Through the winter of 1991 and 1992, the owners of vacant cottages and country houses around Caledon, Ontario, an hour north of Toronto, came back to find that someone had been living in them, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. He left food wrappers and stolen newspapers, large bottles of urine, human waste wrapped neatly in paper, and handwritten lists written like military notes. The police began calling the intruder the House Hermit. In April 1992 the same signs turned up near the car of a murdered couple, and the man leaving them had a name: David Alexander Snow, an antiques dealer from nearby Orangeville.
In Orangeville he was known as slim and bookish, a canny and honest dealer with a real passion for antiques. Residents told the Toronto Sun he was a harmless loner, nice and polite. "He didn't have a lot of friends, but he was good company when he wanted to be," one woman said. Besides dealing, he reconstructed old buildings. His shop, Simply Timeless, lasted about a year before it went bankrupt. In September 1991, as court documents later put it, his business deteriorated and he disappeared, and the Crown argued at trial that from that point he had "descended into a state of lawlessness that spiralled down to break-ins, abductions, murders and sexual assaults."
Ian Blackburn was a Toronto real estate agent, given as fifty-five in some reports and fifty-seven in others; his wife Nancy was forty-nine. They lived in north Toronto and kept a fifty-acre farm at Caledon, and Snow had approached them in 1992 about buying an octagonal barn on the land. In April 1992 they failed to arrive at a family get-together near the farm. Snow had been living on the property. According to court and police accounts, he took the couple hostage with their own firearms, hog-tied Nancy Blackburn and strangled her, and put her body in the trunk of her car. Then he forced Ian Blackburn at gunpoint to drive to the couple's Toronto home, and there asphyxiated him. Both bodies were found in the trunk of Nancy's car in the driveway. Snow took the Blackburns' guns. He was identified as the prime suspect and was already gone.
He surfaced in Vancouver and spent two weeks there kidnapping women at gunpoint, holding them tied and undressed for days, raping and robbing them. North Vancouver RCMP arrested him on July 12, 1992, during an attempt to abduct a fourth woman. He had the Blackburns' camera bag with him, and guns stolen from a home in the Caledon area. He faced fifteen charges in British Columbia, among them kidnapping and sexual assault, and was declared a dangerous offender.
On July 17, 1997, he was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder for Ian and Nancy Blackburn and sentenced to life in prison with no parole for twenty-five years. His record, the Ontario Provincial Police later said, runs to more than twenty convictions, including kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm, sexual assault, forcible confinement, robbery and weapons offenses. In January 2008 he was convicted of attacking another inmate and threatening to kill him.
On October 7, 1991, around noon, a forty-year-old woman named Angelien Josephine Quesnelle was last seen in the Peterborough area. She was reported missing in Apsley two days later, and officers from Belleville searched without finding her. A month later her car turned up abandoned in a quarry, with some of her belongings nearby, and on November 15 a hunter found her body. A post-mortem in Toronto ruled her death a homicide. On June 19, 2025, the Ontario Provincial Police arrested Snow, seventy and serving his life sentence at the Bath Institution near Kingston, and charged him with her first-degree murder. "For 34 years, her family has lived without answers," said Detective Inspector Shawn Glassford. Police released nothing about the evidence behind the charge, which has not been tested in court.
The Toronto Sun has since reported that Snow was also looked at in the death of Caroline Case, a forty-seven-year-old Etobicoke businesswoman who vanished from her import gift store on October 2, 1991, and whose crashed, blood-soaked Mercedes-Benz was found the next day in Caledon, about fourteen kilometers from where she was later found. Glassford called that case an open and active investigation and said it would not be appropriate to identify persons of interest or suspects. Snow has not been charged in her death. In May 2026 Investigation Discovery aired a special on the case under the title The Cottage Killer.