Focus on Brian Walsh murder trial On Thursday, he turned to an affair he had with his wife before he killed her and broke it off on New Year’s Day 2023.
Anna Walsh, a real estate agent who immigrated from Serbia, was last seen early on January 1, 2023, after New Year’s Eve dinner at her home in Massachusetts. Her body was never found. Her husband, Brian Walsh, faces a… Charge of first-degree murderafter agreeing to plead guilty last month to lesser charges of misleading police and intentionally disposing of a human corpse in violation of state law.
William Fastow told the court on the fourth day of the trial that he met Anna Walsh in March 2022 when he sold her a townhouse in Washington, D.C. He said the relationship quickly intensified as they became close friends and confidants and eventually had an “intimate relationship.” He said they went out to dinner and bars together, and she spent time on his sailboat and stayed overnight at his house. They also took a Thanksgiving trip to Ireland.
Fastow testified that he never tried to keep their relationship a secret and told others about their relationship, although he admitted they never communicated with her boyfriends. But they discussed telling Brian Walsh about it.
“Anna felt it was really important for Brian to hear from her when he found out about the relationship,” Fastow said. “She expressed great concern and I think she felt it would be a blow to her integrity if he found out a different way.”
The couple spent Christmas Eve with friends and were planning to celebrate the New Year together on Jan. 4, where they would discuss their plans for the future, Fastow said.
“We had a number of conversations about what life together might look like, what merging two families would look like,” he testified. “But I always told Anna that she needed to know how she wanted things with Brian and what she wanted to look for in her life before we could make any commitments or decisions.”
Fastow said his last contact with Anna Walsh was a text message from her on New Year’s Eve. The next day, he sent her a Vastu picture showing his son how to skateboard, a hand waving emoji, a question mark query, and a few other text messages in the following days to which she received no response. He tried to call her several times on January 2, but the calls went straight to voicemail. Then, on January 4, he received a phone call from Brian Walsh, but he let it go to voicemail because he was having an “intimate relationship with his wife.”
“I hadn’t heard from her in several days, and frankly I was worried that maybe he had found out and was calling me to confront me,” he testified.
Walsh called Fastow a second time, and his voicemail was played in court. In a somewhat upbeat tone, Walsh said he “hopes all is well” with Fastow before saying he was “reaching out to anyone he can” because “Ana hasn’t been in contact for a few days” and that he was wondering if Fastow had “talked to her recently.” Walsh then apologized for the call and said he was sure “everything was fine.”
At the time, Brian Walsh was at home awaiting sentencing in an unrelated art fraud case involving the sale of works of art Two fake Andy Warhol paintings.
Upon cross-examination, Walsh’s defense attorney, Kelly Burgess, was able to get Fastow to admit that he was not aware of any plans by Anna Walsh to tell her husband about their affair.
“There was no plan, that Anna would come home for Christmas to be with her family, that she would come out and tell Brian about you,” Burgess said, prompting Fastow to say he was not aware of “any plan.”
So far, plaintiffs have relied on Incriminating searches Walsh allegedly made several devices related to dismembering corpses and cleaning blood.
Investigators also said that surveillance video showed a man resembling Walsh throwing what appeared to be heavy garbage bags into a dumpster near their home, and that a search of a garbage processing facility near his mother’s home revealed bags containing an axe, a hammer, blades, a saw, towels, a Tyvek hazmat suit, cleaning supplies, a Prada wallet, shoes like the ones Anna Walsh was last seen wearing, and a coronavirus vaccination card bearing her name. Many of these items have been entered into evidence.
In his opening statement Monday, Assistant District Attorney Gregory Connor told the jury that the Massachusetts State Crime Lab checked some DNA elements against samples they obtained from the couple. They found Anna and Brian Walsh’s DNA on a Tyvek suit and Anna Walsh’s DNA on an axe, saw, and other items.
Walsh’s attorney, Larry Tipton, said in his opening statement that this was not a murder case but rather what he called the “sudden and unexplained death” of Anna Walsh. It depicted a couple who loved each other and were planning for the future before Anna Walsh died after celebrating New Year’s Eve with her husband and her boyfriend.
“When he went into the bedroom and started to sleep, he sensed something was wrong. You will hear evidence that it didn’t make sense to him,” Tipton told the jury. “Anna pushed his wife. She didn’t respond.”