BARRIE, Ont.—A former Brampton firefighter who killed his wife in their Collingwood home and tried to make it look like she died in a fiery car crash was sentenced to life imprisonment Monday without parole eligibility for 20 years.
Forty-year-old James Schwalm pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last June, admitting that he strangled Ashley Milnes Schwalm, 40 — with their two young children nearby in their bedrooms — sometime during the night of Jan. 25, 2023.
“The killing of Ashley Schwalm was not spontaneous on Mr. Schwalm’s part. He did not act in the heat of the moment. He did not act in circumstances where his ability to reason was impaired. To the contrary, Mr. Schwalm had resolved to do what would make him happy. And what would make him happy was to excise his wife from his life, by taking hers,” Justice Michelle Fuerst said Monday, reading her scathing reasons for the sentence.
“There would be no alimony to be paid, no assets to be divided, no financial loss to bear, no impediment to leading the happy life to which he felt himself entitled.”
Fuerst said: “This was a case of intimate partner violence of the most extreme kind.”
The sole issue for the judge to decide was when Schwalm should be first eligible to apply for parole, as a conviction of second-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence. The Crown asked for a period of between 20 and 21 years; while the defence recommended he serve between 13 and 14 years in prison before being eligible to apply for release.
The judge said that despite Schwalm’s guilty plea — and the fact he had no prior record — the evidence of planning and deliberation made the case close to a first-degree murder, which was his original charge. (First-degree murder carries an automatic ineligibility period of the maximum 25 years.)
When the judge told the court she was imposing a parole eligibility period of 20 years — which may set a legal precedent in Canada for intimate partner homicide — Ashley’s close friend, Christan Bosley, leaned forward and placed her hand on the shoulder of Lindsay Milnes, one of Ashley’s two sisters, who sobbed quietly.
During the hour-long hearing Monday, Schwalm sat stone-faced, facing the judge, not once glancing at his late wife’s loved ones sitting in the body of the court.
Fuerst reviewed the evidence against Schwalm.
As Ashley’s final hours counted down, she noted he attempted to implicate his wife of a decade in making arrangements for her own death, by asking her to buy gasoline for the snowblower that he used to dispose of her body, the judge noted.
After strangling her in the family home — “an especially cruel” way to end someone’s life, Fuerst said — he dressed her in hiking clothes, put her dead body inside their Mitsubishi Outlander and drove to the ski hills where they shared decades of memories and had exchanged vows. He poured gasoline throughout the interior and then drove it off the side of a road, using a lighter with his initials to set it ablaze.
In the days leading up to her death, Schwalm sought advice on Google about alimony and asked if an iPhone’s search history could be seen once deleted. He’d also asked a doctor at a social gathering if snapping someone’s neck would kill them, and told a friend he was concerned about the financial consequences of divorce.
Schwalm had a $1-million life insurance policy naming him as the sole beneficiary in the event of his wife’s death.
Schwalm also provided police with footage — and a map — of his purported dog-walking route that morning. However, when police checked surveillance cameras in the neighbourhood, they found no sign of him and concluded he had “deliberately manufactured” the footage of him leaving the house. He also literally failed to cover his tracks. A passerby who saw the burning car in a ditch took photos of footprints in the snow leading from the driver’s door.
In the days following the murder, the Collingwood community rallied around the “distraught” first responder, sending flowers, food and messages of condolences.
Ashley’s family believe Schwalm killed his wife because she planned to leave him after tolerating years of his controlling behaviour, which escalated in the last year of marriage when she had a brief affair with her boss.
Scores of women are killed by their intimate partners each year in Canada. Records of nearly 400 Ontario cases since 2003 show that two-thirds of intimate-partner homicides happen after a relationship has ended or is about to fall apart.
Schwalm will have no guarantee of parole upon his first eligibility date, nor ever.
The judge agreed to the prosecutor’s recommendation that Schwalm have no contact with his children until they are 18.
