True Crime Campfire - War Games: The Crimes of David Snow

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

In 1992, the area around Toronto, Canada was terrorized by a strange series of crimes. A burglar nicknamed the House Hermit was breaking into empty summer cottages whose owners were away, stealing what he could and leaving bizarre, creepy calling cards behind. Then, a woman went missing from Toronto—her car was found soon after, run into a ditch and covered in blood. Next, two bodies, bound, beaten and stuffed into the trunk of their own car. Then a series of violent abductions. Who was responsible for all this? Was there a sudden crime wave, or were all these the work of one person—a monster whose fantasy life was spinning out of control, sending him to the depths of depravity and putting everyone around him in danger? Join us for the story of one of Canada's cruellest serial killers, the extent of whose crimes we may never know for sure. Sources:Lee Mellor, book Cold North KillersKate Lines, book Crime SeenRobert Keller, book Canadian MonstersCBC's "The Case That Haunts Me," episode "The House Hermit"Murderpedia: https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/snow-david-alexander.htmToronto Sun: https://torontosun.com/news/provincial/killer-david-snow-just-beginning-to-understand-sick-crimesFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In 1992, the area around Toronto, Canada was terrorized by a strange series of crimes. A burglar, nicknamed the House Hermit, was breaking into empty summer. cottages whose owners were away, stealing what he could and leaving bizarre, creepy calling cards behind. Then, a woman went missing from Toronto. Her car was found soon after, run into a ditch

and covered in blood. Next, two bodies, bound, beaten, and stuffed into the trunk of their own car. Then a series of violent abductions. Who was responsible for all this? Was there a sudden crime wave, or were all these the work of one person? A monster whose fantasy life was spinning out of control, sending him to the depths of depravity, and putting everyone around him in danger. This is War Games, the crimes of David Snow. So, campers, for this one, we're in Caledon, a beautiful rural town about an hour north of Toronto Ontario, Canada. It was early April 1992, and people were getting a little bit worried about Nancy and Ian Blackburn. Their neighbor at their country house, Orville Osborne, couldn't understand

why their car was still in the driveway, parked all haphazardly like Ian and Nancy wouldn't usually leave it. They didn't usually hang out at the country house during the week, only on weekends, and the weekend had passed. Yet there was the car, and it had just been sitting there, parked all crooked for almost a week. He hadn't seen or heard from Ian or Nancy once, and the house seemed quiet and still. Orville wasn't just the Blackburn's neighbor. He was also Ian's brother-in-law.

Their houses were both on shared family land, and the two families were close. He and his wife were really starting to get concerned, so he called his son Jamie in the city. That's where the Blackburn's main house was, the one they lived in when they weren't on their weekend getaways to the Caledon place. Jamie, can you go check on Ian and Nancy?

I'm starting to worry about them. Just go over to the house and see if anything's wrong. Jamie said, sure. He was really fond of his aunt and uncle. Everybody was. They'd been married for 25 years, one of those couples who were still madly in love with each other decades after the wedding.

They never had any kids, and they had a wide circle of friends and successful careers, Ian in real estate and Nancy in nursing. They were the kind of people you liked being around, just easy to talk to, good vibes. They meant a lot to Jamie. So he headed over to their place in North Toronto, and right away he could tell something was off.

Their other car, a Chevy celebrity, was sitting in the driveway, but there were four days' worth of newspapers on the doorstep. When Jamie glanced through the window of the Chevy, he noticed a blood-stained tissue on the passenger seat. His dad had suggested he look in the trunk of the car, just in case Ian and Nancy were planning a sudden trip or something. I guess he figured they'd have their suitcases in there or so. so Jamie checked the car door and found it locked, but he was able to pop the trunk.

