Warrants released in the case of Brian Walshe, the Cohasset man accused of slaying his wife in the first hours of the year, confirm Ana Walshe was having an affair and also reveal a mysterious ransom note sent to police in the first days of the investigation.
“We have the so named Ana Walshe with us here..we had a deal worth $127,000.. She messed up..we have her here with us and if she doesn’t pay the money..then she’ll never be back, and we know that the police and the FBI are involved.. Good luck finding us.”
That’s the body of the email Cohasset Police Detective Harrison Schmidt found in his inbox at 5:18 in the morning on Jan. 7, just three days after police had entered Ana Walshe in the National Crime Information Center database as a missing or endangered person. That’s according to the affidavit filed Jan. 9 by Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino in an affidavit in support of a search warrant on electronic devices in the Walshe home.
It was an unusual detail that has not been remarked upon so far in courts in the case that has thrust the tiny town into the national spotlight after the 39-year-old mother of three children vanished on Jan. 1.
The detail came in a trove of hundreds of pages of documents released from Quincy District Court — where Brian Walshe, 48, was initially charged on Jan. 18 with the murder of his wife — after the case was moved up to Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham on Thursday.
Confirmed in those documents — and in particular MSP Trooper Michael Proctor’s Jan. 17 affidavit in support of an arrest warrant for Brian Walshe — where the affair prosecutors have suggested in court seems to be confirmed by the alleged lover.
Brian Walshe, as stated by prosecutors in Thursday’s Superior Court arraignment, had in December suspected his wife was having an affair and had spent some time monitoring the Instagram page of one of Ana Walshe’s male friends in Washington D.C., where she had taken a job early in 2022 and had purchased a home with the expectation that the family would move there.
Massachusetts police investigators went down to D.C. and interviewed this man — “the most frequent contact with Ana on the cell phone records in possession of investigators.”
The man confirmed “that he was in a dating relationship with Ana Walshe and had been for several months,” and that the relationship was becoming “more serious” as the months wore on. In fact, he told police, the two had traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to spend Thanksgiving together, had also spent Christmas Eve together and planned a belated New Year’s celebration on Jan. 4 when she came back down from D.C. from Massachusetts.
The interview seemed corroborated by another with Ana Walshe’s friends, a woman who told police that the Walshe’s marriage “was strained” and Ana Walshe had presented her husband with “some sort of ultimatum” regarding the sentencing in the federal art fraud case that had been delayed time and again.
A police inspection of her new house in 5300 block of 43rd Street, Northwest, in D.C. showed that it was decorated, stocked and ready for her to move her three children down there with her, according to the docs.
The revelations shed some light on a few interviews police had with Brian Walshe in the days following his wife’s “disappearance.”
In those interviews, which are summarized in a smattering of police affidavits released Thursday, Brian Walshe said that following a New Year’s Eve celebration with his wife and family friend Gem Mutlu — who left the house between 1 a.m. and 1:30 a.m. — she told him she had to leave for D.C. on a “work emergency.” There was no work emergency.
She was actually scheduled to return to D.C. on Jan. 3, a trip she clearly never took. And a police inspection of her work and personal banking records show there was no activity after she allegedly left home for D.C. Police requested that cell carrier Verizon ping her phone at 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 4, and received results that her phone was located in the area of the Walshe residence on Chief Justice Cushing Highway in Cohasset.
“It should be noted Brian never contacted police regarding his wife, as he had only called some friends and her work who in turn notified the Cohasset Police for a well-being check,” MSP Trooper Connor Keefe wrote in a Jan. 20 affidavit.
“Brian explained the fact that he had not reported his wife missing was due to an incident he said occurred over Christmas when Ana had been unreachable for about 24 hours. Brian said when he told Ana how concerned he was, she told Brian not to worry and not to call her work looking for her,” the affidavit explains.
If the alleged lover’s interview is correct, during that period of time Ana Walshe would have been celebrating Christmas Eve with him.
