Before January 1, 2023, now 50 year-old Massachusetts man Brian Walshe was in trouble. He had already pleaded guilty in a federal court in 2021 to selling forged artworks and could’ve gotten off with time served – if his $475,000 restitution check hadn’t bounced. So he was looking at a few years in the joint and his wife, 39 year-old Serbian immigrant Ana, an exec with fancy global property firm Tishman Speyer was having an affair with some real estate broker in DC.
Ana Walshe regularly commuted to the capital for work while staying at a $1.3 million townhouse she owned there, so obviously she had options for her and the three boys, now aged 4 to 8, she’d had with Brian after the jackass felon reported to Club Fed – though the sentencing date was still in flux at that point. So the family rang in 2023 in their home in the Boston suburb of Cohasset with an unidentified guest who left around 1 AM. What happened next is… Well Ana’s remains still haven’t been found and Brian last month pleaded guilty to misleading a police investigation and improper conveyance of a human body, but maintains his innocence on the first degree murder charge.
The defense strategy is to sell the jury on the idea that Brian woke up at some point early that morning to find Ana suddenly deceased in their bed of unknown causes and, out of sheer panic, stupidity, and fear given the circumstantial evidence against him that he carved up her corpse and disposed of it. The old “limited hangout” theory of “I’m a bad guy but not that bad,” and the evidence presented so far in the trial – specifically Walshe’s browser activity in late December 2022/early January 2023 – is actually pretty consistent with that tortuously overtechnical defense.
From Boston.com’s compilation of the browser/search history presented on Monday, the first day of the prosecution’s case, by Massachusetts State Trooper Nicholas Guarino as obtained from a January 9, 2023 warrant executed on Brian’s devices (some of this excised for brevity):
| December 26, 2022 | |
| 12:06 am: | “Cheating wife seduces another man to impregnate her” searches on Pornhub (This was a point of contention and Walshe’s defense lawyer got Guarino to admit on the stand that it’s impossible to prove whether Walshe had actually searched for this on PornHub or if it had merely been suggested to him by the site based on previous content preferences. Must’ve been a hell of a Matlock moment) |
| 8:51 pm: | “Best state to divorce for a man” |
| 8:54 pm: | “Washington DC divorce lawyers” |
| Series of websites regarding divorce advice and mistakes | |
| Sunday, January 1, 2023 | |
| 4:52 am: | “Best ways to dispose of a body” |
| 4:55 am: | “How long before a body starts to smell?” |
| 6:24 am: | “How long for someone to be missing, to inheritance?” |
| 7:44 am: | “Tishman Speyer, Washington, DC, head” |
| 9:33 am: | “Is it possible to clean DNA off a knife?” |
| 9:35 am: | “Can identification be made on partial human remains?” |
| 9:59 am: | “How to dispose of a cellphone?” |
| 10:29 am: | “I am the user on my wife’s credit card. She is missing. Can I still use the card?” |
| 10:34 am: | “Your spouse is missing, and you want a divorce” |
| 11:28 am: | “Ways to dispose of body parts after murder” |
| 11:44 am: | “How to clean blood from a wood floor?” |
| 11:50 am: | “Can I use bleach to clean my wood floors from blood stains?” |
| 12:10 pm: | “What does bleach do to dead bodies?” |
| 12:18 pm: | “Want to get away with murder? Use special detergent” |
| 12:48 pm: | “How to clean blood stains with hydrogen peroxide” |
| 1:43 pm: | “Can the FBI tell when you accessed your phone?” |
| 1:52 pm: | “Does the dishwasher clean blood?” / HIV on knife after washing |
| Monday, January 2, 2023 | |
| 2:00 am: | How to remove SIM card and hard drive from Apple devices |
| 10:32 am: | “How long do stores keep security footage?” |
| 12:27 pm: | “How to dismember a body?” |
| 12:33 pm: | “Hacksaw, the best tool for dismembering a body?” |
| 12:47 pm: | “Can you be charged with murder without a body?” |
| 1:12 pm: | “Can you identify a body with broken teeth?” |
| 1:14 pm: | “Disposing of a body in the trash” |
| 1:34 pm: | Apartment rental searches in Brockton and Abington, MA |
| 2:51 pm: | “What powder mass smells the best?” |
| Tuesday, January 3, 2023 | |
| 1:55 am: | “Can baking soda make a dead body smell good?” |
| 5:03 am: | “Cleaning up blood without leaving a trace” |
| 1:02 pm: | “How long for a dismembered body to decompose?” |
| 1:12 pm: | “Can a body decompose in a plastic bag?” |
| 7:38 pm: | “Can police get your search history without your computer?” |
| Wednesday, January 4, 2023 | |
| 8:55 pm: | “Does a cellphone track your historical location?” |
Yup. Pretty solid alibi Walshy’s got here. All his lawyer’s gotta do now is emphasize to an extremely molecular degree that that the prosecution did not and cannot prove his client did not actually murder his wife so much as failed to call an ambulance when he found her dead and then butchered her corpse out of fear he would end up being accused by law enforcement of having murdered her.