And there, stuffed in awkwardly like a pair of broken dolls were his aunt and uncle. Decomposition was starting to set in. They had obviously been in there for a few days. 54-year-old Ian was still fully clothed, with his wallet still in his back pocket, credit cards still there. His face was bruised and bloody from a brutal beating, and on both sides of his face you could make out the imprint of a gunbearer. Nancy, 49 at the time of her death, was naked, covered in bruises and angry purple ligature marks. Can't even imagine what finding them like that was like for Jamie, who of course called the police as fast as he could get to a phone. As Jamie sat stunned in an officer's car, struggling to comprehend the awful thing he'd just witnessed, forensic texts and detectives began their

investigation. They collected the bloody tissue. Eventually, CSIs would find that the blood wasn't a match to either Ian or Nancy's, meaning it must be the killers. DNA evidence was in its early stages in 1992, but it was being used in court, and the investigators knew this piece of evidence could end up being critical once they had a suspect in the crosshairs. And whoever had done this needed to be found fast. These murders were beyond brutal. The autopsy findings read like a scene from a horror novel. Both the blackburns had been viciously beaten. Ian had been pistol-wipped too, and the killer had shoved a rag down his throat to suffocate him, then tied a plastic bag around his head. And Nancy. As badly as Ian had suffered, Nancy'd gone through worse.

It was clear that she was the main target of the killer's attention. Nancy had been stripped naked, beaten and gagged, and hog-tied with ropes. The killer had arranged the ligatures so he could carry her around by a rope handle, as if this sweet, lovely woman were nothing more than a piece of luggage. The way she'd been tied would have been incredibly painful. The ME found horrible bruises deep down in the joints of her shoulders, which shows how much stress those bindings had put on her body. Nancy's cause of death was ligature strangulation. Although the medical examiner didn't see any definitive signs of sexual assault on Nancy's body, the investigators concluded that the motivation for the murder was definitely sexual, and that an assault was very

probable, almost certain. Interestingly, it didn't seem like the Blackburn's Toronto House was the crime scene. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle and not a drop of blood anywhere. Inspector Doug Grady, the lead investigator, figured they'd been murdered somewhere else and then driven back to their house in the city. And when they sent the forensic text to the Blackburn's cottage and Caledon to poke around, they quickly proved that theory. They found smears of blood on the kitchen floor that would later turn out to be Nancy's. The investigators learned that the last time anybody heard from Ian and Nancy was six days earlier. Ian was seen leaving his office at 5 in the afternoon that Tuesday,

saying he was going to head out to the cottage in Caledon to fix some plumbing issues before going home for the night. But it seems like he'd forgotten to tell Nancy about it because at 7 that evening, Nancy called one of their friends looking for him. And according to the Blackburn's phone records, about an hour later, just a few minutes shy of 8 p.m., Nancy got a call from the cottage number. She picked it up, had a two-minute conversation with whoever was calling, and that was it. Who was on the phone? Was it Ian? Or was somebody else there with Ian? Making him call his wife and lure her to the cottage? Investigators didn't know for sure. What they did know was Nancy had jumped in her car and driven to the cottage after getting that phone call. And probably in a rush, judging by the crooked way she'd parked her car in the driveway.

And nobody ever saw her or Ian alive again. God, that part is just creepy as hell. The idea of the killer making him call her and get her to come to the cottage, it just gives me chills thinking about it. That's so creepy. And this really did feel like a stranger murder to the investigators. Nobody else had any motive to hurt them. Now, Caledon's a beautiful place,

and in the early 90s, it was attracting a lot of well-to-do people from Toronto who wanted to build summer cottages. It was usually a pretty crime-free zone, but some odd things had been happening in the months leading up to the Blackburn murders. A couple of guns had been stolen from one of the Blackburned neighbors for one thing, and then there was Caroline case. Caroline was a Toronto antiques dealer who, on October 3rd of 1991, went missing from her shop, the jeweled elephant. In the late afternoon, Caroline had spoken to her daughter on the phone telling her she was planning to wrap up business for the day soon and come

home, but she never did. And a few weeks later, somebody found her car in a ditch way out in the country in Caledon, not far from Nancy and Ian's cottage. The car was a mess. Someone had covered the back windshield with a dingy blanket, and there was a towel and a bed sheet that was all tangled up in the back seat. None of this stuff belonged to Caroline. The headrest had been torn off their rear seats for some reason, and worst of all, there was blood spatter all over the interior of the car.

