The life and murder of Ashley Milnes Schwalm

And the isolation, how he insisted on the move from Toronto to Collingwood — a place they both knew well as longtime members of Craigleith Ski Club, where they had married in 2012. Ashley missed her close-knit circle of family and friends. While James was gone three or four nights a week to work at a fire station in Brampton; she stayed home to look after their children.

On the surface, James, they acknowledge, did not fit the stereotype of a domestic abuser. He cultivated an image of a selfless and loving father, husband, active volunteer and successful firefighter with Brampton Fire and Emergency Services. Police were never called to their home, and if Ashley knew the danger that lurked, she never said.

Still, looking back, her friends and family tell the Star they now think of James Schwalm as a cold, narcissistic, “control freak.” His true nature, they believe, came out the night of Jan. 25, 2023, when he strangled Ashley at home with their son, 9, and daughter, 6, nearby in their bedrooms.

That night, Ashley called to her son to get her cellphone so she could call the police; James ordered him back to bed. James then dressed his wife’s dead body in hiking clothes, drove to the ski hills and doused the Mitsubishi Outlander with gasoline before sending it off the side of the road down an embankment. He then lit it on fire, fled into the early morning darkness and began preparing himself to perform the role of the grieving husband.

Across Canada, scores of women are killed by their intimate partners each year; abusive men are often at their most dangerous when the relationship is about to fall apart.

Few cases, however, involve the level of planning that’s detailed in the evidence of what James Schwalm did that night and in the days after, when he tried, and failed, to enact an elaborate coverup. 

On Monday, Justice Michelle Fuerst will sentence him to an automatic life sentence for second-degree murder. Last year, he pleaded to the charge rather than face trial for first-degree murder. All that’s now left is for the judge to decide how long Schwalm must spend in prison before he can apply for parole. (He will have no guarantee of parole upon his first eligibility date, nor ever.)

Since Ashley’s murder, her family and friends have declined media requests for interviews. But as her killer’s sentencing day approached, they agreed to talk to the Star — because “someone needs to be her voice.”

In interviews, they say they hope speaking openly can help raise awareness of the fact intimate partner violence can be covert and take many forms.

Ian and Shelley Milnes raised their four children, Lesley, Lindsay, Ashley and Ian David in tree-filled, picturesque Hoggs Hollow near Yonge and York Mills. Ian thrived in finance and could afford family memberships at some of the city’s most exclusive clubs, such as the Granite Club. The family’s retreat was a chalet, near Collingwood, with a tennis court on a large corner lot.

Ian called his youngest daughter “Boo Boo,” after Yogi Bear’s sidekick. The name stuck, and loved ones today still refer to her as “Boob.”

Ashley went to Havergal College and the School of Liberal Arts, a small, independent high school where she met Laura Stavro-Beauchamp. When she thinks of her friend, Stavro-Beauchamp can “hear her squealing and giggling and having fun. That was a huge part of her.”

On a quiet weeknight together at Dalhousie University in Halifax, they’d grab teas, jump in Ashley’s Toyota Celica and drive to the airport singing along to Whitney Houston, she recalled.

If you were around Ashley and she was having fun, “you were getting pulled into the dance,” Stavro-Beauchamp said.

“She was very good at putting people at ease because she was so warm, and caring.”

Ashley left Dalhousie to be with her mother when she was battling cancer. Shelley Milnes died at 55 in 2004, leaving behind a shattered family.

Ashley’s parents had been together for 31 years — for her, it was proof a couple could stay happily married. 

In her interviews with the Star, Ashley’s sister Lindsay stressed the importance of ensuring the privacy of the couple’s two children, now being raised by her brother and his wife.

But she wants attention on her sister’s murder — “If boob’s story can help one person I … want to help,” she said.

She also wants to dispel “the narrative,” in letters the Schwalm family submitted to the court, which describe James as a “doting husband and father” — but for the monstrous act he committed.

