Grand Marais is a quiet outpost on Lake Superior’s North Shore, set among boreal forest in the easternmost corner of Minnesota. The town of roughly 1,300 is home to a mix of artists and outdoor enthusiasts, working-class people and professionals, liberals and diehard Trump supporters. In the summer, Grand Marais’s art galleries, shops, and restaurants swell with tourists drawn to what the website Budget Travel once dubbed “America’s Coolest Small Town.” The wait for a table at the Angry Trout Café, which serves locally sourced cuisine in an old fishing shanty, can run to more than an hour. When summer is over, the town retreats into itself again, which suits full-time residents just fine. “Even though we’re a tourism economy, most of us live a life where we just don’t want to be bothered,” said Steve Fernlund, who published the Cook County News Herald in the 1990s and now writes a weekly column for The North Shore Journal. “I’m at the end of a road, and I’ve got 12 acres of land. My closest neighbors are probably about 600 feet away through the woods. So, you know, we appreciate being hermits.”

Yet privacy only extends so far here. Gossip travels fast while having breakfast at the South of the Border café, or in chance encounters along Wisconsin Street. Everybody knows everybody else’s business—or thinks they do. “Even though there are differences of opinion—we have an eclectic collection of opinions—this is a close-knit community,” said Dennis Waldrop, who manages the Cook County Historical Museum. “Anything that happens here is discussed extensively.”

The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres near town owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk.

But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together.

Every small town has its cast of offbeat characters. Larry Scully was one of Grand Marais’s. Larry, who was 77 in 2023, dwelled on the fringe of town, where Fifth Street meets Highway 61, and on the fringe of reality. His two-bedroom house, which used to belong to his parents, was crowded with items he’d hoarded over the years. The mess spilled into his front yard, which was cluttered with satellite dishes, a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a wood-frame sign advertising “antler bone art.” The sign was decorated with several of Larry’s scrimshaw carvings, which he hawked at art fairs. In addition to carving, he’d tried his hand at an array of other pursuits: refurbishing broken electronics, selling solar-powered generators that could run home appliances in the event of an emergency, and even fashioning leather lingerie that he peddled to women. Larry had had no stable career to speak of since he arrived in town in the early 1980s.

Larry was a conspiracy theorist. On his Facebook page, he posted videos and articles declaring that the federal government controlled the weather, that Sandy Hook was a hoax, that Timothy McVeigh was a “CIA patsy,” that the totalitarian New World Order was real. Around Grand Marais, Larry was also known to be exceedingly religious. He attended Mass on Saturday evenings at St. John’s Catholic Church, always sitting in the front row, and he believed that the statues there cried actual tears—sometimes of blood. He carried a lock of hair that he said once belonged to Father Mark Hollenhorst, a priest at St. John’s who died in 1993, in a leather pouch around his neck; he claimed that it could effect miraculous cures.

Larry referred to himself as a prophet and would often appear around town dressed in a cloak and sandals and carrying a wooden staff. He once showed up on the courthouse steps for the National Day of Prayer clad all in black, his head covered by a medieval-type chainmail hood, and fell to his knees screaming. Another time he berated a group of gay people who’d gathered in downtown Grand Marais, shouting through a bullhorn that God didn’t approve of them.

Many locals found Larry’s zeal exhausting. “When I’d see him, I’d know I was going to be there for a long time, because he’d go on and on,” said Laura Laky, a Grand Marais resident. “He’d talk about the end-times, the Book of Revelation, Christ coming again.”

Other people were scared of Larry. Rumors that he abused children circulated around Grand Marais for years. People whispered about him watching kids from his parked car. There were claims that he’d videotaped girls’ volleyball games and children at Sven and Ole’s, the local pizzeria. A member of the nearby Chippewa tribe told me that Larry had been banned from the Grand Portage powwow after parents complained about him passing out candy to their children.

Larry once approached a man named Gary Nesgoda at a gas station and asked if he had kids. When Nesgoda said that he did, Larry showed him pictures of a fairy garden he’d built behind his house. There were miniature staircases and doors, and little figurines set amid tree roots. Larry insisted that Nesgoda, who had recently moved to Grand Marais, should bring his kids over to see it. “Everything he was telling me sounded pretty neat,” Nesgoda told me. Then, in the gas station parking lot, someone who’d overheard the conversation stopped Nesgoda. “Do not bring your children over there,” they warned.

This was a common theme. “Larry was the boogeyman,” said Brian Larsen, editor and publisher of the Cook County News Herald, who is a father of four children. “You’d tell your kids to stay the heck away from him.”