To investigators, it looked like Caroline must have been abducted and tried crashing the car to escape, but she herself was nowhere to be found. That was especially interesting to Inspector Grady. Blood in a car, a missing woman, seemed tantalizingly similar to what happened to Ian and Nancy. And there was something else, too. For six months or so, somebody had been squatting in some of the summer cottages around Caledon. This person had been breaking into unoccupied cottages left and right and leaving what you might call a little calling card.

Yeah, that's one way of putting it. Everywhere this dude went, he left behind three things. Notebooks full of weird writing, mostly descriptions of obscure military equipment, like the notes for some kind of war game, maybe. And the other two things, buckle up for this. Jars of pee and his own poo, neatly wrapped up in newspaper. Like a little present. How nice. Imagine coming back to your summer house after a long cold winter and finding that.

I think I'd have to sell the place. So they called this guy the house hermit. And I got to tell you, I take issue with that, okay? Don't you dare, Sully, the good name of the hermits, right? I'd never leave my house if I didn't have to. And I ain't wrapping my poo up in newspaper and peeing in jars, okay? So most of us, hermits are totally normal. We'd just, you know, rather hang out with cats than people.

And if that's wrong, I don't want to be right. I think a lot of people embrace the hermit life. Most are harmless, okay? They literally never bother anyone. They do my favorite thing in the world, which is leave me alone. That's their whole thing. Exactly. So this gross dude had been wreaking

stinky havoc all over Caledon for months, and they hadn't managed to catch him yet. But now, Inspector Grady decided it would be worth it to talk to everybody who'd had a suspected house hermit break-in, see if anything interesting turned up. And lo and behold, some did. In a place called Tiny Township, not far from Caledon, a couple named Sam and Rose Appleton

had a hell of a story to tell. A few weeks earlier, they'd tooled on up to their summer cottage to see how it had fared through the tough Canadian winter. Rose stayed in the car while Sam went inside, and as soon as he walked through the front door, he realized something was up. The place smelled horrible, and there was a long extension cable running all the way up the stairs to one of the bedrooms, the door of which was closed. Sam felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle, and the next thing he knew, he was staring down the barrel of a gun. don't move or I'll shoot the man said and don't look at me lie down on the floor the man said still pointing the gun at Sam's head Sam did as he was told I'm wanted for fraud the intruder said and I don't want to go to jail and after pacing around a bit the man ordered Sam to stand back up again you're going to drive me to Toronto he said let's go Sam's heart must have sunk at this point knowing his wife was in the car out front with no idea of the danger she was in

but what else could he do? He did what the man with a gun told him to. At first he tried to play it off like nothing was wrong. Rose, this gentleman just needs a ride to Toronto, but Rose one born yesterday and she knew immediately what was going on. They drove intense silence for a while. At one point, the intruder demanded all the cash they had on them, which they handed over. And then finally, Sam pulled up to a red light at a busy intersection, and he made a decision. He was done with this shit. Okay, look, he told the intruder, you either shoot me right now or you get the hell out of my car. I fucking love this guy, by the way. That is the kind of energy I want to bring to my life. Yes.

The man looked taken aback for a second, and then he just threw open the passenger door and hauled ass out of there. He must have realized Sam meant business, and it was that ultimatum that most likely saved Sam and Rose's lives that day. So, of course, when they heard this story, the investigator's eyebrows hit the ceiling. This was eerily similar to what had happened to Nancy and Ian Blackburn, and pretty similar to what they suspected happened to Caroline Case, too, and it seemed to suggest that their killer might very well be this house hermit asshole who'd been breaking into cottages all winter. They knew he was bold enough to take two adults hostage, and they knew he had a gun. This was bad. So they had Sam and Rose sit down with a sketch artist,

who came up with a really nice photorealistic image of the intruder. While Inspector Grady was talking to Sam Appleton, the CSIs were still busy searching the land around the Blackburn's Caledon College. And it was there where they got their second big break. An odd pile of trash in the grass not far from the house. Trash that matched the house hermits M.O. perfectly. I mean, as perfect as you can call a bunch of neatly wrapped turds and some piss jugs. Tomato. Tomato. But they found more of the strange military writings, too. All three of the hermit's calling cards within spitting distance of the Blackburn crime scene. It was looking more and more likely that this guy was their killer, and they had his

