Murder in the Blue Mountains

On January 26, 2023, just before 6 a.m., a car travelling along the shore of Georgian Bay turned south onto Arrowhead Road, a two-lane street that gently curves and rises into the forested foot of the Blue Mountains. It was a high-beams kind of morning—dark and blustery, with wind whipping snow through the sub-zero air—so the driver, on his way to work at the nearby Alpine Ski Club, kept his eyes on the road. There wasn’t much to see: icy asphalt, hydro poles, the occasional driveway. Then, in the distance, he noticed an ominous orange glow lighting up the bare canopy.

He drove a little farther, pulled over to the shoulder and got out of his car. The stench of gasoline and burning rubber filled his nostrils as he walked to the left edge of the roadway and peered over the guardrails. There, in a ditch several metres below the road, was an SUV engulfed in flames. He called 911, and by dawn, Arrowhead Road was blocked off and crawling with emergency responders. Firefighters had tamed the blaze, and now OPP officers were inspecting the crash site. The vehicle, a blackened Mitsubishi Outlander, was wedged into the Canadian Shield. Inside, investigators discovered a ghastly sight: a charred human corpse curled up in the passenger-­side footwell.

Police ran the licence plate and learned that the vehicle was registered to a 38-year-old firefighter from Collingwood named James Schwalm. But they couldn’t be sure that it was him in the car; the body was burned beyond recognition. There was a lead, though: a few dozen footprints in the snow, stretching from the driver’s door up to the road. Whoever died that morning had not been alone.

James Schwalm was born into a family of Good Samaritans. His maternal grandparents were devout Christians who ran a foundation that funded educational programs, hospice care and addiction-recovery treatment. His mother, Dianne, was an executive in the entertainment industry who sat on the boards of the Jays Care Foundation, the Toronto Santa Claus Parade and the Canadian Tourettes Foundation. In 1998, she co-created Canada’s Walk of Fame with TIFF co-founder Dusty Cohl and arts philanthropist Gary Slaight. Jamie, as everyone called him, spent his teens surrounded by do-gooders, and the spirit of service seemed to rub off on him. After he graduated from Marshall McLuhan, a Catholic high school near his family’s Lawrence Park home, he decided to pursue firefighting. He was going to risk his life to save others. James became a popular member of the Brampton Fire and Emergency Services team. By the early 2010s, he’d been promoted to acting captain. According to a former colleague, he was an effective leader—quick and decisive while responding to calls, eager to mentor younger firefighters back at the ­station. On his watch, the workplace was jovial and supportive: he grew out his ’stache for Movember, gave local kids tours of the station, posted the words “Happy Mother’s Day” spelled out in hoses, axes and helmets to social media. His feeds were filled with footage of firefighting drills and PSAs reminding locals to test their smoke alarms and install winter tires. He didn’t just take pride in his work; his identity was wrapped up in it.

Compared with many of his blue-collar colleagues, James led a charmed life. In a photo he posted to Twitter, he’s seen disembarking a chartered helicopter in a fitted grey suit jacket and jeans, whisky tumbler in hand. He was the kind of guy to own a lighter monogrammed with his initials, JWS. Growing up, he and his family, including two younger sisters, wintered at a chalet near Collingwood. They were members at Craigleith, a private ski club near Blue Mountain Resort. It was through the Craigleith community that James met Ashley Milnes.

Ashley, known to friends and family as AJ, also grew up in north Toronto and spent snowy weekends at her family’s Colling­wood chalet. An avid hiker, runner, golfer, tennis player and Green Bay Packers fan, she was a warm young woman with an electric smile and unwavering optimism. Her many close friends knew that, on their birthdays, they could expect to wake up to a celebratory video message from AJ. When her mom died of cancer in 2004, Ashley became the glue that held the Milnes clan together. She had a reputation for lending support without sugar-coating, so her three siblings, many cousins and legions of friends turned to her to mend familial rifts and dole out wisdom. “Ashley was someone you could talk to about what was going on in your life,” says her long-time friend ­Carrie Dyson. “She made everyone feel like the most special person in the world.” When life was hard, Ashley remained ebullient; she’d sing and dance around the house in her pyjamas, and she fantasized about buying a farm and starting an animal sanctuary. According to her friends, she had a big, beautiful laugh. And when she got started, which was often, it was impossible not to laugh too.

