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2024-09-08 | WebClipping | 2024-09-08 | https://magazine.atavist.com/anatomy-of-a-murder-grand-marais-minnesota-larry-scully-levi-axtell/ | true |
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Anatomy of a Murder
Anatomy
of a Murder
How a shocking crime divided
a small Minnesota town.
By John Rosengren
The Atavist Magazine, No. 151
John Rosengren is a journalist in Minneapolis and has written for more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and The Washington Post Magazine. He is the author of nine books, including Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes. His previous Atavist story, “The Pretender,” was published as Issue No. 107.
Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Kyla Jones
Illustrator: Marco Lawrence
Published in May 2024.
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.”
Content warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of the sexual abuse of children.
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.
“Take whatever treatment is available to you,” the judge said, “because this type of conduct, of course, is just wholly unacceptable.”
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.
By 2018, Anna was working as a day care provider at the YMCA in Grand Marais, which was adjacent to an elementary school. People in town had seen Larry in his van across the street; they claimed that he was watching kids. Anna told Levi that the day care staff opted not to take the kids, which included her and Levi’s daughter, on outings when they knew that Larry was in the vicinity. (Sara Cole, who oversaw the Grand Marais day care operation as CEO of the Duluth Area Family YMCA, disputed this in an email to me.)
But while Anna and other local parents were wary of Larry, Levi became fixated on him—intensely so. On April 5, 2018, when his daughter was 21 months old, Levi filed for a protective court order to keep Larry away from her. In his petition, Levi wrote that Larry “was stalking” his daughter “by waiting in his van by the YMCA,” where he’d said hello to the little girl. “He has been there many times stalking children in his van. I have seen him parked right next to the school,” Levi noted.
On April 12, just a week after filing for the protective order, Levi went for an afternoon run. Even though he’d been attending 12-step meetings, he wound up drunk after buying a handle of whiskey and draining it in half an hour. Levi and Anna had an agreement that he couldn’t be around their daughter if he was intoxicated. He knew he had to tell Anna not to bring their daughter over that night, so he stopped in at Trinity Lutheran Church in Hovland to call her—either because he didn’t have a cell phone on him or because his service in the area was spotty.
Around 4:30 p.m., pastor Kris Garey encountered Levi at the church. He told her that he was drunk and needed to use the phone, which she’d let him do in the past. They sat down to talk in the sanctuary, then Levi tipped out of his chair, which triggered an outburst of anger. “I’m getting the fuck out of here,” he yelled. “I’m killing the fucking bastard.”
Garey followed Levi outside to the church’s parking lot, which was empty except for her gray Nissan Rogue. Levi circled the car and climbed inside. When he couldn’t find the keys, he got out and yelled so loudly about killing someone that neighbors of the church heard him. Then he grabbed a snow shovel and punched out the Nissan’s headlights and pounded its hood. Garey quietly called 911.
Levi kept going: He picked up a wrought iron table and heaved it at the Nissan’s windshield. He removed the car’s gas cap and sparked a lighter next to the opening. Garey, trying to remain calm while waiting for the police to arrive, implored him to give her the lighter. Levi sparked it again. She approached him, holding out her hand and asking for the lighter. Finally he let it fall to the ground.
When deputy Christopher Schrupp pulled into the Trinity parking lot, Levi dropped to his knees, placed his hands on his head, and let Schrupp handcuff him. Levi would later plead guilty to first-degree criminal damage, a felony, and receive four years of supervised probation. The judge would also order him to complete an additional chemical-dependency assessment and submit to more treatment.
In his report about the incident, Schrupp wrote that Levi had screamed the same thing repeatedly. He did it inside the squad car, during the 15-minute drive to the hospital, and in the emergency room, even after hospital staff had placed him in restraints. Over and over, Levi screamed that he hated pedophiles and wanted to kill Larry Scully.
“I fear for my daughter’s safety and well-being knowing that Larry’s out there stalking and grooming children,” Levi told the judge. “It’s very distressing for me.”
