The Netflix limited series Murder Among the Mormons offers a true-crime retrospective on a trio of bombings in 1985 Salt Lake City. Interspersing fresh interviews, era news footage, and impressively compelling re-enactments, the series is a gripping, pacey whodunnit that plunges viewers into the grey market world of religious document dealing and the eerily fascinating psychology of a criminal mind.
The series’ three episodes are structured like an investigative thriller.
The first focuses on the details of the explosions and quickly pivots to the controversy surrounding the so-called “Salamander Letter,” a document that purports to be early evidence that Joseph Smith discovered the golden plates of the Book of Mormon not after being led by an angel, as traditionally believed, but through the guidance of a lizard-like woodland creature.
The connection between these topics is Mark Hofmann, the survivor of the third bomb whose discovery of the letter might have made him a target of religious zealots who deemed him a threat to the credibility of Mormonism.
(If you think you might watch the series, you might like to stop reading here, as what follows is pretty much nonstop spoilers.)
We find in the second episode that the Salamander Letter was, in fact, a Hofmann forgery. It took a significant amount of investigative work to discover the extent of Hofmann’s fraud – the sequence on the forensics of detecting forgeries (and how successful Hofmann was at duping the experts) is particularly engrossing.
But when indisputable evidence eventually comes to light, Hofmann confesses to everything. Following this guilty plea, the third episode attempts to probe the psyche of a killer.
It is a fascinating watch.
Apparently as a teen Hofmann became skeptical of the religious tradition he had been raised in and became enamoured by the thrill of finding he could lie and get away with it. These developments gradually escalated into a career of forging documents which cast doubt upon the Mormon Church.
Long story short, after gaining some significant financial success and even some minor celebrity, Hofmann began to fear his ploy might be exposed. Then at the brink of his biggest ever document deal, he started planting bombs.
As part of his plea bargain – and perhaps what won him life in prison rather than the electric chair – Hofmann agreed to divulge everything, from his forgery procedures and conman business dealings to his homicidal thought processes.
Notable amongst these last, we learn, was a slight hesitancy while putting together the bombs: what if it turns out he’s wrong and there is, in fact, a God? In other words, blowing some people up, he thought, sounded like less of a good idea if there would indeed someday be something like a Final Judgement.
But he did not believe that.
While on one hand his horrifying actions might be diagnosed as the result of a sociopathic deficiency in empathy, from another angle they might also be considered merely the grisly climax to an uninterrupted line of logic.
Put another way, Mark Hofmann murdered because it seemed useful and he could not come up with any overriding reason not to.
Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics about Hofmann throughout the entire ordeal is how calm and rational he is. He was clearly not a foaming-at-the-mouth psychotic, but a soft-spoken, generally liked, geeky kind of guy.
Clearly this does not demonstrate that atheism leads inevitably to homicide, but it just might suggest how, for a certain personality type, it removes certain fundamental impediments.
Mark Hofmann built his life upon a stack of lies, and when it looked like his successful career of forgery was about to topple, he reasoned, quite rightly, that somebody’s life was about to end.
He also preferred, quite naturally, that it not be his.
So he built some bombs.