BOSTON — Brian Walshe is now set to be charged with the murder of his wife, Ana, in the high-profile missing-persons case out of Cohasset in a turn that comes even as her body hasn’t been found — though there’s precedent out of the local district attorney’s office for such a prosecution to work.
Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey took the unusual step Tuesday of releasing a video announcing a murder warrant against Brian Walshe, the 47-year-old Cohasset man who is already charged with misleading cops in the investigation into his wife’s disappearance.
“The continued investigation has now allowed police to obtain an arrest warrant charging Brian Walshe with the murder of his wife,” Morrissey said.
This means authorities have decided that Ana Walshe is dead, as has been feared — but, up until this point, unconfirmed.
Morrissey said in the minute-long video that Walshe is being taken to Quincy District Court for arraignment Wednesday on the new charge of murder. Following that, more information will be available.
Morrissey said the “intensive” investigation by police — one that played out very much in the public eye, with news cameras capturing cops searching dumpsters and a garbage incinerator, among other areas — had led to this point.
Brian Walshe, a convicted art fraudster, has maintained his innocence on the charge of misleading police.
Ana Walshe vanished on New Year’s Day, and there’s been no sign of her since. Her husband told cops she’d kissed him goodbye that morning before heading down to Washington, D.C., for work, but her co-workers reported her missing a few days later after she never showed up.
A large search began — with multiple bizarre occurrences taking place in the public eye, such as a fire breaking out at the swanky Jerusalem Road home that the couple and their three children had just moved out of a few months earlier.
Brian Walshe — who had been under house arrest and GPS monitoring following his federal conviction for using Ana’s eBay account to sell fake Andy Warhol paintings — last week was charged with lying about where he’d been in the days after the disappearance. One of the trips he allegedly didn’t divulge to the cops was a run out to the Rockland Home Depot, where he, masked and wearing gloves, paid cash for $450 worth of cleaning materials, according to charging documents.
Though the search continued around local dumpsters near their Cohasset home and on the North Shore where he’d gone to visit his mother on New Year’s, cops still haven’t found a substantial amount of human remains, as the DA’s office confirmed Tuesday.
There is precedent for successfully charging someone for murder in a case where authorities couldn’t find a body — at least in the colloquial sense, if not the legal one.
In Morrissey’s hometown of Quincy back in 1999, a man named Joseph Romano beat his wife Katherine to death and then borrowed a neighbor’s power saw to chop up her body, which he then disposed of.
Romano cleaned up the saw — and the scene — and gave it back to his kind neighbor. But cops did find some genetic material in the saw, and determined not only that it came from Romano's wife but that it had to have come from internal organ tissue, meaning it’s not the sort of wound one can have and still be alive.
So the Norfolk DA’s office charged him with murder, and a jury in 2002 convicted him of it. That was the first time in state history that someone had been successfully prosecuted without what the common person, if not the law, would consider to be a body.
But even further back, the Norfolk DA’s office secured a guilty plea for a shocking slaying in Sharon that dominated the Boston Herald's headlines in the 1980s, when Tufts School of Medicine professor of anatomy William Douglas killed 21-year-old Robin Benedict, a graphic artist and prostitute he’d been having sex with.
Douglas pleaded guilty in 1984 to manslaughter; according to reports from the time, he admitted to killing her with a hammer in 1983 and then stashing the dead woman in a dumpster at a Providence mall, but her body was never found.
Tufts fired Douglas for stealing $67,000 from the university to support both his payments to Benedict and his cocaine habit. He remained in the news for remarrying while in prison as Benedict’s family sued and fought for more answers that, like the body of their loved one, eluded discovery.
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