fingerprints on a bunch of this stuff. But to everyone's frustration, they didn't match any prints in the system. This was bizarre. I mean, this guy had been escalating his criminal behavior for months, from breaking and entering to theft, kidnapping, and murder. How the hell could he have avoided any contact with law enforcement until now? The investigators brought in a couple of behavioral profilers, including a woman named Kate Lines, whose book crime scene was one of our sources for this case. And they came up with a brilliant strategy to try and identify their suspect. They published pictures of some of the hermit's weird military scribblings in the Toronto papers, figuring somebody might recognize the handwriting or the military obsession. And it worked. A lady named

Allison Shaw called the tip line with a lead that broke the case open. I know who this guy is, she told Inspector Grady. He used to be in business with my husband, Darris. The guy was an antique dealer, Allison said, big military buff. In the previous fall, right around when Caroline Case went missing, Grady noted, the guy had taken off and left Allison and her husband with a bunch of business debt. His name was David Snow. And when he disappeared on the Shaws, they needed to recoup their losses somehow.

So they went and cleaned out Snow's storage locker, and they found some bizarre stuff. A suitcase full of violent porn, including hundreds of cutouts from magazines, precisely done with a razor blade and organized by body parts, there were hundreds of butts, dozens of legs and breasts, women, cut to pieces. Also, in the suitcase was a journal full of the same weird lists the house hermit had left in the cottages he'd broken into, long lists of World War II military equipment. He's always creeped me out, Allison Shaw, told Inspector Gray.

For one thing, Snow always stunk like the devil's asshole. Like he hadn't showered in weeks. But beyond that, there was just something wrong about him. He made her uncomfortable, but her husband thought she was just being dramatic. David was a weird guy, sure, but he wasn't bad. Just misunderstood. When Allison would try to express her discomfort with the guy, her hubs would just shut her down. Like, oh, come on, give the guy a break.

He's a good dude. Our daughter calls him Uncle David. Which, okay, look. Guys, do me a favor. When the women in your life have a gut feeling about one of your buds, chances are she's right. Because the fact is, women have to have good radar about the shit. Our survival depends on it. We've all had years of training. So don't be a dismissive prick. Amen to that. My husband trusts my radar 100%. And it wasn't just the shaws. The interesting thing is when the investigators started talking to people around town who knew day. David Snow. They noticed this same pattern where all the men would be like, oh yeah, you know, he's just kind of weird, but he's a nice guy. And all the women would say stuff like he's creepy. I hated being around him. I wouldn't put anything past him. So see, we've got good radar about this kind of stuff, y'all, because we have to. I argued with a guy once, shocker, I know, about this because he just assumed

that I was conflating, like not vibing with someone with this type of instinct. And I can promise you I can promise you that it's different. You're completely allowed to dislike someone for no reason. Believe me. I know. But sometimes you meet someone and your instincts slam on that no button and you just feel someone as bad news bears. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And we've got to trust that stuff. I mean, that's what our boy Gavin DeBekker is always on about, right? And also, you could smell the guy from space. Like, why didn't that bother the dudes? Like, you could literally smell him from the space station. and that's how bad he stunk. Oh, like, isn't that, like, yeah, anyway. Allison Shaw told the detectives that nobody had seen or heard from David Snow

since he took off in October. But he probably hadn't gone far, she said, he's got a phobia of driving, so he walks everywhere. Huh. A fear of driving. Sam Appleton had told them that the intruder who kidnapped him and Rose a few weeks earlier had insisted on Sam driving. All the puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place.

