Ana Walshe had amassed a property portfolio worth $2.8 million at the time of her disappearance, which her husband’s internet search history showed he was looking forward to getting his hands on.
Brian Walshe was charged with his wife’s murder this week and at his arraignment at Quincy District Court in Massachusetts Wednesday it was revealed he had Googled “how long for someone to be missing to inherit” among other damning searches.
Brian pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife, but a wealth of evidence is mounting against him. Although it is said they had amassed a collection of homes and rental properties together, records viewed by The Post show all of them were in her name only.
Ana, 39, had been associated with eight properties in Washington, DC, Maryland, and Massachusetts since 2018 — four she had sold and four she owned at the time she disappeared, with a current market value totaling $2.8m.
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In addition, Ana — who had three sons with Brian, all aged under six — was the family’s breadwinner, splitting her time between Washington D.C. where she was a property manager for real estate giant Tishman Speyer.
Meanwhile, Brian was under house arrest after he pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges in 2021 for selling fake Andy Warhol paintings for $80,000 on eBay. He had also been accused by friends of his neurosurgeon father of stealing from his estate after his death, although he maintained he and his son were the only rightful heirs to his will.
Ana’s property deals were going on right up until she went missing. Less than a week before she was reported missing by her employer, Ana closed a deal on Dec. 29 and sold an apartment in Revere, MA, outside Boston. The place sold for 220,000, over 50% more than the $137,000 she bought it for in 2020.
The tenants of that apartment, Mike and Mandi Silva, had previously told The Post they felt they were hurried out of the property, and it had been sold without them being properly informed after they had rented it for four years.
They had worked for the couple on their properties and said Ana “wore the pants in the family,” while Brian “presented himself as an investor” but “would have a robe on in his house the whole time.”
In March, the budding real estate tycoon sold a million-dollar house she owned in Massachusetts and bought a house in DC worth about the same.
The house she owned in Cohasset, Mass., the town where she lived with her husband and children, sold for $1.385 million in less than two months on the market. It boasts five bedrooms and four bathrooms and had been purchased in 2020 for $800,000, records show.
The mom then seemed to use her new cash flow to buy a DC mansion in the heart of the Chevy Chase neighborhood for $1.3 million. The house has four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, two half bathrooms, and a newly renovated kitchen. Records show she co-owns the house with an investor other than her husband.
Walshe also purchased a Baltimore row house in September for $191,500.
In 2020, she turned a profit when she sold a house in Marblehead, Mass, north of Boston for $840,100, which she had bought it in 2018 for $510,000. That $800,000 seemed to go into the Cohasset home she purchased for the same price in 2020 and sold last year.
She also owned two investment properties in Lynn, Massachusetts, which she bought in 2018 for $135,000 and $139,900, respectively.
Following Ana’s death and Brian’s arrest it is unclear what will happen to her property interests. In court facing murder charges Wednesday, prosecutors painted a damming portrait of Brian, explaining how he had initially looked up divorcing his wife.
“Rather than divorce, it is believed that Brian Walshe dismembered Ana Walshe and discarded her body,” Assistant District Attorney Lynn Beland charged during the hearing.
The criminal complaint against Brian, released Wednesday, claimed in one count he “did assault and beat Ana Walshe, with intent to murder such person, and by such assault and beating did kill and murder such person.”
On Jan. 3, a man in a Volvo vehicle matching Brian’s description was seen on surveillance placing heavy trash bags in dumpsters at apartment complexes in Brockton and Abington.
By the time investigators were alerted to Ana’s disappearance and checked the dumpsters in question, Beland explained, the bags had already been transferred and destroyed.
The same could not be said, however, for the trash bags Brian was thought to have disposed of at his mother’s apartment complex in Swampscott, where his phone placed him on Jan. 5.
Police traced the bags to a trash transfer station in Peabody, north of Boston. In addition to the bloodstained carpet, hatchet and hacksaw that were previously reported, Beland said law enforcement found towels, slippers, tape, and a Tyvek suit matching the one Brian purchased days earlier.
Also among the rubbish was a Prada purse and Hunter boots matching what Ana was said to have been wearing when she was last seen. A COVID-19 vaccination card in her name was found as well.
Beland told the court that DNA analysis of the items revealed both Ana and Brian’s genetic material on the bloody slipper and on the Tyvek suit.
Walshe also now faces a charge of improper transport of a body in relation to his missing wife. He was ordered held without bail on Wednesday.