Transcript of The After Show: Footprints in The Snow

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Hi there, everybody. Welcome to 2020 The After Show. I'm Deborah Roberts, and thank you so much for taking some time to be with us today to take a deeper look inside our latest 2020 episodes. If you saw it, it was a riveting program, and if you didn't, we're going to break it down for you now. It was called Footprints in the Snow, and it centers around Ashley Schwam, a mom of two kids, an interior designer. She had a lovely marriage, it appeared, to respected fire captain, James Schwam. The family lived what looked like an idyllic life next to a ski slope of all things. So a basic winter wonderland existence. And that's where she met her husband, by the way. She and James fell in love in this ski area. But on January 26, 2023, what appeared to be a fairy tale life really became a nightmare. Ashley's body was found burned beyond recognition inside her car at the bottom of a ditch. Well, of Of course, investigators initially thinking it was an accident, thought this was just a tragic, horrible story, and they quickly discovered that it was not an accident, but a cold calculated murder.

And the big question was, who would want this young mom dead? And how did they zero in on their killer? Well, now we're going to take a good look behind the scenes of how this investigation played out and how the snow played a pivotal role in their investigation. And there's also some material we're going to tell you about that you didn't get a chance to see in our 2020 piece. So Juju Chang, my colleague, is here. Hi, Juju. Hi, Deborah. Welcome to the podcast. You and I are always talking in the hallway about what we're working on, what story we're working on. And invariably, you have one that just really grabs my attention.

Oh, you're sweet. I mean, honestly, this story represents so many of our producers out in the field gathering information. But it is really at its core, the story of a picture-perfect marriage that maybe wasn't so perfect after all.

This couple living by this ski area, and she's an interior designer. He's a firefighter. They have two children. When you first heard about this story, and I should say, it took you to Canada. I covered one in Canada years ago. We don't often go to Canada to cover stories, but this one was just so intriguing with the headlines.

It was idyllic. If you look at their wedding photos, literally a horse-drawn carriage in the middle of this winter wonderland, which, as you know, in the summertime, is gorgeous as well. And they considered their ski house of Four Seasons Paradise. I also got to travel to the Bahamas, where Ashley's dad lives and spends a lot of time. In fact, that's where he got the news that his daughter had died in this fiery car crash. And really what unfolds is this slow peeling away the layers of this mystery. It involves text, it involves betrayal, it involves incredible forensics. It's one of those riveting shows that has it all.

Let's get a sense of our victim, Ashley. What did you learn about her? She was 40, just a couple of years older than her husband. Absolutely.

I talked to her dad, her sister, one of her best friends, and they paint a picture of her as... You know that cliché, she lit up a room? Well, she literally lit up the room and was the life of the party. She would dance on tables and celebrate, and she was the mom that people would refer to as the fun mom who would get on the floor and play with her kids. And you could tell that she just had one of those magnetic personalities. She was a talented interior designer and really devoted to her family.

And then what about him? Because he swept her off her feet, her family told you. Yeah.

And he was one of those, again, straight out of a postcard. He would do public service announcements on fire safety, and he would be repelling down the building and have his six-pack abs out. And everyone thought they just had the perfect, charming life. In fact, they called them the Million Dollar Family. One boy, one girl, perfect little house, perfect, perfect, perfect, but not so perfect after all.

Yeah, not so perfect. And we discover this all the time in stories you and I do, especially when there are couples who people say seem to have a great marriage behind the scenes, sometimes there's something else going on. And in this case, there was trouble in their marriage.

Literally trouble in paradise, right? And so I think part of it was she was also exceedingly close with her sisters. And we've talked about sisterhood. And when they moved away from Toronto to the ski resort, which was like two hours away, It isolated her, according to her friends and her family. I think there was a sense that maybe she felt a little bit isolated from her friends and family. And that was where some of the unease began.

Yeah, and we've talked about that, too, with some of our experts in these stories about women who sometimes feel either trapped or something's going on, and there are red flags maybe that they haven't really noticed that. It fits a pattern for sure. Yeah, that's come up in a lot of our stories. She is suddenly in in what appears to be a fiery car crash, an accident. Everybody's just horrified at the bottom of a ditch. Tell us a little bit about... So it was her husband's car. She drove the car all the time. It's this burning car. But that was already a tip off the way the car was burning.

Absolutely. And it really helps. I'm sure you've seen this when you go out to the actual accident site and you see it differently than even in photos. And what you notice is that whoever was driving the car, I should say, drove right off the road. It was a slow, between a guardrail and trees, and it was a slow speed crash. And so the question was, how did it burn so hot and for so long? And clearly, the firefighters who approached on the scene thought it should have been out by now, the fact that there were accelerants on the scene was an immediate tip off to, oh, red flags.