And now that they had a name to plug into the system, they realized that Snow actually did have a police record, for check fraud. The prince hadn't come back as a match the first time they ran them because there'd been no conviction in the fraud case, so the prince had never been entered into the computer system. Now, when they ran the prince from the house hermit stuff against the ones on file for Snow, they got a perfect match. They had their killer. They just had to figure out where he was. They found They found Snow's mother in a nice neighborhood in Toronto. In fact, when they went to see her, they passed an antique shop called the jeweled elephant on the

way. Caroline Case's antique shop. Just a little way down the road from David's mother's house. Yeah. Now, when you talk to a suspect's mom, you can usually expect to encounter some defensiveness, but when Inspector Grady sat down with Mrs. Snow, he got the surprise of his life. I'm scared to death of him, she said, practically shaking at the thought of her son's last visit. He'd come to see her in early October. One day before Caroline Case went missing, Grady thought. And when she found out he was coming, she hid all the sharp knives in the house. It's that bad? Grady asked her.

Yes, Mrs. Snow said. The whole family was scared of him. Everybody walked on eggshells whenever he was around. She'd even given him a whole ass house so he wouldn't live with her, the poor thing. According to his psychiatrist, David's mom was, as he put it, emotionally unavailable to her children. She was English, and she had that sort of chin up, keep calm, and carry-on mentality that a lot of English people probably did at that time. time, having lived through the bombing of London and all. Plus, she suffered really bad postpartum depression after every birth.

His dad was the total opposite, really outgoing and social, but he died in 1967 when David was 11. And after that, David's personality changed. He started getting verbally and physically abusive with his mom and sister, to the point where they were both scared shitless of him. He punched his mom in the face one time. Another time, he choked his sister practically to unconsciousness for the great of touching his stamp collection.

Yikes. And as he got older, he blamed his mom for all his problems, including his inability to keep a job for more than a few months at a time. Well, she should have called his bosses and told them what a special stinky boy he was. I'm sure they'd appreciate that. That's right. It's like this whole interview with Mrs. Snow is like an episode of that Evil Lives Here show on Investigation Discovery.

Have you all seen that show? It's fascinating. I absolutely can't get enough of that show. It's firsthand narratives from people who've lived with killers, so sometimes it'll be a parent or a sibling or like a wife or a husband. And it is absolutely fascinating. David's mother said she prayed he wasn't the one who murdered the Blackburns, but Detective Grady could tell. Her heart was telling her he was. After talking with David's mother, the investigators went to his house on the other side of town, the one his mom had given him. Unsurprisingly, he was nowhere to be found.

It looked like nobody had been there in months. They went through the place room by room on high alert the whole time, and in one room they found, I shit you not, a hidden door. Our boy had a secret room, because of course he did. And it was pretty much exactly what you'd expect. All over the walls were more of those creepy, exacto-knife cutouts of female body parts. And the tables were full of books about military equipment. David's two obsessions.

The Crown prosecutors felt like they had more than enough for an arrest warrant at this point. This guy was dangerous. God knew what he'd do next, so they put every police force in Canada on notice to keep on the lookout for him and hoped for the best. By now it was June, the investigation had been chugging along for several months. The investigators couldn't stop thinking about what Snow might be up to, wherever the hell he was. It was keeping them up at nights, and they were right to be worried. Somehow, I'm not actually clear on how, since, he hated driving, Snow had made his way to British Columbia by now, and he was wreaking havoc as the Toronto PD frantically tried to find him. On June 29, Snow forced a woman into the back room

of the clothing store where she worked and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint. He tied her up so tightly that she was later diagnosed with nerve damage in her wrists. When Snow heard a customer come into the store and got up to investigate, the woman was able to make a run for it and escape about the back door of the shop. Less than a week later, in broad daylight, Snow kidnapped a woman will call Christina from the photography studio where she worked, made her walk at gunpoint for nine kilometers

to his campsite in the woods, and for the next eight days, Snow held Christina captive. This next part is rough. There's no other word for it. So if you need to skip it, we understand. Go forward about a minute and a half, two minutes, and that should do it.

