Brian Walshe Murder Trial Takeaways: Defense Says His Wife Ana Died Suddenly in Bed

Was Ana Walshe murdered by her husband? Or did she die in bed following a mysterious and unexplained medical event?

Defense lawyers for her husband, Brian Walshe, will try to convince jurors of the latter, one of them said in opening statements Monday as his murder trial began in earnest, nearly three years after Ana disappeared from a Boston suburb in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2023.

It was the first time anyone had publicly offered a theory about the cause of Ana’s death since Walshe was charged with her murder. Her body was never found, and although Walshe pleaded guilty two weeks ago 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 testimony:

Prosecutors told the jury they would prove Walshe planned to kill his wife. But in his opening statements Monday, Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor instead told the panel the known events that occurred 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 property 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 Walshes’ home after 1 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2023, and that the couple seemed happy.

“When he left, she was at home, she was alive, she was with her husband. No one has seen her since her husband said she left on January 1,” said the prosecutor. “She didn’t access her finances, her emails, her phone didn’t make any calls and no one found her body.”

Connor then told the jury that Walshe waited until January 4, 2023, to call Ana’s employer, who then reported her missing. When law enforcement went to the Walshes’ home that day, Walshe told them he had not seen or heard from his wife since the morning of January 1, when he said she had left for Washington, D.C. to handle a work emergency.

Investigators later learned that Walshe had searched the Internet on Jan. 1 for answers to questions such as “the best way to dispose of a body,” “Can you throw away body parts” and “Is it possible to clean DNA from a knife,” Connor said.

The prosecutor also said Walshe went to Lowe’s and Home Depot, where he purchased hundreds of dollars of cleaning equipment and supplies, including a Tyvek suit, a hacksaw, a hatchet and 20 pounds of baking soda.

Connor told the panel that Walshe then threw black trash bags into a dumpster near his mother’s house. On Jan. 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 bearing the DNA of Brian and Ana Walshe.

Walshe publicly acknowledged that his wife was dead for the first time last month, when he pleaded guilty to illegally disposing of her body. But Monday marked the first time anyone has publicly offered an explanation for his death.

After their guest left early on New Year’s morning, Brian and Ana Walshe went up to their room to continue celebrating, Tipton told the jury.

He then came down from their bedroom to clean the kitchen and check his emails, Tipton said. When Walshe returned to the bedroom, “intending nothing other than to get into bed with Ana Walshe, the woman he loved,” she was unconscious, Tipton said: She was inexplicably dead in their bed.

It is not yet known whether Walshe will testify in his own defense. But Tipton said the jury will hear evidence to support the defense’s claim that it was a sudden and unexplainable death.

Tipton referred to the “frantic and tragic” Google searches Walshe made starting January 1, 2023, explaining that his client made the searches as he came to terms with his wife’s death.

“You will hear evidence that these searches evolved from ‘the best way to dispose of a body’ to even dark topics, as he struggled with the fact that Ana Walshe was dead,” Tipton said.

What the jury won’t hear, Tipton said, 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 lawyer said, and he worried about what might happen to his sons if people thought he had killed his wife.

“And that’s how he told the story,” the lawyer said. “He lied. He tried to hide so he could hold on to those boys.”

“What happens if they think, ‘He did something bad to Ana,'” Tipton said, channeling his client’s alleged thought process at the time. “Where will these three boys go?”

“Brian Walshe never killed Ana. Brian Walshe never thought about killing Ana. He would never have thought about killing Ana. Brian Walshe is not guilty of murder,” Tipton told the jury.

The prosecution’s first witness, a sergeant with the Cohasset Police Department, was the only one to testify Monday.

Sergeant Harrison Schmidt testified regarding law enforcement’s investigation into the alleged disappearance of Ana Walshe, which began on 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 conducted by law enforcement with Brian Walshe on January 4, 5 and 7, 2023. During opening statements, Walshe’s attorney acknowledged that he lied to police during all three interviews. However, he did not specify which information provided during the hours of interrogation was false.

In recordings played in court, Walshe told investigators he last saw his wife before 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day, when she was leaving for the airport to return to Washington, D.C., for work. Walshe said that at the time he waited to report her missing because he had upset his wife a week earlier, when he allegedly overreacted after failing to contact her around Christmas.

Walshe told investigators that after Ana left the house on Jan. 1, he made breakfast for his children and played with them before going out to do some shopping. 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 relation to Ana’s disappearance. He was charged with her murder later that month and has been in Commonwealth custody since his arrest.

Prosecutors suggested that Brian Walshe may have been motivated to kill his wife because of 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 Washington townhouse when she moved there for work in 2022, Prosecutor Connor said in his opening statement.

Walshe’s attorney said Monday that his client was unaware of the affair, but said Ana told her husband she had a crush on the man, William Fastow. Walshe wasn’t jealous, Tipton said.

An affair “doesn’t make someone a bad person, or a bad mother,” Tipton said. But Ana “did everything she could to hide this affair” and she didn’t tell her friends, he said.

Ana spent Christmas Eve with the man, prosecutors said, and had traveled with him to Ireland around Thanksgiving.

Connor told the jury that a cell phone belonging to Brian Walshe searched for Fastow’s name on Dec. 25, 2022, after Ana missed the vacation with her family in Massachusetts.

Walshe told investigators during his interviews Jan. 4 and 5 that Fastow was a friend of Ana’s in Washington and that he called the man while he was looking for Ana. He went to Ana’s house to pick her up, Walshe said.

In the January 5 interview, Walshe also told investigators that he was sure Ana was not seeing anyone else in Washington, DC. He said she would wear a wedding ring and tell others about her husband.

“The fact that she was having an affair just doesn’t make sense to me,” Walshe said during his interview with law enforcement on Jan. 7. “And what time is it? Every moment she was flying here or working.”

He eventually acknowledged that an affair was possible, but again said, “I don’t see it.” »

The jury is expected to see the messages between Ana and Fastow, and he is expected to testify for the prosecution later this week.