A driver passing 3746 North Morse Road in Sheridan Township, Michigan, on the morning of Monday, November 22, 2021, saw smoke coming out of the attic of a house and called 911. The fire was reported at 9:06 a.m., according to testimony later given in court.
The house was a small, two-story, wood-sided rental in a rural township outside the village of Fountain, in Mason County, on the Lake Michigan side of the state. The first report that Mason County Press published that morning said that nobody had been home and that two dogs may have died.
Both dogs had died. So had the man who lived there. By the end of the week, the pickup truck he drove had been found in a hospital parking lot on the other side of Michigan, and the woman who had driven it there had been taken off a plane in Detroit on her way to Alaska.
It took the courts almost three more years to finish with her.
The Fire On Morse Road
The Fountain Area and Branch Township fire departments were called first. Crews from Custer and from Free Soil and Meade followed, along with sheriff's deputies.
Branch Township Assistant Chief Luke McVicker was in command. He told Mason County Press that heavy smoke was coming from the eaves when he arrived and that the fire seemed to have started near the middle of the house. His crews could not fight it from inside, he said, "due to many obstacles in the home."
At first nothing told the crews there was a person in the house. McVicker said there was "no indication in the early stages of the fire that the home was occupied, until family members arrived."
Barry Ruger, the assistant chief of the Fountain Area Fire Department, was sent up to open the roof and let the smoke out. He testified eight months later that he had heard a rumor someone might be inside. As the structure vented, the Ludington Daily News reported from his testimony, firefighters saw two dogs. Then they found a man.
He was on the second floor. The stairs up to it had burned away, and the crew had to cut a larger hole in the roof to reach him.
Sheriff Kim Cole was at the scene and confirmed that a body had been found. He did not give a name that day. By the following Monday the man had been publicly identified as Jeffrey Grant, 57.
A Son Of Foster Parents
Jeffrey Allen Grant was born in Muskegon on October 19, 1964, to Brian and Nancy Grant. His parents were foster carers. According to his mother's obituary, "For over three decades, Nancy and Brian welcomed more than 100 foster children into their hearts and home."
He came from a big family and had already lost part of it. His father, a sister and a brother all died before him. His father's death came in 2021, the same year as his own.
Grant's own obituary is five sentences long. It says he "passed away unexpectedly" and "will be greatly missed by his mother Nancy, many brothers and sisters, and his dear friend Shana and her family." It does not say what he did for a living, and none of the news reports reviewed for this article does either. A gathering of friends and family was set for the afternoon of Sunday, December 12, 2021, at the Sherman Township Hall in Fountain.
He did not own the house on Morse Road. It belonged to a property company, and he was the tenant. He did not own the truck either. The black 2003 Chevrolet Avalanche he drove was registered to another man in Fountain, who had lent it to him.
The two dogs were his. Their names do not appear in any of the reports reviewed for this article.
The Woman From Kincheloe
Hope Lynn Snyder was from Kincheloe, in Chippewa County, at the eastern end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She was 40 or 41 at the time of the fire; the reports differ.
She had two earlier felony convictions, the Ludington Daily News reported: larceny in a building in Mackinac County, Michigan, in 2001, and a theft conviction in Alaska. She had served prison time for both. She still had ties to Anchorage.
How well she and Grant knew each other has never been fully explained in public. Sheriff Cole called them acquaintances. The county prosecutor, Lauren Kreinbrink, said only that Snyder had been to Grant's house on at least one occasion before the fire, and that the details of the relationship would come out in court.
One detail did. Det. Sgt. Tom Posma testified that on November 19, 2021, three days before the fire, Grant drove Snyder to Mackinac County, where she was due in court for a probation violation.
Snyder's own description, in a message she sent a few hours before the fire, was shorter. "I don't even know him," she wrote.
"He Has A Fair Shot Of Waking Up"
What happened inside the house that night is known almost entirely from Snyder's phone. Detective Mike Kenney of the Mason County Sheriff's Office read her Facebook messages aloud at her preliminary examination on July 25, 2022. She had sent them to two people, one of them a contact in Anchorage, across the evening of November 21 and the early hours of November 22. Most were written before the fire.
At 8:12 p.m. she wrote: "I know I need to put him to sleep, get the truck." The rest of that message, as the Ludington Daily News reported it, talks about fetching another person to help with "whatever the plan ends up being."
