Here's What Brian Walshe's Lawyer Says Husband Was Doing While Ana Died — and Why Brian Lied to Police By KC Baker

Hours after the start of the new year in 2023, Brian and Ana Walshe went to bed after a quiet night in with an old friend at their home in the affluent Boston, Mass., suburb of Cohasset.

An hour later, Brian got up to clean the kitchen and returned to the bedroom, “intending nothing more than to crawl into bed with Ana Walshe, the woman he loved,” Brian’s attorney, Larry Tipton, said in court on Monday, Dec. 1.

Sensing something was wrong, Brian allegedly nudged his wife, but she didn’t respond, Tipton said in his opening remarks streamed on Masslive.com and reviewed by PEOPLE.

Ana was dead, Tipton told Norfolk Superior Court jurors in Dedham.

Ana, Tipton said, died a “sudden unexplained death” and in that alleged moment of shock and disbelief, Brian, who was “panicking,” made the life-altering decision to “hide” what happened that fateful morning.

“It didn’t make sense to Brian Walshe. It was confusing. He never thought anybody would believe that Ana Walshe was alive one minute and dead the next,” he told jurors. 

“And all he could think about were those three boys,” he said, referring to the couple’s sons — who were 2, 4 and 6 years old when their mother disappeared. 

“What would happen to their three boys now that Ana is no longer here? What will happen if they think he did something bad to Ana? Where will those three boys go? And so he told the story … he tried to hide so he could hang on to those boys,” Tipton said.

“Brian Walshe never killed Ana. Brian Walshe never thought about killing Ana,” he added.

Brian is facing a first-degree murder charge in the death of Ana, who vanished sometime on or around Jan. 1, 2023, prosecutors said.

Brian told police that Ana had left their home early that morning to catch a flight to D.C. for a work emergency, prosecutors said.

But she never made it and her body has never been found.

In his opening remarks, Tipton stressed that Brian and Ana were in love, even though she was having an affair with a D.C.-based real estate agent named William Fastow.

“Yes there was an affair,” Tipton said. “An affair does not make someone a bad person, does not make someone a bad mother.”

Ana, however, “was never going to leave Brian, the father of her children,” he said.

Just before jury selection began on Tuesday, Nov. 18, Brian pleaded guilty to two lesser counts: willfully conveying a human body in violation of state law and misleading police, CBS News Boston, WCVB and MassLive.com reported.

He admitted to dismembering his wife’s body and disposing of her remains in dumpsters. The contents of the dumpsters were later incinerated.

He pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife and still faces the murder charge.

On the prosecution side, Commonwealth Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor told jurors that on Jan. 4, 2023, Brian called his wife’s employer to ask about her whereabouts but never called the police.

Her boss was the one who first reported her missing.

Connor told jurors that evidence shows that Ana had more than $1 million in life insurance and that her husband was the beneficiary.

He also told them about the searches Brian allegedly made after Ana vanished. These included, “Can you identify a body with broken teeth?; how to saw a body; how to dismember a body; and can you be charged with murder without a body?”

As he ended his remarks, Connor told jurors to “keep an open mind. Do not rush to judgement. See how all the evidence fits together. Use your common sense. Don’t leave it at home.”

Previously, in Feb. 2024, Brian was sentenced to 37 months in prison and three years of supervised release in connection with “a years-long, multi-faceted art fraud scheme involving two purported Andy Warhol paintings,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said.

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He was also ordered to pay restitution of $475,000. 

In April 2021, he pleaded guilty to one count each of wire fraud, interstate transportation for a scheme to defraud and unlawful monetary transaction.

If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.