For those that are first responders, or love a first-responder, please heed my message at the end of this episode.  For many first-responders, the theme of PTSD and the effects it can have will ring loudly in this episode.

INTRO

Imagine waking up at two in the morning to the sound of fists pounding on your front door. You stumble out of bed, pull back the curtain — and the entire sky is orange. Sixty feet of flame, roaring out of your barn, so close you can feel the heat through the glass.

That's what happened to Marilyn and Earl Snedden on the night of July 3rd, 2002. A pair of truck drivers had spotted the glow from the highway and raced to their door.

And that was only the beginning.

Over the next eleven weeks, sixteen fires would burn across the farm country surrounding Almonte, Ontario — a quiet community of about forty-two hundred people, roughly fifty kilometres west of Ottawa. Known, if it was known for anything, as the birthplace of James Naismith, the man who invented basketball.

The fires caused over a million dollars in damage. They killed livestock. They exhausted a volunteer fire department already running on fumes. And they terrorized an entire community of farmers who began sleeping in their overalls with shotguns by the bed.

Residents started calling the arsonist "The Ghost," because no one could see him. No one could catch him. He struck at will — evening, night, sometimes broad daylight — and vanished.

When the truth finally came out, it was worse than anyone had imagined. Because the Ghost wasn't a stranger. He was one of the most respected men in town. A man who had spent thirty years of his life fighting fires.

This is the story of Gilmour "Gib" Drummond. And this is the summer he burned it all down.

CHAPTER 1 — The Hero

To understand what happened in the summer of 2002, you need to go back five years earlier. To a freezing December night that changed everything.

December 6th, 1997. A Saturday. Just after midnight. A fire erupts in Almonte's historic downtown block — in a building on Mill Street that houses a thrift shop on the ground floor and an apartment above. Inside that apartment, a young couple is trapped, they were college sweethearts.

The Almonte Volunteer Fire Department scrambles to respond. Among the first up the aerial ladder is Gib Drummond, then fifty-four years old. A thirty-year veteran. A captain. A man the other firefighters looked up to.

What happened next, by all accounts, shattered him.

As firefighters reached the second-floor apartment, one of them broke through the window and was hit by a wall of heat so ferocious it melted the face shield on his helmet. That firefighter was Drummond. Flames seared his eyes. Glass exploded inward. He fell from the ladder, breaking his left arm and severely injuring his left shoulder.

The couple couldn't be saved. Billy Coughlan and Andrea Ceolin died in the blaze. Drummond helped pass their bodies down to the ground.

It was Almonte's worst fire in a generation. And it was Gib Drummond's last.

His shoulder never recovered. He was diagnosed with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a chronic pain condition in which nerve injuries go undetected for long stretches. He couldn't work. He gained nearly a hundred pounds. Some days he couldn't get out of bed. He spent years cycling in and out of hospital. Heavy medication. Prolonged depression. He tried for months to get workplace compensation from the town. He eventually got it, but the experience left him bitter.

Mississippi Mills Mayor Ron Pettem, who knew him well, would later say that the fire just changed Drummond's whole life. He couldn't work, couldn't resume any role with the department, couldn't fight fires. Pettem added that Drummond had been pretty bitter about the compensation battle.

This was in 1997, well before it was acceptable to be diagnosed with PTSD. I feel its obvious now that Drummonsd was suffering from PTSD.   I hope in todays world, people like Drummond would be offered help. 

His daughter-in-law, Terra Drummond, told reporters he'd been hospitalized on and off for four years. That he saw people burning to death he couldn't help. That you'd have nightmares from it, too.

And then, in June 2001, another blow. Drummond — still listed as an honorary member of the fire department — was one of the first volunteers on the scene of a car crash and discovered that the victim was his own thirty-two-year-old niece, Dana Joy Drummond. His twin brother Dave, also a captain with the department, was not far behind.

This was another traumatic event suffered by Drummond, and it seems like he was not provided with the help he needed to cope with the effects of PTSD.

Drummond told the Ottawa Citizen at the time that you spend thirty years on rescue trucks thinking you're hardened enough to handle any situation. Then you come upon one of your own.

