Accused wife killer Brian Walshe, denied bail once again, allegedly had a private eye hired to shadow his wife he suspected of cheating on him.
Prosecutors in Norfolk Superior Court Thursday also said he would benefit from her death because by pocketing $2.7 million from her life insurance policy.
In a case that has thrust the south shore town of Cohasset into the national spotlight, Brian Walshe, 48, was indicted in March for the murder of his 39-year-old wife Ana Walshe in the early hours of Jan. 1.
Judge Beverly Cannone ordered that Walshe be held without bail and scheduled a next court date for Aug. 23.
He was brought into court at 10 a.m. and sported dress clothes and dark cardigan over his shackles and a shorter haircut. His only words were to plead “not guilty” to the charges of murder, misleading a police investigation and improper conveyance of a human body.
At the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor set forth two possible motives for Ana Walshe’s slaying.
One is financial: Ana Walshe had taken out a life insurance policy in 2021 that, by her disappearance on Jan. 1, stood at roughly $2.7 million. Brian Walshe was the sole beneficiary.
The other is jealousy: Brian Walshe began in December to suspect his wife was having an affair and had repeatedly visited the Instagram page of the suspected lover, one of Ana Walshe’s male friends in Washington, D.C., where she had taken a job with international property management company Tishman Speyer.
Further, Connor said, Brian Walshe’s mother on Dec. 26, with his “input and direction,” hired a private investigator to follow Ana Walshe around in D.C.
The next day, Connor said, Brian Walshe used his oldest child’s iPad to research “What’s the best state to divorce for a man?”
As ADA Lynn Beland said at the Jan. 18 Quincy District Court arraignment, “Rather than divorce, it is believed that Brian Walshe dismembered Ana Walshe and discarded her body.”
The run-up
Property records show Ana Walshe sold the family’s old Cohasset home in March and purchased a home in D.C., where prosecutors said she expected the family to move as her new job now made her the primary breadwinner.
The couple rented another Cohasset home as the move was continuously delayed alongside Brian Walshe’s sentencing in a federal fraud case involving forged Andy Warhol paintings.
Eventually Ana Walshe’s hopes were dashed.
On Dec. 28, 2022, just days before Ana Walshe was last seen alive or dead, “she became uncharacteristically emotional and extremely upset,” prosecutors say, as she told a friend in D.C. that she thought her husband would go to prison and she intended to leave him and move the couple’s three young children to D.C.
She returned to Boston on Dec. 30. The next day, she got her nails done in Hingham and invited a family friend over to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
Defense attorney Tracy Miner said a good time was had by all three adults that evening, and that they even wrote on the Champagne bottle that they were expecting the year to be the best one yet.
When 1:30 a.m. rolled around on the new year, the friend left the celebration and would be the last adult, “other than the defendant,” prosecutor Connor said, to see Ana Walshe alive.
Suspect trips and shopping lists
Brian Walshe cooperated with investigators, a point his attorney reiterated at the hearing, which included handing over cell phones and iPads and allowing searches of the home. But police arrested him on Jan. 8 on the grounds that he had misled the investigation.
Forensic examination of the electronics turned up location and search data prosecutors have built their case on.
Data on the oldest child’s iPad showed internet searches between 4:50 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 1 that prosecutors say “progressed from researching human decomposition, to effectively dispose of body parts, to how to clean up a crime scene.”
A babysitter, who the couple had hired because they had planned a brunch together, arrived at 2 p.m. and was told by Brian Walshe that his wife had a “work emergency,” prosecutors said, but that he would spend the day in Swampscott to visit his mother.
Instead, prosecutors say, cell phone data and video surveillance shows he made numerous shopping trips to Lowes, Home Depot and CVS where items including buckets, a Tyvek suit, shoe guards, mops, disposable rags, soap and other cleaning products and jugs of ammonia.
The next day, prosecutors say, internet searches continued, as did additional purchases for the likes of 24 pounds of baking soda, a hatchet and a new Tyvek suit.
He also took trips to dumpsters around the region, prosecutors say. By the time investigators learned of this, almost all of the dumpsters had been emptied and their contents shredded and incinerated.
But in one dumpster in Swampscott, police on Jan. 8 recovered items that included Ana Walshe’s car keys, her COVID vaccination card, a Hermes watch that matched the one she was known to wear, and the boots, purse and short black coat identical to those Brian Walshe had told police his wife was wearing when she left for D.C. — a trip police confirmed she never made.
Alongside those, investigators found items identical to things the defendant had purchased in the preceding days, including a hacksaw, a hammer, a hatchet and a Tyvek suit with stains that tested positive for Ana Walshe’s DNA. The hacksaw also had red-brown staining and “a small bone fragment,” items which are being tested for DNA.
Investigators also found stains in the basement of the home, which prosecutors said field-tested positive for blood, but a swab sent to a lab couldn’t confirm this.
Defense attorney Miner seized on that and added that the Tyvek suit returned not only Ana Walshe’s DNA but that of another that could be someone other than her client.
She also said prosecutors were cherry-picking Google searches to fit their storyline — adding Brian Walshe also made searches for “best places for family vacation” and other harmless prompts. As for financial motivation, she said that her client’s mother was rich and he had no want for money.