That laugh dazzled James, and soon he and Ashley were hitting the slopes together and grabbing drinks in the city. Eventually, they started imagining what a life together could look like. James was moving up through the ranks of the fire department. Ashley, who had degrees from Dalhousie and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, was starting her own interior design and home-staging company. They dreamed of having kids who would grow up with their friends’ children. In the early 2010s, they bought their first house, a new build in Collingwood, and got engaged.

---

“I truly felt like a princess,” Ashley said. “Isn’t that how you’re supposed to feel on your wedding day?”

---

The wedding, held at Craigleith in September of 2012, was a luxurious event. To reflect the couple’s love of the outdoors, the club’s four main halls were themed by season: the winter room, for one, resembled an après-ski lounge, decorated with pine cones, antlers and bearskin rugs. Ashley arrived at the ceremony by horse-drawn carriage. “I’ve been picturing that moment since I was a little girl,” she told Weddingbells magazine. “I truly felt like a princess, and isn’t that how you’re supposed to feel on your wedding day?” That afternoon, James and Ashley recited their vows before 160 guests, promising to love each other for better or worse. Afterward, they hopped in a vintage green convertible to take photos, then partied the night away.

The next several years went as planned. James was promoted to full-time fire captain, a job that came with a $140,000 salary, and Ashley designed home after gorgeous home. They got a dog, Rocco, and started a family: first a son and then a daughter. In 2018, they moved into a picturesque Tudor-style brick house in Collingwood that backed onto a 12-kilometre hiking trail. It was everything they’d hoped for—but it wouldn’t last.

For James and Ashley, building careers and raising a family unfolded in ways familiar to so many middle-class parents: an ongoing cycle of managing household expenses, shepherding kids to extracurriculars, long commutes and even longer hours. Like most firefighters, James typically worked several 24-hour shifts per month; during his downtime, he took occasional shifts at Walker’s Small Motors, a local business that sells and services lawnmowers and snowblowers.

In the summer of 2021, Ashley started a new job at a company based in Port Carling that constructs custom cottages, ski chalets and vacation homes. Her boss, the firm’s founder, was a handsome entrepreneur named Steve. Roughly six months after she started working for him, they began an affair. It would have been easy to conceal: they had plenty of time together at work, on the road, visiting projects. For a few months, James and Steve’s wife, Alexandra, had no idea, but in April of 2022, they found out. Alexandra filed for divorce. James and Ashley decided to try to work things out. Ashley quit working for Steve and found a new job at Blake Farrow, a project-management firm in Collingwood, and she and James started going to couples’ counselling and individual therapy. He didn’t talk about the affair; publicly, he denied that anything had happened. But whispers floated through their social and professional circles, and James’s temperament seemed to confirm that something was up. At work, he began treating his juniors with condescension. Craigleith members noticed that he was drinking more than usual at the club. To the people in his orbit, he seemed distant and self-involved. But they cut him some slack. Given the demands of firefighting—the round-the-clock shifts, stress and lack of sleep—plenty of his colleagues had gone through marital problems of their own. They hoped he’d get through it and return to his old self. Related: “I was nearly beaten to death by my partner. The case was dismissed because it took too long to get to trial”

Instead, the situation got worse. In 2022, as Christmas approached, James told his mother that he wasn’t sure he and Ashley could make the relationship work. Separately, Ashley confided to her family that she was thinking about leaving James. On New Year’s Day, Ashley quoted Air Supply in a text to her sister, writing, “All out of love.” She told an old friend that, in 2023, she was going to prioritize her kids, her health and her happiness. It was going to be the “year of Ashley.”