None of this came up six weeks later, on May 25, 2018, when Levi appeared before Judge Michael Cuzzo in the Cook County courthouse to argue that Larry should not be allowed anywhere near his daughter. Cuzzo, a grandfatherly type with a close-cropped gray beard, told Levi to provide “evidence of specific facts and circumstances” supporting his petition for a protective order. Levi was unable to do so. Indeed, he seemed confused and overwhelmed by the proceedings. He even backtracked on his charge that Larry had spoken to his daughter and to other children, saying that he’d merely waved. “You were expected to have come prepared,” Cuzzo admonished Levi.
The most Levi could do was describe his worry. “I fear for my daughter’s safety and well-being knowing that Larry’s out there stalking and grooming children, like giving them gifts and stuff, while I’m at work and unable to watch out for her,” he told the judge. “It’s very distressing for me.”
When it was Larry’s turn to speak, he told the court, “I have never had any words of disagreement, or arguments, or anything to incite Mr. Axtell. And as far as I know, I’ve never done anything that would upset him. And in the past, he has been very gracious and pleasant to me at his place of employment, even going so far as giving me stuff that was going to be discarded. ”
Larry called two witnesses, his friend Jerome Brandt and Jerome’s wife, Patricia. The couple lived across from the YMCA, and Larry explained that when he parked his van on the street next to the facility, it was to visit the Brandts. He said that he waved at children when they waved at him. Jerome confirmed in his testimony that Larry visited the Brandt house “several times a week.” Patricia, addressing Larry directly, said, “You’ve always been good to us, and our family, and my granddaughter, too. I trust you with children. I’ve never seen you abuse one of them.”
Cuzzo needed only six minutes in his chambers to consider the situation. When he returned, he said that Levi had not provided sufficient evidence that Larry had harassed his daughter or was a threat to her. “I can’t just issue a harassment restraining order because you believe Mr. Scully has performed acts against other people,” Cuzzo said. But before he adjourned the court, Cuzzo issued a directive to Larry. “Take notice from the filing of this petition that Mr. Axtell does not want you to have contact with his daughter,” Cuzzo said. “Take heed of that so we don’t end up back here at some point in the future.”
A few weeks later, Larry came into the Holiday gas station to buy lunch, and Levi refused to ring him up. Larry left in a huff. He drove to the sheriff’s office and reported the matter to a deputy, demanding that she make Levi serve him. The deputy pointed out that this wasn’t a criminal matter, and she suggested that Larry speak to the Holiday manager.
Larry complained that he was being harassed, and not for the first time. It seemed like people were trying to make his life miserable, maybe even run him out of town. That included members of his own family.
Larry, born in 1945, was the eldest of eight children. His parents, Marge and Al Scully, raised their kids in Minnetonka, now a Minneapolis suburb. Patrick, the youngest, was a sophomore in high school and the only one still living at home when his parents relocated to Grand Marais in 1975. He stayed in town after finishing school, working as a first responder and an ambulance driver. Patrick didn’t like it when Larry got out of prison and moved in with their parents, and he didn’t like it when Larry stayed in the family home after their parents died. Nor did their brother Jon, who visited regularly from his home in suburban Minneapolis. (Jon eventually retired and moved to Grand Marais in 2019.)
Patrick and Jon kept close tabs on Larry. They tracked him on Facebook, scoured the newspaper for items about him, confronted him in town, and frequently reported perceived legal infractions to the sheriff’s department. Patrick and his siblings showed people around Grand Marais photocopied court documents pertaining to Larry’s 1979 conviction. In 2015, shortly after Larry’s conviction had been detailed in the newspaper and he’d lost the mayoral election, Patrick obtained a restraining order against his brother. He applied for another one to protect himself, his wife, and his brother Jon in 2019. At the hearing, Judge Cuzzo, who’d denied Levi Axtell’s request for a restraining order a year prior, was again on the bench.
Around town, Larry complained to anyone who’d listen that he was the real victim in the situation. He accused his brothers of slashing the tires on his car, torching his motor home, and stealing a crucifix from outside his house. He claimed Jon once pointed a pistol at his head in Patrick’s presence. “Don’t shoot him here,” Larry claimed Patrick said. “If you shoot him here, I’ll go to prison as an accessory.” When a sheriff’s deputy questioned Jon, he said the incident never happened. The brothers also said they had nothing to do with any damage to Larry’s property and were able to provide alibis when questioned by law enforcement.
