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.”

Business plans that didn’t add up

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.

Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a press conference in Blaine, Minnesota following the arrest of Vance Boelter on Sunday.

Kerem Yücel/AP

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.