David Alexander Snow was born around 1955 and ran an antiques shop called Simply Timeless in Orangeville, Ontario, north-west of Toronto. Neighbours described a slight, bookish, polite loner who knew his trade, disappeared for weeks at a time, and had few friends. The shop went bankrupt after about a year.
Through the winter of 1991 and 1992 there was a run of break-ins at cottages and rural properties around Caledon. The intruder took little and left odd things behind, and the behaviour escalated over the months. The local press called him the House Hermit. Canadian reporting called him the Cottage Killer.
In April 1992 Ian Blackburn, a Toronto estate agent in his fifties, and his wife Nancy, forty-nine, failed to arrive at a family maple tapping gathering near the fifty-acre farm they owned at Caledon. They were found stuffed into the boot of Nancy's car, parked in the driveway of their Toronto house. Snow had been living on their property and had taken their firearms. He was identified as the suspect within days and was already gone.
He surfaced in Vancouver and spent a fortnight there abducting women at gunpoint, holding them tied and undressed for days, and raping them. He was caught by North Vancouver RCMP on July 12, 1992, during an attempt on a fourth woman. In his possession were the Blackburns' camera bag and guns stolen from the Caledon house. He faced fifteen charges in British Columbia and was declared a dangerous offender.
He was convicted on July 17, 1997 of two counts of first degree murder and sentenced to life with no parole for twenty-five years, on top of more than twenty other convictions for kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm, forcible confinement, robbery and firearms offences. He was later convicted of attacking a fellow inmate.
On June 19, 2025, the Ontario Provincial Police arrested him, aged seventy and held at the Bath Institution near Kingston, and charged him with the first degree murder of Angelien Josephine Quesnelle, a forty-year-old woman from the Apsley area near Peterborough who was last seen on October 7, 1991 and reported missing two days later. Her car was found abandoned in a quarry that November, some of her possessions nearby, and a hunter found her body on November 15. The force said it had continued to investigate for thirty-four years and released no detail of what led to the charge, the case being before the courts. As of August 2026 that charge has not been tested and nothing about it is treated here as proved; the entry should be re-checked when it is. He has been named in reporting as a person of interest in other unsolved Ontario cases; none has been charged.