Patrick told his pastor, Dale McIntire, that he was worried about Larry’s mental state and thought Larry needed medical treatment. Patrick and Jon insisted that by monitoring their brother and publicizing information about his criminal record, they were only trying to keep the citizens of Grand Marais safe. They had the support of their other siblings, who were scattered about Minnesota and Colorado, and details from court records and subsequent interviews with six of the siblings indicate why.
According to the Scully siblings, when they were growing up in Minnetonka, Larry molested all seven of them. “We’re all in one large bedroom, and I’m up in my bed, listening to my sisters trying to fight off my brother,” Terry, the fourth-eldest child, told me. “This happens repeatedly. It was so tormenting for me. I wanted to protect my sisters, but I felt so weak.” Patrick stated under oath that Larry molested him on a family vacation, when Patrick was just five years old. Jon testified that Larry once suspended him by his wrists from the rafters in a cellar and abused him. “The torture Larry did to Jon was medieval,” said Beth, the second youngest, who also claimed that Larry raped her many times. If she fought back, she said, he smothered her mouth and nose with his hand or clamped down on her carotid artery until she passed out. If she stayed still, he rewarded her with candy or a trip to Queen Anne Kiddieland, a small amusement park not far from their home. “He’s the devil,” Beth told me, bursting into tears.
Patrick remembered Larry killing chickens and decapitating a cat. “He’d tell us, ‘If you tell Mom and Dad what’s going on, you’re next,’ ” Patrick said. That mostly kept them quiet, but when they did speak up, according to the siblings, their parents didn’t believe them, even when presented with direct evidence. Jane told me that Larry raped and impregnated her when she was 12, and when their mother noticed that Jane had stopped using menstrual pads and confronted her about being pregnant, Jane snapped, “If I am, it’s your asshole son’s baby.” She said that Marge knocked her down a set of steep steps, causing Jane to bloody her head against a wall. Jon said that he watched it happen. According to the siblings, their parents borrowed money to pay for an abortion and gave Larry condoms.
In another instance, Mike, the Scullys’ second son, came home one night when he was 17 and found Larry assaulting Mary, the eldest girl. Mike blackened Larry’s eyes, then carried him into his parents’ room and heaved his naked brother onto their bed, waking them up. “I said, ‘Larry, you tell them what you were doing,’ ” Mike said. Larry wouldn’t, so Mike did. “My mother said to me, ‘Pack up your stuff and get the hell out of here, you little lying son of a bitch!’ ” Mike left and moved to Colorado.
Much of this was detailed at the 2019 court hearing to consider Patrick’s application for a restraining order. When it was Larry’s turn to speak, he didn’t deny the accusations against him. Instead, he focused on an anecdote Jon had shared about a time when Larry had held him down in the front pew during Mass and wouldn’t let him go until the priest, Father Seamus Walsh, halted the communion service to intervene. “I wish Father Seamus was here as a witness,” Jon said, to which Larry responded, “Being that Father Seamus isn’t here, then you don’t have any[thing] other than your word against mine on what took place.”
Larry argued that his siblings had no evidence of what they claimed he’d done to them as children, or of the threat he now posed—to them or to anyone else. “I have never done anything to hurt anybody,” Larry told Judge Cuzzo. “There was no proven stuff of me being a person going around trying to groom people, or going around in town, assaulting children, and doing all this stuff. So it was false accusations, just hearsay.” Still, Cuzzo found the siblings and their concerns credible and granted the restraining order Patrick had requested. The judge set it for 50 years.
Larry’s friends dismissed his siblings’ accounts of abuse. “That’s all false,” Carol told me. “There were no facts, no evidence to prove it.” She said that Larry’s brothers and sisters resented that he’d been given the family home after their mother died and were motivated by greed. The siblings maintained that Larry was squatting in the house, though they never took any legal action to remove him.
