Less than two years before she went missing, missing Massachusetts mom Ana Walshe told a judge that her husband Brian Walshe suffered from an “ever-present” trauma and had been “taught to lie and hide” in his childhood.
The admission was buried in a glowing September 2021 letter she wrote a judge asking to consider giving her husband a lenient prison sentence for committing art fraud.
Brian, who was arrested this week in connection to his wife’s disappearance, admitted that year to selling two fake Andy Warhol paintings to an eBay buyer for $80,000. He is still awaiting sentencing for that crime.
While praising Brian for supporting their family of five and participating in charity work, Ana claimed that he suffered a traumatic childhood at the hands of his abusive parents that affected him through his adult life.
“He was taught to lie and hide. He was told that he was a loser, that his parents should not have had him, that he had no chances of making anything of himself in life, and that he was a lost cause. A deep sense of shame governed his life,” Ana wrote.
Ana wrote that Brian had a difficult time allowing others to get close to him, including his wife, because he was “afraid of relationships.”
In the years before writing the admiring letter about her husband, Ana told Washington, DC police that he had threatened to kill her and her friends. Brian was never charged with the threats.
Brian, who Ana claimed had a “big heart” and was the “love of her life,” was arrested Sunday and charged with misleading police during their investigation into his missing wife.
Ana had vanished on New Year’s Day. She never boarded a flight to Washington, DC that Sunday, but Brian didn’t report the mother of his three children missing for three days.
Police found blood in the family’s basement and a blood-stained, damaged knife. They also discovered a hacksaw, a hatchet, blood, used cleaning supplies and a rug at a trash transfer station in Peabody, a little more than an hour away from the couple’s home.
Brian had also reportedly searched for “how to dispose of a 115-pound woman’s body” online.