. He then cooked an old acidic ink recipe from scratch, mimicked the handwritings of famous figured from authentic documents, and exposed the finished drafts to high levels of ozone and used a vacuum to suck the ink to the other side of the paper to make it appear appropriately aged.
Since the paper was authentic and the ink/pen strokes were indistinguishable from authentic documents, no one had any reason to believe the documents were fake. In the end, the investigation hired two document authenticators who did what even the FBI couldn’t.
The forgeries were so perfect that it took the authenticators weeks to find Hofmann’s slip up. But on all of Hofmann’s documents, they found consistent cracking within the dried ink that would not be present on real historical documents. The ozone exposure Hofmann used to age the paper and ink had the unintended effect of warping and cracking the ink as it dried - the one detail that exposed Hofmann as the fraud he was.
Holy absolute hell.
It’s crazy, right?
So let’s noodle out they “how” and “why.” How could someone do what Hofmann did? Why did it have to escalate to murder?
Mark Hofmann was raised in an extremely strict Mormon household where he was almost certainly emotionally abused by his father. He lost his faith at 14 years old and began forging coins around that time, even managing to pass his work off as genuine. On his Mission trip to England, he kept journals in which he detailed his growing disgust for the Mormon Church and its censorship of information. He grew frustrated that the church seemed more interested in telling convenient lies rather than adapting faith to truth. As a side note, he also began practicing skin resistance techniques to fool lie detector tests during his youth. Just, you know, for fun.
I imagine his foray into professional deception started around this time, but it had obviously been part of him for years by then. He told stories about lying to grade school friends by planning treasure hunts with them, planting jars of coins where he knew they’d be hunting in advance, and pretending to have found the coins the next day. He said he liked the feeling of deceiving others, of knowing he had power over the way things were perceived and, therefore, reality. To him, if something is believed to be genuine by everyone, then, by definition, it must be.
After he got married and had a handful of kids, he began targeting the Mormon Church with his deceptions. He forged the Anthon Transcript, the Salamander Letter, and most of his more famous discoveries. His goals in those forgeries were twofold: make money, and destroy the church’s reputation by shaking Mormonist practitioners’ faiths.
But things began catching up to him. Hofmann had developed something of an expensive taste in adulthood. He made frequent trips to the east coast, where he indulged in every vice one can imagine. He spent money hand over fist, forcing his family to adapt to a “feast or famine” way of life. And finally, during one of their “famine” phases, Hofmann bit off more than he could chew.
In a mountain of debt and pushed against a wall due to a delay in the sale of Oath of a Freeman, Hofmann fabricated his possession of the McLellin Collection. Not only did he not have the genuine documents, he had not even bothered to forge them. He attempted to broker the sale of the collection, but quickly realized that he was in an impossible situation. He did not have the documents, but he had multiple people waiting for it to manifest. He was going to be found out.
This was when he began constructing bombs. Steve Christensen was a target simply by virtue of his proximity to the sale of the McLellin Collection. Kathy Sheets’ husband, J. Gary Sheets, was chosen as a diversion to provide investigators with a fake motive for the suspect. The third and final bomb was not initially meant for Hofmann, but he later claimed that he decided to take his own life after the first two bombings. I don’t know if I believe him.
After he was found guilty of the murders and sentenced to 5 years to life in prison, he explained his motivations in graphic and disturbingly casual detail to a parole board. His disillusionment with the church and faith in general fueled his belief that life is worthless, and he expressed no remorse at having taken two lives. “I figure no harm done - could’ve died in a car accident. The worthlessness of life, or whatever.”
But his behavior went beyond ambivalence toward life’s value. He viewed his murders and the lives of his victims as a game for his enjoyment. He even admitted that he wired the bomb that killed Kathy Sheets to have a 50% chance of detonating. He also said he didn’t care who was killed by the bomb should it detonate, whether it was an adult, child, or animal. It was simply a matter of impassive curiosity. The only remorse Hofmann ever expressed was for himself and for the fact that his wife was now raising four children alone. At the end of his parole interview, when asked whether he thought he should ever be released from prison, he very casually replied that he should.
Fortunately, the parole board thought differently. He was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. While in prison, he attempted to assassinate the members of the board and one of the document authenticators who discovered his forgery technique, George Throckmorton. Predictably, he expressed no remorse when he was caught. Though Hofmann attempted suicide shortly after his imprisonment, he remains incarcerated to this day (and refused to be interviewed for the documentary series).
I don’t know what to say. How can someone be this way?
It’s a good question, and one we’ve asked so many times about so many people on this podcast. My theory is tenuous, but I strongly believe that monsters don’t come out of a vacuum. I refuse to believe that Hofmann’s repressive and arguably abusive upbringing had nothing to do with his personality and antisocial tendencies. His relishing of deceit and control leads me to believe that he rarely felt in control of his life during his formative years, and I’d venture to guess that he felt extremely betrayed by the church, which had been his whole life from birth. That kind of identity crisis can destroy a person.
A lot of folks rightfully don’t care for the practice of humanizing murderers, and I can see where they come from. He stole two lives and doesn’t even feel bad about it - he’s absolutely a monster. It’s far more productive to take care of the victims and commemorate their lives. After all, lots of people are raised in repressive/abusive households don’t go on to, uh, murder people.
For my part, I’d argue that those folks are both right and not. It’s a grey area, and a really uncomfortable one, especially when our society tends to idolize murderers and prioritize them over their crimes. But I think understanding monsters is vital to creating a world where they don’t exist anymore. When we look to the future, I think it’s most constructive to imagine and build toward a world where we prioritize radical internal and external care - and that has to address the systems and circumstances that create monsters. No one is born evil, but many may be more disposed to behavior outside social graces. Add a little abuse and poor coping mechanisms to those existing dispositions, and you’ve got all the makings of someone who can snap to violence.
On the other hand, it’s impossible to ignore the role white supremacist delusion plays in this kind of violence. Sure, Hofmann’s victims were also white people, but his internalized sense of supremacy was born and stoked by western society’s obsession with individualist signifiers of white manhood. When God was ripped from his life, he was able to replace that God with himself and take lives as he imagined God would. Ultimately, his bad coping mechanisms were characterized by the kind of ego and delusion that white supremacy allows and cultivates.
But enough of all that!
So how’d the documentary do?
Honestly, we both thought it was pretty solid. The editors and directors certainly know how to keep people on the edges of their seats, and the slow reveal of the truth was incredibly satisfying.
On the “con” side, the two directors (one a practicing Mormon and one an ex-Mormon) tried to play a balance between criticizing the church and praising it and ended up doing neither. While I felt that the overall display was satisfying, I felt myself wishing that Measom and Hess had leaned into the very obvious parallel between Hofmann and the Mormon Church. Both rewrite history to fit the narrative they want circulated. Both have placed themselves in places of authority over what people believe. Sure, it’s unequivocally evil that Hofmann used his skills to target others’ faiths, but is it equally as evil that the church does the same thing in reverse? Why or why not? EXPLAIN YOUR ANSWER IN MLA FORMAT, HESS AND MEASOM.
That said, it’s an absolutely wild story that left us both angry and speechless, so I’d say the series was ultimately a success. Remember kids - do your work projects on time, or else you might be driven to murder people with pipe bombs. Oh, wait. No, you won’t. Because you’re not a monster.