What true crime adds to crime is the element of fear. Usually, crime shows have some gruesome murders or diabolical plans that take away almost 3 nights of your sleep. Now when the word true is associated with this, we also have the feeling of how what we are seeing on the screen has happened in real life. This just adds to the fear factor almost tenfold. And that is where the popularity of the show kicks in. Now let’s get back to the topic at hand. This true-crime documentary type show will cover the bombing that took place in Salt Lake, Utah which took two lives and left a third heavily injured. It’s going to be a three-part series. One of the major problems of such a show would be the fact that people don’t know much about this topic, we man people who live far away from the location in question. So the show developers have stated that the documentary would run in a way that would help people understand what the incident was. The series is being produced by BBC Studios Production. We have Jared Hess and Tyler Measom at the helm of direction. But if let’s quickly learn a little bit about this incident, feel free to skip this part. It will contain spoilers to the story of Murder Among The Mormons.
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The Incident
It’s been over 35 years that the tragic event of the Salt Lake city bombings took place. On October 15, 1985, two homemade bombs went off that killed two eminent Utahns, Steve Christensen, a financial consultant, and Kathy Sheets, wife of the former’s boss. Both the incidents were well planned by Mark Hofmann, one of the forgers of all time in an attempt to keep his fraudulent practices a secret. The forgery was Hofmann’s only means of living. Starting at the age of 14, he has been producing forged signatures, documents, coins, and photos for years that even the forgery detection machines and handwriting experts failed to identify. His documents were so convincing that he appeared in the Time magazine as the one who discovered the long lost Anthon Transcript, the document of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on which the founder of the church, Joseph Smith had copied Egyptian characters from gold plates. Later on, he appeared in the same magazine after he found out “The Salamander letter”, a letter that narrated how a prophet encountered a white salamander that transformed into a spirit to protect the gold plates.
It was in the early 1980s that Steve Christensen, a document collector became Hofmann’s victim by buying the Salamander Letter for about 40,000 dollars to donate it to the church. Later on, when Christensen became a threat to Hofmann, through which he believed his forgeries would be revealed, he decided to kill him along with Kathy Sheets, who was also his victim, using handmade bombs packed in the forms of couriers and delivered to them. The whole world believed that someone was targeting the CFS Financial Corporation, where Steve Christensen was the former vice president with the president being Kathy Sheets’ husband. But it was on the next day, that a third bomb exploded whose victim, Mark Hofmann was only injured which lead the police to connect this with the previous bombings. This incident is carved in stone for the people of Utah, it has such an unbelievable story behind it. The people behind it have stated that they will do their best to do the story justice and to tell the world about the incident.
Murder Among The Mormons: Release Date
The first trailer for the show is already out. Murder Among The Mormons will release on 3rd March on Netflix. With such an amazing story to tell this sure is a must-watch. Read: Top 10 Netflix Crime Series Streaming Right Now