Fire Chief Art Brown, who considered Gib a personal friend, watched him deteriorate. Drummond would try to attend the department's monthly meetings but would break down at the door and go home. When fire calls came over the radio, he'd hurl it across the room in frustration — but refused to turn it off.

And then, in the spring of 2002, Drummond had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. When he came home a month later, his wife, Debbie, noticed something. He spent long hours sitting in his recliner, petting his pugs, Romeo and Winston, his fire radio always at his side. And occasionally, when a call came in, he would hustle out the door.

She thought he was showing signs of life again. She thought it was a good thing.

CHAPTER  2 — The Ghost Arrives

Now we come to the summer of 2002. Late June. The Ottawa Valley is baking under a heat wave. The grass is parched. The fields are dry as kindling.

And someone starts setting fires.

Here is the chronology. Pay attention to the pace — how it accelerates. How the Ghost grows bolder.

THE FIRE TIMELINE

**Fire 1 — June 20, 2002**

The first suspicious fire strikes a rural property in Mississippi Mills. An old barn. No witnesses. The pattern begins.

**Fire 2 and 3 — July 3, 2002 (Snedden Farm, first attack)**

The Snedden family farm — Mississippi Holsteins, a 180-hectare dairy operation that has been in the family for six generations — is hit for the first time. Around 7:30 in the evening, a barn wall begins to smoulder. The Sneddens rush over with hoses and pails and call the fire department. The volunteers manage to put it out before it spreads.

Fire Chief Art Brown finds a road flare inside the barn. It's the arsonist's signature — a flare gives roughly twenty minutes of burn time, enough to light a fire and be long gone before the flames take hold.

But the Ghost isn't finished with the Sneddens. Not even close. After dark, at the very same barn, under cover of night — the arsonist returns. At two o'clock in the morning, truck drivers spot the blaze and bang on the farmhouse door. The Sneddens look out their window and see a sixty-foot wall of flame.

After five hours of fighting, the firefighters and the farmers admit defeat. The horse stable — an 1830s structure packed with antique farm equipment, an old buggy, a set of sleighs, and milk cans — is reduced to ash. Forty hens are killed. The uninsured loss is later estimated at forty-five thousand dollars, though family heirlooms inside were priceless.

And among the people on the scene that night? Offering a helping hand, chatting with firefighters?

Gib Drummond. Nobody gave it a second thought.

Almonte Fire Chief Art Brown would later tell reporters that Drummond routinely turned up at the scenes of barn fires. It was his way of staying close to the action after being forced off the job in 1997. Brown said that after that many years of firefighting, it got into Drummond's blood. It definitely changed him. He had a real association with the fire department and wanted to stay involved.

**Fires 4 through 9— First three weeks of July**

In the span of twenty-one days, Almonte-area farmers endure eight major barn fires. The community begins to crack. Farmers lock their doors. They board up windows. They move their tractors into the fields and cancel vacations. They write down licence plate numbers of unfamiliar cars. One family sets up a video camera filming their property from a bedroom window each night.

Undercover OPP detectives begin sleeping in barns at night, hoping to catch the arsonist at work.

**Fire 7 — July 24, 2002 (Snedden Farm, second attack)**

The Ghost returns to the Sneddens. This time, the target is their old milking barn. A passing motorist spots the first puffs of smoke and alerts the family. Earl Snedden, in his late sixties, tries to fight the fire himself and pulls his hamstring collapsing onto the pavement. He would spend four days in hospital recovering. They manage to extinguish the blaze — barely.

Marilyn Snedden finds the remnants of a flare. She is now certain an arsonist is targeting them personally. The arsonist struck on July 4th, then returned twenty days later to — as Mrs. Snedden figures — finish the job. She brings sandwiches to the firefighters and offers meals to the undercover detectives.

On July 25th, local police acknowledge they cannot solve this alone. A regional OPP task force arrives to take over the investigation.

CHAPTER 3 — The Pattern Breaks

For weeks, the Ghost has been careful. Barns only. Rural properties. Nothing near inhabited homes. But on August 4th, 2002, that changes — and it terrifies the investigators.

