Edgar Earl Lenear

Edgar Earl Lenear is 69 and lives in Burnsville now. He's a Level 3 registered predatory offender, which is the highest public-notification tier Minnesota has. Burnsville PD sent out the standard notice on July 9, 2026, after he moved into the 13900 block of Preserve Boulevard West on July 1. He'd been released from custody a few months before that, on February 19.

The notice describes a 2003 conviction for first-degree criminal sexual conduct — he broke into an adult woman's home back in 1993, used a weapon to control her, and assaulted her. Prosecutors didn't actually charge that case until 2002, nine years after it happened.

Here's what the notice doesn't get into, because it's not built to: Lenear also has a second-degree murder conviction from 1997, a burglary conviction from 1995, and two more felony convictions — 2018 and 2025 — for blowing off his own registration requirement. That second registration case is actually why he got out of prison this February, not the original sex crime, which he'd finished serving out a long time ago.

I pulled five separate court files and two Court of Appeals opinions to piece this together, because a Level 3 fact sheet only has to cover the offense that put someone on the registry — it's not a full rap sheet, and Burnsville PD didn't do anything wrong by keeping it to that.

The murder case is from 1996. Anoka County originally charged him with first-degree premeditated murder, then dropped it the same day he was convicted of second-degree murder instead. I can't tell you what sentence he actually got — that case is old enough that Minnesota's court system never fully digitized it. The only documents attached to it online are from 2020, authorizing release or destruction of trial exhibits, filed 23 years after the conviction.

The burglary conviction, from 1995, is more straightforward: two counts, Hennepin County.

On the registration violations — he got popped once in 2018 (stayed sentence, 180 days in the county workhouse, off probation by late 2021) and again in 2023, charged that October. That second case actually got contested pretty hard: discovery demands, pretrial motions, five witness lists filed in the weeks before it wrapped. He pled guilty and got sentenced the same day, September 30, 2025: twelve months, with 101 days already credited. That timing lines up almost exactly with his February 19 release.

Both the 2018 and 2025 cases had sentencing departure paperwork filed, meaning a judge went outside the normal guidelines. I don't know which direction either one went, and the public docket doesn't say, so I'm not guessing.

One more loose thread: Minnesota's DOC registry lists his supervision as Intensive Supervised Release — their most hands-on tier — under an agent named Chad Blake. The Burnsville notice lists a different name, Lance Culliver, as the contact. I don't know how those two names relate to each other. The DOC file also has five slightly different spellings of his name on record, mostly Lanier versus Lenear. I checked the court system under those alternate spellings too, in case there was a separate case history hiding under a different name. Nothing came up.

What I still don't know: the actual sentence on the murder conviction, which way those two sentencing departures cut, and what a June 2025 "conditional release" filing in the 2025 case is really about. My best guess is it's a pretrial release condition rather than his ten-year post-conviction supervision term, but I'm flagging it as unclear rather than pretending I know.

Neither victim — not the 1993 assault, not the 1996 homicide — is named anywhere in this, and I'm not going to go looking for them.