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