Jerome Brandt recounted a time when, in July 2015, he drove Larry over to Patrick’s house so that Larry could give his brother a Bible. As they walked up the driveway, Patrick saw them through the screen door. “He was shouting, ‘Get off my property, you blankety-blank,’ ” Brandt said. “ ‘I’ve got you in my crosshairs.’ ” Brandt did not see a gun. Still, afraid that they might be shot, he persuaded Larry to leave the Bible in the driveway and retreat to his car.
According to Patrick, he met Larry and Brandt ten feet from the door and told them to go away. He recalled Larry saying, “I’m praying for you. I forgive you.” Patrick insisted that he never threatened to shoot the two men. He said that he wasn’t even armed. He told a sheriff’s deputy who questioned him about the encounter that if he’d wanted to shoot his brother, he would have done it.
Brad Wilson, who lived next door to Larry, told me that he sometimes saw Patrick and Jon slow down when driving by. They’d shout nasty things or throw objects to provoke Larry to come outside. They’d yell that he needed to get out of their parents’ house. Larry would tell them to leave or he’d call the police. Wilson thought that the brothers picked on Larry. “I believe the guy was trying to mind his own fucking business for a long time,” he said.
Paul Scully, the eldest of Larry’s three sons, told me that he didn’t believe his father had ever molested anyone—not in the family, and not outside of it. He blamed his father’s siblings, especially Patrick and Jon, for tension in the family. “They hated my father,” Paul told me. “It’s almost like they made it a full-time job to harass him. They wanted that house ever since my grandma died.”
“My father always said if anything ever happened to him,” Paul added, “my uncles had something to do with it.”
Following their encounter at the gas station, when Levi Axtell refused to ring Larry up, the two men had a few more run-ins. The Holiday’s owner ended up banning Larry from the premises because of something he’d said to a female cashier that made her uncomfortable, but almost a year later he came back anyway and purchased a prepaid Verizon card. Levi was at the register. When the phone card didn’t work, Larry demanded a refund, and Levi told him to take up the matter with Verizon. Larry returned the next day and confronted Levi, and the owner, Courtney Quaife, told him that he had to leave. Quaife then reported Larry to the police, and he was charged with misdemeanor trespassing.
On November 13, 2020, a court determined that Larry was not competent to stand trial for the misdemeanor charge; according to two court-appointed psychologists, he met the criteria for civil commitment, in which individuals are placed in a secure facility for treatment, most often for mental illness. One of the psychologists diagnosed Larry with “substantial psychiatric disorders of thought, mood, perception, and orientation that grossly impair [his] judgment, behavior, capacity to recognize reality, and to reason or understand.” The psychologist concluded that Larry posed a danger to other people, based on “recent alleged threats that he made toward his family members,” and that there was a “substantial likelihood” of him causing “physical harm to himself,” because he seemed to have difficulty with self-care.
In recent years, Larry’s house had become practically unlivable. His hoarding was so out of hand that there was almost nowhere to move inside. Four-foot-high piles of debris clogged the rooms. “Nobody could go in there,” one of his friends told me. “Same with his car—you couldn’t even get in it.” Larry had grown a long, unkempt white beard. His teeth were rotting. He told his son Paul that he’d stopped taking his diabetes medication because he’d “cured” it by losing weight.
Patrick and Jon managed to enter the house at one point, and what Patrick saw stirred his compassion for his brother. Larry had moved a microwave and toaster into the bathroom, because it was the only place with any space for him to live. “I saw he’d been reduced to this, eating and sleeping in the bathroom,” Patrick said. “I saw him as a victim at this time. Even a pig doesn’t have to live like that.”
At first, Larry contested that he met the criteria for civil commitment. At a court hearing on March 19, 2021, Judge Cuzzo agreed to stay a mandated commitment for six months, in part based on Larry’s willingness to meet with a primary care physician, follow any recommendations for therapy, and take any prescribed medications. The court also informed Larry that he’d be required to allow representatives from the Cook County Public Health and Human Services Department to inspect his home. Grand Marais being a small town, one of the social workers who would attempt to visit Larry’s home was Anna Ross, the mother of Levi’s daughter. But neither Ross nor any other social workers were able to reach Larry or gain access to his house, prompting the county attorney’s office to ask Cuzzo to lift the stay and commit him to a facility. Larry failed to appear at a court hearing on April 21, and sheriff’s deputies detained him three days later. Cuzzo signed an order for him to be treated for six months at the Community Behavioral Health Hospital in Baxter.
