The Massachusetts man whose wife mysteriously vanished on New Year’s Day ““was taught to lie and hide” as a child, his now-missing spouse said in a 2021 letter trying to keep the convicted art fraudster out of prison.
Ana Walshe, a 39-year-old real estate executive who went missing after leaving her family’s Cohasset home on Jan. 1, submitted the letter to the court in support of her husband Brian, detailing what she claimed was a horrific childhood. She said she saw “suffering in his life” when they first met, attributing his fragile mental state to his upbringing.
“He was taught to lie and hide,” Ana wrote. “He was told that he was a loser, that his parents should not have had him, that he had no chances of making anything of himself in life, and that he was a lost cause. A deep sense of shame governed his life.”
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The trauma has been “ever-present” in her husband’s life, “brought deep sadness for years, and was the determining factor for how he showed up for himself and others in the past,” the letter said. Others who knew Walshe described him as a “sociopath.”
As a student at Carnegie Mellon University, Walshe checked himself into a psychiatric in-patient treatment facility for depression, anxiety, and anger that “left him unable to function,” his psychiatrist wrote to the judge. However, it says Walshe was forced to leave early “when his parents each thought the other should pay for his treatment and neither one of them would.” He subsequently dropped out of school and never finished.
“Brian felt neglected, unloved, and emotionally damaged from being used as a pawn by his parents in their acrimonious marital relationship,” Ana’s letter said.
Walshe was arrested earlier this week on charges of impeding a police investigation into Ana’s sudden, unexplained disappearance. He had been under home confinement for several months while awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in 2021 to selling a pair of fake Andy Warhol paintings to an unsuspecting art dealer in Los Angeles. He is now jailed on $500,000 bond.
In a separate letter submitted to the judge on behalf of Walshe by his defense lawyers in the art fraud case, the convicted con artist’s upbringing was laid out in detail. He has lived with “the impediment of having a mental illness since the age of 7 as a result of his being born into a dysfunctional family situation,” it says. Walshe’s late father was a well-respected Boston neurologist who enjoyed partying with “mere acquaintances,” according to the letter, while his mother, who was described in the letter as a “recluse” with a “strong distrust of strangers,” remains “totally dependent on her son for her emotional and physical needs.”
Walshe’s mom, Diana could be “confrontative,” a close family friend told The Daily Beast, conceding, “There were aggressions sometimes.” However, the friend said, “I never heard of [the household] being violent.”
After allegedly stealing more than $800,000 from his father, Walshe and the older man became estranged. In his absence, Walshe began doting on his mother, who lived nearby, his lawyer’s letter reveals.
“Brian forgave his mother for her shortcomings and became her lifeline,” it says. “Although Brian changed, his mother did not. She remains a recluse and is totally dependent on her son for her emotional and physical needs.”
In her own letter to the court, Diana Walshe wrote, “My son is the only reason I get up in the morning. He is the ONLY person to take care of me and is always there for me.”
Diana said in court filings that she does not have a good relationship with her daughter-in-law Ana Walshe, saying the tensions were “perhaps due to cultural differences,” without further explanation.
Walshe has in the past apparently acted out in a number of ways, including an episode in which Walshe was “incredibly rude” to a server while out to dinner with his yoga instructor, states a letter the man sent to the court that same month in support of his friend and student.
“When I met Brian, he very much seemed to be a man in transition,” the teacher wrote.” At the time of our meeting, he had spent many years in the fast-paced business world, and I was initially surprised to discover that he had decided to engage in yoga at all.
Walshe has since made improvements, although “his journey has not always been linear (few journeys to overcome mental illnesses are) but took a sharp turn for the better after having participated in a self-reflection, self-improvement program through Boston Breakthrough Academy in 2020,” the letter continues. “Since that time, Brian Walshe has devoted himself to his family, including his mother with whom he had a difficult relationship in his youth, and his three young children, and to others by raising much needed funds for worthy charities providing food and shelter to people hard hit by the Covid epidemic.”
On the other side of the coin, prosecutors filed a memo during the proceedings citing passages from Walshe’s personal diaries, which, they argued, showed his longstanding “intent to betray the people who trusted him.”
Walshe has a history of swindling family and friends that goes back to 2011, according to prosecutors in the art fraud case. The fake art he sold in 2016 began with the theft of real art, which he stole from a close friend with whom he was staying in Seoul. He then had them copied by an art forger in New York City, sold the real pieces to a collector in France, and fobbed off the fakes on Ron Rivlin, a Los Angeles gallery owner. (Rivlin described Walshe to The Daily Beast in an earlier interview as “very calculated.”
Ana Walshe’s whereabouts are still unknown. On Wednesday, the New York Post published photographs of a note she wrote to her husband before disappearing.
“Wow! 2022…What a year!” it read. “And yet, we are still here and together! Let’s make 2023 the best one yet! We are the authors of our lives…courage, love, perseverance, compassion, and joy. Love, Ana.”
Walshe’s attorney, Tracy Miner, declined to comment to The Daily Beast, saying in an email that her “focus is on defending Mr. Walshe in court.”
