He was supposed to save lives — not take them.
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In a crowded Barrie courtroom, Ashley “A.J.” Schwalm’s family and friends poured out their grief and pain 22 months after the beloved mother of two was strangled to death and set on fire by the firefighter husband they had all comforted when they first thought she’d died in a tragic single car accident.
A week would pass with Jamie Schwalm playing the grieving husband in what the Crown would call an “astonishingly heartless performance” before his calculated plan and cover up disintegrated, and he was under arrest for first-degree murder.
Despite the overwhelming case against him, the former Brampton fire captain was lucky to plead guilty in June to the lesser charge of second-degree murder. He’ll receive an automatic life term — but Superior Court Justice Michelle Fuerst will determine how long he’ll serve before he can apply for parole.
On the International Day For the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Crown attorney Lynne Saunders urged the judge to impose a stiff 21-year to 22-year period of parole ineligibility and no contact with his children until they’re 18.
Ashley was everyone’s best friend, a 40-year-old mom and project manager who lit up the room with her contagious laugh. She was entitled to feel safest with her husband and in her own home, Saunders said.
Instead, Schwalm used the firefighter brawn he so liked to display on social media to strangle her to death with her precious kids sleeping just metres away.
He then dressed her body in hiking clothes, stuffed her in her Mitsubishi Outlander and leaving his children alone, drove her SUV to Arrowhead Rd. where he doused it with gas and lit it on fire.
Schwalm’s cold-hearted deceit knew no bounds: The day before the murder, he took their son along as he scoped out the scene to stage the fiery “car accident” and even asked Ashley to fill the very jerry cans — ostensibly for their snow blower — that he later used to burn her remains.
Just before 6 a.m. on Jan. 26, 2023, firefighters responded to a car fire in a ditch in the Blue Mountains — it would take dental records to identify Ashley’s remains.
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It was supposed to look like she’d gone off the road on her way home from an early-morning hike while he was out walking the dog. But Schwalm forgot his initialized lighter behind, and the pathologist would find Ashley died of strangulation — before the fire.
Dressed in a charcoal suit and white dress shirt, the killer often wiped away tears during the lengthy sentencing hearing, especially when family and friends described the devastating trauma he’s caused his children, just nine and six at the time. There were groans from the courtroom as defence lawyer Joelle Klein said he’s so remorseful that he’s even attempted suicide and when she complained prison conditions have been so “horrendous” that he should be able to apply for release after just 13 years to 14 years.
She also said the kids should be allowed contact with their dad when they reach 16.
Their guardians are now Ashley’s brother and wife, David and Tia Milnes, and they want them to have nothing to do with the evil, greedy narcissist who stole their mom.
“He left them alone for hours after they heard their mother screaming. He was a father at one point. How does a father kill your children’s mother and do it with the children in the house? I hope that screaming haunts him constantly,” David Milnes said.
“To heal, we need him to never be a part of our lives again.”
Married in a fairytale wedding in 2012, they both wanted out of their relationship by Christmas 2022. “This is the year I’m choosing me and the safety of my children,” Ashley had texted her friend, Christian Bosley, just five days before she was killed.
“Why not just get a divorce?” Bosley demanded tearfully in her victim impact statement.
But Schwalm, who had found another woman, didn’t want to suffer the financial costs of a split and also had his sights on his wife’s $1-million life insurance policy.
Offered a chance to speak, he shakily rose and faced the judge.
“I despise my actions and that they continue to hurt the people that I love and care for the most,” he said softly. “This is where I need to be, deserve to be, because of my terrible, awful actions.”
One of Ashley’s friends called him a monster. How right she is.
That day, Schwalm told his kids their mom had died in a car accident. “He then hugged them,” the prosecutor said, “using the hands he had used to kill their mother just hours earlier.”
Fuerst will deliver her sentence on Feb. 10.