CARTHAGE — A Mexico couple who lost their retirement summer home to an arsonist on June 26 offered a reward Friday for information leading to the arsonist’s arrest and conviction.

Gene and Andrea Casey, who built the roughly $150,000 log cabin 15 years ago with friends, family and relatives at 471 Winter Hill Road, are still distraught about losing the house and precious family mementos that were inside.

They’re also angry at whomever burned it down.

They said Friday that they decided to offer a reward to try to help state Fire Investigator Ken McMaster, who labeled the fire that destroyed their house and a Wilton house 10 miles away and about an hour earlier as arson fires.

“It was a log summer home,” Gene Casey said. “It was a little more than a camp and we were going to retire to it. We didn’t build it totally ourselves, because we had to hire some things out, but we used the best logs that were available at the time for it.”

They said they had hoped to spend winters in Florida and summers in the Carthage cabin. He works in the maintenance department for Rumford paper mill Catalyst; she works for Regional School Unit 10’s Nutrition Service.

The 1½-story cabin that was purposely built “off the grid” was totally destroyed.

“That’s why I’m keeping this (reward) ball rolling for as long as I can,” Andrea Casey said. “I want to get them. I want to find somebody. That’s why we’re offering a reward.”

Anyone with any information is asked to call the State Fire Marshal’s office at 626-3870.

The Caseys declined to state the amount of the reward. “We don’t want to say, because it could be $1,000 or it could be $2,000. It depends on how long they wait,” she said.

Gene Casey said he doesn’t know who destroyed their home, but he believes McMaster has suspects. McMaster wasn’t available for comment Friday, but his supervisor, Sgt. Ken Grimes, said he couldn’t talk about the case because it was still being investigated.

McMaster has been in contact with the couple “almost daily,” Gene Casey said. “He’s very thorough.”

“He’s doing an excellent job,” Andrea Casey said. “He calls us almost every day and texts us. He’s been right there for us. He’s been awesome.”

At the time the house was burned, Gene Casey said, there was no electricity to it and he didn’t have the propane turned on for it. “The camp was secure.”

Both think whomever burned their house down did it to cover up a burglary and theft of items. They said things are missing that they don’t believe perished in the fire. “They’ve determined that,” Gene Casey said. “We were looking for certain items there.”

He said the cabin was burned flat to the ground. “We lost everything,” Andrea Casey said. “There was nothing that I could save.”

Lost items include an old Revere copper teapot, a cribbage board made by a neighbor now deceased and a chest that came from France with a Catholic nun, who gave it to the Caseys to thank them for helping move her to a retirement community.

“We’re too old to rebuild it,” Gene Casey said.

The Caseys said they would spend holidays at the cabin with their two sons, a granddaughter and granddogs. They’ve lived in Maine all of their lives. Gene went to school in Rumford, Andrea in Mexico.

“We would all meet there. It was the perfect place,” Andrea Casey said. “To think that somebody had to go in there and destroy it — any place, not just my place — take away from what so many people worked so hard for, I just can’t get over it.

“I want to look at him, sit him right down,” she said if she gets the chance to face the arsonist in court and ask, “What was the purpose? Look me in the eye and tell me, what were you thinking?”

The house was insured. But that doesn’t bring back irreplaceable family lore like the logbook they kept since it was being built. Their children and granddaughter wrote in it. They would read it from time to time and laugh at the memories. Remembering that stirred Andrea’s emotions. As tears fell, Gene hugged her.

“If we could get only one thing back, it would have been that,” Andrea said. “We lost everything, even that, and that was precious.”

tkarkos@sunmediagroup.net