“It certainly wasn’t the person I saw,” Lindsay said in an interview from her Toronto home, remembering one instance, around 2017, when she heard him call Ashley the c-word in an argument. She remembered looking at him and saying, “If you ever call my sister that again — I don’t care how pissed you are, you never use that word.”

The full, intimate details of what happened during their relationship will only ever be known by James and Ashley. However, court records and the accounts of those close to Ashley paint a portrait of a relationship that, despite a couple’s efforts to keep up an outward image of happiness and success was draped in troubling signs of abuse. 

James’s parents, Dianne and Peter, through their lawyer, Joelle Klein, declined to comment. In their letter to the court, they wrote that they “never expected him to act in a way that was so counter and polar opposite to our beliefs.”

James, born in 1984, is the oldest of the Schwalm’s three children. The Lawrence Park family owned a cottage in the Kawarthas and a ski chalet a few minutes’ drive to the Craigleith, one of several private ski clubs in the Collingwood area.

Peter was an accountant; Dianne worked her way up to be a senior marketing executive at Warner Brothers. In 1998, she co-founded Canada’s Walk of Fame.

The job brought cool perks for her kids. In his late teens, James pulled into local events behind the wheel of the Warner Brothers’ Hummer to promote summer blockbusters.

His aunt, a retired Toronto police officer, told court in a letter that her nephew grew up admiring her profession, “and often wished he could do something to help the public.” So, in his early 20s, James signed up as a volunteer firefighter, which eventually led to a full-time position in Brampton.

A close friend of James, who asked not to be identified, recalled how he was over the moon after meeting Ashley at a party when they were in their 20s.

“She was just that girl, so for James it was like: ‘She wants me? She loves me?’ (The friend said she never saw an unpleasant side to Schwalm, describing him as charismatic with a “megawatt smile.”)

As friends remember, Ashley loved what James represented — a future with a stable household and the potential for family.

On Sept. 15, 2012, they married in a lavish ski-hill-side ceremony. They arrived in a horse and carriage, and staged a game of tennis in tux and wedding dress. Each room at the Craigleith Ski Club was decorated so their 160 guests would have a “taste of all four seasons.”

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

By 2018, the parents of two young children had moved into the family-friendly Lockhart neighbourhood. James enlisted firefighter buddies to help with a home renovation; throughout, he kept his social media followers updated with the progress, along with photos of himself doing firefighter training, while Ashley’s online postings prominently featured their kids.

In one photo, from 2019, James and Ashley can be seen smiling at the fire station over his promotion to platoon captain — the children climbing over their dad in front of the big red fire truck.

Online and in person, the couple was keen for people to think they were a happy family, and that the kids were healthy and well cared for. But beneath the perfect surface, there were cracks.

A friend remembered feeling “uncomfortable” watching James “study” his wife closely when she talked to other people. She remembered, too, how he resented that she solicited advice from her dad, who lives in Nassau.

When the Milnes family gathered, James made little effort to join in, Lindsay said of her brother-in-law. “We’d all be in the kitchen, talking or cooking whatever, and he’d be sitting on a couch and turn over and look, with a magazine in his hands … watching and listening to what everyone was saying.”

In the spring of 2022, while working as a project co-ordinator for Patty Mac, a luxury home and chalet builder, Ashley and her boss had an affair. For her family and close friends, it was out of character — a sign of how desperately lonely she must have been.

That holiday season, Ashley told her family she was contemplating leaving James. She sent her sister a message — “all out of love” — quoting from the Air Supply song, but they never discussed specifics of her affair before the murder. 

When a man kills a current or former partner, the warning signs are often missed — but when many men kill many women over many years, the patterns of violence tell a chillingly consistent story.

Ontario’s chief coroner has tasked the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee to probe every death by intimate partner homicide, and find ways to help prevent future killings.

From these cases, the committee has prepared a list of dozens of risk factors for intimate-partner homicide: They include a history of domestic violence; obsessive or controlling behaviour; alcohol and drug use; depression; sexual jealousy; access to guns; and more — in most killings, several factors are present simultaneously.