**Fire 8 — August 4, 2002 (Grace Property, County Road 29)**

Not a barn this time. A house. On the edge of town, near a busy highway. A man driving to the local gas station for cigarettes and milk spots what he thinks is fog drifting around a two-storey house. On the return trip, he sees flames and calls 911.

But here's the twist: the house is uninhabited. It belongs to a long-time local resident named Jimmy Grace, who, according to local lore, had fixed the place up decades earlier for a lady friend who never married him. Rather than sell it, he kept it exactly as it was — tidy curtains, freshly mowed lawn. He now lives across the road with his sister, in his nineties.

No outsider would have known that house was empty. Only someone with deep local knowledge would have realized the house could burn without risking anyone inside.

This is the moment the investigation pivots. Inside the Grace house, investigators recover something they haven't seen before: pristine, unburned flares. Not the common commercial kind available at a hardware store. These are the type used exclusively by professional emergency crews — firefighters and police officers.

The Ghost isn't just local. He may be wearing a uniform.

**Fires 9 to 11 — Late July to August 10**

More barns. All old structures, all accessible from the road, all set back from where people sleep. At each scene, investigators recover the same evidence: the remnants of road flares. The fires are occurring in the evening hours, within a tight geographic radius. A pattern is forming — but nobody can identify a vehicle, a suspect, or a witness.

CHAPTER 4 — The Trap

The lead investigators now face the most uncomfortable question of the case: is the arsonist a cop, or a fireman?

They devise a plan. Specially marked flares — products branded in a way designed to survive a fire — are placed in police vehicles. Art Brown, the fire chief, is asked to do the same with his fire trucks.

Brown agrees, but it tears him apart. He has to discreetly investigate all of his men. He has to create a profile for each firefighter so detectives can compare them against the psychological portrait they're building. He drives past every firefighter's home with police, sharing every scrap of gossip he knows. Every night, he checks the marked flares, praying they're all accounted for.

He cannot tell his men what is happening. They are frustrated. Exhausted. They don't understand why no arrest is being made.

Meanwhile, the OPP brings in a behavioural profiler and a team of forensic psychiatrists to study the case file. They build a portrait of the arsonist: someone formerly enthusiastic, now sidelined. Someone who craves excitement. Someone who would appear overly inquisitive, who would demonstrate risk-taking behaviour. Someone who needs to see the damage he has committed. And critically — someone who would tend to involve himself in the investigation.

The profile notes another detail. Every single fire falls within the Mississippi Mills township boundary. Not one target sits outside it. If a building across the line burned, a different fire department would get the call. The Ghost needs *his* department to respond.

**Fire 12 — August 20, 2002 (McCracken Property, River Road)**

Another barn. Another flare.

**Fire 13 — August 26, 2002 (Gleeson Farm)**

On the outskirts of Almonte, a jogger notices a smoking hay bale. She also spots a red Ford SUV driven by a man in his late fifties who hides his face as he passes. Then she finds a flare. She calls police, who bring it straight to Chief Brown.

The news is delivered to Brown in his small office by two grim-faced officers. The flare recovered near the hay bale is one of the marked flares. It came from a fire truck. Not a police car.

The Ghost is a firefighter.

At this point, the investigators may have missed a valuable clue.  They had reason to believe the suspect might be a firefighter.  They had a witness say a red SUV left the scene of a fire.  It would have taken only a few minutes to make database enquires with the names of the local firefighters and determine who owned a red car.  In my experience, this is a basic investigative step.

Fire 14 - August 28

An old hunting shack

Around the same time, Drummond makes a surprising appearance at the police office, striding in and loudly demanding that detectives catch the arsonist before someone is killed. The visit, perhaps intended to cover his tracks, instead pushes his name to the top of the suspect list.

**Fire 15 — September 8, 2002 (Woods Property, County Road 29)**

Fifteen fires now. Over a million dollars in damage. The community is fraying.

CHAPTER 5 — Hiding in Plain Sight

Here's what the investigators now piece together.

Gib Drummond had been showing up at fire scenes all summer. Helping out. Directing traffic. Passing water. Chatting with firefighters. To anyone watching, it was just Gibby — unable to let go of the job he loved, still trying to be useful.

No one thought twice about it.