At the hearing regarding a restraining order two years prior, Patrick had requested that his brother receive a psychiatric evaluation so that he could “get the long-overdue help that I believe he desperately needs.” Now Patrick believed Larry might finally get that help, at the age of 75. For the other Scully siblings, the overwhelming feeling was one of relief in seeing the man they claimed had abused them locked up; they hoped that he would remain so for the rest of his life. When Jane saw him in court before he was sent to Baxter, Larry was wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles. “That was wonderful,” Jane told me. “It was good to see him like that. He could hardly walk. Being restrained where he couldn’t get you, you know?”
The feeling of relief didn’t last. After Larry’s mandated stay at Baxter, the court ruled that he had “substantially complied with all items outlined in the discharge treatment plan.” He was released and went home to Grand Marais. The county and court would intervene again only as a result of a precipitating event: another arrest, a family member expressing concern, or a physician who’d treated him saying he could no longer take care of himself. None of that happened.
Larry remained at home, where his physical condition, and that of his house, declined over the next two years. The mounds of junk grew. They blocked the path to the bathroom, so Larry started using an outdoor toilet. Sympathetic observers were concerned. “Law enforcement could’ve done more in getting him help for his problems and him away from his community,” Grand Marais resident Laura Laky told me.
But there are limits to how long the state can hold someone. In Minnesota, individuals can only be committed for up to six months at a stretch unless someone is deemed to be mentally ill and dangerous, to have a sexual psychopathic personality, or to be sexually dangerous. Larry didn’t qualify as any of those. “We did what we could when we could,” Cook County attorney Molly Hicken told me. “Our commitment laws are such that people maintain their own authority over themselves and their bodies up until a certain point. It’s all about the balancing of people’s rights. That’s what our system is set up to do.”
Some people in Grand Marais believe that the system was to blame for what happened next—and not only to Larry. “I believe if Levi would’ve gotten more help,” said Amber Lovaasen, Larry’s niece. “that probably wouldn’t have gone the way it did.”
Levi and Anna got married in late 2018, but they filed for divorce less than two years later, signing legal paperwork that said “the marriage cannot be saved” due to “an irretrievable breakdown of our marriage relationship.” Levi’s mental health no doubt played at least some role in this.
The following winter, Levi staged a one-man protest urging a boycott of the Whole Foods Co-op, where he’d recently been employed. He’d earned $14 an hour stocking produce and ringing up groceries, but he didn’t think it was enough to provide for his daughter. Her day care alone cost $760 a month. After wrangling with the store’s management over a personal tip jar he propped up at the register, Levi lost his job. Soon after that, he set up a table and chair outside the store’s entrance along with a sign demanding that the co-op pay living wages.
Levi sat alone in the bitter cold for days—some locals remember it as weeks. He collected a few donations that he split with other co-op employees, but on the whole his campaign garnered scant sympathy. For a lot of people, it was a sign that something might not be quite right with Levi. “That was an indicator to me that perhaps he was struggling with his mental health,” his friend Christina Conroy told me.
After that, to make ends meet, Levi did odd jobs: clearing snow from roofs, picking weeds, cutting down trees, cleaning apartments, building shelves. By the end of 2022, he and Anna had reconciled enough that they agreed to live together for their daughter’s sake. They shared a split-level home on the edge of Grand Marais, and their property backed up against the woods behind Larry’s house. That meant Levi was now neighbors with the man who, over the previous five years, he’d come to consider his worst nightmare.
According to friends, Levi generally kept his fears about Larry to himself following the outburst at Trinity Lutheran. He didn’t bring up Larry in casual conversation, though it seemed that Larry was on his mind. He once posted a meme on Facebook depicting a person holding a gun, with a caption that read, “Only cure for pedophiles. A bullet.” In a comment below the image, Levi wrote, “People always ask me why I hate pedophiles. They assume I’ve been abused. But really I think being protective is just an Axtell trait.”
