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(Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice & Accountability) |
This is the second time I have posted here about femicide hitting close personally, and for the second time, I wish I had named my electronic journal...
"I Am NEVER Gonna Laugh About It!!"
In this second instance, I have been writing about Ashley here for the last year and a half. Readers and friends know just how much I have struggled with the shocking and brutal murder of my former coworker.
Well, on June 21st, 2024, her accused plead guilty and will be sentenced (after victim impact statements are heard) September 24th, 2024.
Since the moment the murderer entered a guilty plea, I have read and listened to every possible account of what unfurled in the courtroom the day he admitted to his violent crime. The article I am sharing below, is by far, what I feel provides the most detail and insight into the final day of her life.
My biggest fear, is that by waiving his right to a pre-trail, and taking the plea bargain to a lesser charge, he will be out sooner than later. That said, that shit scumbag doesn't deserve any space in my mind that is easily devoted to her.
Because, let's face it, if there is one thing my beloved friend truly deserves, it is to rest in peace and forever sleep easy.
On a very personal note. I will always pray for her young children, as they are sadly living victims, that will never forget the very last night of their deceased mother's life.
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Firefighter admits to murdering wife in Collingwood home then staging elaborate, clumsy coverup outside one of Ontario's wealthiest private ski clubs.
Written by: Betsy Powell
Courts Reporter - Toronto Star
Betsy is a reporter with the crime, courts and justice team at the Star
BARRIE A Brampton firefighter who masterminded his wife’s murder and attempted to conceal it by staging a fiery car crash in Ontario’s ski country left behind a trail of evidence for police to unravel.
Soon after he strangled Ashley Schwalm, 40, to death early last year in their Collingwood home — which they shared with their two young children — James Schwalm sent a series of texts to himself from her phone.
It was an attempt to convince police that she was still alive. In one, he asked her to fill up gas cans for a snowblower.
But she was already dead.
On Thursday, Schwalm, 40, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder but guilty to second-degree murder, admitting in a Barrie courtroom that he killed his wife in their two-storey, three-bedroom home, dressed her in hiking clothes, put her lifeless body in the passenger seat of her Mitsubishi Outlander and drove to Alpine Ski Club on Arrowhead Road.
Schwalm had borrowed his mother’s car and “pre-positioned it” at the Craigleith Ski Club North Lodge parking lot to use as a getaway vehicle after staging the crash nearby.
Sometime before 6 a.m. on Jan. 26, 2023, he set the car on fire, then went home to enact his alibi.
“Ok I’m going to zip out I think the kids will be fine their sleeping,” he wrote in one text to himself from Ashley’s phone.
“Eww I left the gas cans in my car and it smells,” he wrote in another, again pretending to be her.
And later: “Oh, I have vertigo. I’m going to rush home.”
Soon, he walked their two young children to school, telling them their mother was out on a hike.
In the days leading up to her death, Schwalm Googled “alomony” — misspelling “alimony” — and the questions, “can you see iophone history after deleted,” and “does a road flare completely burn,” and “throw road flare into fire.” He also asked a doctor at a social gathering if it was possible to kill someone by snapping their neck, suggesting he was trying to settle a debate with co-workers about the reality of Steven Segal movies.
Police soon found other clues.
There was a $1 million life insurance policy naming James Schwalm as the sole beneficiary in the event of his wife’s death, along with a $250,000 policy with the couple’s children as beneficiaries. Investigators also learned the couple’s 10-year marriage was also the rocks.
On Thursday, the excruciating details of Ashley Schwalm’s murder were revealed for the first time in an agreed statement of facts.
James Schwalm poured gasoline throughout the interior and then drove the vehicle off the edge of the embankment and then, after opening the driver’s side window, lit the vehicle on fire using a lighter bearing his own initials, Crown Attorney Lynne Saunders said reading from the agreed facts in a courtroom filled with the couple’s family and friends.
Two days after the killing, Schwalm gave police a statement and handed over footage from his home’s surveillance system. That footage, he claimed, showed him leaving the home to walk his dog through the neighbourhood the morning Ashley died — he even gave police a map of the route.
When police checked his neighbours’ surveillance cameras, they found nothing to match his story; Schwalm’s footage had been “deliberately manufactured.”
Wearing a grey suit and white button-down shirt, and no tie, Schwalm appeared solemn but composed in the prisoner’s box as he answered Justice Michelle Fuerst’s questions on if he felt any coercion to plead, with his lawyer, Joelle Klein, standing nearby.
Despite pleading to a lesser charge, Schwalm still faces an automatic life sentence with Fuerst set to decide when he will first be eligible to apply for parole, from 10 to 25 years. The sentencing hearing is Sept. 26. (Schwalm will have no guarantee of parole upon his first eligibility date, nor ever.)
Schwalm was a captain with the Brampton Fire and Emergency Services until he was charged with first-degree murder.
The prosecutor gave a detailed account of the couple’s troubled marriage, which started 10 years earlier in a lavish wedding ceremony beside the ski slopes at Craigleith Ski Club, one of several private clubs in the Town of the Blue Mountains, near Collingwood on the shores of southern Georgian Bay.
In early 2022, Ashley was involved in an extra-marital affair with her then-boss. The Schwalms decided they wanted to work to repair the relationship and sought counselling. But by Christmas that year, fissures appeared, the prosecutor said. James told his mother he wasn’t sure they could make it work and Ashley informed her family she was thinking of ending the relationship, sending her sister a message quoting the lyric “all out of love,” by the band Air Supply.
James was also “nurturing” a relationship with the ex-wife of the man with whom Ashley had the affair, and days before killing her, told the woman he’d developed feelings, which she reciprocated. On Jan. 21, 2023, Schwalm told the other woman he was resolved “to do what would make him happy regardless of Ashley still wanting to make their marriage work,” the Crown attorney said.
Sometime the night of Jan. 25, their son heard his parents arguing and when he opened his bedroom door, he saw his mother and father in the upstairs hallway. Ashley asked her son to get her cellphone for her so that she could call police. He retrieved it and gave it to his mom, but then his dad told him to return to bed, Saunders said.
“Sometime later, he opened his bedroom door and saw James Schwalm crying in the area of the mudroom which connects the house to the garage,” and heard his father ask the house’s virtual assistant, “What time is it, Alexa?” to the reply, 3 a.m. Also that day, their daughter told a teacher that she had a bad night because her parents fought and she heard her mother fall down the stairs, Saunders said.
Surveillance video captured some of Schwalm’s movements that cold, dark morning, including footage showing a figure carrying a large backpack running from the area of the crash towards the Craigleith ski lodge parking lot where he had parked his mother’s car.
Just after 6 a.m. on Jan. 26, fire crews responded to a 911 call and extinguished a blaze. They found a badly burned body in the front passenger side of the vehicle.
After determining the deceased was Ashley, police interviewed Schwalm who shared bogus text messages and video clips in an attempt to deflect suspicion away from him. He said Ashley had left home early that morning to go hiking up at the ski hill — a departure from her usual hiking routine.
But it didn’t work, and Ontario Provincial Police investigators from the Collingwood detachment started digging.
On Feb. 3, 2023, they announced Schwalm had been charged with second-degree murder and indignity to a dead body. The charges were later upgraded to first-degree murder.
A post-mortem examination determined Ashley’s cause of death was neck compression not related to the crash, and that she was dead before the fire.
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