This wasn't just an accident. So tell us a little bit about that, because I found that interesting when you and I were talking about that earlier, that the car was burning beyond. Typically, I guess if it's an engine fire. It is something that goes out pretty quickly, but this was a stubborn fire, but that immediately set off some signals for them. Absolutely.

When you go out to the scene, you still see the charred trees, and when they found that there was a body inside, it was burned beyond recognition. So it was really difficult for them to get the clues. What they did was something that modern day forensics really are fascinating. They lifted the entire car and they took it to Toronto, again, 2 hours away, to A center called the Center for Forensic Sciences in Toronto. And they didn't want to lose any of the forensic evidence in the car. And so it was inside this center that they removed her body. They found traces of gasoline on her socks. They found found, and then they did an autopsy to reveal the cause of death. And they realized her lungs didn't have any soot inside them.

Which it would have if she had died in that fire. But that's so interesting, though. They took the crime scene to them. Exactly. And oftentimes, they're processing right there on the scene, but they took it someplace to control everything they got. That was fascinating.

Exactly. The entire car was a crime scene.

Yeah. So she didn't have any soot, and this is within days of having found her body. So they immediately know that this was no accident. Now they know that they're looking for a killer. And she was not in the driver's seat, right? Exactly.

She was found in the well of the passenger seat. And they look at video, obviously. And the investigators do what they always do, is they They talk to the husband. They talk to friends. They talk to people who might have seen her. And her husband immediately comes up with an alibi. I was walking my dog. I went, Here's the video camera. Let me show it to you. Let me show you the text chain that I had with her explaining why she was going on this bizarre early morning hike in the middle of a snowstorm at five o'clock in the morning. I mean, it was just some things just weren't adding up even before they were looking at the car.

So when they reached out to James to tell that is what they suspected, and obviously that his wife had died, their radar went up pretty quickly. I mean, and this happens a lot. You and I see it, whether we see it in the investigative video or this tape when they sit and they interrogate people, but their radar went up pretty quickly with him.

Absolutely. But I find that good investigators, and these certainly were the best of them, they don't want to rush to judgment. So they are being very careful to not close off any leads, and they're talking to everyone. Bringing up every possibility. But they said that Jamie was too quick with the answers, had too many explanations. There was a text, The smell of gas is in the back of my car. So there's text explaining everything, right? Almost too neatly.

Almost too cleanly. So police find her in her car in a ditch, and initially, they think it's an accident, a car, a tragic car accident.

Absolutely. And there's really no reason to think anything's amiss other than it is a pre-dawn hike, and supposedly, she left her two young school-age kids at home while her husband was out on a dog walk. And again, when he gets called in by the police, he immediately says, I went on a dog walk. Let me show you this video surveillance of me leaving the house. But what they later discovered was that that was just a ruse. The next big clue was a 911 call that came in. A teacher of one of the children said she had concerns because the daughter said, My mom fell down the stairs, and she was worried. And the teacher said, I think maybe you should do a wellness check. Because she asked the child, Did your mom drop you off at school? Have you seen her? And she said no.

And that was their indication that something was wrong in the marriage. Juju, you and I do so many of these stories where text messages, phones, the towers, the cell towers reveal a lot. The technology forensics play a part. And once again, it did in this one, when you're talking about the messages that he had sent, and they started to examine these text messages, and they began to see that they were a little weird, and one of them in particular.

Exactly. There were a number of them that were odd. The other thing that plays out is that there are surveillance cameras, right?

Always a surveillance camera.

There's always surveillance cameras. But in this one, it was the opposite. Instead of capturing something, buddy, they failed to capture him. The police asked him to chart out the dog walk because it was the perfect alibi. It took him an hour to do this dog walk, right? But what they realized is when they canvassed the neighborhood, they took the same walk and they found themselves on eight cameras.

But how come he wasn't on a camera?

But he was a ghost. He was not captured by any of those cameras, which really blew a hole in his alibi. So the technology played a a negative It proved the negative, right? But the texts were really almost too orchestrated. She explains, for example, Oh, I'm sorry, we got in a fight last night, which would have explained why the children heard shouting and the ultimate fight that they had the night before she disappeared. But that also raised alarm bells with the detectives because it tipped them off. Oh, there was fight. There was trouble in paradise.

