Was Ana Walshe murdered by her husband? Or did she die in bed of a mysterious, unexplained medical event?
Defense attorneys for her husband, Brian Walshe, will try to convince jurors of the latter, one said in opening statements Monday as his murder trial began in earnest, almost three years after Ana vanished from a Boston suburb in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2023.
It was the first time anyone has publicly offered a theory for the cause of Ana’s death since Walshe was charged with her murder. Her body has never been found, and while Walshe two weeks ago pleaded guilty to illegally disposing of Ana’s body and misleading police as they investigated her disappearance, he insists he did not kill her.
Walshe faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted of first-degree murder for Ana’s death.
Here’s what happened Monday during opening statements and the first day of witness testimony:
Prosecutors have told the jury they will prove Walshe planned to kill his wife. But in opening statements Monday, Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor instead walked the panel through the known events in the days around Ana Walshe’s disappearance – without suggesting how Walshe allegedly killed her.
Ana Walshe flew to Massachusetts on December 30, 2022, from Washington, DC, where she worked as a real estate manager for Tishman Speyer. The next day, the Walshe family hosted Ana’s former boss, who joined them to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
That man is expected to testify at trial that he left the Walshe home after 1 a.m. on January 1, 2023, and that the couple seemed happy.
“When he left, she was home, she was alive, she was with her husband. No one has seen her since her husband said she left on January 1,” the prosecutor said. “She has not accessed her finances, her email, her phone has made no calls and no one has found her body.”
Connor then told the jury Walshe waited until January 4, 2023, to call Ana’s employer, who then reported her missing. When law enforcement went to the Walshe home that day, Walshe told them he hadn’t seen or heard from his wife since the morning of January 1, when he said she left for DC to handle a work emergency.
Investigators later learned that Walshe searched the internet on January 1 for answers to questions like, “best way to dispose of a body,” “Can you throw away body parts” and “Is it possible to clean DNA off a knife,” Connor said.
The prosecutor also said Walshe went to Lowe’s and Home Depot, where he bought hundreds of dollars in equipment and cleaning supplies –– including a Tyvek suit, a hacksaw, a hatchet and 20 pounds of baking soda.
Connor told the panel Walshe then threw black trash bags away in a dumpster near his mother’s home. On January 9, he said, law enforcement recovered a number of items Walshe allegedly threw away, including a Tyvek suit, a hacksaw, a hatchet and several items with Brian and Ana Walshe’s DNA on them.
Walshe publicly acknowledged his wife was dead for the first time last month, when he pleaded guilty to illegally disposing of her body. But Monday marks the first time anyone has publicly offered an explanation for her death.
After their guest left early on New Year’s morning, Brian and Ana Walshe went up to their bedroom to continue celebrating, Tipton told the jury.
He then went downstairs from their bedroom to clean the kitchen and checked his emails, Tipton said. When Walshe returned to the bedroom, “intending nothing more than to crawl into bed with Ana Walshe, the woman he loved,” she was unresponsive, Tipton said: She was unexplainably dead in their bed.
It’s unclear at this point if Walshe will testify in his own defense. But Tipton said the jury will hear evidence to support the defense claim of a sudden, unexplainable death.
Tipton referenced the “frantic and tragic” Google searches Walshe made beginning January 1, 2023, explaining his client made those searches as he came to terms with his wife’s death.
“You will hear evidence that those searches evolved from ‘how best to dispose of a body’ to even dark subject matter, as he wrestled with the fact that Ana Walshe was dead,” Tipton said.
What the jury won’t hear, according to Tipton, is evidence that Walshe murdered his wife.
When Walshe found his wife dead, he thought no one would believe he had nothing to do with it, his attorney said, and he worried about what might happen to his sons if people thought he killed his wife.
“And so he told the story,” the attorney said. “He told lies. He tried to hide so he could hang on to those boys.”
“What will happen if they think, ‘He did something bad to Ana,’” Tipton said, channeling his client’s purported thought process at the time. “Where will those three boys go?”
“Brian Walshe never killed Ana. Brian Walshe never thought about killing Ana. He would never think about killing Ana. Brian Walshe is not guilty of murder,” Tipton told the jury.
The prosecution’s first witness, a sergeant with Cohasset Police Department, was the only witness to testify Monday.
Sergeant Harrison Schmidt testified about the law enforcement investigation into Ana Walshe’s purported disappearance, which began January 4, 2023, when Ana’s employer reported her missing.
Schmidt is expected to continue testifying Tuesday morning when the trial resumes.
The jury also heard three audio recordings of interviews law enforcement conducted with Brian Walshe on January 4, 5 and 7, 2023. During opening statements, Walshe’s attorney acknowledged he lied to the police in all three interviews. He did not, however, specify what information provided in the hours of questioning wasn’t true.
In the recordings played in court, Walshe told investigators he last saw his wife before 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day, when she left for the airport to return to Washington, DC, for work. Walshe said at the time he waited to report her disappearance because he upset his wife a week earlier, when he purportedly overreacted after failing to get in touch with her around Christmas.
Walshe told investigators that, after Ana left the house on January 1, he made breakfast for his kids and played with them before he went out to run some errands. He went to see his mother and went to the grocery store and pharmacy while a nanny watched his children, Walshe told them.
Walshe was arrested on January 8, 2023, and charged with misleading police in connection to Ana’s disappearance. He was charged with her murder later that month, and he has been in commonwealth custody since his arrest.
Prosecutors have suggested Brian Walshe could have been motivated to kill his wife over an extramarital romantic relationship she had with a man in Washington, DC.
Ana Walshe was romantically involved with the real estate agent who helped her buy a townhouse in DC when she moved there for work in 2022, prosecutor Connor said in his opening statement.
Walshe’s attorney said Monday his client didn’t know about the affair, but said Ana had told her husband she had a crush on the man, William Fastow. Walshe wasn’t jealous, Tipton said.
An affair “does not make someone a bad person, does not make someone a bad mother,” Tipton said. But Ana “did everything she could to hide that affair,” and she did not tell her friends about it, he said.
Ana spent Christmas Eve with the man, according to prosecutors, and had traveled to Ireland with him around Thanksgiving.
Connor told the jury that a cell phone that belonged to Brian Walshe searched the Fastow’s name on December 25, 2022, after Ana missed the holiday with her family in Massachusetts.
Walshe told investigators in his interviews on January 4 and 5 that Fastow was a friend of Ana’s in DC, and that he called the man while looking for Ana. He went to Ana’s townhouse to look for her, Walshe said.
In the January 5 interview, Walshe also told investigators he was sure Ana wasn’t seeing anyone else in Washington, DC. He said she would wear a wedding ring and talk about her husband to others.
“Her having an affair just doesn’t make sense to me,” Walshe said in his interview with law enforcement on January 7. “Also where’s the time? Every moment she was flying here or working.”
He eventually acknowledged an affair was possible but again said, “I don’t see it.”
The jury is expected to see messages between Ana and Fastow, and he is expected to testify for the prosecution later this week.