Yeah. Snow kept Christina naked. and tied up, alternating between beatings and sexual assaults multiple times a day. He threatened her repeatedly with a gun, pressing it to her head, telling her, my life is more important than yours. Fucking trash. And he kept up constant stream of blather the entire time. He yammered on about the size of his dick, which he had no reason to brag about, according

to Christina, talked about a fictional wife he had called Allison, Allison Shaw. And... It's got to be Allison Shaw. right, the one who turned him in about the writings. That's got to be freaking creepy. Oh, man. And bragged about a bunch of crimes he hadn't actually committed, which just baffles me. Like, what did he want her to say to all that?

Was she supposed to be impressed? I know. I know. A lot of what he said seemed designed to dehumanize Christina. When she told him something he was doing hurt her, he said, well, it's going to be done to you regardless. At one point, she said something that made him laugh, and that seemed to be. annoy him. I don't want to have sex with you now, he said, now that I know you have brains. Which is just such bald misogyny that I can't help but be impressed. Usually, violent sexist men

couch their bullshit in like evolutionary biology that they don't understand. Like, women want to be cheated on. It shows you, shows them that they're, they're with, in good hands, with competitive sexual partner. Yeah. Like, instead he's just like, oh, you're no longer an object. God, I hate that about you. Yeah, it's like he's just coming right out and saying the quiet part out loud. I hate this dude so much. Ugh. Makes me fucking nauseous.

Apparently, having one victim to torture wasn't enough for David Snow. So on July 11th, while he still had Christina captive at his campsite, he burst through the door of a video store in North Vancouver. He brandished his gun at the male manager and his teenage female employee and demanded all the cash in the register. Then he tied up the man with a phone. own cord, held the gun on the 19-year-old girl, and ordered her to take him to her car. A VW bug parked out front. Then he made her drive to the campsite, where the girl, will call her Jane, must have been terrified to see a bound and gagged Christina tied to a tree. We're moving camp,

he told the women. Get in the car. Now, right around this time, North Vancouver RCMP officers Dave Kwasnika and Reg Cardinal were sitting in their patrol car talking about the case. Ever since the bulletin went out from the Toronto PD, they'd been keeping their eyes open for any sign of snow, and they figured he was probably the one responsible for the two recent abductions. As they talked it over, they realized something. He abducted this girl from the video store at gunpoint, right? One said. That must mean he's wanting to do something that requires privacy, so we should look for him someplace secluded. So they started driving around, no particular destination in mind,

just kind of looking for a likely spot not too far from the video store. And it wasn't long before they spotted a VW bug, parked a little haphazardly on the side of the road at the base of Mount Seymour. And when they checked a license plate, holy shit, it matched the one from the missing girl's car. And just as they got out of their squad car to investigate, they heard a piercing scream from somewhere out in the forest. Hearts in their throats, guns drawn, the two officers ran toward the scream. And there she was. Their 19-year-old victim, Jane, terrified and tied to a tree. Officer Cardinal quickly started untying her, but as he did that, another scream rose up through the trees.

Leaving Cardinal with the first victim, Dave Kwasnika ran toward the second scream, and a couple minutes later, found Christina. There's another woman, she told him. We know, we got her, Dave said. As they sped the two women to safety, the officers called it in, and my guess is the dispatcher thought it was a prank at first, because when does shit like this ever happen in real life? And within an hour, the hunt was on for David Snow.

This is just unbelievable, isn't it? Like an episode of Criminal Minds or something where they rush in and rescue everybody in the nick of time? I mean, it happens every week on criminal minds, but it happens almost never in real life. Side note, that always really annoyed me about that show, that and the fact that they almost never actually arrest the killer. They almost always shoot them.

But, you know, shout out to Dr. Reed. You're the bum. Yeah, I love Dr. too. You know, oddly enough, I can't actually think of one other case where this happened, where investigators stopped a serial killer like in mid-kill and rescued the victim. And it happened in Canada, too. Like, what is going on in Canada? That one was the Bruce MacArthur case from a few years ago. They'd been surveilling MacArthur, suspected him of being the one behind a whole series of missing gay men. When they saw him pick up a young man and take him home, they realized we can't leave him alone with this guy. So they burst into his apartment. found this poor guy tied up and terrified and got him out of there in the nick of time. Most likely saved him from being murdered. So anyway, the investigators figured Snow wouldn't get far, what with his driving phobia and all, and they were right.

