Crime

Judge sentences Brian Walshe to life without parole for wife Ana’s murder

“You will live with the guilt and burden of Ana Walshe’s death for the rest of your life.”

Brian Walshe, center, at his sentencing. Mark Stockwell / Boston Herald via AP, Pool

updated on December 18, 2025

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A Norfolk Superior Court judge sentenced Brian Walshe to life in prison without the possibility of parole Thursday morning for the murder of his wife, Ana Walshe, closing a case that has drawn national attention since her disappearance on New Year’s Day 2023.

“Mr. Walshe, you will live with the guilt and burden of Ana Walshe’s death for the rest of your life,” Judge Diane Freniere said before imposing the sentence.

Freniere also ordered Walshe to serve concurrent prison terms for additional convictions, including a sentence of no less than 19 years and no more than 20 years for lying to police, and no less than two years and no more than three years for improper disposal of a body.

Those sentences will run concurrently with his life sentence and with the one from his federal art fraud case, in which he received a 37-month prison term.

Judge Diane Freniere, during the trial. *Stuart Cahill / Boston Herald via AP, Pool*

As the judge read the sentence, Walshe stood reserved between his attorneys, Larry Tipton and Kelli Porges, wearing a black sweater over a white button-down shirt, his hands bound in bright orange handcuffs.

Massachusetts’ mandatory sentence for a conviction of first-degree murder is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The state does not have the death penalty.

A jury convicted Walshe of first-degree murder on Monday, and he pleaded guilty to the two lesser charges just before jury selection.

Before sentencing, Freniere considered the sentencing memos from both the defense and the prosecution; impact statements on behalf of the couple’s three children in coordination with the state Department of Children and Families; written letters from Ana’s friends, Alissa, Peter, and Pam Kirby; and from Diana Walshe, Brian’s mother.

The judge did not read the letters in court.

Diana Walshe listens as her son, Brian Walshe, is sentenced. *Mark Stockwell / Boston Herald via AP, Pool*

However, Ana’s sister, Aleksandra Dimitrijevic, stepped onto the witness stand and described the emotional toll in the years since Brian murdered her sister.

“Losing my sister in January 2023 has forever changed our lives and left us with an unbearable emptiness,” Dimitrijevic said, on behalf of her and her mother. “It has altered our world in ways we never imagined.”

“Ana was not just my sister, she was someone I grew up with, someone who knew me in ways no one else ever will,” she continued. “I struggle with the grief that comes without warning, hoping every morning that this is all just a terrible dream.”

Aleksandra Dimitrijevic, the sister of Ana Walshe, on the stand Thursday. *Mark Stockwell / Boston Herald via AP, Pool*

Dimitrijevic said the most painful part is knowing that Ana’s children will now grow up without their “mother’s hand to hold” and will face milestones, “both big and small, where her absence will be deeply and painfully felt.”

Dimitrijevic described that family gatherings now serve as a painful reminder of her sister’s death.

“We will carry her light and her memory with us forever,” she said.

The sentencing comes after a trial that lasted over eight days, where prosecutors argued their case for Walshe’s guilt, pointing to internet searches, large purchases of cleaning supplies and tools, and discarded bloody items with DNA from the couple, as well as Ana’s affair.

Prosecutors said that after killing his wife, evidence points to Walshe hiding her body in the basement while their three children, a babysitter, and his mother were upstairs in the home.

He then obtained tools to dismember her body and later discarded her remains in dumpsters across the region, including one near his mother’s home in Swampscott, they said. Investigators never recovered Ana’s body.

In the days after her disappearance, prosecutors said Walshe painted a web of lies as he misled police while searches stretched from the couple’s Cohasset neighborhood to Washington, D.C., where Ana worked.

“When you look at the facts of these three charges, each one calls for a harsh penalty,” prosecutor Greg Connor said before the sentencing.

Connor, who was looking for maximum sentences on the lesser charges, said that Walshe denied Ana’s family the opportunity to have any customs or burial.

“There is no grave, there is no memorial, and he did this all in an effort to destroy evidence on the misleading component,” he said.

In addition, Connor said there is no death certificate. The church will not allow a funeral without one.

“When I looked behind me after the closing arguments,” Connor said, “I realized that was the closest thing that those people had come to a wake, because they never got together to mourn her, and that happened three years later.”

Brian Walshe is brought to a prisoner transport van after he was sentenced. *Mark Stockwell / Boston Herald via AP, Pool*

The defense called no witnesses in the trial. In his opening statement and closing argument, Tipton told jurors his client found Ana suddenly dead after a night of New Year’s celebrations and then spiraled into a panic.

In a case where the sentences run concurrently, Porges argued that it was “inhumane” to sentence someone to prison posthumously.

“Anytime there is a death, a murder, a loss of life, it is horrible, whether it’s a loved one or a stranger,” she said. “But that does not negate that he is a human being.”

Before sentencing, Freniere criticized Walshe’s “character, or lack thereof,” saying his lies wasted thousands of hours of investigative resources. She also described the dismemberment of his wife’s body and the disposal of her remains in area dumpsters as “barbaric and incomprehensible.”

“You had no regard for the lifelong mental harm that your criminal acts inflicted on your then 2, 4, and 6-year-old sons,” she said. “Not only in taking their mother, but also … never being able to properly grieve that loss, to say goodbye to their mom.”

Freniere said that through testimony and impact statements, it was clear that Ana was a “bright light in the lives of many people.”

“I am sure that nothing I say and no sentence I can impose, even a life sentence, will lessen the grief that Ana Walshe’s family … and others have endured and will continue to endure,” she said.