Brampton firefighter admits killing wife, staging crash

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James Schwalm and Ashley Milnes had a fairytale wedding at the Craigleith Ski Club, complete with the beautiful bride arriving by horse and carriage.

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“I’ve been picturing that moment since I was a little girl,” she told Wedding Bells magazine in 2012. “I truly felt like a princess and isn’t that how you’re supposed to feel on your wedding day?”

How eerie it is to look at those happy photos now, of a once-loving couple staring into each other’s eyes. One of their relatives would call it “The Royal Wedding.” Just over 10 years later, Ashley would be dead, murdered at the hands of her Brampton firefighter husband, leaving their two young children without a mother — and now, for many years at least, without a father as well.

In a Barrie courtroom this week, Schwalm pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder — a deal after he was facing first-degree, which on conviction would have carried an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

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With his plea to second, the wife killer still gets life — but the judge could set his eligibility date to apply for parole between 10 and 25 years.

On Valentine’s Day 2013, Schwalm addressed a tweet to his wife — bad grammar and all: “Lots of people can say your pretty when they meet you Guys at the bar say your hot but I get to call you beautiful every day.”

Just a few weeks shy of a decade later, Schwalm admitted that in the overnight of Jan. 25 to Jan. 26, 2023, he killed his 40-year-old wife during an argument in their Collingwood home. According to the agreed statement of facts read into court, their marriage had long been troubled — he’d discovered her affair with her boss in 2022 and though she’d changed jobs and they’d gone to marital counselling, he had started his own relationship with her former boss’s ex-wife.

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It looked like they were headed to divorce, with all the heavy financial costs involved.

Instead, Schwalm used the brawn he so liked to display on social media as a firefighter to strangle her to death. He then dressed her dead body in her hiking clothes and placed her in the 2018 Mitsubishi Outlander that she drove to work each day as a successful project manager.

According to the agreed statement read into court, Schwalm then left his sleeping children — aged 6 and 9 — and drove her SUV to Arrowhead Rd. where he doused it with gas and then lit it on fire with his wife’s body inside.

How ironic, how twisted, that the Brampton fire captain would use a blaze to try to cover up his evil deed.

But you’d think that considering his profession, he would know enough not to leave his lighter behind in the vehicle — compete with his initials JWS. And when first responders arrived at the fiery crash at 6 a.m. — the burning vehicle was found down an embankment near Hwy. 26 in The Blue Mountains — the smell of gas was obvious and a body was in the passenger seat, not the driver’s.

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She’d been so badly burned that dental records were required to identify the mother of his kids.

A man was seen on neighbourhood surveillance cameras running from the fire toward Craigleith Ski Club — the site of his wedding — where he’d parked the car he’d borrowed the previous day from his mom, court heard.

Schwalm then attempted to cover his tracks, but again not very well — telling police that he’d last seen his wife heading for a early morning hike and backing that up with what the agreed statement described as “deliberately manufactured” texts from her phone that he’d actually sent himself.

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Court heard his computer search history showed queries about alimony, deleting your iphone search history and whether a road flare completely burns. He also asked someone if you can kill a person by snapping their neck — but said it was a question to settle a debate about a movie.

Any movie plot would have provided a more sophisticated way to cover up a murder.

This horrific script, though, is as old as time: Another senseless act of violence against an intimate partner. Ashley was the 15th victim of femicide in Canada in January 2023.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for September.

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