She didn’t know that by then, James was considering an affair of his own. In late 2022, he’d started exchanging texts and phone calls with Alexandra, the now-ex-wife of the man Ashley had been involved with. He saved her information on his phone under a fake name to avoid suspicion. In mid-January, James texted Alexandra to tell her that he had feelings for her. She admitted she felt the same way but said she’d understand if he wanted some distance. He replied a few days later, announcing that he’d made a decision. His marriage wasn’t working. Like Ashley, he was going to do what would make him happy.

James weighed his options. Staying with Ashley was untenable. But, as he told a friend, divorce was unimaginable. He couldn’t picture sharing custody of the kids. Between legal proceedings, alimony and child support, the breakup would be both emotionally and financially devastating. If they split up, he told his friend, he worried he wouldn’t be able to get back on the property ladder. He desperately wanted to find another way.

It’s comforting to pretend that only psychopaths kill—that, for the sane and the rational, murder is an act too heinous and unforgivable to warrant serious consideration—but history and science prove otherwise. As evolutionary psychologist David Buss argues, normal people often contemplate murder. In the 2000s, Buss’s lab at the University of Texas asked nearly 5,000 people if they’d ever had a vivid fantasy of killing someone. Ninety-one per cent of men and 84 per cent of women said yes. Many of them confessed that they’d played out specific scenarios in their heads, imagining themselves stabbing abusive husbands with kitchen knives, breaking the bones of rival suitors or swinging baseball bats in fits of road rage. These fantasies, Buss came to believe, aren’t in themselves overly distressing, because it is often in the process of imagining murder that people talk themselves out of it. They consider the pain they’ll cause, the guilt they’ll feel or the punishment they’ll endure, and they reconsider.

Except sometimes they don’t. In Canada, an average of two people are murdered every day, most often by someone they know and love. When the victim of a homicide is a woman, there is a 44 per cent chance she was murdered by her spouse or intimate partner. According to StatCan, the countrywide rate of intimate partner violence—79 per cent of which is committed by men against women—has risen every year since 2015.

This is especially tragic because 2015 was supposed to mark a very different kind of turning point for violence against women. That March, Kathleen Wynne, then premier of Ontario, launched a three-year, $41-million action plan to combat sexual violence and harassment. As part of the plan, the province convened a roundtable of 22 organizations—advocacy networks, women’s clinics, human rights groups—in hopes of improving women’s experiences in the justice system, providing survivors with more supports, and updating grade-school curricula to educate students about consent and the root causes of gender inequality.

The work took on new urgency in September of 2015, when a man named Basil Borutski murdered three of his former romantic partners—Anastasia Kuzyk, Nathalie Warmerdam and Carol ­Culleton—during a day-long rampage in Renfrew County, in the Ottawa Valley. The killings were among the worst examples of intimate partner violence in Canada’s history, worse still because of all the warning signs that had been ignored. Borutski had previously served multiple prison sentences for various violent offences, including assaulting two of the women he ultimately killed; he had violated the conditions of his probation; and he had failed to attend a single session of court-ordered counselling for partner abuse and domestic violence. The state had neglected to protect these women from a convicted criminal, and now they were dead.

In the years following the Renfrew County tragedy, the roundtable made modest strides, convincing the province to fund women’s shelters in rural and remote communities, provide paid leave to employees who miss work due to domestic violence, and waive certain legal fees for survivors. But, when Doug Ford’s Conservatives took over from the Liberals in 2018, the appetite for such work evaporated. That October, after months of radio silence from the new provincial government, the roundtable’s co-chairs resigned, saying that the new government had not only stalled progress but reversed it by repealing several of the roundtable’s advancements.

---

If Ashley died, James would get the house, custody of the kids and a $1-million life insurance payout

---

In 2022, Ontario finally conducted an inquest into the Renfrew County murders, which resulted in 86 recommendations, many of which echoed the aims of the 2015 roundtable; the first was for the province to declare intimate partner violence an epidemic. Ford’s government dragged its feet on implementing those recommendations too. It was the opposition NDP who, in 2024, introduced a bill that would recognize the epidemic, study the problem comprehensively, fund prevention efforts and bolster survivor supports. The bill initially had momentum but, like the roundtable before it, was pushed to the side amid chatter of an early provincial election in 2025. Kristyn Wong-Tam, the NDP MPP who tabled the bill, told the Canadian Press, “This whole process is very much becoming a farce.”

