This was a crime documentary that I felt went down a different route to earlier Netflix documentaries. If you enjoyed The Night Stalker or the Yorkshire Ripper this one might not be for you.

Murder Among the Mormons follows a man called Mark Hofmann who was a man who did forges of Mormon documents as he was part of the church, but this soon landed him in trouble and he needed to make more money to help with his debt that he had got himself into, living a lavish lifestyle.

He said to certain collectors that he had a group of documents that would provide revelations unfavourable to the Mormon church, however during these negotiations he needed more time so decided to construct the idea of making bombs, how he got to this idea I do not know.

In the end he bombed two people and himself. The first bomb went off in a business building of a document collector and the second went off in a home that accidentally killed the targeted victim’s wife. The third bomb went off in his own car so in some ways you could think that he was a third victim of the attack however it turned out that he was the perpetrator himself.

There was a big moment in the documentary where another man prayed for him to survive this bombing and I can only imagine how terrible that man must feel thinking that he was one of the reasons why this man lived, yet did he really deserve to live with all that he had done to those other people?

This documentary was very in-depth, there was a lot of information being thrown at you through most of it and in my opinion it was quite hard to follow. I feel if you have an interest in the Mormon church or have an interest in this case then you would really enjoy it because it gives you a lot of information, but as a general watcher of crime documentaries this series was just too much for me to be able to take on.

I don’t know too much about the Mormons and so being thrown into this world that I don’t have a lot of understanding of and just having all this information thrown at me about forgers and documents and bombings it was all too much. While it was only three episodes long it felt so much longer because there was so much going on and I found it so hard to keep track.

That isn’t saying that it’s a bad documentary, I don’t think it is, I think what it did to provide insight into this case was really good and it gave away so much information that I feel other documentaries could learn from it (i.e the Madeleine McCann case where it felt more like a come to Portugal advert than a crime case) but for me it just didn’t hold my engagement.

If you have an interest in this crime or you have knowledge of the Mormon church already then I think you would enjoy it. It is a fascinating story and the way that the crime came about happened in a different way to what we normally see, so I think that’s really interesting too, but the amount of information that is given over to the audience was too much too quickly and I feel if I did my own research on the case I would enjoy it more than if I re-watched the show.

What do you think of the Mormon bombings?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding