Newly-released court documents in the Ana Walshe case show that police in Cohasset, Massachusetts, received a ransom note asking for $127,000 for her return in the days after her disappearance.
A court affidavit released Friday showed that a Cohasset police Detective Harrison Schmidt received an email on Jan. 7 at 5:18 a.m. from a Gmail account saying, "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."
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"Investigators are considering this email suspicious because there is no timeline to respond to the demand and no contact instructions," state police said in the court filing.
Court documents show that state police intended to request the subscriber information from Google to determine who sent the Jan. 7 email, but it is not clear whether they ever received that information.
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Ana Walshe, 39, a mother of three who is originally from Serbia, was last seen early Jan. 1 following a New Year’s Eve dinner at her Cohasset home with her husband and a family friend, prosecutors said.
Her husband, 47-year-old Brian Walshe, has been charged with first-degree murder as well as misleading a police investigation/obstruction of justice and improper conveyance of a human body. He is accused of killing his wife, dismembering her and disposing of her body. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment last week and was ordered held without bail.
Brian Walshe told police Ana was called back to Washington on New Year’s Day for a work emergency. He didn’t contact her employer until Jan. 4, saying she was missing. The company — the first to notify police Ana Walshe was missing — said there was no emergency, prosecutors said. Ana Walshe divided her time between Washington, D.C., where she worked for an international property management company, and the family home in Cohasset.
In court documents released last week, prosecutors said Brian Walshe suspected his wife was having an affair and persuaded his mother to hire a private investigator to prove it.
In December, Brian Walshe “would repeatedly access the Instagram page” of one of Ana Walshe’s male friends from Washington, D.C., where she was working, prosecutors said. His mother hired the investigator on Dec. 26 “with his input and direction” to conduct surveillance and, the next day, his oldest child’s iPad was used for an internet search on “divorce.”
Ana Walshe went out with a friend in Washington on Dec. 28 and became “uncharacteristically emotional and extremely upset,” prosecutors said.
“Ana believed Mr. Walshe was going to be incarcerated on his pending criminal case. Ana told her friend that she intended to relocate her three children to Washington, D.C., and was prepared to leave Mr. Walshe,” the document said.
Brian Walshe had been on home confinement with some exceptions while awaiting sentencing in a fraud case involving the sale of fake Andy Warhol paintings, according to federal court records.
Brian Walshe’s attorney, Tracy Miner, said last week that a person is not presumed dead for seven years “because it is easy for a single person to disappear if they want to disappear.” She said there’s been no body found, no indication if she died or how, and no murder weapon or motive.
Miner said Brian Walshe waited three days to call Ana’s employer, following a pattern since Thanksgiving where she would be gone for days at a time and couldn’t be contacted.
Prosecutors have said that starting Jan. 1 and for several days after, Brian Walshe made multiple online searches using the child’s iPad for “dismemberment and best ways to dispose of a body,” “how long before a body starts to smell” and “hacksaw best tool to dismember.”
Miner said there also were other searches, such as “how to set up a charitable corporation to give away large lottery winnings, tax free,” and best places to go for a family vacation in 2023.
Investigators said they found Jan. 3 surveillance video of a man resembling Brian Walshe throwing what appeared to be heavy trash bags into a dumpster at an apartment complex in Abington, not far from Cohasset.
A Jan. 8 search of a trash processing facility not far from Brian Walshe’s mother’s home, uncovered trash bags that contained a hatchet, hacksaw, towels and a protective Tyvek suit, cleaning agents, a Prada purse, boots like the ones Ana Walshe was last seen wearing and a COVID-19 vaccination card with her name, authorities said.
Prosecutors also said that Ana Walshe had taken out $2.7 million in life insurance naming her husband as the sole beneficiary. Miner said Brian Walshe was not in need of money. She said his mother, who is wealthy, has given “tens of thousands of dollars” to the couple.
