For decades, Vance Boelter seemed to be living a typical midwestern American life. His resume showed him climbing the corporate ladder at food service companies like Gerber and 7-Eleven as he raised a family with five kids and two German shepherds and bought a series of bigger and bigger homes in Wisconsin and Minnesota suburbs.
Then, in 2021, Boelter abruptly quit his job and headed to the Democratic Republic of Congo on what he described as a mission to end world hunger. He began regularly jetting to Central Africa to preach sermons, funding his travels by working at Minnesota funeral homes – sometimes collecting bodies from crime scenes, he told roommates at a run-down rental house where he lived part-time.
As police work to piece together the motive behind Boelter’s alleged assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband Saturday morning – in what authorities describe as a brazen plan to hunt down a long list of elected officials – a CNN review of public records and interviews with people who knew Boelter suggest his life took a strange turn in recent years.
One longtime acquaintance said that Boelter had poured cash into far-fetched ventures, including an armed security firm in Minnesota and a fishing and farming company in the Congo.
“I was more on the side of, ‘Hey buddy, this doesn’t sound right, it’s irresponsible to quit your job and now you’re burning your cash,’” said the acquaintance, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety. “It just made no sense to me.”
In Minneapolis, meanwhile, one of Boelter’s roommates said it was clear that he was becoming increasingly pressed for money as his businesses floundered and he tried to keep the trappings of his previous life intact. He stayed in the rental home a few nights a week while working funeral home shifts in the area, according to the roommate, who also requested anonymity out of safety concerns.
“He couldn’t keep up with the big, fancy $400,000 house in Green Isle, three Shiloh shepherds, all the kids, all of the bills,” said the roommate, referring to the town about an hour outside Minneapolis where Boelter’s family home is located. “He couldn’t keep up with it.”
But even as some who knew him grew concerned with Boelter’s behavior, they said he gave no indication that he was planning the violent rampage he’s now accused of carrying out.
According to the federal indictment charging Boelter with murder and other crimes, he went to the homes of four Democratic Minnesota public officials in the early hours of Saturday disguised as a police officer, fatally shooting State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and injuring State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. In Boelter’s house and car, officers found handwritten lists “containing the names and home addresses of many Minnesota public officials, mostly or all Democrats,” the indictment said.
“Dad went to war last night,” Boelter texted his wife and family hours after the shootings, the indictment said.
Boelter once registered as a Republican, state records show, and he voted for President Donald Trump, according to another roommate at his Minneapolis home. But his public social media barely mentioned politics, and four people who knew him and interacted with him in recent months told CNN he never showed signs of political extremism.
In his passionate sermons at a Central African church thousands of miles away from Minnesota, however, Boelter described a desire to make his mark on history.
“When I die and go to heaven… I don’t want to just listen to other people tell their stories,” he declared in one of his speeches. “I want to have my own stories to tell.”
Boelter’s LinkedIn page hints at the sharp turn his life took in recent years: It lists multiple middle management positions in Midwest food service firms, and then, suddenly, in 2021, his role as CEO of a brand-new company that he started in the Congo.
His career started off unremarkably. Boelter said he worked as a supervisor and manager at a baby food plant and sausage company in Wisconsin and a company that produced manufactured food-to-go products for US convenience stores in Minnesota, where he accepted a local award for workforce development in 2012.
He received a doctorate in leadership from Cardinal Stritch University in Wisconsin, according to his LinkedIn. An abstract from his dissertation on job training remains online, but former officials from the university, which is now defunct, did not respond to requests for confirmation that he completed the degree.
Real estate records show that as Boelter moved to different jobs, he and his wife Jenny bought homes in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In 2023, the couple purchased a four-bedroom home on 11 acres of land in rural Green Isle, Minnesota – near where police arrested Boelter in a farm field Sunday night after a massive manhunt.
Boelter was involved in his community, serving on local and state government boards supporting job training programs. He was appointed to the Minnesota governor’s statewide Workforce Development Board by former Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat who served from 2011 to 2019, a spokesperson for current Gov. Tim Walz said. Walz, also a Democrat, later reappointed Boelter to the volunteer, unpaid board, in what the spokesperson described as a routine process for hundreds of similar positions in the state.
Boelter’s Christian faith was also prominent in his life. In one sermon, he described being born again when he was 17. Boelter was ordained as a reverend in 1993, according to an archived webpage for a Christian charity he started, Revoformation Ministries. He told friends that he traveled to the Middle East to hand out gospel materials early in his career, his longtime acquaintance said.
And he painted his work in grandiose terms: The Revoformation webpage described Boelter as the author of a book that purported to “change the way you see yourself, other people, and God.”
“You may agree or disagree with what you read in this book, but you will never forget what you read,” the website stated.
The website GoodReads suggests Boelter self-published the book, titled “Original Ability: Can Man Obey God?” in 2006, though no copies of it are readily available online.
Even as he continued his career in food service, Boelter started security-related businesses – although they don’t appear to have had much success.
Wisconsin records list him as the registered agent of a company called “Souljer Security, LLC,” which formed in 1999 and dissolved about a decade later.
And Boelter’s wife incorporated a company in 2018 called Praetorian Guard Security Services LLC, according to Minnesota corporate filings. The company – which shares a name with the elite bodyguards of Roman emperors – currently holds a license as a protective agent in Minnesota, which allows it to hire armed security guards.
