Brian Walshe’s Google searches, run between December 26, 2022, and January 4, 2023, on a MacBook synced to his young son’s iPad, became the central proof of premeditation at his December 2025 murder trial. The queries moved from divorce research to graphic questions about killing, dismembering, and disposing of a body, and about evading forensic detection. A Norfolk County jury convicted him of first-degree murder on December 15, 2025, in the killing of his wife, Ana Walshe, whose body was never found.1
What Walshe Searched, Day by Day
Massachusetts State Police Trooper Nicholas Guarino testified that data pulled from Walshe’s laptop covered December 25, 2022, through January 8, 2023, and contained dozens of searches run mostly through Google and Yahoo.
December 26–27, 2022: Divorce and Finances
The earliest notable activity came on December 26, when Walshe viewed pornography with a “cheating wife” theme and searched “best state to divorce for a man” and “Washington D.C. divorce lawyers.” The next day he pulled up a Chase credit card login page. Defense attorney Larry Tipton confirmed at trial that the graphic searches did not begin until January 1.
January 1, 2023: Disposal, Forensics, and Cleaning
Ana Walshe was last seen between 4 and 6 a.m. that morning. By 4:52 a.m., Walshe searched “best ways to dispose of a body.” Three minutes later: “how long before a body starts to smell.” The queries kept coming through the day and grouped around a few clear concerns.
On body disposal and decomposition, he searched “10 ways to dispose of a dead body if you really need to” and “ways to dispose of body parts after murder,” and visited a page titled “6 ways to dispose of a body” on murdermurdermurder.com.
On forensic detection, he asked “how long does DNA last,” “can identification be made on partial human remains,” and “can the FBI tell when you accessed your phone.”
On cleaning blood, the searches included “how to clean blood from a wood floor,” “can I use bleach to clean my wood floors from blood stains,” “what does bleach do to dead bodies,” and “want to get away with murder? Use special detergent.”
On destroying devices, he searched “how to dispose of a cellphone” and “how to dispose of a computer.”
He also ran searches that read as logistics for what came next: “I am the user on my wife’s credit card. She is missing. Can I still use the card?” and “my wife is missing. What should I do?”
January 2–3, 2023: Dismemberment and Cover-Up
On January 2 at 12:27 p.m., Walshe searched “how to saw a body” and “how to dismember a body.” Six minutes later: “hacksaw, the best tool for dismembering a body.” He also looked up “can you be charged with murder without a body,” “murder conviction without a body,” and “can you identify a body with broken teeth.” Around the same time, he searched apartment rental listings in Abington and Brockton, Massachusetts, the same areas where investigators later recovered heavy garbage bags from dumpsters.
January 3 brought more of the same: “can baking soda make a dead body smell good,” “cleaning up blood without leaving a trace,” “are footprints easy to wash away,” “how long for a dismembered body to decompose,” and “can a body decompose in a plastic bag.” That evening he searched “can police get your search history without your computer.” A final query on January 4 asked, “does a cellphone track your historical location?”
The Patrick Kearney Search
Walshe also searched for Patrick Kearney, the serial killer known as the “trash bag killer” for the way he disposed of his victims’ remains. Trooper Guarino testified that he opened the same Wikipedia page Walshe had viewed and confirmed the connection. Prosecutors argued the search showed Walshe modeling his own method (placing evidence in black trash bags and dropping them in dumpsters) on Kearney’s crimes. The defense objected to the evidence being introduced. The court overruled the objection.
How Investigators Recovered the Searches
Investigators first spotted the search history on an iPad belonging to one of Walshe’s sons. The iPad was synced through a shared Apple account to Walshe’s MacBook, so the activity originated on the laptop and mirrored to the child’s device. Police obtained the data using a warrant for the Cohasset home, a warrant to seize specific devices, and a separate warrant for Google’s records.
The defense worked hard to suppress it. Walshe’s attorneys argued that state police had exceeded the scope of an agreement his former federal defense lawyer, Tracy Miner, had made with investigators, which they said limited any device search to communications only. Judge Diane Freniere rejected that argument in a July 2025 ruling, finding Miner likely understood the agreement authorized a full search. The judge noted that if the deal had been limited to communications, “there would have been no need to turn the iPad over at all,” since the device was known to contain none. She also ruled the evidence would inevitably have been found through execution of the home search warrant. On September 15, 2025, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Elizabeth Dewar denied an interlocutory appeal, writing that review at that stage “would not facilitate the administration of justice” and that Walshe could raise the issue after trial.
How Prosecutors Used the Searches at Trial
Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor introduced the search evidence in opening statements on December 1, 2025, calling it part of a mountain of proof “stacked against Walshe.” Trooper Guarino then read the searches aloud to the jury on day two, walking through each query with its timestamp.
The purpose was to prove premeditation, the element separating first-degree murder from lesser charges. The prosecution’s theory: the searches showed Walshe researching how to kill, dismember, and dispose of his wife, and then doing precisely that. The pre-dawn January 1 timeline sat alongside surveillance video of Walshe spending roughly $450 on cleaning supplies, tarps, and tools at a Rockland Home Depot later that day, often masked and paying in cash. Prosecutor Anne Yas told jurors, “The defendant did not want anyone to find Ana’s body and to know how she died.”
The searches also connected directly to physical evidence. Investigators recovered a hacksaw, hatchet, shears, a hammer, a Tyvek protective suit, blood-stained towels and rugs, cleaning supplies, and Ana’s personal effects from dumpsters near the Swampscott apartment of Walshe’s mother. The tools matched the “hacksaw” and dismemberment queries. The bleach and baking soda queries matched the cleaning products he was filmed buying. The trash-bag disposal method matched the Kearney search. Cell phone records placed Walshe near the dumpsters where the items were recovered.
The Defense’s Explanation
Walshe’s lawyers did not dispute that he ran the searches. Attorney Larry Tipton told jurors Ana died from a “sudden, unexpected medical event” after she “rolled off the bed” during the night, and that Walshe panicked. According to the defense, he “never thought anyone would believe Ana Walshe was alive one minute and dead the next,” and his subsequent actions, including the graphic searches and the disposal of her remains, were driven by fear and a wish to protect the couple’s three young sons.
Tipton offered a separate account for the late-December activity. He said the divorce-related searches reflected an effort to “preserve family assets” in case Walshe was imprisoned in his pending federal art fraud case. Walshe was on house arrest with location monitoring at the time, awaiting sentencing for wire fraud tied to counterfeit Andy Warhol paintings; a police report noted that his January 2 Home Depot trip violated his probation conditions during the window he was allotted to pick up his children from school.
The defense rested on December 11 without calling a witness. Walshe did not testify.
Verdict and Sentence
Closing arguments took place December 12. The jury deliberated about four hours that Friday and roughly two more on Monday morning before convicting Walshe of first-degree murder on December 15, 2025. Days before trial, on November 18, he had pleaded guilty to misleading police and improper conveyance of a human body while maintaining his not-guilty plea on the murder charge.
On December 18, 2025, Judge Freniere imposed the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder in Massachusetts: life in prison without the possibility of parole. She added consecutive sentences of up to 20 years for misleading police and up to three years for the illegal disposal of a body, with the state term running concurrently to his 37-month federal fraud sentence. She called Walshe’s conduct “barbaric and incomprehensible.” Under Massachusetts law, the first-degree murder conviction will receive automatic review by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court, where Walshe can renew the suppression arguments his lawyers made about how the search history was obtained.