And, in two out of every three intimate-partner homicides in Ontario, the victim is killed at the end of a relationship or as it is beginning to fall apart. 

In 2022, the wife of Ashley’s boss found out. She called Ashley at her dad’s place in Nassau, where she was celebrating her 40th birthday, giving a two-hour ultimatum: Tell James, or she would. So Ashley did.

(Ashley’s former boss and his then-wife did not respond to the Star’s requests for interviews.)

The Schwalms’ home life soon became toxic. James had surveillance cameras installed and insisted Ashley surrender her phone to him for inspection. She changed jobs and began working for another builder.

The couple agreed to try and rebuild their marriage through counselling, but James turned elsewhere. According to an agreed statement of facts read out in court at his guilty plea, he began “nurturing a relationship” with the now-separated wife of Ashley’s old boss.

The two were regularly in touch by text; James even gave her a cover name in his phone to hide the relationship from Ashley. And, on Jan. 21, 2023, he sent the woman a text message letting her know it was over with Ashley, and he was resolved to do what would make him happy.

At the same time, James was telling anyone who would listen about Ashley’s affair, her friends and family said.

Lindsay recalled telling her little sister she would spend the rest of her life “paying for this” — he would never let it go, she explained. Ashley “had embarrassed him in front of his friends, her friends, the whole Craigleith community.” (Lindsay’s voice filled with anger as she remembered the last year of her sister’s life; how James was “painting himself as this victim of this affair, meanwhile he’s doing the same thing.”)

Christan Bosley, one of Ashley’s oldest friends, was so alarmed in the final months that she asked countless times “if James was abusing her.”

Bosley declined the Star’s request for an interview but wrote of that time in one of many victim impact statements read out at James’s sentencing hearing. “I still spend days, hours and minutes haunted by the many warning signs missed along the way,” she wrote.

Ashley downplayed the worry, but “I shared my concern for the control he so clearly demanded over her and her children.”

A few weeks before James killed Ashley, she told Bosley: “I am choosing my happiness and the safety of my children. It’s going to be the year of Ashley and I can’t wait.”

She’d also told her friend she was working on her will.

Looking back, Lindsay emphasizes that Ashley was not herself in the last year of her life. She believes James “caught wind” of her plan to leave, which is why she believes he made a plan to kill her.

Before murdering Ashley, James pre-positioned his mother’s borrowed car as a getaway vehicle. He then drove his wife’s body out to stage a fiery crash. His movements that night were caught on surveillance footage. He sparked the blaze using a lighter bearing his own initials.

To try and cover his tracks, he faked a text conversation using Ashley’s phone. To explain why the gas was inside the SUV, he wrote: “Eww I left the gas cans in my car and it smells.”

When he returned to the house, he told the kids their mom had left to go on a hike; he repeated the lie to police.

When Ian Milnes called Lindsay from Nassau to tell her Ashley had died in a car crash, she suspected James was involved — but not to the extent to which he was.

Ashley loved to hike, she reasoned, but not pre-dawn after heavy snow, 20 minutes from home.

“There’s no way Boob was hiking at 5 a.m., at Craigleith by herself,” Lindsay said. Still, she remembered thinking, perhaps, they’d had a fight; that Ashley drove off and got in an accident.

But as the week went on, his stories weren’t adding up.

As the Craigleith community was rallying around the grief-stricken firefighter and children — as friends and neighbours delivered food and flowers and messages with their condolences — Lindsay heard him say something that left her dumbstruck: “I’ve got an alibi.”

“I looked at my husband and said this isn’t right … and made him take me back to the police.” 

Soon, the investigation revealed a mountain of evidence — life insurance policies, footprints leading away from the crash, incriminating internet searches and the manufactured text messages.

James Schwalm was arrested on Feb. 3, 2023. He is set to learn his fate on Monday. 

“I hope he spends the rest of his life where he is,” Lindsay told the Star.

“Her life is over; why should he get to live his?”