His friend Amber Waldrop knew that trait well. She’d met Levi in an outpatient treatment program for addiction, and she found that despite his personal struggles—or maybe because of them—he looked out for other people. Once, they were walking on the lakeshore together and stumbled upon a hornets’ nest. Waldrop thought that she’d been stung and panicked because she was allergic and didn’t have an EpiPen with her. Levi rushed her home in his car. In another instance, when Waldrop was in a dark place, Levi talked her through it. “He has a really big heart,” Waldrop told me.
Many people in Grand Marais knew that Levi had issues and that he could be aggressive when he was drunk. But those close to him didn’t imagine that he would commit brutal violence against another person. On March 8, 2023, Brad Wilson, the carpenter who lived next to Larry Scully, learned that they were wrong.
As the light drained from the sky that afternoon, Wilson was in his garage putting away some tools when he heard a loud crash, like the sound of a car accident. It came from Larry’s driveway. Wilson raced over and saw that Levi had slammed his white Dodge Caravan into Larry’s car. Levi had then jumped out of the van, grabbed a garden shovel from the deck, and barged inside the house. Wilson arrived on the scene in time to hear Larry’s screams.
Wilson stopped short of going inside. He heard the thud of the shovel hitting something, then hitting it again. “Help! Help!” Larry cried out.
Wilson, who had mowed Larry’s lawn the previous summer without pay and generally felt sorry for the man, wanted to intervene, but he feared for his own safety. From his vantage at the front door, he could tell that Levi was in a drunken rage. And Wilson knew from watching Levi play football when they were in high school that although he was only five foot eight and 185 pounds, he was strong. Wilson also feared that Levi might have a gun.
Wilson went around the back of the house to look through an open window. He saw that Levi had trapped Larry in a corner of the kitchen. Hemmed in by stacks of hoarded junk, 77-year-old Larry had nowhere to go. Wilson saw Levi swing the shovel at Larry, who raised his arms as a frail shield against the blows.
Wilson ducked beneath the window and called the sheriff’s department. He then heard a different kind of smash and what was “almost like gurgling.” Wilson said, “It sounded like he was choking on his own blood.” The screaming stopped; Wilson knew that Larry was dead.
Levi bolted out of the house, got into his van, and peeled away. But he wasn’t fleeing. Instead, spattered with his victim’s blood, he drove four blocks to the sheriff’s department, walked inside, and announced that he had just killed Larry Scully. He confessed that he had hit Larry between 15 and 20 times with a shovel, then “finished him off” with a large moose antler.
According to a report from the court-appointed psychologist who evaluated him, Levi considered himself a hero for killing Larry: “[He] believes that others are likely ‘relieved this was taken care of.’”
At Levi’s arraignment, Cook County attorney Molly Hicken successfully argued that bail should be set at $1 million. She told Judge Cuzzo, who was again presiding, “This was a brutal attack without provocation on an elderly man.” People close to Larry thought the attack was provoked—by his brothers Patrick and Jon. “They basically got the whole town against him,” his son Paul told me. “They created the environment where my father could be lynched.”
It was a sentiment that Larry himself had voiced at the hearing three years prior, when Patrick sought a restraining order. “He’s talked to other people and had Levi Axtell say I was trying to groom his daughter,” Larry said. “This shows the vindictiveness of my brother Patrick. He’s trying to establish that I’m a predator.”
According to a report from Mischelle Vietanen, the court-appointed psychologist who evaluated him, Levi considered himself a hero for killing Larry. “[He] believes that others are likely ‘relieved this was taken care of,’ ” Vietanen wrote. She determined that Levi was “impacted by hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia,” and that he was “unable or unwilling to take responsibility for making decisions to interrupt a repeat of impulsive, harmful behaviors.”
Based on Vietanen’s recommendation, Cuzzo found Levi incompetent to stand trial and suspended the criminal charges against him. Should he regain competency, prosecutors could proceed with trying him for second-degree murder.
