Was Anna Walshe murdered by her husband? Or did she die in bed due to some mysterious, unexplained medical event?
Defense lawyers for her husband Brian Walshe will try to convince jurors, one said in opening statements Monday, when his murder trial began in earnest, nearly three years after Anna disappeared from a Boston suburb in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2023.
It was the first time that anyone has publicly offered a theory about Anna’s cause of death since Walshe was charged with her murder. Her body was never found, and while Walshe pleaded guilty to illegally disposing of Anna’s body two weeks earlier and misleading police investigating her disappearance, he insisted that he did not kill her.
Walshe faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted of first-degree murder in Anna’s death.
Here’s what happened during the first day of opening statements and witness testimony on Monday:
Prosecutors have told the jury they will prove Walshe planned to kill his wife. But in opening statements Monday, Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor told the panel about the known events in the days surrounding Anna Walshe’s disappearance — without explaining how Walshe allegedly murdered her.
Anna Walshe flew to Massachusetts from Washington, DC, on December 30, 2022, where she worked as a real estate manager for Tishman Speyer. The next day, the Walshe family hosts Anna’s former boss, who joins them to celebrate New Year’s Eve.
The man is expected to testify at trial that he left the Walshe home just 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. Her husband said she left on January 1, no one has seen her since,” the prosecutor said. “He has had no access to his finances, his emails, his phone, made no calls and no one has found his body.”
Connor then tells the jury that Walshe waited until January 4, 2023 to call Anna’s employer to report her missing. When law enforcement went to Walshe’s home that day, Walshe told them that he had not seen or heard from his wife since the morning of January 1, when he said she left for DC to deal with an emergency.
Investigators later learned that Walshe searched the Internet on Jan. 1 for answers to questions such as “best way to dispose of a body,” “can you throw away body parts” and “is it possible to clean DNA with a knife,” Connor said.
The prosecutor also said Walshe went to Lowe’s and Home Depot, where he purchased hundreds of dollars worth of tools and cleaning supplies — including a Tyvek suit, a hacksaw, a hatchet and 20 pounds of baking soda.
Connor told the panel that Walshe threw black garbage bags into a dumpster near his mother’s home. On January 9, law enforcement recovered several items allegedly discarded by Walshe, he said, including a Tyvek suit, a hacksaw, a hatchet and several items containing Brian and Anna Walshe’s DNA.
Walshe acknowledged publicly for the first time last month that his wife was dead, 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.
Tipton told the jury that after their guest left early on New Year’s morning, Brian and Anna Walshe went to their bedroom to celebrate.
He then went downstairs from their bedroom to clean the kitchen and check his email, Tipton said. When Walshe returned to the bedroom, “Anna Walshe, wanting to do nothing more than crawl into bed with the woman he loved,” was unresponsive, Tipton said: she was inexplicably dead in their bed.
It is unclear at this point whether Walshe will testify in his own defense. But Tipton said the jury would hear evidence to support the defense’s claim of sudden, unexplained death.
Tipton referenced “frantic and sad” Google searches made by Walshe from January 1, 2023, and explained that his client made these searches after he learned of his wife’s death.
“You’ll hear testimony that those searches evolved from ‘how to best dispose of a body’ to deeper topics as he grappled with the fact that Anna Walshe was dead,” Tipton said.
According to Tipton, what the jury did not hear was evidence that Walshe murdered his wife.
When Walshe found his wife dead, he thought no one would believe he had anything to do with it, his lawyer said, and he worried what would happen to his sons if people thought he killed his wife.
“And so he told the story,” the lawyer said. “She lied. She tried to hide so she could stick with those boys.”
“What if they think, ‘He did something bad to Ana,'” Tipton said, reflecting his client’s alleged thought process at the time. “Where will those three boys go?”
Tipton told the jury, “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.”
The prosecution’s first witness, a sergeant with the Cohasset Police Department, was the only witness to testify Monday.
Sergeant Harrison Schmidt testified about the law enforcement investigation into Anna Walshe’s alleged disappearance, which began on January 4, 2023, when Anna’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 admitted that he had lied to police in all three interviews. However, he did not say which information given during the hours of questioning was not true.
In the recording played in court, Walshe told investigators that he last saw his wife just before 7 a.m. on New Year’s Day, when she left for the airport to return to Washington, D.C., for work. Walshe said at the time that he had waited to report her missing because he had upset his wife a week earlier when she allegedly overreacted after failing to contact him around Christmas.
Walshe told investigators that, after leaving Ana’s house on January 1, he made breakfast for his children and played with them before going outside to run some errands. Walshe told them he visited his mother and went to the grocery store and pharmacy while a nanny watched his children.
Walshe was arrested on January 8, 2023, and charged with misleading police regarding Anna’s disappearance. He was charged with her murder later that month, and has been in Commonwealth custody since his arrest.
Prosecutors have suggested that Brian Walshe may have been motivated to kill his wife because of an extramarital romantic affair with a man in Washington, DC.
Prosecutor Connor said in his opening statement that Anna Walshe was romantically involved with the real estate agent who helped her buy a townhouse in D.C. when she moved there for work in 2022.
Walshe’s attorney said Monday that his client did not know about the affair, but said Anna had told her husband she had a crush on a man named William Fastow. Walshe was not jealous, Tipton said.
“An affair doesn’t make someone a bad person, doesn’t make someone a bad mother,” Tipton said. But Anna “did everything she could to hide that relationship,” and she didn’t tell her friends about it, he said.
According to prosecutors, Anna spent Christmas Eve with the man and traveled to Ireland with him around Thanksgiving.
Connor told the jury that Fastow’s name was discovered on Brian Walshe’s cell phone on December 25, 2022, when Anna missed a vacation 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 had called the man while searching for Ana. He went to Anna’s townhouse to find her, Walshe said.
In the January 5 interview, Walshe also told investigators that he was sure Anna was not seeing anyone else in Washington, DC. She said she would wear the wedding ring and talk about her husband to others.
“Her having an affair doesn’t make any sense to me,” Walshe said in her January 7 interview with law enforcement. “Where else is the time? Every second she was here flying or working.”
He eventually admitted that an affair was possible but then said, “I don’t think so.”
The jury is expected to see messages between Ana and Fastow, and she is expected to testify for the prosecution later this week.
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