But under twenty-four-hour surveillance, detectives notice something revealing. Drummond — the man everyone believed was too physically broken to climb a ladder, too disabled to hold a hose — is moving with surprising agility. When a fire call comes in on the radio, he races out of his house. He is not nearly as physically incapable as he had led everyone to believe.

The profiler's portrait fits Drummond precisely: formerly enthusiastic, now sidelined. Desperate for excitement. Showing up at scenes. Overly inquisitive. Deep local knowledge. Risk-taking.

And then, the most chilling realization. Detectives figure out his method. Drummond would set a fire, light the flare, and then race home — ten minutes was all he needed — where he would sit by his fire radio and wait for the dispatch call to announce his own fire. Then he would drive to the scene and offer to help.

He was creating the emergencies so he could respond to them.

OPP officers followed Drummond to a hardware store and watched him purchase road flares. But circumstantial evidence and psychological profiles are not proof. They need to catch him in the act.

CHAPTER 6 — The Last Fire

September 16th, 2002. After ten days of round-the-clock surveillance.

It is still daylight — just before 6 p.m. — when Gilmour Drummond turns his red Ford Escape off County Road 29 onto Bennies Corners Road, a bush-lined stretch of washboard gravel seven kilometres north of Almonte. He drives about five hundred metres, past one laneway, around a slight bend, and stops at what appears to be a deserted spot on a narrow strip of gravel.

The road isn't deserted. At least two plainclothes OPP officers — members of the Rural and Agricultural Crime Team that has been prowling Lanark County for two months — are watching his every move.

Drummond steps from his vehicle. He clambers over a shallow ditch and disappears into thick bush. Moments later, smoke drifts above the trees.

He returns to his SUV. As the unmarked police car passes, he lifts a work glove and waves cheerfully. Then he climbs back in and floors it toward home at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour — he doesn't want to miss the action when the fire call comes over the radio.

But there is no chase. Instead, a second team of officers tails Drummond as he turns right on County Road 29 and heads back toward town. Meanwhile, the first two officers dive into the bush. The dry grass and parched bushland along Bennies Corners Road are a wildfire waiting to happen. Area farmers had recently been warned against burning brush for fear of igniting a grass-and-bush inferno.

The officers peel off their jackets and shirts in a desperate bid to beat down the fire before it spreads. They manage to smother the flames. Their clothes are destroyed. They are treated at the scene for smoke inhalation.

A few minutes later, the surveillance team arrives at 213 Naismith Drive in Almonte. Neighbours returning home from work or preparing the family supper describe a host of marked and unmarked police vehicles squealing around corners and descending on the scene. Officers apprehend Gilmour Drummond, leading him away in handcuffs from a street lined with well-kept homes in one of the town's prettiest neighbourhoods.

Fire number sixteen. The final fire.

CHAPTER 7 — The Reckoning

The news ricochets across Lanark County like a shockwave. In a small town where everyone is connected, the arrest is devastating. Drummond was one of ten children — seven boys and three girls — and had three children of his own. Everyone in Almonte seemed to know a Drummond.

His twin brother Dave — also a volunteer firefighter — was at one time married to the sister of Edwin Lowry, whose barn had been burned down during the summer. After that fire, Lowry had said he hoped he didn't know the person who had lit it. He told reporters that you depend on your neighbours around here, and you're nowhere without them.

Now he knew.

Drummond's son, Davey, pleaded publicly for sympathy. He told reporters that his father had given his heart and soul for thirty years to the volunteer fire department. That he had not been in the right frame of mind since December 1997. That he had been in and out of hospital for four years, a man who takes heavy medication. A man who worked hard all his life and cannot work any longer.

Early the next morning, investigators combed through Drummond's home, searching for evidence connecting him to the fires that had stymied police for months.  One of the pieces of evidence they found was a flare gun

Art Brown, the fire chief who had considered Drummond one of the best firefighters the department ever had — a man all the members respected — was left to reckon with the truth. Brown told reporters he was the last person he expected to be charged. And if Drummond truly was the arsonist, Brown said he felt sorry for him. He also expressed relief, saying he just hoped it was all finally over.

