Lester Nygaard

"What if you're right and they're wrong?"

-A motivational poster owned by Lester  Lester Nygaard was a life insurance salesman from Bemidji, Minnesota. After a chance meeting with contract killer Lorne Malvo in January 2006, Nygaard was motivated to murder his wife, Pearl. Despite being a prominent suspect in the early investigation of his wife's murder, he was eventually able to avoid detection by framing his brother, Chazz, for the crime.

Despite avoiding prosecution for over a year, another chance encounter with Malvo would lead to even more murder, and eventually, his role in Pearl's murder being revealed. Following this revelation, Nygaard managed to flee the authorities for over two weeks, before he died after falling through thin ice in Montana.

Early life
Lester Nygaard was born in 1966 and raised alongside his younger brother, Chazz.

Throughout his early life, Nygaard was consistently regarded as timid and faint-hearted. His high school acquaintance, Bill Oswalt, would later recall that Lester fainted during a biology dissection and when a female classmate had her period during class.

Lester's faint-hearted personality would lead to him frequently tormented by his classmates, with his most consistent tormentor being Sam Hess, whose bullying would eventually culminate in Hess putting Lester in an oil drum and rolled him into the highway.

Throughout high school, Lester had a crush on a female classmate, Pearl. According to Bill, Lester once told him that we was "going to marry that girl one day". Lester would eventually go to prom with Pearl, and the two would be married in 1988.

By 2006, Lester was working as a life insurance salesman at the Bo Munk Insurance Shop, where he was considered an underachieving employee, and was frequently humiliated by his younger brother's financial success in comparison to his own. His relationship with Pearl had also soured over the years, as she commonly remarked on his underwhelming income in comparison to Chazz, even once stating that she had "married the wrong Nygaard".

In fall of 2005, Lester was purchasing a pair of socks from a sporting goods store, and accepted an offer from the owner to include a shotgun with ammunition along with the socks for $55. When he came home with the gun, Pearl mocked him, stating that "if anyone could shoot themselves in the face with an unloaded firearm, it's you."

Season 1

 * The Crocodile's Dilemma
 * The Rooster Prince
 * A Muddy Road
 * Eating the Blame
 * The Six Ungraspables
 * Buridan's Ass
 * Who Shaves the Barber?
 * The Heap
 * A Fox, a Rabbit, and a Cabbage
 * Morton's Fork