In 2014, Larry decided to run for mayor of Grand Marais. In a candidate forum broadcast on WTIP, a community radio station, he ranted about Christianity. “We can’t sit by and let our government stop us from having the Bible in the military, taking out the crucifixes, taking out the Ten Commandments in our federal buildings and establishments,” he said. Then, just before election day, the Cook County News Herald ran a front-page article that seemed to confirm the longstanding speculation about Larry. The piece detailed his criminal conviction for the sexual assault of a six-year-old girl.

Before he became an object of fear and fascination in Grand Marais, Larry was married—twice. For a time he lived with his second wife, Sheila, in Ramsey, about 25 miles outside Minneapolis. On Ash Wednesday in 1979, Sheila went to evening Mass and then to bowl in her weekly league, leaving Larry home alone with their five children: three young boys from his first marriage and six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, from hers. While the other children slept, according to police and court records, Larry invited his stepdaughter into his bedroom.

The little girl later told a police investigator that he showed her “pictures of naked people,” touched her “potty area” with a vibrator, then stuck his tongue and finger into her vagina. She said it wasn’t the only time he’d touched her, and that he’d warned her not to tell anyone, but she went to her mother anyway. Sheila reported the incident to child welfare services, who notified law enforcement. She told the police investigator that her husband had also recently become violent and suicidal.

The police arrested Larry. In a recorded statement with investigators, he admitted that he’d had sexual contact with his stepdaughter on two Wednesday evenings while his wife was bowling. A psychiatrist determined that he was competent to stand trial, finding no evidence of “any kind of psychiatric disorder.” Rather than face a jury, Larry confessed to second-degree criminal sexual conduct, and the prosecution recommended a sentence of five years. Two court psychologists submitted reports indicating that Larry wasn’t open to receiving treatment. At an October 1979 hearing, the judge urged Larry to reconsider. “Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”

Larry was incarcerated in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison, and in records from his time there, there’s no mention of him receiving counseling or treatment, though he did join a Bible study. Soon, changes to the state’s sentencing guidelines allowed Larry to seek early release. Since the state did not provide evidence that doing so would “present a danger to the public,” the court approved Larry’s request. He left prison on January 19, 1982, after serving a little more than two years for his crime.

In those days, there was no sex offender registry in Minnesota, or in most states. Larry was at liberty to go where he liked. Sheila had divorced him by then, and his three sons were living with their mother. Larry, who was 36 at the time, hitchhiked to Grand Marais to move in with his parents.

Three decades later, Larry lost the town’s mayoral election, 345 votes to 42. Many locals were surprised that he’d gotten any votes at all, especially after the story broke about his criminal record. “Forty-something people voted for him,” said Amber Waldrop, who lived down the street from Larry. “They knew about this guy. For anybody to even think that someone like that should become mayor of this town is sickening.”

Some of those votes came from Larry’s friends, many of whom shared his belief in conspiracy theories. Perhaps it’s no surprise that they also believed what Larry told them: that the accusations against him were made up, that his ex-wife had encouraged her daughter to lie to the police, that he only took the plea deal to avoid a long prison sentence.

Larry’s friends knew that he tended to hijack conversations and go on at length about topics ranging from the Rapture to homeopathic cures, and that he engaged strangers in ways many people found uncomfortable. But being an oddball, they said, isn’t a crime. Some of his friends thought Larry was on the autism spectrum, which made it hard for him to read social cues and show empathy. “This man has been persecuted all of his life,” said Bob Stangler, a Vietnam veteran who knew Larry for years. “The citizens of the area have labeled him a pervert, and he’s not a pervert at all. He’s a genius with Asperger’s who’s overcaring of people.”

A woman I’ll call Carol, who asked that her real name not be used, said she was so close with Larry that she spoke to him almost daily for 12 years. She knew him to visit sick people, distribute food to the needy, and take care of his ailing mother, who died in 2013. At her memorial service, Larry displayed his mother’s ashes in a cookie jar resembling the Star Wars character R2-D2, saying that it was what she wanted. (His father passed away in 1997.) “As long as I’ve known him, he never hurt anybody,” Carol told me.

She knows that hers is a minority opinion, that for many people in town Larry was foremost a convicted sex offender. “You can never get rid of that label,” she said.

Once they learned about his 1979 conviction, many parents in Grand Marais were more worried than ever that Larry posed a threat to their children. It’s a common enough fear. On the far right, popular conspiracy theories such as QAnon decry a global cabal of child molesters, but even among the general population, concern about the danger posed by pedophiles is widespread. In a Lynn University poll, 75 percent of roughly 200 Florida adults said they believed that sex offenders would reoffend. Yet according to a meta-study conducted by researchers at Public Safety Canada in 2004, one of the most comprehensive available, only 23 percent of people convicted of child sexual abuse were charged or convicted of a similar crime within the next 15 years. (The study’s authors concede that many victims never come forward.) In interviews for this story, researchers noted that recidivism rates have declined even more in recent years.