On October 1st, fifteen additional criminal charges were laid, bringing the total to twenty-three counts connected to eight of the sixteen fires. Drummond was ordered to the Royal Ottawa Hospital's forensic psychiatric unit for a thirty-day assessment. Two court-ordered psychiatric evaluations found him mentally fit to stand trial and criminally responsible for his actions.

On January 20th, 2003, in a Perth courtroom, Gilmour Drummond — looking sickly and exhausted, unsteady on his feet, barely able to stand — pleaded guilty to twelve charges: eight counts of arson and four counts of possession of incendiary devices.

His defence lawyer, Jack Kirkland — a veteran who called the case one of the most confounding he'd ever handled — told reporters that Drummond was still a good man. But because of an accident, he was physically and emotionally scarred. Kirkland said he didn't know why Drummond did what he did, and didn't think Drummond himself knew either.

Drummond was sentenced to three years in prison.

On the Snedden farm, Marilyn Snedden heard the news and exhaled for the first time in months. She told the Ottawa Citizen that she felt real relief. That if the accused doesn't plead guilty, these things can drag on through the courts for so long. She said the family hadn't realized how much stress they'd been under until the arrest, and that it used to be every time you heard a siren, you could walk outside and see the smoke. Now things were finally quiet.

She even found a measure of sympathy for Drummond. She said it seemed obvious he was in a state where he needed help.

Since the arrest, there have been no more fires.

CHAPTER 8 — The Dirty Secret

There's a phrase that kept coming up in the reporting around this case. A fire chief in New Mexico, Tom Aumhammer, called it the "dirty secret" of the fire hall: among the men and women who douse blazes and pull children out of burning homes, some are arsonists.

It's not a popular topic. Other fire chiefs are reluctant to discuss it. But the research exists. A retired FBI investigator named Timothy Huff surveyed seventy-five American firefighters who were collectively responsible for a hundred and eighty-two fires. The primary motive, according to his 1994 study, was a desire for excitement and power.

And two American profilers — John Philpin and Chris Rush — had actually studied the Almonte case *before* the arrest, based on information published in the Ottawa Citizen. Both independently concluded that the suspect was likely a white male with a connection to the fire department.

They were exactly right.

The motives of the firefighter-arsonist, according to experts, can vary: a desire for recognition, wanting to play the role of hero, low self-esteem, a maturity level that doesn't allow the thrill-seeker to see the harm caused by the fires.

Gib Drummond was a man who gave thirty years of his life to saving his neighbours. A man who climbed a ladder into an inferno and fell trying to rescue two people he couldn't save. A man who was broken — physically, psychologically — and left to spiral. And in that darkness, he found the only thing that still made him feel alive.

He set fires so he could respond to them. He created disasters so he could be needed. And in doing so, he terrorized every person he had ever sworn to protect.

Marilyn Snedden, whose farm was targeted twice, told the Ottawa Citizen that Drummond was at some of the fires, talking to people. That, she said, was the galling part.

EPILOGUE

The Ghost of Almonte set sixteen fires in eleven weeks in the summer of 2002. He was charged in connection with eight. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Today, the twisted metal salvaged from the Snedden barn sits on their property — a kind of accidental sculpture, a monument to a summer no one in Mississippi Mills will ever forget.

If there's a lesson in this story, maybe it's this: the people we trust the most are the ones who can hurt us the worst. And sometimes the most dangerous fire isn't the one burning in the barn.

It's the one burning inside someone you thought you knew.  From my many years spent in policing, I have seen many good people destroyed by their own personal demons, if you see someone struggling, and they aren’t able to ask for help, be courageous and have the hard conversation with them and get them help.  It will make an incredible difference to them.

This episode was written, researched and produced by me, Ryan Dell. If this is your first time listening, and you like what you heard, please take a moment to give me a 5-star review. It helps the podcast grow and helps other people find these amazing stories.

I love hearing from you, if you have a story I should cover, please send me an email. My email is: canadiancrimecast@gmail.com

I’m Ryan Dell, and this is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

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*Sources: The Ottawa Citizen (September 18, 2002; October 1, 2002; January 21, 2003), The Globe and Mail (April 19, 2003), The Windsor Star (September 18, 2002).*