I’ve just watched the TV miniseries “Murder Among the Mormons”. I was disappointed in many ways, but it was really well done. No spoilers in this post, due to mouse-over. 
But I’m curious if anyone else saw this and would like to talk about it.
Wife and I watched. I went into it remembering just the basic facts. We enjoyed it. Why do you say it was well made, but disappointing?
I didn’t know the basic facts. This was a new story to me. And at the very beginning, this guy showed up and finds documents that are too good to be true. And not one or two, but a bunch. So I thought it was going to be a story about a forger. But then the narrative went hard into, "the Mormon hierarchy is trying to hide these real, embarrassing documents about the history of the church. (And i don’t even see them as being all that embarrassing). But it turned out i was right all along.
And it turned out the Mormon hierarchy was moderately responsible about the whole thing.
Also, Hoffman turned out to be incredibly evil. He killed some woman out of total indifference to whether she or anyone else might die. And had a total lack of remorse.
And finally, they gave SO much weight to polygraphs. I’m not even a little surprised that a guy who had no emotional engagement with killing people could fake out a polygraph.
But i did think the show was well done. And real stories don’t always turn out the way you want them to.
I’ll have to watch this. I was living in Salt Lake City as this unfolded, and was fascinated by the whole thing. I’ve got about four books about the case.
What really amazed me was Hofmann’s deep knowledge about the documents and the psychology of the people he was selling them to. As an example, his first big forgery was the “Anthon Transcript”. The transcript was described in early documents, but not reproduced. There was a document in the hands of the RLDS that was called the Anthon transcript, but which didn’t resemble the description, so it’s long bothered Church historians.
Hofmann produced a document that did resemble the description, but which used the characters in the existing “Anthon transcript”. But it made the existing transcript look as if it was a poor copy of his forgery. Then he sealed up the manuscript, folded, between two pages in an old family bible that were stuck together with what he later admitted was colored Elmer’s glue.
He sold it to the LDS church. They probably didn’t examine it as carefully as they could have. They published copies of the new “discovery” and distributed them at the Museum of Church History next to Temple Square in Salt Lake City. I still have my copy of it.
After that, Hofmann said he was amazed he’d gotten away with it. He produced a series of documents after that, all exactly what the Church thought might be out there, based on known LDS history, much of it (like the “White Salamander” letter) things that they’d rather keep out of view. Hofmann, like any good scam artist, knew exactly what his marks were looking for, and gave it to them. For a price.
The kicker is that he didn’t only forge Mormon Church documents. He forged early American colonial stuff, too, like the Oath of a Freeman. It’s suspected that there’s a lot of Hofmann forgeries still floating around in the world of high-priced document collectors. He told about the LDS forgeries, but not about everything else.
I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s a mix of contemporary footage and modern interviews.
The weirdest part to me is the bystander who was the first person to come upon Hoffman after he bombed himself. He took out his consecrated oil and blessed Hoffman and commanded him to live.
I had never heard of this case before watching the Netflix documentary. Now I’m reading one of the books about Hofmann, The Poet and the Murderer.
Hofmann’s forgery skills were astounding. He created a phony Emily Dickinson manuscript that fooled practically everybody—Harvard University Press was actually planning to include Hofmann’s fake Dickinson poem in their edition of her complete works. But his skills weren’t only technical; he was very adept at figuring out what kinds of documents people desperately wanted to have. He realized that when people needed to believe that a manuscript was real, they wouldn’t be as careful or skeptical.
I wanted more technical info about the third bomb. The first two bombs were pipe bombs, with nails strapped to them. Detonated at close range, I’d expect death to be certain. Yet Hofmann survived the third bomb, with no apparent long term injuries beyond the loss of a fingertip. I expected the show to describe the bomb, where it detonated, and where Hofmann was.
Anyone here know?
I enjoyed it. My prior knowledge was rather limited. Beyond the basics, I had forgotten most of the never-very-extensive details I had once known. The line-up of people being interviewed was rather impressive and their testimony was effectively combined with the archive footage.