The result is that the province has done next to nothing to prevent and protect women from gender-based violence. Rather, the number of femicides has steadily risen. The public hears about the most heinous and high-profile cases—for example, Toronto neurosurgeon Mohammed Shamji, who in 2016 strangled his wife, doctor Elana Fric, and then stuffed her body in a suitcase; or John Edward Collins, who killed his ex-lover, Collingwood realtor Kinga Kriston, with a golf club in 2022. But there are hundreds more cases that don’t make headlines. Between 2018 and 2022, 850 women were killed across Canada. Related: Mohammed Shamji and Elana Fric Shamji—the inside story of a marriage gone horribly wrong

Unlike Borutski, their assailants often don’t have violent histories, criminal records or glaring red flags. “Most killers, in a nutshell, are not crazy,” Buss wrote in his 2005 book, The Murderer Next Door. “They kill for specific reasons, such as lust, greed, envy, fear, revenge, status and reputation, or to get rid of someone who they perceive is inflicting costs on them. They are like you. They are like me…. But, perhaps unlike you and me, their cost-benefit calculators have arrived at a deadly solution to their problems.”

James Schwalm’s wife, in his eyes, had ruined his life and shattered the sterling reputation he enjoyed in their tight-knit community. Perhaps, in a noxious fog of hatred, egomania and vengefulness, he reached the gruesome conclusion that murder was a justifiable retaliation for infidelity. Or maybe his primary motivation was simply greed. There were two insurance policies on Ashley’s life, one that would leave $250,000 to the kids and another that would leave $1 million to him. If Ashley were to die, James could keep the house and custody of the kids. He’d be seven figures richer, his community would shower him with sympathy and he’d be free, in time, to pursue another romance. He just had to make it look like an accident.

January 25, 2023, began like any other day. Ashley fed the kids breakfast, took them to school and then went to work. Meanwhile, James finished an overnight firefighting shift, ran some errands in Toronto and returned home. That afternoon, while Ashley was out walking the dog, James loaded the children into the family’s Toyota 4Runner and dropped his daughter off at her riding lesson. He drove to the Alpine Ski Club on Arrowhead Road and, without telling his son why, quickly scoped the parking lot. Next, they visited his parents’ home—he’d already told his mother that, the following morning, he planned to hike a long route that would end at Craigleith. He had explained that he’d need a car waiting for him there, and his mom had agreed to lend him her vehicle, a Hyundai Kona. That evening, James parked the Kona at Craigleith, picked up his kids in the 4Runner and took them home. Soon afterward, Ashley tucked the children into bed for the last time.

Some hours later, James and Ashley’s nine-year-old son awoke to the sound of his parents arguing. When he opened his ­bedroom door, he found his mom and dad in the upstairs hallway. Ashley asked him to go into her bedroom and fetch her phone so that she could call the police. He followed her instructions and handed her the phone, and then James told him to go back to bed. ­Ashley never got the chance to call 911. After her son retreated to his bedroom, James grabbed Ashley, wrapped his hands around her neck and started strangling her. Ashley struggled to break free. The noise woke their six-year-old daughter, and from her bedroom, she thought she heard someone fall down the stairs. For Ashley to lose consciousness, James would have had to choke her for 10 to 20 seconds; for her to die, he would have needed to apply uninterrupted pressure for five minutes. The next time their son emerged from his bedroom, Ashley was gone and James was crying in the mudroom downstairs. The boy heard his father say, “What time is it, Alexa?” and, as he remembers it, a speaker announced that it was 3 a.m. Sometime in the next two hours, James dressed Ashley in hiking clothes and loaded her body into their Mitsubishi Outlander, the vehicle Ashley typically drove. Around 5 a.m., James noticed their son stirring again and told him that he was going to take Rocco for a walk. But, when James put on his coat, pocketed his phone and Ashley’s, and walked out the door, the dog was still in the sunroom.

