When Alissa Kirby met up with Ana Walshe on the night of Dec. 29, 2022, she noticed quickly that something was off with the woman she called her “new best friend.”
Walshe was uncharacteristically upset. She “hit a breaking point,” according to Kirby.
Kirby was the final witness called by prosecutors during the trial for Brian Walshe, who is accused of killing Ana Walshe on the morning of New Year’s Day, then dismembering her body.
On the stand, Kirby told jurors she and Ana Walshe became fast friends after being introduced by her brother when Ana Walshe moved to Washington, D.C., for work. They “clicked like sisters,” Kirby said of the woman who lived just a five-minute walk away.
Walshe admitted to Kirby that she had developed a crush on another man — William Fastow, the real estate agent who sold the Walshe family their Washington, D.C. townhouse. Kirby recalled Walshe often talking about Fastow, her interest in him and “what she wanted to have happen with him.”
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Walshe also told her husband about the crush, Kirby said. But Kirby testified she did not know the extent of the relationship between Fastow and Walshe — they had begun an affair not long after Walshe moved.
Kirby recounted a brief interaction with Brian Walshe on Christmas Day in 2022. That day, Ana Walshe’s flight was cancelled due to a snowstorm, so she was forced to drive back to Cohasset.
But Brian Walshe grew concerned when he hadn’t heard from his wife, and reached out to Kirby.
Ana Walshe would call Kirby later that day, furious about her husband’s concern.
“She was angry and she was upset that Brian would’ve called me that day because … she said that she had only not spoken to him for like an hour and a half or two hours, that it really hadn’t been that long,” Kirby said on the stand Wednesday afternoon, adding the conversation lasted only 20 minutes.
But the pair made plans to connect when Ana Walshe was back in Washington, D.C. and catch up before the new year.
They met up on the night of Dec. 29, 2022, heading to a bar across the street from the area where they both lived and then heading to a karaoke dancing bar. They spent roughly six hours out that night, Kirby said.
“She was really upset,” Kirby said. “She was kind of breaking down because everything had been breaking down … Ana was always a very strong person so that was very unusual for her. She was just really upset about so much. She really hit a breaking point.”
When prosecutor Anne Yas asked Kirby what Walshe was upset about, she reached for a tissue she had placed on the witness stand.
Kirby explained that she was primarily upset about her relationship with her husband and being so far away from her three children. Walshe believed her husband’s actions had led to a delay in his sentencing after he had pleaded guilty to federal crimes for selling fake Andy Warhol paintings.
“Their marriage had been really strained for a long time,” Kirby said, adding she had never seen Walshe like that before. “She was really at a breaking point.”
Ana Walshe wanted her husband to take responsibility for the art crime, according to Kirby, and knew that potentially meant he’d serve time in prison.
At the time, Walshe was trying to figure out a way to bring her children with her to Washington, D.C.
The “physical separation from a husband was very hard for her,” Kirby said, later adding that Walshe told her she hadn’t been intimate with her husband in a long time, possibly more than a year.
Kirby broke down when Yas published a photo of her and Ana Walshe on the in-court TV screens. The photo was taken on the night of the 29th, she said.
The pair never saw each other again.
Brian Walshe reached out to Kirby on Jan. 3, asking if she knew where his wife was. The next day, Kirby said, she got scared after Brian Walshe told her he still hadn’t heard from his wife.
On cross-examination, defense lawyer Kelli Porges suggested to Kirby that the Walshes always had an “open, honest relationship.” Kirby said that was what Ana Walshe told her.
“In that conversation, when she was telling you about how she had told her husband about having a crush on Will [Fastow] that Brian wasn’t the jealous type?” Porges asked. “Not only was he not jealous, that she kinda wished he was a little more jealous.”
“I think in the way that a wife would want a husband to be protective, yes,” Kirby replied.
On a brief re-direct, Yas asked Kirby what Ana Walshe had said about whether she still loved her husband.
“She told me that he would often not tell her he loved her and would always ask her how much she was in love with him,” Kirby said. “She told me that this time she answered not as much because of everything that had happened and that she was falling out of love.”
