Opening statements in the murder trial of a convicted fraudster accused of killing his wife and dismembering her body are scheduled to begin Monday in a Massachusetts courtroom.
Brian Walshe, 50, pleaded guilty in mid-November to two lesser charges linked to the 2023 disappearance and death of Ana Walshe, 39 — misleading a police investigation and improper conveyance of a body.
The trial, in Norfolk County Superior Court, is expected to last two to three weeks.
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 on New Year’s Day nearly three years ago. Her body has never been found.
An attorney for Brian Walshe has denied the allegations.
Ana Walshe, a mother of three, was reported missing after her employer 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.
Evidence presented at pretrial hearings detailed internet searches Walshe is alleged to have conducted on Jan. 1 and Jan. 2 — “hacksaw best tool to dismember” and “what happens when you put body parts in ammonia” were among them — and purchases he made from a Home Depot on Jan. 2.
Wearing a surgical mask and gloves, he paid $450 for a Tyvek suit, buckets, a hatchet, goggles, baking soda and other cleaning products, prosecutors said.
Authorities later found a bloody knife in his basement and a hacksaw, a hatchet, a Tyvek suit and other items that prosecutors accused him of dumping in an area south of Boston.
Walshe’s attorney, Tracy Miner, has cast doubt on the state’s physical evidence and suggested that Ana Walshe may have voluntarily disappeared. Miner accused the media of trying and convicting her client.
“It is easy to charge a crime and even easier to say a person committed that crime,” she said. “It is a much more difficult thing to prove it, which we will see if the prosecution can do.”
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.