Related: Who killed Sharmini Anandavel?

Before getting into the Outlander, James texted Ashley’s number, “Ok leaving now see you soon.” Several minutes later, he used Ashley’s phone to reply, “Ok I’m going to zip out I think the kids will be fine they’re sleeping.” Then, as James drove north to Arrowhead Road, he sent himself another text message from Ashley’s phone: “Sorry about yelling at you this morning. We both need our time your walks and my hikes are important.” Around 5:45 a.m., James stopped the car in the parking lot of the Alpine Ski Club, the area he’d scoped out 12 hours earlier. He walked to the back of the vehicle, opened the trunk, doused the interior with gasoline and rolled the driver’s window down a crack to allow oxygen in to feed the eventual fire. As a firefighter, he knew investigators would detect the extra gas and open window, so to provide pretext for these oddities, he messaged himself once again from Ashley’s phone: “Eww I left the gas cans in my car and it smells. I have to drive with the windows open and it’s so cold out.”

From the parking lot, James drove another minute north and got out of the vehicle again. He sent himself one last text from Ashley’s phone, which read, “Oh, I have vertigo. I’m gonna rush home and try to…work out in the basement. I feel like crap I can’t hike.” This message, too, would later seem believable; Ashley had an inner-ear problem called Ménière’s disease, which brought on occasional bouts of vertigo and once caused her to collapse in a grocery store. James managed to get the Outlander to drive off the edge of the road and into a snowy embankment without him in it. Finally, he climbed down after it and tossed a lighter in through the open window. He fled the scene as the car, with Ashley’s body inside of it, burst into flames.

James trekked roughly two kilometres on foot and arrived at the Craigleith parking lot, where he got into his mother’s Hyundai. He drove 20 minutes to Admiral Collingwood Elementary, a school near his home, and left the car in the parking lot instead of driving it home—likely so that his children wouldn’t ask why their grandmother’s car was in the driveway. James ran the rest of the way home and then carried on as if nothing had happened. He showered, made breakfast for the kids, told them their mom was on a hike and walked them to school. He called his mom to tell her that she could pick up her Kona, and then he drove to his part-time job at Walker’s.

While James was at work, the OPP visited his home, but no one answered the door. By then, police had figured out that James was a firefighter, so they made calls to the Brampton fire department. They reached Britney Holmberg, a firefighter who’d worked with James for 12 years, and filled her in. Startled, she confirmed that the Outlander belonged to James and told police that Ashley worked at Blake Farrow. Holmberg told them she would call them both. She tried James first. As the phone rang and rang and then went to voicemail, her mind raced. James wasn’t scheduled to work at the firehouse that day. Maybe he had driven up to Craigleith to ski, she thought. She knew Arrowhead Road could be treacherous after a storm; she’d driven that stretch the night before and almost lost control of her car on the ice. What if he crashed? she thought. Or what if it wasn’t an accident at all? She knew James had been struggling after the affair. Did he kill himself?

Holmberg composed herself and called Blake Farrow only to learn that Ashley hadn’t shown up for work that morning. What was going on? Just then, Holmberg’s phone rang. It was James. She picked up in a panic and told him that she’d thought he was dead. James laughed it off; no, he said, he was very much alive. “Schwalm,” she replied. “Where is Ashley?” James told Holmberg that he thought Ashley was at home. She’d had a bout of vertigo while out hiking that morning, he said, so she decided not to go into work. Holmberg took him at his word and called the OPP again to inform them that James was at Walker’s and that Ashley hadn’t gone to work.