Licensing documents from the Minnesota Private Detective and Protective Agent Services Board list Jenny Boelter as the company’s CEO and Vance Boelter and other family members as employees. The documents show Vance Boelter received two firearms trainings in July 2019, and that he had completed a “conceal carry renewal training” by the following year.
But in a 2023 filing, Jenny Boelter wrote that the company had yet to provide security services for any client.
“Right before we were able to get up and running, the pandemic hit,” she wrote. “In trying to get this company going I have spent thousands of dollars getting ready, but it seemed like I kept running into brick walls.”
Boelter’s longtime acquaintance said that he had talked about the company offering expensive, paid private protection plans during a “social unrest environment,” but that the plans had never really made sense.
“There’s a disconnect to business reality here,” the acquaintance remembered thinking.
Boelter’s life took a turn in 2021, when he was inspired to quit his job and dedicate his life to promoting development in Africa, he later recounted.
In an introduction video that Boelter recorded and was later posted to social media, he said that he took a trip to the DRC and came up with plans to help improve the food supply in the country, which he said locals thought “were pretty promising.”
But after Boelter’s employer didn’t agree, he decided to quit and pursue “farming and fishing projects” in Africa himself, he said.
“The company I was working for at the time wasn’t interested in doing anything in Africa,” he said in the video. “So I talked with my wife, and we decided, I just put in my two-week notice, and we’d just go off on our own to try to do these projects to help out in Africa.”
Boelter started an organization called Red Lion Group, which an archived webpage claimed was working to build the DRC’s first modular oil refinery, as well as a glass manufacturing facility and logging company in the country. “Even if profit isn’t there in the end for Red Lion, but if we were able to create good jobs … that is good enough for us,” the website declared.
The move concerned some of Boelter’s friends. His longtime acquaintance said he was worried about what seemed like a lack of a real business plan for the venture.
“It was just too pie-in-the-sky every time I’d talk to him,” the acquaintance told CNN. “I never saw a specific business plan, like, here’s how I generate revenue, here are going to be my expenses, here’s how we’re going to make a profitable business.”
Boelter preached at a Pentecostal church in Matadi, a port town on the Congo River, delivering sermons with the help of an energetic French translator. In videos of his sermons posted on Facebook and YouTube, Boelter passionately described his connection to his faith, speaking about his religious awakening as a teenager and claiming he had traveled to “places a lot of people didn’t want to go,” such as the West Bank, Gaza and Southern Lebanon, to “talk to them about Jesus.”
He also voiced anti-LGBT rhetoric, saying in one sermon, “there’s people, especially in America, they don’t know what sex they are, they don’t know their sexual orientation, they’re confused … the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”
Boelter also registered a nonprofit in 2021 called “You Give Them Something to Eat.” He described its mission in state records as “working to end American Hunger by removing long term obstacles that keeps food from people that are in need” while also “working to end World Hunger by building strategic relationships with people and businesses in developed nations with people and businesses in underdeveloped nations.”
But the nonprofit reported no revenue in its tax filings before it dissolved two years later.
In recent years, Boelter picked up a new career: funeral home worker. In one video, Boelter said he started working at funeral homes “to help pay the bills” as he pursued his plans in Africa and because “the shift worked good for my schedule with the other things I was doing.”
Boelter appears to have recorded the video for a mortuary science program at Des Moines Area Community College, which a spokesperson confirmed he attended in 2023 and 2024. He started working at two funeral homes in the Minneapolis area in 2023, spokespeople for the companies told CNN.
Boelter went back and forth between his family’s home in Green Isle and his work in Minneapolis, where he stayed at a run-down bungalow he shared with four other men in a working-class neighborhood of the city. When a CNN reporter visited this weekend, a gray cat scurried around the three-bedroom, 1,550-square-foot house.
A roommate who lived with Boelter, and asked not to be named out of safety concerns, said Boelter had stayed at the home a couple nights a week for the last year and a half.
Once, the roommate said, Boelter summoned him to his minivan in the alley and popped the back hatch to show the roommate two empty body bags he used in his work.
“It was just a little eerie, a little dark,” the roommate said. “I’m just wondering, this just doesn’t match up with Vance – the college guy, the family.”
Boelter seemed uninterested in talking about politics, the roommate said, adding that when he brought up Trump – whom both men supported – Boelter would cut the conversation short.
“He would sit there and say something real quick and then he goes … ‘You know, I don’t want to get into it. Have a good one. Have good night,’” the roommate said.
It was in that rental home that police found notebooks with handwritten notes listing the names and home addresses of “numerous Minnesota public officials,” including Hortman, according to the indictment. “Big house off golf course 2 ways in,” one note about Hortman’s house read.
Now, Boelter’s friends are struggling to reconcile the cold-blooded assassin described by police with the man they knew.
The longtime acquaintance said the two caught up over the phone as recently as a month ago – and Boelter showed no warning signs during the conversation.
“I’m shocked,” he said. “The Vance that I interacted with wasn’t that guy at all – not even an inkling.”
CNN’s Scott Glover, Bob Ortega and Anna-Maja Rappard contributed to this report.