Later that same night, Marie Tremblay was heading to her car after work at the Bridge House restaurant in North Vancouver when she suddenly found herself staring down the end of a gun barrel. Move and you're dead, Snow told her. I'm desperate for money and I don't care. how I get it. Poking the gun into her side, he walked her back inside the restaurant. But it was after closing, and a series of beeps told him that the security alarm had been tripped. Call the company, Snow demanded. Tell them everything's fine. Marie did, but there must have been something

in her voice, because the operator immediately sensed that something was wrong. She called the police as soon as she hung up with Marie. And as the RCMP sped toward the restaurant, Marie fought David Snow like a tiger. She gave it everything she had and the fight was ferocious. Snow fractured her skull, stomped her in the stomach and sexually assaulted her as she fought for her life. And it was in the midst of all that the RCMP showed up. Caught the piece of shit red-handed trying to strangle Marie with a wire around her neck and a plastic bag over her head. Snow leapt up and ran for it, leaving Marie Tremblay lying face down on the ground, probably less than a minute away from death. She was badly hurt, but she survived. Officer Peter Cross took off after Snow and

launched himself at him, tackling him to the ground. And that was it for Mr. Snow. It didn't take long for the DNA on the bloody tissue found in Ian and Nancy Blackburn's car to come back as a perfect match to his. The Crown prosecutor charged him with two counts of first-degree murder, and on the same day, those charges came down, the RCMP launched a full-scale search for the body of antique dealer Caroline case. The one whose missing car had been found a year earlier. And they found her, only 500 yards from where her car had been dumped. God, the luck they had in this case is just amazing. Like to rescue not one, but three victims just in time to save their lives. And now to find the body of Caroline Case on the same day that he gets charged with the Blackburn murders. It's just,

it's like a movie. It's just unbelievable. Yeah. If I didn't know this was true, I would say that this was like bad fiction. I'd laugh at a screenplay with this stuff in it. A hundred percent, it'd be over the top, right? But it's actually every word of it's true. It's bonkers. They did an autopsy on Caroline case's remains, but never found enough usable evidence

to charge Snow with her murder. That said, the people closest to the case have said they believe he's responsible. And I think the circumstantial evidence is strong. And they had more than enough to convict him of the murders of Ian and Nancy Blackburn. A jury found him guilty in 1996. five years after the fact, and as the judge read the verdict, Snow just sat at the defense

table looking kind of bored. He never even glanced at the jury. The judge sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, which is about as tough as sentences you're going to get in Canada. When the judge asked if he wanted to respond to the sentence, Snow just mumbled, I have nothing to say. After the sentencing, Jamie Osborne, the nephew who found his favorite aunt and uncle's bodies in the trunk of their car, that awful day in 92, talked to a reporter outside the courthouse. I've had the occasion to actually be quite close to him and stare him right in the eye, he said. And it's just a blank stare.

There just doesn't seem to be anything there. Canada wasn't finished with David Snow. On top of the two murder convictions, he was found guilty of more than 20 other crimes. Kidnapping, sexual assault, unlawful confinement, robbery, choking, and strangling in the process of a crime and misuse of a firearm, just to name a few. All those were just for the assault on Marie Tremblay. When a judge acquitted him for Marie's attempted martyr, Canadians were outraged. God, I bet. She was literally like seconds away from death when they caught him.

They found him on top of her, for God's sake. Like, what more did the judge need to prove he was trying to kill her? It's just, it's ridiculous. And I hate it for her. But, you know, I'm glad they got him on all that other stuff, obviously. Yeah. He's not going to. anywhere. In 93, they actually had a hearing to get him named a dangerous offender, which is a thing in Canada. It means you can keep somebody in prison pretty much indefinitely for the greater good of protecting the public. Yeah, I think that's actually why Paul Bernardo is still in prison. He's a dangerous offender, too. Mm-hmm. It's a big deal, and they didn't have any trouble

