Minnesota Prairie Roots

ALTHOUGH I AM DECADES removed from working as a full-time journalist, my innate curiosity remains unchanged. I still want to gather the facts, get answers, and uncover the who, what, when, where, why and how. That has never left me.

Last Saturday, June 14, memories of working as a newspaper reporter in Gaylord, the county seat of Sibley County, rushed back as the top news story in Minnesota, and the nation, unfolded. That breaking news was the politically-targeted assassinations of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the shootings of Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. The suspect now accused in the crimes, Vance Boelter, 57, lived near Green Isle. In rural Sibley County.

My first job fresh out of Minnesota State University, Mankato, in 1978 with a degree in mass communications, news/editorial emphasis, landed me in small town Gaylord, at The Gaylord Hub. I was affectionately dubbed “The Cub from the Hub,” or at least affectionately by those who appreciated my fair and balanced reporting. Some did not. Gaylord lies about 15 miles southwest of Green Isle, where Boelter was eventually apprehended near his home. Green Isle was mostly outside The Hub’s coverage area, although I recall writing a few stories from that part of Sibley County.

Today the June 19 edition of The Hub landed in my mailbox. I’d been waiting for this issue, curious to see how third-generation publisher and editor, Joseph Deis, would cover the largest news story in the paper’s history. The Hub front page headline reads: Shooting suspect lived in Gaylord a few years ago—Largest manhunt in state’s history ends in Sibley County.

I couldn’t help but think how hard Joe (he was just a kid when I worked for his dad, Jim, at The Hub) and other media have worked to cover this evolving story. It’s not easy to gather information from multiple sources and angles and keep everything straight. That said, law enforcement did an impressive job of informing the media and the public, at least from my at-a-distance perspective.

And Joe Deis did a good job of pulling everything together in a lengthy story that published in his weekly. His dad would be proud, as am I. His story included new-to-me information that Boelter and his family lived on the northwest side of Gaylord a few years ago. They mostly kept to themselves, the article states.

Now, as if the Gaylord/Sibley County connection to my past isn’t enough, there’s more. I left The Hub after several years to become a newspaper reporter at The Sleepy Eye Herald-Dispatch. The murder suspect grew up in Sleepy Eye, graduating from the public high school in 1985. (I was long gone.) Boelter returned to his rural southern Minnesota hometown, living with his family in Sleepy Eye from 2008-2011 and working at Del Monte. And he apparently preached occasionally at church services held in the high school gym, according to media reports. If I know one thing about Sleepy Eye, it’s that the community is deeply religious, with an especially strong Catholic base. I have no idea what Boelter’s childhood faith background may be. But he graduated from an interdenominational Bible college in Texas in 1990 and served as an evangelical missionary in the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent years.

These two connections to my past rattled me. But they also reminded me that, even in rural areas, a reporter’s job can be about more than covering government, sports, community events and the everyday happenings of small town life. Sometimes it can be about covering a really big, life-changing story. A story that grabs headlines locally, statewide, nationally and internationally as did the manhunt in Sibley County, in the readership area of a small town weekly newspaper where I once covered the news.

© Copyright 2025 Audrey Kletscher Helbling