At 3:13 a.m. she wrote again. Grant, she said, could not find his "dope sack," had told her she had to help him look for it, and had said she was not leaving until it was found.
"I don't even know him. Mason does, and Mason left me here … But this fool don't know me. I'll burn this (expletive) to the ground right now."Hope Snyder, in a message sent at 3:13 a.m. on November 22, 2021, as read in court and reported by the Ludington Daily News
Other messages, as Mason County Press reported them, referred to Grant giving her drugs. She described a plan, which she herself called "crazy and heartless," to get drugs, a house, a truck and money.
She wrote that she believed Grant was trying to drug her, and that she had switched the drugs with his. After that, she said, he passed out or fell asleep.
Then she seemed to weigh her choices in writing. "But now I'm sitting here confused on what I should do now," one message read. "Let the place burn and leave in the truck or pillow him…"
And another: "I know I'll just turn the gas on, the stove on, and just leave it that way. I'm not playing God. He has a fair shot of waking up."
Kenney also found videos on the phone. One showed Grant asleep, then his keys, then the screen of his home security monitor, with the Avalanche parked in the driveway.
Later that morning Snyder told one of the same contacts that she was deleting her Facebook account and starting a new one. "I'm freaking the (expletive) out right now and don't even know what to say," she wrote.
Kenney told the court what he took from all of it: "That Hope Snyder was looking to get Mr. Grant's dope and she was coming up with a way to get some money from Mr. Grant, contemplating taking his vehicle and somehow taking his money and dope."
Under cross-examination, he agreed that Snyder never wrote, in those specific words, that she was going to kill Jeff Grant.
A Closet Under The Stairs
Sgt. Joseph Allen of the Michigan State Police Fire Investigation Unit examined what was left of the house. A dog trained for fire investigations worked the scene on the day of the fire and again the next day. An electrical engineer ruled out an electrical cause.
Allen concluded that the fire began in a closet under the stairs on the first floor. "It was an incendiary fire," he testified, "meaning the suspect used a competent fire source to light a fire under the steps in the house."
He could not at first say what had been lit. About three months later, after sheriff's detectives told him that a jug of alcohol-based gel fire starter had been seen in the living room next to the wood pellet stove, he came to believe that the gel was probably the first fuel. It can be lit, he said, with a lighter or a match.
The stairs above that closet were the ones the firefighters found burned away. Grant was on the floor they led to.
None of the reports reviewed for this article quotes a formal medical examiner's ruling on his death. What is on the record is a summary of the autopsy report given from the bench by Judge John Middlebrook at the end of the preliminary examination.
"[T]here was soot in his lungs, in his esophagus and in his stomach ... Apparently he had gotten up off of where he was sleeping on. According to the report, there was a blanket around his foot as if he tried to make it to the doorway but was unable to."Judge John Middlebrook, 79th District Court, July 25, 2022, as reported by the Ludington Daily News
9&10 News reported that the autopsy showed Grant was alive before the fire. Prosecutors said he was alive, on the second floor, when it was set.
A Missing Truck
Sheriff Cole said later that the first question his investigators had on the day of the fire was a simple one. What had happened to Mr. Grant's vehicle?
The Avalanche was not in the driveway. On Wednesday, November 24, the sheriff's office reported it stolen and asked the public for help, releasing two pictures of the truck, its Michigan plate number and one detail that would make it easy to spot: a set of aftermarket fog lights across the front bumper.
The appeal brought a call. Someone in Osceola County, to the east, called detectives about Snyder. That call, Cole said, "put us on a course going east from here."
On Friday, November 26, a Saginaw police officer found the truck in a hospital parking lot in Saginaw. Detectives also obtained a search warrant for Snyder's phone and tracked its location.
"They Just Missed Her"
The phone led to MBS International Airport, outside Saginaw. Cole called the Saginaw County sheriff and asked him to get officers there. "They just missed her," Cole said afterward. "She boarded a flight."
The flight was a short hop to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. She was booked to go on to Anchorage.
The Mason County detectives were on the highway at the time, driving east toward Saginaw. They turned south for Detroit instead and phoned ahead.
