Postmormon Postmortem

In part 2 of Elizabeth Smart, we offer a prequel, going back through the lives of Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Barzee before June 2002: their childhoods, marriages, Mormon lives, family relationships, and the religious system they built before they kidnapped fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart.

We trace Mitchell’s history of violence, sexual abuse allegations and controlling behavior; his return to Mormonism; his years as a high priest, stake high councilor, bishopric counselor, and Salt Lake Temple worker; and his move into Ezra Taft Benson, conspiracy politics, alternative health, the one mighty and strong, the Davidic servant, and celestial plural marriage.

We look at Wanda Barzee’s Mormon upbringing, family history, mental-health problems, music and temple work, and her role in preserving Mitchell’s revelations and helping build the religious world in which Brian became Immanuel David Isaiah and Wanda became Hephzibah.

The episode follows their years of wandering, the Seven Diamonds Plus One society, their attempts to recruit plural wives, The Book of Immanuel David Isaiah, their excommunication in June 2002, and the Mormon Church’s response after their arrest.

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

In 2009, a former U.S. senator told the Mormon Church's Quorum of the Twelve how he got 200 missionary visas approved with one phone call to a foreign ambassador. No one ever asked if it was legal.

Jess and Hannah trace what happened after that 2009 briefing: Gordon Smith's Senate staff called "church broke," the R-1 and EB-4 visa backlogs that leave ordinary missionaries waiting up to five years, and Sister Fanny Clain — a missionary injured in the 2016 Brussels airport bombing while stuck waiting on the exact visa Smith's phone call skipped entirely. In 2016, Mormon Leaks published video of the briefing. In 2017, two advocacy groups filed a formal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act complaint with the DOJ and State Department over Smith's dealings with then-Ambassador Ronen Sen. No investigation has ever been publicly reported. This only makes sense if you grew up Mormon — access has always had a shape, and nobody with the standing to say so out loud ever did.

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

Sixteen questions stand between a Mormon and a wallet-sized card that gets them through the temple doors — but not one of them asks how you treat other people. Jess and Hannah break down every question in the 2026 Mormon temple recommend interview, tracing its history back to 1922 and the 1976 addition of the honesty question (added only after Utah was branded "the fraud capital of the nation"). Then: The Salt Lake Tribune asked 400+ readers what question they'd add — and the answers converged on one glaring gap the church still hasn't addressed. Plus a candid conversation on "worthy" vs. "worthless," Mormon-affinity fraud, and why perfectionism might be the real cost of a compliance-based faith.

SHOW NOTES, including all sources mentioned in this episode, are available on Patreon with a FREE membership. FREE members also get our monthly newsletter. Paid memberships start at $2/month for AD-FREE listening. https://www.patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

What happens when research produces findings Mormon apologists don’t want to hear?

In 2011, Church Historian Marlin Jensen admitted that Mormonism was going through a period of massive apostasy, unlike anything since Kirtland. More than a decade later, faithful Mormon researcher Jeff Strong gathered thousands of responses about why people left the church—and found that the real reasons were church history, social issues, church experience, and distrust of the institution rather than the familiar explanations about laziness, sin, or wanting an easier life.

Then came the apologetic response.

We look at how some faithful Mormon writers responded to Strong’s research, why self-report suddenly becomes suspect when former members explain why they left, and how the same pattern appears in debates over the Gospel Topics Essays, Mormon retention data, internal reformers, and institutional boundary enforcement.

At the center of it all is a simple question: what evidence would actually be enough for faithful Mormons to accept that the church culture itself is part of the reason people leave?

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

Why are Mormons leaving the church, and what does Jeff Strong’s research reveal about the culture they’re leaving behind?

In Torn, faithful Mormon researcher Jeff Strong examines why current and former members disengage from the church. His research identifies church history and truth claims as the largest reason people give for leaving, followed by social issues, church experience, and pressures associated with Mormon life.

We look at Strong’s findings on trust, fear, obedience, belonging, control, Mormon parenting, leadership culture, and what former members say would have to change before they would consider returning.

SHOW NOTES, including all sources mentioned in this episode, are available on Patreon with a FREE membership. FREE members also get our monthly newsletter. Paid memberships start at $2/month for AD-FREE listening. https://www.patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

Ask American Mormons how often they go to church and roughly three quarters say they attend every week. Track where people actually go on Sundays, and the number drops to about 15%.

