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MINNESOTA — Accused assassin Vance Boelter was a popular high-school athlete before becoming born again in his teens, moving into a tent in the park to preach and eventually morphing into an apparent far-right Christian.
Boelter — a 57-year-old married dad of five accused of murdering Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and trying to assassinate Dem state Sen. Mark Hoffman and his wife early Saturday — gave few hints in his childhood of the seeming religious radicalization he would undergo.
The suspect was born into a sports-mad Lutheran family and raised in the small town of Sleepy Eye, with his father Donald a high-school baseball coach later selected for the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
In high school, Boelter was named “Most Friendly” and “Most Courteous,” according to pictures of his high-school yearbook shared by one of his classmates.
One of five siblings, he seemed to have shared his family’s love for sports and was listed as captain of the basketball team and a member of the baseball and football teams, as well the chorus, in the yearbook.
“Vance was a normal kid who came from a middle-class background,” former classmate Wendel Lamason told the Washington Post.
Boelter was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with his father active in the church council and he himself participating in its youth groups.
“He wasn’t rebellious. He was polite and all that. He was just a good kid,” said Ron Freimark, who pastored a different Lutheran congregation in the town, to the outlet.
Conversion
Then at 17, Boelter had a religious conversion and declared himself born again, according to people in his life.
While at high school, he began preaching in his local park and even lived there in a tent, according to lifelong friend David Carlson.
“Everything in his life — he just changed. People were saying, ‘Yeah, Vance is in the park preaching.’ He was just trying to spread the word about Jesus,” Carlson said.
Boelter later claimed he had met the Holy Spirit and began producing pamphlets about Jesus and giving them to everyone he knew.
“So often in the world today, everyone wants an excuse for not doing the right thing. We want to blame someone else,” Boelter said during a sermon he gave in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2023, according to footage shared online.
“God doesn’t say, ‘Oh, your parents messed up, I know you came into this world all troubled.’ You have a choice, you have a decision,” he said in his talk — which included an anti-abortion rant.
Boelter graduated from St. Cloud State University with a degree in international relations, according to his LinkedIn profile, before attending the small, now-defunct Catholic college Cardinal Stritch near Milwaukee.
He was later “ordained” in 1993 after studying at the Dallas-based Christ for the Nations Institute and said he had made several overseas trips seeking out “militant Islamists” and persuading them “violence wasn’t the answer,” according to a biography on the now-defunct website for his nonprofit, Revoformation, seen by the Washington Post.
Christ for the Nations Institute confirmed Boelter graduated in 1990, saying it was “aghast and horrified” at the charges against their alumnus in a statement.
“This is not who we are. We have been training Christian servant leaders for 55 years and they have been agents of good, not evil,” the statement read.
Radicalization
At some stage, Boelter’s views appear to have shifted to the “far right” of Christian beliefs in the United States, according to Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.
The suspect believed in demons and a satanic evil in the world, as well as a need “to fight back against it,” Taylor told the Washington Post after an analysis of Boelter’s online presence.
Some people in these online radical Christian spaces spread “very extreme” anti-abortion rhetoric, portraying it as a form of child sacrifice which empowers demons, according to Taylor.
Boelter “seems very much to embrace some of the violent rhetoric and ideas that circulate through those spaces,” Taylor said.
In some of his sermons, Boelter preached against LGBTQ+ rights, as well as abortion.
“God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course,” he said in footage of one sermon shared online, apparently referring to American churches which he felt had gone soft on abortion.
In Boelter’s car, cops found a list of family planning centers along with 45 state and federal Minnesota officials, according to investigators.
But friends said that although they knew Boelter was religious and conservative, he rarely discussed politics and his views didn’t seem extreme.
“He was right-leaning politically but never fanatical, from what I saw, just strong beliefs,” longtime friend Paul Schroeder told AP.
“He never talked to me about abortion. It seemed to be just that he was a conservative Republican who naturally followed Trump,” Schroeder said.
Boelter worked mainly in the food industry but spent several years as a security contractor in the Middle East and Africa before returning to the US in 2023.
In August of that year, he began working for a funeral home transporting bodies of those who had died in assisted living facilities, telling friends he needed the work to pay the bills.
His most recent job was extracting eyeballs from corpses as part of an organ donation program, Carlson said.
The suspect was also spending nights away from his wife and four daughters and son, renting a room in a small house in northern Minneapolis with acquaintances, while working.
“Dad went to war last night,” Boelter said in a message to his family sent after his alleged shooting spree, CNN reported Monday.
He has now been charged with federal crimes that could land him the death penalty.
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