A Massachusetts man looked up how to “dispose of a 115-pound woman’s body” — amid reports that his wife, who weighs about 115 pounds, disappeared en route to the airport for a business trip.
According to a report from CNN, Ana Walshe, 39, was supposed to take a ride-share to the airport in Boston for work on New Year’s Day — but there is no record that she took the ride-share, and she did not ever board the plane.
She was reported missing — by both her workplace and her husband, Brian Walshe, when she did not show up for work on January 4th. And in the days since, police have executed an exhaustive search in the area near her home in Cohasset, a suburb of Boston — sending divers into a local pond and bringing in three K-9 teams to assist as well.
Throughout the course of the investigation, however, the missing realtor’s husband Brian Walshe has apparently raised suspicions with a number of actions he allegedly took around the time of his wife’s disappearance.
Several law enforcement sources told CNN that police shifted their focus from a potential missing persons investigation to a possible murder investigation after a search of Brian Walshe’s computer history showed that he had been looking up information about how to “dispose of a 115-pound woman’s body” and how to dismember a body.
Following that discovery, police began searching in dumpsters in Peabody — about an hour away from Cohasset by car — and near Brian Walshe’s mother’s home in nearby Swampscott after they learned that he had visited his mother after his wife had disappeared.
Prosecutor Lynn Beland raised concerns that Brian Walshe had intentionally misled investigators.
“These various statements caused a delay in the investigation to the point that during the time frame when he didn’t report his wife and gave various statements, that allowed him time to either clean up evidence, dispose of evidence, and causing a delay,” Beland said. “The intentional, willful and direct responses to questions about his whereabouts on the days of Sunday, January 1, 2023, and Monday, January 2, 2023, were a clear attempt to mislead and delay investigators. The fact that he was asked a specific question and he gave an untruthful answer that led investigators out of the area caused a clear delay in the search for the missing person, Ana Walshe.”
Police were able to obtain a search warrant, and in addition to surveillance video showing him purchasing “$450 of cleaning supplies, including mops, a bucket and tarps” at a local Home Depot, they found blood and a bloody knife in Walshe’s basement.
Walshe, who is on probation for a previous fraud case and is only supposed to leave his home during certain times, attempted to avoid raising alarms by making the trip to Home Depot during the time he was normally allotted to pick his kids up from school — however, police learned that their school was not open that day.
He has since been arrested and charged with misleading the police.