Not long after 2 p.m., police arrived at Walker’s and told James that they had discovered a dead body inside the crashed Outlander. They suspected it was Ashley. James feigned disbelief. To the OPP, he probably seemed like a shellshocked husband coming to terms with the unthinkable. The police asked James to recall what had happened that morning, and he launched into his version of events. He and Ashley had argued because she wanted to go hiking and he wanted to take the dog for a walk, which would have left no one to care for the kids. He explained to police that there were gas cans in the Outlander because he’d asked Ashley to pick up gas for the snowblower the previous day. James pulled out his phone and showed the officers video clips, recorded by his doorbell camera, of himself taking the dog out and of the Outlander backing out of the driveway (the driver wasn’t visible). And his text exchanges with Ashley seemed to corroborate his story about the gas cans, the ­rolled-down window and the vertigo. A theory emerged: Ashley must have become dizzy behind the wheel and accidentally driven off the road. After his conversation with police, the OPP drove James home and left him in the care of two friends, one of whom was Holmberg. She didn’t know what to do, so she just held him. “Watching him cry like that?” she says. “I’ve never seen him so distraught.” Later that afternoon, the three of them informed Ashley’s family and friends that she was gone. James was the one to call Ashley’s father, Ian. Through tears, James told him that his daughter had died in a car accident.

James and the kids were soon spending a lot of time at ­Ashley’s dad’s house, receiving condolences, embraces and home-cooked meals. James played the part of the grieving husband perfectly, sorrowfully retelling his concocted narrative. Though he’d wanted Ashley dead, surely some part of him felt overwhelmed now that he’d actually killed her. Perhaps some part of him was also relieved. It seemed, at least at that moment, that he might actually get away with it.

The recent glut of cold-case podcasts and unsolved-mystery TV shows would seem to suggest that, with enough guile, just about anyone can conceal a crime. As an emergency responder, James had seen the way investigators operated, how the bereaved behaved and what kinds of clues perpetrators left behind. He evidently believed he had the cunning to cover his tracks, stump detectives, and fool his family and friends.

But, in reality, it’s never been harder to get away with murder. Today, cell towers can triangulate a person’s position by pinging the smartphone in their pocket. In-car electronics record a vehicle’s routes. And there are cameras everywhere: in phones, on dashboards, outside businesses, at stoplights, in the doorbells of private residences. In the age of mass surveillance, it’s not unusual for police to collect hundreds of hours of video footage while investigating a single homicide. As a result, they usually crack the case; in Toronto, for example, police now solve four out of five homicides. As long as investigators have a decent set of leads, it’s often just a matter of time before they amass enough evidence to make an arrest. And there was suspicion surrounding James Schwalm.

Even as Ashley’s family members comforted James, a few of them couldn’t shake the feeling that his story didn’t add up. Yes, Ashley loved to hike, but it would have been unusual for her to drive all the way to Craigleith so early in the morning. Typically, she hiked the trails near her home on weekdays, and always during daylight. Why would she travel 20 minutes from home to hike in the dark during a storm? And it would have been especially unlike her to leave the kids alone. “AJ would do absolutely anything for her kids,” says her friend Carrie Dyson. “They were always number one.”

Back on Arrowhead Road, investigators were beginning to harbour doubts about James’s story too. Typically, when a driver loses control of a car in wintry conditions, the tires stop rotating and slide along the surface, leaving smooth skid marks. Here, ­however, the tread of the Outlander’s tires was clearly visible in the snow all the way to the edge of the roadway, which suggested the tires were still rolling when the vehicle left the asphalt. The driver hadn’t even tried to brake. There were also two lingering questions: Why was the body on the passenger side? And what explained the footprints leading away from the driver’s door? In search of answers, the police towed the car out of the ditch and sent it, along with Ashley’s body, to the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto.

---

Analyzing debris samples from the Outlander, investigators found a lighter. It bore the initials JWS

---

On January 28, while the OPP were still waiting for the centre’s results, officers paid James another visit. He was a person of interest—not yet a suspect—but the evidence against him was growing. They cautioned him that the circumstances surrounding Ashley’s death were suspicious. James could have come clean then and there. But he was in too deep. He had spent the last two days lying to Ashley’s loved ones. So he lied again, repeating the story he’d told at Walker’s: Ashley had picked up gas for the snowblower the day prior, she wanted to go hiking that morning, she complained via text about experiencing vertigo. James stuck by his alibi too. On a map, he drew the route he claimed to have walked with the dog that morning.

