Before leaving for Angola, missionary and wife charged with his murder shared troubled paths to Jesus
Barely a year after the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2021, and shortly before they would jet off to Angola in southern Africa with their five children to do missionary work, Beau Shroyer and his wife, Jackie Shroyer, who was recently charged in connection with his Oct. 25 murder, shared their troubled paths to Jesus and what made them so willing to dive into the mission field no matter the cost.
“We were like, we'll do it God, we don't care what it costs. We need to make You known,” Jackie Shroyer recalled about their decision to do ministry work in Angola in a recording of their testimonies shared on YouTube in a video titled, “Why I Believe in Jesus — Beau and Jackie Shroyer.”
Angolan authorities revealed at a press conference last Thursday that Beau Shroyer was found fatally stabbed in a thicket on the outskirts of the municipality of Humpata in Huila province, Voice of America reported.
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Manuel Halaiwa, a spokesperson of the country’s Criminal Investigation Service, said Jackie Shroyer was the mastermind behind a murder for hire plot involving three other men in which her husband was killed. Investigators also allege that Jackie Shroyer was involved in a romantic relationship with one of the men, Bernardino Elias, 24, who worked as a security guard for her family. The two other men have been identified as Isalino Kayoo, 23, and Gelson Ramos, 22.
“There are strong suspicions here of a possibly romantic relationship in relation to the person who ordered the case and her accomplice, the citizen who was initially a guard through a private security company, but who, after ending his contract with this company, was welcomed because he seemed to be a good person very close to the couple and was hired with another salary to serve the couple,” Halaiwa said.
Beau Shroyer was found fatally stabbed inside his vehicle on Oct. 25 in a thicket in the Palanca commune on the outskirts of the municipality of Humpata in the province of Huíla.
Investigators say the missionary's wife, 44, first asked her alleged lover to kill her late husband, also 44, and he hired the two other men with a promise to pay $50,000 for the murder.
Jackie Shroyer allegedly paid $400 to set the stage for her husband’s murder in a place where he was known to give her driving lessons. The murder was set up to look like a robbery and the guard reportedly paid the other two men $9,000.
The couple were beloved members of the Lakes Area Vineyard Church in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, before moving to Lubango, Angola, to do missionary work under the auspices of SIM USA, a longtime global missionary organization that focuses on doing missionary work in places where it’s difficult to share the Gospel.
When asked for comment on the allegations by Angolan investigators on Friday, SIM USA noted that because the matter is now an ongoing investigation, they wouldn't comment further.
“In light of an ongoing investigation, SIM USA has no further comment beyond the statement that we have previously provided,” Mark Bosscher, chief personnel officer at SIM USA told The Christian Post in a statement Friday.
In explaining what led them down the path of missionary work, the couple noted that they were searching for love.
Beau Shroyer described being born to teenage parents and experiencing a lot of instability during his early years with a loneliness that haunted him throughout his life before he knew Jesus.
“There was just never a place where I belonged and [I] never had real friends, never really had any real relationships growing up,” he recalled.
The late missionary, who previously worked as a realtor and a police officer, said he would do funny things to get attention and described himself as a goofy guy. He was voted as the class clown in high school and met his wife in college on the party scene.
Jackie Shroyer said she grew up in a Christian home and she got baptized when she was around 10 or 12 years old, but strayed from the faith as a teenager.
“I grew up being a good kid and then when I was a teenager, I think like just that longing and searching for love caught up with me. I started to get into the bad crowd. I started looking for love in all the wrong places and acceptance in all the wrong ways,” she recalled.
“[I] just got into the party scene, got in with the bad crowd. I was having a blast. I loved it, but I never felt loved. I remember being a teenager just coming home after partying and being with friends and just sobbing in bed like, why doesn't anybody love me?” she recalled. “I just really wanted to be loved for who I was. I was tired of always trying to be something to make people like me and look a certain way.”
She said when she met Beau in college they were just living for themselves, and it continued like that even after they got married.
“We weren't even really living as a married couple. We loved each other certainly, but we were individuals. We were still just having fun doing whatever we wanted. He was a police officer, so he got busy working and then I became pregnant with our first child,” Jackie Shroyer explained.
When that happened, she said she fell back to her Christian “roots” and tried being a grown-up.
“I feel like it's time to grow up and do what grown-ups do. When I was a kid we went to church every week. This is what my mom taught us. We do all the church things. I want my kids to be good moral people, so I was like, we're starting to go to church,” she said.
And they found themselves a church in the Detroit Lakes area “just to be grown up and be around good people.” Beau Shroyer said he wasn’t a fan of church and described how his wife dragged him to participate.
“By our second child I was going to church every week. I was getting the kids into Sunday school and Beau would show up at the last minute. Sometimes he wouldn't even show up, but he got really busy working as a police officer,” Jackie Shroyer said.
She described how her husband would work at nights and had a lot of “weird hours,” and would also spend time in bowling leagues and doing other fun things in life while she was stuck alone with their children.
“I'm now at home with our two youngest children who are only a year apart. Obviously, that life is done for me. I've moved on beyond that and I just remember feeling really alone and sad and lost again,” she recalled. “I know that my husband loves me, and I have a great family, but I still just had this empty feeling of loneliness, and I didn't even really pray to God or anything like that.”
Jackie Shroyer said she began having conversations with Jesus during her loneliness over time and discovered a new relationship with Him that eventually caught her husband’s attention.
“I remember one day [...] looking at Jackie and she physically looked different. Like more happy. I started to realize that when I would do not smart things in a marriage that would normally make her angry and would get in this five-day long fight, she's not getting upset about this stuff anymore,” Beau Shroyer said.
“I started to think about what's going on. Like, did she find another man?” he quipped. “I started going through all these things in my head and finally, I got up the courage to ask her what's up, why are you so happy? Why aren't we fighting? Why does this stuff that normally bothers you not bother you?”
And that’s when Beau Shroyer said his wife told him about her newfound relationship with Jesus which made him jealous.
“She told me how she has this personal relationship with Jesus, and I got mad. I got jealous. I was like who's this Jesus dude and how dare He take my wife from me.”
Beau Shroyer said he then went on a journey to learn more about Jesus and became more active in his church before eventually deciding to do missionary work overseas for the first time.
“I set out to find out who He was so that I could defeat Him and get my wife back. I got into the Bible, and I started praying. I realized He's not against me. He's for me. Our marriage was always Jackie, the individual, me the individual, married. And you know, trying to do things together but individually. Once Jesus came into our marriage and it was the three of us working together, it was like we don't have those stupid fights anymore,” Beau Shroyer said.
“We're one now instead of being two individuals and this is really refreshing that Jesus found her or she found Him and then He found me in the middle of all of the turmoil. I went from being really jealous that she had this love and acceptance that I had always been looking for and now I have it too.”
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