The following events took place in Waconia, Minnesota, population 2445, on Highway 5 in northwestern Carver County. The two men involved were Edward Edmunds, who farmed 180 acres in the vicinity, and Dr. Joseph Cleary, his nearest neighbor, who didn’t do much of anything at all.
Dr. Cleary lived in Carver House, a fourteen-room structure which had come to him as part of an estate. He was a sharp but controversial individual. He had earned his doctorate in parapsychology at Duke University but he had been dismissed from his post at nearby Carleton College because of his questionable activities off campus.
Edmunds, on the other hand, was an inarticulate, uninteresting man who blundered into the affair only because his farm happened to lie athwart the course of events.
On Tuesday, July 9th
