A man accused of dressing up as a police officer and shooting two Minnesota state lawmakers in their homes – killing one and her husband – also showed up at the houses of two other legislators the same night intending to assassinate them too, authorities revealed on Monday.
Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured on Sunday night after a major two-day manhunt and charged by state prosecutors with the second-degree murder of the Democratic representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, at their residence in Brooklyn Park early on Saturday.
He was also charged with the attempted murder of state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their home in Champlin.
Boelter was set to make an initial appearance before a district court judge in St Paul on Monday afternoon after officials announced a separate 20-page federal indictment, which could include the death penalty for Hortman’s murder, at a late-morning press conference.
The acting US attorney for the district of Minnesota, Joe Thompson, told reporters that as well as the early-hours attacks on the Hortman and Hoffman residences, Boelter was spotted at the homes of two other unnamed lawmakers, one a state representative, the other a state senator, in a “planned campaign of stalking and violence”.
At one of the properties, nobody was home, he said. At the other, he was confronted by a police officer who was called to make a wellness check, and fled the scene.
“It is no exaggeration to say that his crimes are the stuff of nightmares,” Thompson said.
“Boelter stalked his victims like prey. He went to their homes, held himself out as a police officer, and shot them in cold blood.”
Hortman’s killing, at the final house he visited, “was a political assassination”, he added.
“It’s a chilling attack on our democracy, on our way of life. The trend [of political violence] has been increasing over recent years and I hope it’s a wake-up call to everyone that people can disagree with you without being evil, without [anybody] needing to be killed for it.”
Thompson gave a timeline of Boelter’s alleged spree, which began at the Hoffmans’ home. Arriving in a black SUV disguised to look like a police vehicle, and wearing a “hyper-realistic latex mask”, Boelter knocked on their door claiming to be a police officer, and shot them both repeatedly after they opened the door and realized he was not who he claimed to be.
Both remain in hospital in serious condition but are expected to survive.
Next, Thompson said, Boelter drove to the home of a Minnesota state representative in Maple Grove, where a doorbell camera captured him at 2.24am. She was on vacation, and he left.
From there, he traveled to the home of a state senator, arriving at about 2.36am. An officer from the New Hope police department arrived to find Boelter’s vehicle parked a short distance away with lights on.
Thompson said she assumed he was a fellow officer already there in response to the Hoffman shooting – but when she wound down her window to speak to him, Boelter did not respond, and “just sat there and stared straight ahead”, Thompson said.
She retreated to the senator’s home to await the arrival of colleagues, who arrived to find him gone.
Finally, Thompson said, he drove to the Hortmans’ home in Brooklyn Park. Officers arrived at about 3.30am to find him standing on the porch – and when they got out of their vehicles, he began firing at them, forced his way into the house and shot and killed Hortman and her husband, then fled on foot.
after newsletter promotion
“Boelter planned his attack carefully. He researched his victims and their families,” Thompson said.
“He used the internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of the family members. He conducted surveillance of their homes and took notes about the location of their homes.”
He said he could not speculate on a motive, but said investigators found “dozens and dozens of names on hundreds of pages of documents” in the vehicle retrieved at the Hortman residence. All the elected officials targeted were Democrats, Thompson said.
The writings and list of names are believed to include prominent state and federal lawmakers and community leaders, along with abortion rights advocates and information about healthcare facilities.
An FBI affidavit states that after the shootings Boelter used cash to purchase a vehicle from a stranger, which he drove to Green Isle, about an hour west of Minneapolis, where a police officer reported seeing him run into woodland.
The Brooklyn Park police chief, Mark Bruley, said about 20 different tactical teams searched inside a perimeter for him and he was located after an hours-long operation that included a helicopter.
When Boelter was found, Bruley said, he crawled out of the woods after “a short period of negotiation” and was taken into custody in a field.
In the vehicle there, police allegedly found a handwritten confession, while a search of his wife’s car yielded two handguns, passports and $10,000 in cash, the affidavit said.
It states that Boelter texted his wife: “Words are not gonna explain how sorry I am for this situation. There’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around.”
The superintendent of Minnesota’s bureau of criminal apprehension, Drew Evans, told a Sunday news conference that authorities interviewed Boelter’s wife and other family members in connection with Saturday’s shootings and that they were cooperative and not in custody.
