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.