That week, officers walked that path and canvassed a number of homeowners along the route, asking for access to footage recorded by their security and doorbell cameras. When the police watched the footage, they found no evidence that James had taken the dog for a walk on the morning of January 26. There was, however, plenty of video evidence revealing where James had really been. In the early hours, security cameras captured a dark figure opening and closing the trunk of an SUV in the Alpine Ski Club parking lot. Fifteen minutes later, a residential camera caught a similar figure, now wearing a knapsack, running down an adjoining road with a ball of fire visible in the background. Yet another home surveillance system captured the same person running toward Craigleith Ski Club, which had cameras of its own. When police examined the in-car navigation and entertainment system in James’s mom’s Kona, they learned that the engine had been turned on at 6:01 a.m. The system recorded the car’s route into Collingwood, as did several residential cameras along the way, including one that showed the same backpacked figure parking the Kona at Admiral Collingwood Elementary and running toward the Schwalm residence.

Police obtained warrants to seize James’s cellphone and footage from his video doorbell system. His browser history was damning. In the days leading up to Ashley’s death, James had searched “alomony,” “does a road flare conpletely burn,” and “can yoi see iophone history after deleted.” The Schwalms’s front-door camera, meanwhile, captured James using a snowblower to clear his driveway before driving to Walker’s on January 26. It wasn’t out of gas after all.

Police suspected that James had killed Ashley, and as they interviewed the couple’s friends and family, they also began to doubt it was the fire that had ended her life. A local doctor reported that at a social gathering days before the incident, James had asked him whether it was possible to kill someone by snapping their neck. He told the doctor that he was trying to settle a debate among his co-workers about the veracity of Steven Seagal movies.

Around the time the OPP got its first hint that James may have strangled Ashley, the Centre of Forensic Sciences filed its report. Dental records confirmed what everyone already knew: the body belonged to Ashley. More importantly, when the forensic pathologist examined her muscles and bones, there was no evidence that she’d died in a car crash; her body bore none of the skull, rib or limb fractures typically seen in a collision victim. Her death was due to neck compressions; she’d been dead well before the exposure to fire.

The centre’s report contained one last piece of evidence. Analyzing debris samples from the Outlander, investigators found the lighter that they believed started the fire. It bore the initials JWS.

Twenty-two months later, on a Monday morning in November of 2024, 40 of Ashley’s friends and family members filed into a Barrie courtroom. There were weepy hugs and silent fist bumps, black suits and Craigleith-branded ski jackets. Though Ashley had been gone for nearly two years, her loved ones had not been afforded the luxury of mourning and moving on. Every time their emotional wounds began to heal, new revelations—inaccurate news stories, torturous court dates, salacious gossip—made their grief raw all over again. This, it seemed, would be the end, not of their suffering but of the protracted legal process and media circus perpetuating it.

James, who was denied bail, had been in custody since February of 2023. He’d attempted suicide multiple times. He’d been charged with first-degree murder and indignity to a dead body, but his defence lawyer, Joelle Klein, reached an agreement with Crown prosecutor Lynne Saunders that allowed James to plead guilty to the lesser crime of second-degree murder. The conviction came with an automatic life sentence but meant he could eventually be released on parole. For second-degree murder, that can happen at any point after the perpetrator has served 10 years. It would be up to Justice Michelle Fuerst to decide how much time would need to elapse before James became eligible for parole.

To aid Fuerst’s sentencing decision, 21 of Ashley’s loved ones provided the court with victim impact statements. Before they began reading those statements aloud, a court officer escorted James into the courtroom. Voices hushed and heads turned as he took a seat in the dock, wearing a white shirt and a dark suit. He kept his gaze fixed on his lawyer, the judge, the floor—anywhere but the faces of the bereaved.