Yeah, it almost seemed too orchestrated. Well, you mentioned the 911 call, which also had to be troubling for investigators for investigators. So there was a lot here for them to start looking in the home and looking at the husband, Juju. Well, don't go anywhere, and don't you go anywhere, because when we come back, we're going to dig deeper into the forensics of this investigation. And you're going to talk to us a little bit more about the unique way that they were able to process this crime scene and put these pieces of this puzzle together. So stay with us. You're going to want to hear all of this.

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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to 2020, The After Show. I'm here with my colleague, Juju Chang, who I never can stop talking with. I mean, it's amazing you and I can even make it through these episodes. Through the hallway.

I know.

We're always chatting. We're always chatting. But you cover so many interesting stories for us, and this particular one just grabbed everybody. It's our latest episode. It's called Footprints in the Snow, and that's very significant. You'll tell us why. But it took us all the way to Canada. The murder of Ashley Schwam, a mom of two. She was found dead in a burning car. Initially, police thought that she had had an accident in her car, and of course, they quickly discovered that this was no accident. She didn't appear to have really died in the car. She hadn't had soot, as you said, in her lungs that would indicate she had died in this fiery crash. So investigators now are zeroing in on her husband. As you said, they don't want to rush to judgment, but his alibi that just seems too slick and too clean has raised some red flags. And then they began the forensics, and they began looking at Ashley and this car, and there's a true smoking gun, which was really the forensics here, right?

Yeah. Well, and there was also a smoking lighter, don't forget. What they found inside the fiery crash was literally a Zippo lighter that had the monogram of the husband's name on it.

Now, you could make the argument he just happened to have had it in the car and maybe was smoking, right?

It is circumstantial evidence, and yet it built a case against the husband, who was a firefighter and knew that you had to stand away to start a fire. And you could imagine a Zippo lighter. Again, that wouldn't take anybody to trial. There were also other little tidbits along the way. He had been at a party shortly before the murder and asked a doctor friend if you could really kill somebody by snapping their neck like a Steven Segal movie. Little snippets like that. And then really, it came down to looking at the forensics of the autopsy because she died from injuries to her neck as if she had been strangled.

And that was so different from what they would have found in an ordinary car crash.

Not smoke inhalation, not injuries from a car accident. And those footprints in the snow were a key indicator because when the first person came up and dialed 911, they took some iPhone photos thinking, I'm going to document this. And you don't realize what you're looking at initially, but what they saw were footprints in the snow away from the car crash, meaning somebody else was in that driver's seat. Really telling. And that is what really lit the investigation.

What was fascinating to me in your piece was, as we said earlier, about the lab and the forensics, and they had a unique way of peeling away the layers in this story. And I think so many viewers now are fascinated by the forensics because that's the high tech part of our lives now, and so revealing in so many cases. And this lab had a unique way of taking a look at this evidence. Absolutely.

They brought the entire wreckage, it completely into this science lab so that they could examine every part of it and not disturb any of it. And yet we also know in these investigations, it is the combination of the forensics and the circumstantial evidence that allows you to take something to court, right? Because it's the surveillance camera and the lack of his appearance there. It's the fact that he had a Zipple lighter. It's the fact that this, that, and the other. And they also understood that there was some motivation in that, A, he bought life insurance against her. And he also was very upset, apparently, about a brief affair that Ashley had had a year before the murder. And that even though they were trying to reconcile well, even though they were trying to repair the damage, it was something that left an impression on him.

He was not happy. He was not happy in this situation. Well, it's not lost on anybody in seeing this story that we're talking about a woman dying in a fiery crash, and she's married to a firefighter. Exactly right. And so the idea that he could have done this and engineered it and clearly knows a lot about fires, which is also telling that that was the fatal flaw. I mean, the way this was executed. He is a firefighter who has gone into fires and knows what to look for. And sure enough, it winds up revealing so much about him.

And the other part of the surveillance camera is, is part of his plot was to preposition his car. He put a backpack on. He may have even been wearing, according to investigators, one of those firefighter suits to be fire resistance in case. He then is seen in another surveillance camera running away from the scene with a backpack on running. And they're like, who is that figure? And then they see his car driving away from the pre-positioned location. And it's, again, all of these circumstantial pieces of evidence, because no one of those things. The lighter doesn't prove anything. Life insurance doesn't prove anything. But you match that with the forensics, and you have a case.

And you have a case. Well, they definitely had a case. So Juju, let's talk about that when we come back. We are going to look into the fact that James was charged in his wife's murder, and we're going to take you into the court proceedings and the sentencing, and also the possibility that he may, at some point, be a free man again. So stay with us. We're going to talk more about what happened with James when we come back.

