Vance Boelter Pleads Guilty in Federal Court to the Hortman Killings and the Hoffman Shootings

On June 11, 2026, Vance Boelter pleaded guilty in federal court to all counts arising from the June 14, 2025 attacks: the killings of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, and the shootings of state Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman.

At the plea hearing, Boelter’s own attorney asked him whether he put the gun to Hortman’s head and pulled the trigger. He answered yes, drawing cries from the courtroom (Minnesota Reformer).

Federal prosecutors sought an expedited sentencing hearing by the end of July, noting the pending state murder charges — which is the fact that makes the later filing legible.

Why this entry exists eleven weeks late

The corpus tracked the 2025 attack and the data-broker evidence but never recorded the plea. It was found on 2026-08-30 only because a subsequent filing (2026-08-28–boelter-justifiable-taking-of-life-defense-state-murder-case) prompted a check of what canon already held — and canon held zero mentions of a guilty plea.

The gap matters because the two prosecutions are easy to conflate. Without this entry, the August filing reads as a defendant denying the killings. With it, the sequence is clear: a federal guilty plea in which he admitted the act, then a justification defense in a separate state case.

The data-broker evidence, which is why this case is in this corpus

Per FBI and court filings, Boelter’s SUV contained a notebook listing eleven data brokers and people-search sites — Spokeo, Intelius, and TruePeopleSearch among them — annotated with costs and results. He bought his targets’ addresses. See harms-and-victims-data-colonialism-substrate-2026-06-11 and 2025-06-14–minnesota-house-speaker-assassination.

Not established

• Whether federal sentencing has occurred, and what sentence was imposed.
• The specific counts pleaded to. “All counts” is the Reformer’s characterization; the plea agreement itself has not been read.
• This entry rests on two independent contemporaneous news accounts, not on the federal docket. Pull the docket before quoting the plea agreement.