Over the next hour, Ashley’s friends and family spoke of the holes left in their hearts, the hours they’d spent in therapy, the way the murder hung over their once-trusting community like a storm cloud. Several people told the court that, having been so nefariously deceived, they no longer knew whom to trust. Many of them had been forced to explain to their own children—kids that James had watched grow up, babysat and given tours around the fire station—that he had killed Ashley. “He was supposed to save lives, not take them,” Ashley’s long-time friend, Christan Bosley, said. “Why not just get a divorce? It could have been so simple.” Several of the people who spoke remained haunted by the image of Ashley struggling to break free from James’s violent grasp. “I have no doubt she would have fought like hell for those two kids,” said Ashley’s sister Lindsay, who, alongside Carrie Dyson, has organized a donation drive in Ashley’s memory to raise funds for My Friend’s House, a Collingwood-based non-profit that supports abused women and children.

After James’s arrest, the Schwalm children were left in the care of their aunt and uncle—Ashley’s younger brother and his wife, who don’t live in Collingwood and requested not to be named for the sake of the kids’ privacy. When they took the podium, they delineated all the ways Ashley’s murder had scarred the children. They had tried, in spite of their own grief, to provide the kids a sense of safety and security, but it felt like an impossible task. The children had to leave behind their home, friends and school and start over in a new town. Now, they are terrified to be left alone. They distrust firefighters. They hate getting into cars, knowing that their mother’s body was burned in one. “Their childhood innocence, happiness and freedom are all gone,” Ashley’s sister-in-law said. “This will follow the children for their entire lives.”

Ashley’s father, Ian Milnes, was the last to speak. By then, the box of tissues atop the podium was empty. He didn’t need them. He was composed and unflappable. He had lost his wife to cancer 20 years earlier and had assumed he would be the next family member to die. Instead, he found himself living every parent’s worst nightmare. “AJ will miss the kids growing up, bandaging their cuts, consoling their breakups, cheering them on to victory and enjoying them growing to adulthood,” he said. “No proms, no graduations, no marriages, no grandchildren.” All because James had dismissed sensible options—separation, divorce—and instead been guided by greed and narcissism. “This selfish act only benefited you, Jamie,” Ian said, staring straight at James.

That afternoon, Ashley’s family and friends sat silently in the courtroom as Saunders and Klein made submissions about when James should become eligible for parole. The lawyers calmly compared the facts of his case to other femicides, weighing the degree of premeditation, the brutality of the act and James’s level of remorse. Saunders made the case that, given the preponderance of aggravating factors, James should remain ineligible for parole for at least 21 years.

Klein, pleading for no more than 14 years, tried to paint a sympathetic portrait of her client. She reminded the court that James had attempted to take his own life. She spoke of long periods of lockdown in which James could not leave his cell due to staffing shortages at the Central North Correctional Centre in Penetanguishene. She mentioned that, more recently, James had committed himself to rehabilitation: he’d voluntarily enrolled in anger-management classes, grief counselling and, to the horror of those in attendance, parenting classes. Klein then provided Fuerst with seven letters written by James’s fellow inmates, each attesting to his character. He was a leader, the letters said—a positive, smiling presence who delivered food to prisoners’ cells, worked in the laundry room and demonstrated workout techniques for other inmates. One inmate said he expected James to be a lifelong friend. Of the seven letters, five were written by convicted child sex offenders. Fuerst ultimately sentenced Schwalm to life with no chance of parole for 20 years and prohibited contact with the children until they turn 18.

Before court was adjourned that November afternoon, Fuerst addressed James, telling him that she would need time to consider the evidence before deciding on his sentence. She asked if he had anything to say before she began her deliberations. “Yes,” he replied, shakily rising and reading from a single sheet of paper. “I never thought of myself as someone capable of taking these horrendous actions,” he said, choking up. He said he was ashamed to have hurt the people he loves and those who once loved him. He expressed a desire to be a resource for others in his situation. “I miss helping people. I wish to be a support to others, somebody to turn to.” But he did not plead for leniency. “This is where I need to be, deserve to be, because of my terrible, awful actions.”

Ashley’s family and friends sobbed as they listened, silently questioning whether they could trust a single word.

This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.