No one came forward to accuse Larry of more recent abuse after his 1979 conviction. Still, perception alone was enough to put many Grand Marais parents on edge. For one young man, that concern became an obsession.

If you were passing through Grand Marais a few years back and stopped for gas at the Holiday station on the corner of Broadway and Highway 61, you might have met a stocky cashier with a round, friendly face. While making change, he might have told you one of his homespun puns or signature dad jokes: Why does Paul Bunyan trip in the woods? Because he’s always felling.

That cashier was Levi Axtell. He was raised by his parents, Denise and Treg, in Hovland, a small community located 18 miles from Grand Marais. The Axtells were devout Christians and widely respected in Grand Marais, where they both worked. Denise was a nurse, Treg a physical therapist. The couple had three children: daughters Karlee and Katrina, and Levi, the youngest.

Levi grew up in a picturesque log cabin in a clearing among birch and pine trees. The woods were his playground. He spent hours there as a child, often with his friend and neighbor Cedar Adams. They roasted marshmallows over campfires, tried to catch fish barehanded, and played make-believe, running through the trees as if an attacker were pursuing them.

But Levi couldn’t outrun his demons. There was a history of addiction on Denise’s side of the family, and Levi seemed to have inherited a predisposition to substance abuse. At Cook County High School, he played football, ran track, and drank. Brad Wilson, a carpenter in Grand Marais who was a few years behind him in school, recalled Levi getting caught with liquor bottles in his locker and running from the cops.

Levi’s parents sent him to finish school in Duluth, but he was cited twice within two months for underage drinking. The first time was at Duluth East High School. On the morning of May 29, 2014, when a resource officer tried to restrain him, an inebriated Levi pulled away. The officer wrestled Levi to the ground, but he pushed himself up and army-crawled—with the officer on top of him—down the hallway, until he wore himself out. Levi spent two days in jail and was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process with force. “I didn’t know it made the charges worse if you resisted arrest,” he later told Cedar Adams.

Not long after, a law enforcement officer stopped Levi as he walked along the shoulder of Interstate 35. The officer smelled booze on his breath, and Levi admitted that he’d been drinking. The officer cited him and let him go after Levi dumped out a container of alcohol he was carrying.

Three days later, Levi was given a year of probation for his disorderly conduct at Duluth East. (The obstruction charge was dropped.) A judge also ordered him to obtain a chemical-dependency assessment and follow any recommendations. Levi satisfied the terms of his probation, including a stint in treatment.

By 2015, Levi had started dating Anna Ross, who was from Duluth. Their daughter was born on June 17, 2016. Anna had just turned 19; Levi was 20. At first they didn’t live together—Anna stayed in Duluth, while Levi lived with his parents in Hovland. He adored his daughter and beamed when she was in his arms.

Despite the new light in his life, Levi remained burdened at times by darkness. About a year after his daughter’s birth, on the Sunday evening of Memorial Day weekend, Levi got drunk, taped a vacuum hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, ran the other end through the back window, and started the engine. When he texted Anna about what he’d done, she called the sheriff’s department. While she was on the phone with them, Levi called her, and she talked him into turning off the car. Deputies arrived at his home and transported Levi to the hospital. It appears that he received some psychiatric treatment after the incident; a year later he indicated in a court document that he’d been a patient in a mental hospital and had seen a psychiatrist.

Despite his troubles, Levi was by all accounts goofy and lovable. Christina Conroy, a friend who worked with Levi briefly at the Holiday station, described him as “a beautiful soul.” Cedar Adams said, “He’s the best person you’ll ever meet. He’s joyful.” Michael Farnum, another friend, told me, “Levi is very kind and caring. He’d give you the shirt off his back.” His mother, Denise, described Levi as “a sweet, thoughtful boy.” (Levi’s family otherwise declined to talk to me.)

People who knew him casually from encounters at Holiday or Grand Marais’s Whole Foods Co-op, where he also briefly worked, described Levi as personable and a hard worker. Pat Eliasen, the Cook County sheriff and a former assistant coach for the varsity football team at the local high school, coached Levi, who played nose tackle and offensive guard. “You’d tell Levi to do a technique or something and he would just go do it,” Eliasen told me. “You couldn’t find a better football player than that.”

A photo posted on Facebook in 2023 shows Levi with his daughter climbing on his shoulders. According to friends, she was his everything. He was often her primary caregiver while Anna completed a social work degree and later held down two jobs. In the winter, Levi built his daughter snow forts that were so solid he could light a campfire inside. He and his daughter cooked together, drew pictures, and took walks. “She’s his life,” Adams told me.

Levi could not bear the thought of anything bad happening to his little girl. Like any parent, he was on the lookout for any threat to his child. At some point, his attention came to rest squarely on Larry Scully.