In a separate and parallel proceeding before a different judge, the Cook County Public Health and Human Services Department pursued a civil commitment of Levi on the grounds—supported by Vietanen’s report—that he was mentally ill and dangerous as well as chemically dependent. At a hearing held via Zoom on June 23, 2023, Levi sat at a table inside the Lake County jail in Two Harbors, 80 miles down Highway 61 from Grand Marais. He wore a black-and-white-striped uniform. He picked at his hands while answering a series of questions, agreeing that he met the criteria for civil commitment. He appeared docile, almost childlike. The judge, David M. Johnson, ordered that Levi be committed, “for an initial period not to exceed 90 days,” to a secure treatment facility.
Levi would remain in the Two Harbors jail for nearly a year, waiting for a bed to open up at a psychiatric facility. When I spoke to him briefly on the phone in late September 2023, he couldn’t discuss the particulars of his case, but he told me a story about a time when he was working at the Holiday gas station and a customer—a man who drove a snowplow for the city—reached across the counter and slapped him in the face. Levi said that he reported the incident to the sheriff’s department, but “they were saying since he didn’t slap me very hard, I shouldn’t have called about it. I was feeling like the cops didn’t care about anything that happened.”
Levi told me that he didn’t know Larry was arrested for trespassing at the gas station, or that the arrest had led to his civil commitment. It seemed as though Levi mostly felt that law enforcement had failed to find a permanent solution—meaning a way to keep Larry away from his daughter and other kids forever.
While he awaited transfer, Levi was able to see visitors, including his daughter. He passed the time drawing pictures that he intended for his daughter and others to color. He sent them to his sister Katrina, dozens every week, and she posted the pictures on Facebook with the invitation, “Please consider mailing him your colored version of his artwork, a letter, photos, and/or a piece of art of your own creation.”
Levi also sent drawings to his friends. One of them went to Amber Waldrop. It depicted a bird’s wings spread wide. “To my dear friend Amber,” Levi wrote. “Remember to … celebrate every victory. To not give up … To leave the past behind … And on your darkest days I hope you learn to dance in the rain.”
When Waldrop showed the drawing to me, she said, “It’s almost like he’s giving himself advice.”
It didn’t take long for a substantial cohort of people in Grand Marais to elevate Levi to the status of folk hero. In their view, what he did was in service of the greater good. Brandy Aldrighetti, a sexual-abuse survivor who lived near Larry, told the Star Tribune, “To me, Levi is like St. George who slayed the dragon—he killed a monster.” Kelsey Valento, a Grand Marais resident and mother, posted an article about the murder on her Facebook page with a comment addressing Levi directly: “I stand by you for removing a horrible nasty pedophile from this community.”
Within days of the crime, his sister Katrina had started a crowdfunding campaign, “to ease the financial burden of the family.” As of this writing, it had raised more than $7,000. When Katrina saw that Amber Lovaasen, Larry’s niece, had posted on Facebook that she and her family had nothing against Levi, she reached out. Soon Lovaasen had designed T-shirts featuring the words, “Our Connection Is Our Strength. Two Families. One Goal. Stop Childhood Sexual Abuse.” She told me that “my family and Levi’s family are coming together pretty much as one family now.”
She does not speak for Larry’s three sons. “I feel sorry for this poor Levi guy,” Paul told me. “He’s obviously got mental issues. I just hope my father gets some justice, that his name is cleared, and he can be seen as the kind, gentle, loving person he was.” Paul and his brothers also hoped to inherit Larry’s house, but a district court judge ruled in March 2024 that a photocopy of their grandmother’s will appointing Larry the sole inheritor of the property was not valid. That placed the home in the possession of Larry’s seven siblings.
His siblings had mixed reactions to Larry’s death. His sister Beth told me that she was worried when she heard the news. “I wanted to make sure that none of my siblings had done anything,” she said. “When I realized that everybody I loved was OK and they all had alibis and it was not them, then I felt relief, kind of lighter and bouncier.” His sister Jane said, “Nobody has the right take anybody else’s life, but when Larry was beating me up and doing things to me as a kid, I wish I would have had access to something to kill him.” Patrick told me that he feels Larry’s death was preventable, if the court system had only listened to him and his siblings. “The sad thing is we tried to warn authorities something like this was going to happen,” he said. “We were afraid some kid’s dad would go over and kill him when they found out about him.”