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Welcome back, everybody, to 2020 The After Show. I am talking with Juju Chang here about her most recent report, Footprints in the Snow. And this one just had so many of us not only talking, but scratching our heads. The wife of a firefighter, 38-year-old James Schwam's wife, Ashley, was found dead. And ultimately, police were able to zero in on him as the killer. He was the one who killed his wife and tried to cover his tracks. He eventually, Juju, pleaded guilty in this case. His kids would have had to testify, potentially. So I guess, presumably, everybody wanted to spare them that?

Absolutely. And because both their son and their young daughter were ear witnesses or eyewitness to events that led up to the murder. So the daughter reported to the teacher that she heard her mother fall down the stairs and she was worried. But the son also was an ear witness. He went up and his mother asked him to get her cell phone for him so she could call 911. And the father said, Don't do it. And so he reported this to authorities later. And the idea that what Ashley's sister Lindsay told me was she knew she was in trouble. She knew that this was turning dark. And so the fact that her son would have to have testified to this fact would have been something that clearly the He definitely wanted to spare the entire family.

Yeah, it would have been traumatic for everybody involved. Well, he was charged with first-degree murder, but then he pleaded to what was a second-degree.

And the Canadian legal system is slightly different than the US system, but he could be eligible for parole in 20 years.

That's what I think really floors us. In the US, we are more accustomed to stiffer sentences, but in this case, it's a little different.

Wow. And you have to wonder if a Canadian Parole Board would consider the children or others in this, and clearly the family would give an impact statement. I will say for Ashley, she left behind a lot of people who love and care for her, and her The legacy in many ways is through this organization called My Friends House, which deals with survivors of domestic violence. They did a memorial walk, hike in her name, because she really did love hiking.

You mentioned her friends and the victim impact statement from the family. There were 21 victim impact statements being read. I mean, that speaks to how loved she was. Again, the kids didn't have to testify, so that had to be a little bit of relief for the family. But then did they sacrifice a of justice, or do they feel ultimately that they are satisfied?

There's obviously multiple ways of looking at it. I think the family members I spoke to said that they were relieved that the children didn't have to testify. They felt that ultimately the punishments would have been similar, even between first degree and second degree, so that the sentence itself was not that huge a factor for them. However, getting all of this into the public domain, you know what it's like when it becomes part of a public court record it serves as an object lesson for others, right? And you can see it as a roadmap to looking at behavior, at patterns of behavior. So in many ways, the larger questions of telling Ashley's story, even for 2020, to be able to tell her story, it serves as a tribute to Ashley and lessons for others.

But you raise an interesting point there because is it really going to benefit the family that much more for him to get another 5 or 10 years in prison, or is it going to benefit them to protect those kids and to know that there is punishment happening and that maybe on some level, as you said, they can start to try to highlight her life in a different way? I was struck by the conversation you had with Ashley's sister Lindsay, and that bond you talked about, that powerful bond. And as you said, you and I both have talked about this. I wrote a book about sisters and bonds and how it can be strengthened sometimes in trauma, and she's lost her sister, but that bond is still so important to her.

You have sisters. I have sisters. Lindsay talked about this family text chain and how tight they were. They were the type of sibling group that would vacation together. Their kids, as cousins, you've talked about this, too, are bonded to each other. And so there is a giant hole in this family fabric. And I think that it's worth remembering that it's never just one victim. There are families on many sides who have been impacted by this.

Yeah. James actually ultimately did make some a statement. It seemed like he was taking responsibility.

I think he said words to the effect of, I deserve the punishment that I'm getting. It's hard to know what's in somebody's heart, but clearly, he's got a lot of time to think about it.

Yeah, clearly. Well, this story is one filled with emotion, is filled with intrigue, especially when you think about the investigation and how police were able to put this puzzle together. I always, always marvel at how this happens. But I also am just perplexed how this keeps happening, and we keep doing these stories. But again, as you said, we highlight moments there that might be helpful in a warning to other women. Juju, it was such a great, great story. So fascinating. Thanks, Deborah. Thank you for bringing it to us as always. And we should tell you that if you are experiencing abuse, you can get help by reaching to the National Domestic Violence Hotline for Confidential Support 24/7, 365 days a year. And there's a phone number for them, 1-800-799-7233. So important. It might save a life. Well, watch us now for our latest 2020 episodes. Of course, you can always find us on Friday nights on ABC, and you can stream episodes just like this one anytime on Disney Plus and Hulu. Take care, everybody..

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