By Lauren del Valle, CNN
(CNN) — Brian Walshe is expected to be sentenced Thursday to life in prison without parole after a jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, convicted him of first-degree murder, finding he planned to kill his wife Ana Walshe just hours after ringing in the new year in 2023.
The sentencing will represent the culmination of a case that captured national attention almost three years ago, first with the initial search for 39-year-old Ana Walshe, and then with the grisly evidence that her husband googled topics like “how to dispose of a body” and other inquiries on cleaning up blood.
For the defense, the trial itself “was an uphill battle from the jump,” according to Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University, despite the prosecution’s lack of concrete evidence about how Ana died and definitive proof of premeditation – an element needed to convict Walshe of first-degree murder.
Walshe left a trail of evidence prosecutors used to retrace his actions to dispose of his wife’s remains.
Prosecutors left jury ‘breadcrumbs’
Prosecutors told the jury Ana met a violent death at her husband’s hand before he dismembered her body and disposed of her remains in area dumpsters.
Walshe then lied to investigators, claiming she had gone missing the morning of January 1, 2023, after leaving their Massachusetts home to handle a work emergency in Washington, DC, where she worked and lived part time.
Ana Walshe’s body has never been found.
Prosecutors called about 50 witnesses over eight days, but they never offered the jury a theory of how exactly Walshe killed his wife, a real estate manager and the mother of his three children.
Instead, they worked to shed light on purported strife in the Walshes’ marriage, stemming from a separate, federal criminal case against Walshe and an affair Ana was having in DC.
Walshe has always maintained he had nothing to do with Ana’s death. His defense team told the jury he found her dead in their bed hours into the new year, then panicked, fearing no one would believe him.
“Why do people kill? It’s usually love or money or both,” Medwed told CNN. “Here, it was a ‘love gone bad’ theory, because she was having an affair and he was in financial distress.”
Prosecutors alleged Walshe found out about his wife’s monthslong affair with a man she met in Washington, DC, William Fastow, and feared losing his wife and kids to a new life she had there while he was facing the possibility of prison time and a hefty restitution bill for a federal fraud conviction.
When Ana died, Walshe was still awaiting sentencing for that conviction. He had pleaded guilty to selling forged Andy Warhol artwork and was granted home confinement ahead of sentencing because he was the primary caregiver for their three kids.
“The prosecution tried as best as possible to create motive,” Medwed said, “and then they pointed to the post-incident cover-up to suggest (Walshe) was acting in a cold and calculating manner, and that that may reflect back on his mental state at the time of her death.”
Digital data recovered from Walshe’s devices revealed he also googled divorce and William Fastow days before his wife’s death.
A conviction on first-degree murder requires evidence of deliberate premeditation, which was not a given in this case, according to Medwed.
“I think the prosecution did as good a job as possible to allude to premeditation, given the absence of the body for an autopsy and the absence of any direct evidence about cause of death,” Medwed said. “Given all of the absence, what the prosecution, I think, tried to do is leave the jury some breadcrumbs.”
One such breadcrum