Within a week of the murder, someone created an online petition asking people to sign “if you agree that Levi Axtell should not be charged with any crimes and immediately be released from jail.” As of mid-May 2024, it had drawn nearly 900 signatures. The petition asks people to “stand by this father, who tried to seek relief via the justice system which failed him.” People who signed the petition noted various reasons for doing so: “I would’ve done exactly what he did if the court system failed me” (Dmitri Birmingham); “Anyone with children understands how this man felt and why he acted” (Joan Folmer); “The world is better off without a child molester!” (Grace Koopman).
Paisley Howard-Larsen, a local mother, told me that she believes Levi did the community a service by killing Larry. “I think this should have been done a long time ago, and I feel bad that it had to be Levi doing it,” she said. “I don’t even see Larry as a human. I think he’s just a monster. It makes me really sad that Levi is going to do any sort of time, whether it’s in a prison or a mental institution. I don’t think that’s right. I think he should have got off free.”
“Even though he actually murdered somebody?” I asked.
“Yeah. I think he did the right thing.”
Others in town, while not condoning murder, nevertheless welcomed the news of Larry’s death. One mother of four young children said, “What Levi did wasn’t justified, but that’s not to say I’m not thankful for it.” Others felt that Levi had been treated unfairly by the state. “Levi tried to go the legal route, he tried to do what he was supposed to do,” his longtime friend Cedar Adams said, citing Levi’s effort to get a protective order against Larry. “They say, ‘Don’t corner a wild animal, because if you do it will attack.’ I feel he felt he was backed into a corner and had no other choice. I feel he’s a victim more than anything.”
Adams’s boyfriend, Nick Swenson, who works at Buck’s Hardware, never met Larry but had heard rumors about him. “You can’t go around killing people,” Swenson told me, “but Levi couldn’t have picked a better person.”
There’s another side to public opinion, and its defining feature is dismay. The Cook County News Herald published a letter from Jim Boyd, a Grand Marais resident and retired newspaper editor, that argued against vigilante justice. “Scully had not been arrested, charged, jailed, tried, or convicted of any recent crime,” Boyd wrote, referring to the fact that no one had come forward to accuse Larry of abuse since 1979. “You can’t go around killing people just because they are horrible. (The dead would be stacked up like cord wood.)” Similarly, on Facebook threads about the case that mostly lionize Levi and disparage pedophiles, an occasional voice of dissent pops up. For example: “You can’t just murder people because you ‘think’ they might do something” (Penelope Orl). And: “Child molestation is horrible and wrong. Murdering someone by butchery is also wrong” (Don Croker).
For Larry’s friends and sons, much of the discourse about his death is chilling. “He did not deserve to die the way he did,” Carol told me. “I hate the way Levi’s family and Pat and Jon are going after Larry as a monster, and Levi’s a hero.” She conveyed that the main reason she didn’t want her real name used in this story was that she feared repercussions from Larry’s brothers.
She wasn’t the only person to request anonymity. People on both sides of the Levi–Larry divide told me that they were concerned about their reputations. Two sources said the situation is so polarizing that having their names attached to their opinions might hurt their businesses.
On March 7, 2024, Levi was finally moved to the Forensic Mental Health Program, a locked facility in St. Peter, Minnesota. Where his life goes from here, and how the dust of his crime will settle in Grand Marais, is an open question. During my visit to Grand Marais last August, I spent the better part of an hour talking to Amber Waldrop and her father, Dennis, a thoughtful man with a thick gray beard. We met in a building downtown overlooking Lake Superior’s seemingly infinite horizon. When it came to this story, the Waldrops saw no happy ending in sight.
“It’s just a series of people being hurt: Larry’s family, Levi’s ex-wife and daughter, Levi’s parents,” Dennis told me. “There are a lot of victims here. And being in a small town, there’s a conflict going on with what happened and what should’ve happened. It’s a tough line to walk. This is sensational news to the rest of the world, but we’re living it.”
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