If there was an angle they could perhaps have done more to develop, it was the fallout for those involved. There was a definite sense from some of the interviews that they had found it difficult to come to terms with what had happened. Personal betrayal and challenges to one’s religious faith are a potent mix.
It was also a little fuzzy about his motive with the third bomb, probably because no one (maybe not even Hoffman) knows. But from a story-telling perspective that was a little frustrating.
I actually thought they did a pretty good job of that one. Again, they were limited by what people were willing to tell them. But you got a sense of how it affected his wife, the guy who was out $185k, and his closest friend. Some of those interviews were pretty personal.
I think they were trying not to hurt any of the people they interviewed, and i was happy for that. But it did limit the scope a little.
I haven’t finished watching, but I knew about the case from John Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven”. What is interesting to me is that the scheme seems foolproof on paper- sell the church forgeries of embarrassing documents, the forger gets large payments, the church hides the documents in a vault, never to be revealed, so there is no chance of getting caught.
In reality, the documents weren’t buried by the church, so hooray for honesty and ethics, I guess.
The salamander letter wasn’t buried, because Hofmann made sure it was publicized before the Mormon Church took possession of it. I think the intention was to bury the McLellin collection. but maybe he was going to try the same game with that. The documentary presents evidence that Hofmann may have had reasons to resent the Mormon Church.
Hofmann seems to have taken steps to make sure some of his other embarrassing forgeries were known of outside the Church hierarchy.
But also, my sense is that his scheme would have worked if he had managed his money more carefully, and also if the sale of “The Oath of the Freeman” hadn’t been delayed by taking a lot longer to authenticate than he expected. It sounds like he basically ran out of time and couldn’t produce the McLellin collection in time to save his ass, so he decided to murder some people to buy time.
In hindsight, I think the way the doc staged it out as a murder mystery was kind of boring, especially with a full confession in the offing. I think I would have enjoyed a chronology of Hoffman’s life culminating in the murders a lot more. The forgery and religious aspects of the story are a lot more interesting than the bombings.
I haven’t seen the miniseries, but I am familiar with the case.
The third bomb went off accidentally, in Hofmann’s car (a Toyota MR-2) as he was taking it out of the backseat to deploy it. The ATF expert (one Jerry Taylor) knew that Hofmann was the bomber as soon as he saw the bomb site. The blast pattern and the configuration of the car (along with Hofmann’s injuries) indicated he was handling the bomb when it went off. He had told investigators that the bomb had detonated when he got into the car, portraying himself as a victim.
When Taylor and the other investigators confronted Hofmann in his hospital bed with this, his vital-sign indicators (heart rate, blood pressure) went nuts, causing Taylor to remark that it was a perfect lie detector test.
Yes. It’s pretty clear that Hofmann was trying to come up with forgeries of documents that were known or suspected to have existed, but which would be embarrassing to the Church, so they’d be anxious to buy them and sit on them. as I said – Hofmann really knew and practiced the con man’s game.
But there was something else. As you say, he then publicized the item, which pretty much subverts the point of the Church buying it to keep it quiet. It doesn’t make logical sense, but Hofmann kept doing it. It really does seem as if he had something against the Mormon Church, or at least its hierarchy.
What’s amazing is that they kept buying the stuff he produced, even though he’d done this before. But we’ve seen that sort of behavior elsewhere.
I think the problem with the McLellin collection was that it was simply too much material to forge believably all at once. Promising that was a mistake. I don’t know if Hofmann didn’t think they’d take it seriously, or if he spoke before really thinking about it, or if he hoped he could parcel it out a few documents at a time. But it looks as if the strain of coming up with too much material all at once drove him to desperate measures.
That is certainly the conclusion of the miniseries.
fwiw, his father, an uber-religious Mormon, comes across as likely to create a pretty unpleasant household for an inquisitive boy.