BOSTON — Brian Walshe has been formally charged with the murder of his wife, Ana Walshe, who vanished in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day.
“Can you be charged with murder without a body?” Brian Walshe, 47, allegedly searched on Google the day after his wife was said to disappear and two days before her work in Washington, D.C., reported her missing and police came knocking on his door.
The answer to that quoted search is apparently yes, as the search was one of a litany read off by Norfolk Assistant District Attorney Lynn Beland at Brian Walshe’s arraignment Wednesday morning in Quincy District Court for the murder of Ana Walshe and for disinterring her body.
Beland said those searches began early in the morning of Jan. 1, which is the day that Brian Walshe said he last spoke to Ana. He told police when they showed up at his door — only after Ana Walshe’s work reported her missing — on Jan. 4, in which he confirmed she was missing.
He told police then, according to prior police statements and Beland’s presentation at the arraignment, that she had left that morning at maybe 6 or 6:10 a.m. in an Uber or a Lyft for a flight from Logan International Airport to Reagan International Airport in D.C.
It’s a trip she often made, as she worked there as an executive for Tishman Speyer, a property development and management company, and had recently purchased a townhouse there, as the Herald has previously reported.
But police found no record of her calling a rideshare or boarding a flight. And she never made the Jan. 3 flight she actually had booked in order to appear for work on Jan. 4, the day she didn’t show up and her employer called the police.
In the immediate aftermath of her being reported missing, police had said that Brian Walshe had been fully cooperative. But within days, on Jan. 8, police arrested him and he was soon formally charged with misleading a police investigation by lying about his whereabouts.
Those details have been reported in detail: alleged lies about running up to Swampscott to visit his mom to run some errands for her to Whole Foods and CVS and getting lost along the way. But security footage never shows him at either location.
Instead, on Jan. 2, Beland says, security footage shows him visiting the Rockland Home Depot and buying $450 worth of cleaning supplies. A Tyvek suit with boot covers, mops, buckets, goggles, baking soda, tape, a hatchet and more — all while wearing a facemask and rubber gloves in the store.
That’s a shopping trip after some scary online searches the day before that the DA says show a cram study session on the art of murder, with a little monetary motivation thrown in. The searches on the iPad allegedly started at 4:55 a.m. on Jan. 1 — an hour before Ana Walshe allegedly left for the airport — with the search “How long before a body starts to smell?”
Those were quickly followed up with, “How to stop a body from decomposing,” Beland said, and “how to embalm a body.” At that one, the wide-eyed but otherwise stoic face of Brian Walshe showed some emotion: incredulity, as his head began a slow shake.
Other searches followed, and Beland read them off with their time stamps: “10 ways to dispose of a body if you really need to,” “Can you throw away body parts?” “What does formaldehyde do?”
“How long does DNA last?” “Can identification be made on partial remains?” “Dismemberment and the best ways to dispose of a body.” “How to clean blood from wooden floor.” “Luminol to detect blood?” “What happens when you put body parts in ammonia?” “Is it better to throw crime scene clothes away or wash them?”
Among all those, early on, at 6:25 a.m., Brian Walshe allegedly searches, “How long for someone to be missing to inherit.”
On Jan. 3, prosecutors allege, again using data on his phone, tracked Brian Walshe to an apartment complex in Abington where surveillance video then showed his Volvo and a man matching his description park near a trash bin where he brings a garbage bag that appears to be heavy as he “heft it,” into the bin.
Police were not able to recover any of the bags disposed of in Abington. However, during the high-profile search of the transfer station in Peabody on Jan. 10, police were able to recover 10 trash bags. Among the contents of those bags, police recovered towels, rags, slippers, tape, Tyvek suit, “a hacksaw, a hatchet and some cutting shears.”
Also recovered in the trash bags searched in Peabody was a COVID-19 vaccine card “in the name of Ana Walshe.”
Testing from the state crime lab on the items recovered from those trash bags confirmed DNA from both Brian Walshe and Ana Walshe, according to prosecutors.
The affidavits and arrest warrants supporting these charges have been impounded by an order of the court.