"When our detectives learned she hopped a flight, our detectives hopped on (I-75) southbound and started heading to Detroit. We made a phone call to the Detroit airport police, and they got her getting off the flight in Detroit."Sheriff Kim Cole, March 23, 2022, as reported by the Ludington Daily News
Airport police stopped Snyder as she came off the plane. Posma and Kenney interviewed her at the airport and arrested her.
The only warrant the detectives had at that point was for the truck. Snyder was taken back to the Mason County Jail and arraigned on Sunday, November 28, on a charge of unlawfully driving away an automobile. Bail was set at $25,000 cash. In the fire itself, the sheriff's office called her a "person of interest."
From A Stolen Truck To Murder
It stayed that way for almost four months. On February 1, 2022, Snyder pleaded guilty to attempted unlawful driving away of a motor vehicle. Her sentencing was set for March 22.
Behind that small case, the larger one was being built. Cole said his office carried out more than 18 interviews and more than 23 search warrants, eight of them for digital devices. Detectives worked in five other Michigan counties. Early in 2022, two of them travelled to Anchorage. "This trip was crucial in tying evidence gathered in Mason County and to validate some statements made," Cole said. He did not say what they found there.
The clock was the truck case, and the sentencing date in it. "She was a very significant flight risk," Kreinbrink said. Her office and the sheriff's, she said, "worked diligently to make sure that these charges were levied prior to the sentencing."
They made it with four days to spare. On Friday, March 18, 2022, Snyder was arraigned on open murder, first-degree felony murder, first-degree arson and two counts of second-degree killing or torturing an animal, as a third-offense habitual offender. Her bail was revoked.
Five days later Cole, Kreinbrink and a Michigan State Police lieutenant held a press conference at the sheriff's office. "This could have been written off as just a fatal fire," Cole said, "but there were things that just weren't adding up."
He said he had never seen a case like it in his career. And he spoke to Grant's family, who had waited through a winter of rumors on social media without an arrest for the death. "You allowed us to work at a pace that best served the investigators, and for that, I am grateful," he said. "I wish you peace moving forward."
What The Defense Said
The murder case slowed almost at once. On March 30, 2022, Snyder's lawyer at the time, Al Swanson, told the court she had a history of psychiatric conditions and asked for her to be examined, both for her competency to stand trial and for criminal responsibility. In June 2022 the judge reported that she had been found competent. The report was sealed.
By then she had a new lawyer, Tracie Dinehart, who asked for the case to be thrown out because the defense had still not been given more than 78 documents, the autopsy and fire reports among them. The judge ordered the prosecution to hand them over instead.
The preliminary examination, the hearing at which a Michigan judge decides whether there is enough evidence for a trial, lasted one day. Five witnesses testified for the prosecution. The defense called none.
Kreinbrink told the judge that the messages "paint a picture of a defendant who, quite frankly, is pissed off." Snyder wanted money, she said, and wanted a truck, and wanted to get away with it. "She lit that house on fire to get away with it."
Dinehart did not dispute how Grant died. "I'll concede," she said, "that the fire caused the death." Her argument was about who started it.
"But what we don't have in this record is any indication that Hope was the one that set this fire, that Hope was the one that started this fire."Tracie Dinehart, defense attorney, July 25, 2022, as reported by the Ludington Daily News
Judge Middlebrook found there was probable cause and sent the case to the 51st Circuit Court for trial. Snyder stood mute, and a plea of not guilty was entered for her.
The Prosecutor Is Removed
No trial came. Almost a year after the case reached circuit court, it lost its prosecutor.
Back when Snyder was charged only with taking the truck, her lawyer had been Sarah Valente. Valente later took a job in the Mason County Prosecutor's Office, the same office that was now trying to convict her former client of murder. On May 30, 2023, Judge Susan Sniegowski ruled that Valente had not been properly walled off from the case and removed the entire office from it.
"I order that the prosecution be recused from this case and a request for a special prosecutor be filed in the next 48 hours," the judge said, according to the Ludington Daily News.
Kreinbrink asked for the case to be paused while she appealed. The judge said no. The Michigan Department of Attorney General took over, and in September 2023 an assistant attorney general told the court she had only just received the evidence and was not ready to make any offer.
Grant's mother did not see the end of it. Nancy Grant died on October 10, 2023, at 87. Her obituary lists Jeffrey among the children who died before her.
