Opening statements in the trial of a convicted fraudster accused of killing his wife and dismembering her body began Monday in a Massachusetts courtroom, with the prosecution alleging that Brian Walshe committed the premeditated murder of Ana Walshe and the defense suggesting that she died suddenly for unexplained reasons.
Defense attorney Larry Tipton said Brian Walshe, 50, who pleaded guilty last month to disposing her body, panicked when he discovered his wife’s apparently lifeless body in their bed early New Year's Day in 2023.
Hours earlier, Tipton said, the couple had been celebrating with a friend at their home in Cohasset, south of Boston. After doing the dishes and returning to their bedroom, Tipton said, Brian Walshe repeatedly nudged his wife and she fell to the floor.
“He doesn’t understand what has happened and what is happening,” Tipton said. “It didn’t make any sense that someone he’d just been with and just enjoyed New Year's Eve with would suddenly be dead.”
Afterward, Tipton said, Brian Walshe began a “frantic and tragic” internet search that started with how best to dispose of a body and moved to darker subject matter “as he wrestled with the fact that Ana was dead.”
Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Scott Connor pointed to the search history as evidence of murder.
Other search terms authorities discovered on Walshe’s laptop from Jan. 1, 2023, included “is it better to throw crime scene clothes away or wash them?” and “what happens when you put body parts in ammonia,” Connor said.
He also pointed to cutting tools, a Tyvek suit and cleaning products Brian Walshe is alleged to have purchased that day. Days later and miles from the couple's home, Connor alleged, he dumped the suit, a hacksaw and Ana Walshe's belongings.
No one has seen Ana Walshe, 39, since Jan. 1, 2023, Connor said.
“She has not accessed her finances, her email,” he said. “Her phone has made no calls. No one has found her body.”
Brian Walshe, 50, pleaded guilty in mid-November to two lesser charges linked to his wife's 2023 disappearance and death — misleading a police investigation and improper conveyance of a body.
He has not been sentenced for those crimes.
Prosecutors have alleged that Walshe was motivated by money — he was the sole beneficiary of his wife’s $2.7 million life insurance policy — and that he believed she was having an affair when she disappeared.
Tipton denied those allegations and said Brian Walshe was not upset about the affair.
Ana Walshe, the mother of three, was reported missing after her employer, a real estate management company, asked police in Massachusetts to perform a well-being check at the family’s Cohasset home on Jan. 4, 2023.
During an interview with authorities that day, Brian Walshe said his wife left their home between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. Jan. 1 for a work emergency, according to an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant. He told police that she kissed him and told him to go back to sleep, the affidavit says.
Prosecutors allege that Ana Walshe was already dead by the time the officers spoke to Brian Walshe.
Walshe changed his plea on the two lesser charges on Nov. 18, the day jury selection was scheduled to begin. Documents filed by his attorneys admitted that he “disposed of and did convey the body of Ana Walshe after her death” and intentionally made false statements to police officers during four interviews in January 2023.
In a separate case, Walshe was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison last year after he pleaded guilty to charges linked to what federal prosecutors called a “years-long, multi-faceted art fraud scheme.”
Prosecutors said Walshe sold two fake Andy Warhol paintings that he’d claimed were authentic for $80,000. He pleaded guilty in 2021 to one count each of wire fraud, interstate transportation for a scheme to defraud and unlawful monetary transaction.