In 2024, University of Chicago economist Devin Pope used cell-phone location data from 2.1 million Americans to measure religious attendance based on behavior rather than self-report. Among Mormons, only about one in seven attended nearly every week.

We look at the enormous gap between reported Mormon church attendance and actual attendance, why people overreport religious behavior, and what Pope’s data shows about who is really sitting in those pews every Sunday.

SHOW NOTES, including all sources mentioned in this episode, are available on Patreon with a FREE membership. FREE members also get our monthly newsletter. Paid memberships start at $2/month for AD-FREE listening. https://www.patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

A BYU student and decorated Vietnam pilot may have been D.B. Cooper — and his own family hid the parachute logbooks that prove it for decades.

Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was a Green Beret, Purple Heart recipient, devout Mormon, and BYU law enforcement student who hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 in April 1972 — five months after D.B. Cooper's original 1971 hijacking. We trace his Mormon upbringing in a first-cousin marriage, the helicopter-run Sunday services he organized for Mormon soldiers in Vietnam, his wife Karen's role as an accomplice, his death in an FBI shootout after a Lewisburg prison escape, and the decades his family spent hiding the parachute logbooks connecting him to Cooper. We cover Bernie Rhodes and Russell Calame's investigation and Karen's 1990s lawsuit over the book D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy. This only makes sense once you understand what a Mormon family will bury to keep the story straight.

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

What do you know about Mormons on the Titanic?

Irene Corbett was a Mormon woman from Utah who traveled to London for advanced midwifery training, despite opposition from her husband and counsel from Church president Joseph F. Smith to stay home with her family. In April 1912, she boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second-class passenger. She died when the ship sank, leaving three young children behind.

Nearly a century later, Apostle Quentin L. Cook used Irene’s story in General Conference, saying it was believed she gave up her chance at a lifeboat to care for injured passengers. The source for that claim turns out to be a family story told by a grandson who was born long after her death, with no surviving witness placing Irene there.

Then there are the six Mormon missionaries who supposedly escaped the Titanic after a providential change of plans. Contemporary records tell a rather different story: the missionaries sailed from Liverpool on the Mauretania, and the surviving evidence gives little reason to believe they were ever booked on the Titanic at all.

This week on What Do You Know Wednesday, Hannah tells Jess how two Mormon stories became attached to the most famous shipwreck in history—and what happens when family lore, faith-promoting storytelling, and historical fact begin to blur together.

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

BYU didn't suspend its quarterback for the rape and strangulation allegations against him. It suspended him under the Mormon Church's honor code for one word he used in his own defense: consensual.

Jess and Hannah trace three decades of BYU honor code cases — Omarr Morgan (1997), Tico Pringle (2006), Harvey Unga and Keilani Moeaki (2010), and the January 2004 party case — alongside two current cases: quarterback Jake Retzlaff's 2025 honor code suspension over a consensual-sex admission, and receiver Parker Kingston's ongoing rape prosecution, which BYU has never publicly connected to the honor code at all. They also revisit Madi Barney, the survivor BYU investigated for reporting her own rape in 2015. The pattern: BYU's honor code was built to punish sex, not violence — and the silence around assault allegations isn't an accident, it's the mechanism.

SHOW NOTES, including all sources mentioned in this episode, are available on Patreon with a FREE membership. FREE members also get our monthly newsletter. Paid memberships start at $2/month for AD-FREE listening. https://www.patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick

The Mormon Church helped slash a rival paper's revenue nearly in half, in a deal negotiated in secret.

Jess and Hannah trace a 180-year fight over who controls the news in Mormon Utah: Joseph Smith ordering the Nauvoo Expositor's press destroyed, the founding of the church-owned Deseret News, the Mountain Meadows Massacre and John D. Lee's execution, the Salt Lake Tribune's Pulitzer-winning BYU Honor Code investigation, and the 2013 deal that slashed the Tribune's revenue share from 58 percent to 30 percent overnight. It's a story about institutional power, media control, and what it costs to keep telling the truth anyway. Sometimes pressure doesn't look like a headline — it looks like a renegotiated contract nobody outside the industry ever hears about.

SHOW NOTES, including all sources mentioned in this episode, are available on Patreon with a FREE membership. FREE members also get our monthly newsletter. Paid memberships start at $2/month for AD-FREE listening. https://www.patreon.com/postmormonpostmortem

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Theme song | Vocals: Hannah W. | Guitar: Dr. Dave | Audio: Mick