Police had little to go on after a fire destroyed Michael Purves' downtown home in August of 2007.

Purves' daughter Karen had arrived home in the early-morning hours of Aug. 31 to see a cloud of smoke hanging over the neighbourhood where she lived with her father.

At first she thought it was coming from a neighbour's house and rushed to their front door to wake them. It was then she realized the smoke was coming from her own house.

As she walked back toward her home, two young men came running toward her, shouting at her that her house was on fire.

Karen, sensing something was very wrong about the situation, kept her distance from the two. She had her cell phone out by that point, and as the two teenagers peered in the back window, Karen went around to the front door.

She still hoped that there was smoke but no fire as she opened the door.

The force of the heat knocked her on her back. When she regained her senses, she called 911 and rushed to the safety of a neighbour's house.

It took firefighters more than five hours to put out the blaze. The fire got into the logs of the Purves' well-built home, and kept re-igniting.

Finally, at around 6:30 a.m., Fire Chief Clive Sparks called the Purves to tell them the fire was out. He wanted them to come and look at the house, and he warned them it would be a difficult sight.

As soon as Karen and Michael walked into the blackened kitchen, the young woman noticed something was amiss. The laptop she had been working on the previous evening was gone, she told the fire chief.

"This is now a police investigation," he said. "Don't go any further, just look around and tell me if anything else is missing."

Karen pointed out a couple of other things she noticed missing from the kitchen, and Sparks, along with police, began investigating.

The fire had begun in the basement bedroom, the investigators found. There was nothing in that room that could have spontaneously started the blaze, and it was shortly deemed the fire was deliberately set.

Although the house did not burn to the ground, the damage was so extensive that the customized log home had to be bulldozed.

The flames, heat, smoke and water ruined most everything the Purves owned. It was a bitter irony for a man who, as vice-president of the Yukon branch of Habitat for Humanity, gives much of his time to help build homes for people less fortunate than himself.

For Karen, the experience was so traumatic that she left the territory.

For her father, the greatest tragedy of the whole affair is knowing his daughter will never return to Whitehorse.

Nothing significant happened on the case until Whitehorse RCMP, who were investigating a different crime, interviewed a 17-year-old male being held at the Young Offenders Facility.

He was accused of breaking into the Youth Achievement Centre in August of 2007, and during the investigation, police came to suspect him of several other property offences, including lighting the fire.

He was one of the two teenagers Karen had seen outside her house the night it was set on fire. The ones she had a bad feeling about.

When police questioned the young man, he readily admitted to breaking into Purves' home. He said he was the one who went into the kitchen and stole a laptop and a backpack, while his partner in crime went into the basement and started the fire.

He also confessed to stealing a safe from a house on Oglvie Street at about the same time.

Because he was under the age of 18 at the time of the offences, the young man's identity is protected by a publication ban.

But his young age has not saved him from an adult punishment. He was sentenced to two four-month sentences for breaking and entering, theft and robbery, to be served concurrently at the Whitehorse Corrections Centre.

"I hope he learned something from this," Purves told the Star this week.

"It was such a silly act. I can see why someone would steal, I guess, but to do what they did, it's inexplicable."

A psychological assessment done on the young man found he may suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, likely caused by a childhood marred by alcohol and abuse.

It warned that his "aggressive, defiant" attitude could well develop into a "fully formed antisocial personality disorder." Part of his sentence is that he must seek counselling after he is released from jail.

It is unclear where the other suspect is now. Purves has heard the young man is being held in Saskatchewan, and that he also denies setting the fire and puts the blame on his accomplice.

Because the two were minors at the time of their crime, the court file is sealed from public viewing.

The RCMP's file on the investigation, "is pretty sketchy," on details of the second suspect, said a spokesman for the Whitehorse detachment.

The officer said the investigator who was originally put in charge of the case has since been transferred to Toronto and it seems no one else was given the file.

To date, no one has been charged with lighting the fire.

Michael Purves rebuilt his home over the summer of 2008, and last November, it was completed.

It isn't quite the same, he said.

The insurance company wouldn't cover the cost of building another log home, or the substantial amount of upgrades and renovations Purves did on his original house.

No amount of money, of course, could replace the photos and heirlooms destroyed in the fire.

And his daughter is gone.

So instead of living on his own in the house, Purves is renting it out. He lives with his partner now, one of the few happy circumstances to emerge from the whole affair.

The other, Purves said, is the help he received from friends, neighbours and people he didn't even know.

"It was overwhelming," he said. "So many people came forward with support. That's the thing I want to remember about the whole thing."