getting snow classified as dangerous. A psychological evaluation showed he was completely obsessed with violent, non-consensual sex. Like a lot of serial offenders, David, had very few social skills and tended to isolate himself, which meant that his fantasy life became way more significant than his real one. And when you combine that with a total lack of empathy for other people, you've got a recipe for badness. Big, big badness. So while we can't prove David Snow is a serial killer, to get that label, you have to have killed at least two people with what they call a cooling off period in between them. It used to be three people, but now it's too. But despite the fact that we can't prove it, prove it, investigators are pretty well convinced

that he is a serial, and I'm very much inclined to agree. Inspector Grady is convinced he killed Caroline Case, and so are the authors of three different books I read for this episode, one of whom is a criminal profiler. I mean, look at the circumstances. They found Case's body near the Blackburn's house in Caledon, which we know was like his favorite hunting ground. She went missing the day after he arrived at his mom's house. Her store was right down the road. from his mom's place. The M.O. fits perfectly. And remember, he was an antique dealer

and she owned an antique store. So the way I think it probably happened as he was just strolling around his mom's neighborhood, went in to look at some antiques. And he was very much about the victim of opportunity. You know, he was all about barging into somebody's store and taking them hostage. I think that's exactly what happened.

And it was right after case disappeared that David Snow dropped off the map, leaving his business partners in the lurch and becoming the house hermit. And it's not just Caroline case. He's a strong suspect and at least 10 other murders as well. And when I say strong suspect, I mean, there's a lot of good circumstantial evidence, just nothing absolutely definitive.

So I'll give you just a few examples from Lee Miller's book Cold North Killers. When police searched his house in the course of the Blackburn investigation, they found a handmade map. When they investigated several of the routes that Snow had drawn on this map, they realized that they all led right to where dead bodies had been found over the years. And this is leading all the way back to 1977. Okay. Now, one of these bodies was that of a woman who went missing right after being seen with snow. Her body was found later, out in Caledon, not far from where Caroline Case would turn up years

later. And the day after she went missing, David showed off an antique clock he said he'd just bought. It was the missing woman's. And there's a similar story with an elderly man and an antique red chair. Was this one of his favorite methods of acquiring new antiques for his business? We might never know for sure, but has given me the hebes to think about it. Evidently, prison hasn't been going so well for David. According to a 2020 article in the Toronto Sun, he's racked up some additional convictions since he got there, including one for physically assaulting another inmate and threatening to kill him. I, for one, am shocked. Unsurprisingly, the parole board denied him in 2019, telling him he still had no consent.

of what he'd done to his victims or why. He's been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder, a pretty poisonous combination. And my guess is he's probably staying right where he is. One of the things that haunts me the most about this case is that phone call from Ian and Nancy's Caledon Cottage to their Toronto house on the night of the murders. We know Ian was going there that night to work on the plumbing. Did he walk in on the house hermit?

Did Snow realize Ian had a wife and decide to have a little quote, fun? Did he make Ian call Nancy and say something to lure her there? Or did he call her himself? Like, I have your husband come here or I'll kill him and don't call the police? There's something about that lingering question that I can't get out of my head. I think about Nancy driving hell-bent for leather to the cottage through the dark, thinking she's on her way to help her husband out of some unknown emergency. Did she have any idea what was waiting for? We'll never know. what I think we can be sure of is that the man who did it to her

hasn't lost a moment of sleep over it since so that was a wild one right campers you know we'll have another one for you next week but for now lock your doors light your lights and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire and as always we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons and to all of them

as a matter of fact because some of our patrons actually helped us pick this case this week which is one of the perks you get if you're one of our Patreon subscribers. Thank you so much to Elvis. Ah, the king's alive and he's a camper. Elza, Gene, Heidi, Brianna, Mary, Alexa, and Amanda.

We appreciate y'all to the moon and back. And if you're not yet a patron, you're missing out. Patrons of our show get every episode ad-free, at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus an extra episode a month. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more cool stuff. A free sticker at $5, a rand-a-end,

enamel pin while supplies last at 10 virtual events with Katie and me and we're always looking for new stuff to do for you so if you can come join us at patreon.com slash true crime campfire and for great TCC merch visit the true crime campfire store at spreadshirt.com