Mormon Stories 1406: Sandra Tanner - Reflections on Mark Hofmann & "Murder Among the Mormons" Pt 2

The Hofmann Documentary Gap: What Netflix's "Murder Among the Mormons" Left Out of the Historical Record

When Netflix released Murder Among the Mormons in 2021, the three-part documentary became the definitive visual account of how forger Mark Hofmann deceived the LDS Church, killed two people, and upended Mormon historical scholarship. Yet according to Sandra Tanner, a pioneering researcher who documented Hofmann's deceptions alongside her late husband Gerald, the filmmakers faced a consequential constraint: approval from the Church required editorial trade-offs that left crucial testimony on the cutting room floor. In a recent Mormon Stories interview, Tanner reflects on what the documentary accomplished, and what remained untold.

The question her remarks raise is deceptively simple but historically significant: When an institution cooperates with documentary filmmakers by providing archival footage, does that cooperation inherently shape what story gets told? And more broadly, what responsibility do historians and producers bear when they must choose between narrative completeness and institutional access?

The Trade-Off Between Access and Narrative Depth

The documentary's production required extensive cooperation from the LDS Church's media archive (KSL). According to Tanner's account on Mormon Stories, the filmmakers originally proposed a six-part series but received approval for only three episodes. This constraint shaped every editorial decision that followed.

Tanner observed that maintaining enough institutional goodwill to secure that archival footage likely required the filmmakers to adopt a more neutral tone than they might otherwise have chosen. The documentary needed to remain palatable to Church leadership, a reasonable calculus for accessing irreplaceable news footage from the 1980s, but one with real historical costs.