Mormon Stories 1409 - Jared Hess and Tyler Measom - Murder Among the Mormons

The Super Bowl of Mormon Podcasting: Three Years Later, "Murder Among the Mormons" Still Divides

John Dehlin opened Mormon Stories episode 1409 by calling it the "Super Bowl of Mormon podcasting." He was half-joking, but the analogy holds. When filmmaker Jared Hess and director Tyler Measom sat down to discuss their Netflix documentary Murder Among the Mormons in 2021, they brought with them the weight of the most explosive true crime story in Latter-day Saint history. Three years after the series dominated Netflix's top ten, the conversation reveals uncomfortable truths about who gets to tell Mormon history, and what happens when the Church cooperates with its critics.

The Long Road to Telling the Hofmann Story

The Mark Hofmann case should have been filmed decades earlier. By 1985, the forger had planted bombs that killed two people in Salt Lake City while flooding the Mormon history market with counterfeit documents designed to undermine the faith's foundational narratives. Yet as Measom discovered while digging through detective Ken Farnsworth's files, Hollywood had been trying to secure the movie rights since the mid-1980s. Dozens of producers had failed.

Hess and Measom's project languished for years. Netflix initially passed. The filmmakers shot interviews on spec between other projects, collecting footage of historians and detectives while waiting for a streamer to bite. When Netflix finally greenlit the three-part series, the directors made a consequential decision: they brought in two California editors, Greg O'Toole and Matt Prekop, who knew nothing about Mormonism. "We don't want to know anything," the editors told Measom. "We just want to come in cold."

This outsider perspective shaped the documentary's most distinctive feature. Rather than narrating the obvious, that Hofmann's Salamander Letter was as fantastical as the golden plates themselves, the film lets the parallels sit there for viewers to catch. Hess cites Billy Wilder's dictum: "Let the audience figure out two plus two and they'll love you for it."