A week after her death, the state made its offer: plead guilty to open murder, first-degree arson and the two animal counts, have the felony murder count dismissed, and serve a minimum of 35 years and a maximum of 60. Snyder did not answer at once. In November the judge kept the offer open for 30 more days and warned that she would accept no plea after the deadline.
On January 16, 2024, Snyder turned the offer down. The case was set for a trial expected to last up to two weeks.
No Contest
The trial never happened either. On June 25, 2024, Snyder appeared before Judge Sniegowski in Ludington and pleaded no contest to second-degree murder, first-degree arson and two counts of second-degree killing or torturing an animal. The agreed sentence was the same 35 to 60 years she had refused five months earlier. The open murder and felony murder counts were to be dropped at sentencing. A first-degree murder conviction in Michigan carries life in prison without parole.
A no-contest plea is treated as a conviction, but the defendant does not admit the facts. Asked why her client was pleading that way, Dinehart gave two reasons, the Ludington Daily News reported: Snyder did not remember much of what happened, and there was the possibility of a civil lawsuit. The court accepted both.
"This plea agreement ensures Ms. Snyder will face significant consequences for her unconscionable crimes," Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement.
"That's Exactly What She Did"
Snyder was sentenced on August 27, 2024. Mason County Press was the only outlet to report what was said in the courtroom. It wrote that Snyder wept as Grant's family spoke.
His sister Jodi Budzynski spoke.
"I don't think there is anything worse than watching a family member get burned up in a house."Jodi Budzynski, Jeffrey Grant's sister, at the sentencing
Shana Sterling, whom the paper described as Grant's significant other, told the judge that the date of the fire would stay with her for the rest of her life. "That day someone's son, brother, uncle, best friend, soulmate and a grandpa was taken from us," she said.
She said she had sat through two and a half years of hearings and had never once seen Snyder show remorse. "He got wrapped up with people that he shouldn't have, and this is what happened," she said. "She does not deserve to see light outside of those prison walls — ever."
Another sister, Barb Willoughby, went back to the messages, and to the one about not playing God. Snyder, she said, had told someone in Alaska that "she had to make the decision whether or not to play God." Then: "That's exactly what she did. It is no one's choice to take a life. She deserves to be behind bars."
Snyder did not speak. Dinehart read a written statement for her. It apologized to the Grant family and to her own, "mainly my mother and my son." It said she had been sober for almost three years.
"I don't even recognize the person I was in the grips of my addiction … I feel selfish for being able to have the opportunity to move forward and better myself when Jeffrey doesn't have that option."Hope Snyder, in a written statement read by her attorney at sentencing, as reported by Mason County Press
Dinehart called the case "nothing other than a tragedy" and said addiction had taken "100 percent control" of her client. The assistant attorney general, Michael Doby, said nothing could make the family whole, but that the certainty of the sentence gave them some solace.
Judge Sniegowski had the last word on the drugs. "People have this opinion that substance abuse or substance use is a victimless crime, and it absolutely is not," she said. "This is an extreme example of that."
She sentenced Snyder to 35 to 60 years for the murder and the same for the arson, and to 38 months to seven years for each of the dogs. The terms run together. Snyder was given credit for 893 days already spent in jail.
What Is Still Not Known
There was no trial. The evidence was presented and cross-examined once, at the one-day preliminary examination, and a good deal was left unexplained.
The reports reviewed for this article give no toxicology results for Grant and no formal ruling on the cause and manner of his death, and nothing in them confirms what Snyder wrote about switching drugs. They do not explain who the people in her messages were to her, including the "Mason" she said had left her at the house. In March 2022 Sheriff Cole said that "all options are on the table" on further charges; no report of anyone else being charged was found. Nor do the reports say what the detectives learned in Anchorage.
Some published accounts also disagree with what local reporters heard in court. The Attorney General's sentencing release spells the victim's name "Jeffery" and says Snyder fled "across the state in Grant's truck" to Detroit; the testimony was that she left the truck in Saginaw and flew. The Ludington Daily News gave the sentence as 36 to 60 years, where the plea agreement and every other report say 35. Two outlets called Grant her boyfriend, which nothing said in court supports.
The Attorney General's release also says Snyder set the fire while Grant slept. The autopsy summary read out by Judge Middlebrook suggests he did not stay asleep. The judge said Grant had apparently got up, and that the blanket around his foot looked as if he had tried to reach the doorway.