Brampton firefighter admits killing wife

Collingwood OPP uncovered plot to hide murder with staged car crash

- BETSY POWELL

James and Ashley Schwalm in a photograph from their wedding. The couple had a troubled marriage, but had sought counselling and were working to repair their relationship in early 2022. But by Christmas that year, fissures appeared, said prosecutor Lynne Saunders.

BARRIE A Brampton firefighter who masterminded his wife’s murder and attempted to conceal it by staging a fiery car crash in Ontario’s ski country left behind a trail of evidence for police to unravel.

Soon after he strangled Ashley Schwalm, 40, to death early last year in their Collingwood home — which they shared with their two young children — James Schwalm sent a series of texts to himself from her phone.

It was an attempt to convince police that she was still alive. In one, he asked her to fill up gas cans for a snowblower.

But she was already dead.

On Thursday, Schwalm, 40, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder but guilty to second-degree murder, admitting in a Barrie courtroom that he killed his wife in their two-storey, three-bedroom home, dressed her in hiking clothes, put her lifeless body in the passenger seat of her Mitsubishi Outlander and drove to Alpine Ski Club on Arrowhead Road.

Schwalm had borrowed his mother’s car and “pre-positioned it” at the Craigleith Ski Club North Lodge parking lot to use as a getaway vehicle after staging the crash nearby.

Sometime before 6 a.m. on Jan. 26, 2023, he set the car on fire, then went home to enact his alibi.

“Ok I’m going to zip out I think the kids will be fine their sleeping,” he wrote in one text to himself from Ashley’s phone.

“Eww I left the gas cans in my car and it smells,” he wrote in another, again pretending to be her.

And later: “Oh, I have vertigo. I’m going to rush home.”

Soon, he walked their two young children to school, telling them their mother was out on a hike.