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“It’s going to be challenging for sure to try to regroup on the evidence side because so much had been destroyed, and that definitely could be a motivation of the fire,” she said, stressing that fire investigators must first find out the cause of the fire before police can continue.

Because the dungeon was in the basement, there is a hope that the room may still be intact, she said.

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Steve Fowlds, the City of Pickering’s fire prevention officer, said only smouldering bits of the house remain amidst the debris — part of the chimney, a few columns from the front porch and a TV antenna. The house is in a densely wooded area, so officers had to go into “defensive mode” to knock it down. It “took a while” before fire crews could snuff out the fire completely as there was no water supply nearby.

Before the blaze, police were trying to determine who built the “confinement-style” room with padlocks affixed to the very thick door, discovered in late November when crews went in to assess the building that had been scheduled for demolition.

Police said the house was last occupied in 2006, but the room was new — believed to have been built within the last year or two.

“I can’t get into what was in the room, but the way it was constructed — the time and effort put into it and the materials used — clearly indicated it was a room designed to hold somebody in,” Durham Regional Police Detective Darren Short said last month.

“There was a locking mechanism nobody would be able to penetrate or breach.”

Pickering is about 40km northeast of Toronto.

National Post, with files from Postmedia News