He Admitted He Dismembered His Wife’s Body — But Denied Killing Her

Sometime in those intervening hours, prosecutors alleged, Walshe killed his wife of seven years and then began an extensive online search for ways to destroy all the evidence of the crime.

Walshe is now on trial, charged with first-degree murder in the death of his wife. Her body was not found — because, the lead prosecutor alleged in an opening statement on Dec. 1, Walshe dismembered it in their house and placed the remains in garbage bags that he discarded in multiple trash bins miles away from their affluent suburb.

Walshe had also been charged with misleading police and improper conveyance of a human body. But last month, on the first day of jury selection, the courtroom was jolted when Walshe pleaded guilty to lying to investigators and disposing of his wife’s body.

Despite the stunning admissions, Walshe has continued to maintain that he didn’t kill his wife. His, of course, isn’t the first high-profile case with such a bizarre admission.

Robert Durst, the infamous real estate heir whose alleged crimes were documented in HBO’s true crime classic “The Jinx,” was charged with murder after he admitted to dismembering his Galveston, Texas, neighbor’s corpse and disposing of his body parts in garbage bags in the bay in 2001. He pleaded not guilty, and the jury in his murder trial believed Durst’s testimony that he had shot the man, Morris Black, in the head in self-defense and then chopped up his body in a drunken panic.

Black’s head was never recovered, and prosecutors could not disprove Durst’s account of how he died. He was acquitted of murder but served some prison time for evidence tampering and other charges. (Durst, who was also implicated in his wife’s death, was found guilty in 2021 of murdering his friend Susan Berman in December 2000, nine months before Black’s killing. He died in prison months after his conviction.)

Prosecutors must now persuade a jury to convict Walshe of premeditated murder. At his arraignment in April 2023 following a grand jury indictment, they suggested that he was motivated by both love and money. (He had previously been arraigned twice in January, first on Jan. 9 for misleading the police; the murder and improper conveyance charges were added on Jan. 18.) Prosecutors alleged that Walsh had recently discovered his wife was having an affair, and he was the sole beneficiary of her $2.7 million life insurance policy — money he could use for restitution payments in an unrelated art forgery case.

But without a body, the commonwealth has no evidence to indicate how Ana Walshe died.

In his opening statement last Monday, Walshe’s defense attorney offered a jaw-dropping explanation: Ana Walshe was a victim of an unusual phenomenon known as “sudden unexplained death.”

Public defender Larry Tipton said that after the couple went to bed early on Jan. 1, Brian Walshe got up to clean the kitchen. About an hour later, Tipton claimed, he returned to the bedroom and found his wife dead.

He acknowledged the “darker subject matter” in Walshe’s internet searches — many of which were read aloud in court last week by a digital forensics investigator — but claimed that his client had panicked and was simply trying to protect his three sons.

After Walshe’s arrest on murder charges, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families took custody of the Walshes’ young boys. The children, who were born in 2016, 2019 and 2020, remain in state custody, the Associated Press reported.

“They were her world,” Peter Raider, a friend of Ana Walshe’s, told Boston 25 News following a private celebration of her life on Jan. 18, 2023. “Make no mistake about that. Everything she was doing was deliberate for those children and for her family,” he added.

Despite Walshe’s guilty pleas, prosecutors have spent much of the trial so far eliciting testimony about his alleged plans and the actions he took to dispose of her remains.

Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino spent hours testifying about the web searches he said he discovered on Walshe’s electronic devices.

Some of the most gruesome and unsettling searches were made between Jan. 1 and Jan. 3 and include the following:

On Jan. 1: “How long before a body starts to smell?”; “Best ways to dispose of body parts after murder”; “Can identification be made on partial remains?”; “How to clean blood from wooden floor?”; “Can I use bleach to clean my wood floors from bloodstains?”; “Is it better to throw crime scene clothes away or wash them?” 

Jan. 2: “How to saw a body”; “How to dismember a body”; “Hacksaw the best tool for dismembering a body?”; “Can you identify a body with broken teeth?”; “Disposing of a body in the trash”; “Can you be charged with murder without a body?”

Jan. 3: “Can baking soda make a dead body smell good?”; “How long for a dismembered body to decompose?”; and “Can a body decompose in a plastic bag?”