Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Mystery of Ana Walshe

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

Ana Walshe, a property manager for Tishman Speyer, goes missing January 1, 2023. She is reported missing by her employer and by her husband Brian Walshe. Her husband is arrested on January 8th and charged with misleading the police investigation. Police then obtained a search warrant to the couple’s home where in the basement they find a damaged and bloody knife. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the timeline of Ana’s disappearance, the bloody knife found in the basement, the logistics of dismembering a body, looking at suspects deviating from their behavior, and much more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:18 - Background and overview of the case 2:45 - The disappearance timeline 4:20 - Bloody knife in the basement 7:20 -  Evidence found from blood 10:40 - The husband and tracking his moves 14:20 - Hacksaw 15:20 - Dismembering a body 18:45 - Determining the search radius for a missing body 23:00 - Suspects deviating from their regular behaviors 26:20 - Investigators relying on intuition 28:20 - Death threats 29:45 - OutroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Sometimes you sit back as a crime scene investigator and you try to observe things from the perspective of a clinician, somebody that's kind of cold, that goes in and just wants the facts. But there are those cases that, I don't know, tease your humanity out of you at the scene those things that you look at them and you think how in the world could this possibly have happened

today we're going to talk about a mother and a wife by the name of Anna Walsh. We're going to talk about her disappearance, her possible homicide, and her dismemberment. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me today is my friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I know that you, like much of the country, has been following this case for some time. I think that we're left again with a case where we've gotten more questions than answers.

What do you think about that? I think you are absolutely right. The disappearance of Anna Walsh has so many more questions than answers. Just like Jennifer Dulos up north, this woman disappeared. I mean, literally disappeared. One day she was here, next day cannot find her. There's a lot of similarities between these two cases for that. But Anna Walsh left her home. She was seen leaving her house with her bags in hand.

She worked at a different location. She was a real estate professional. She had taken on a new job in the Boston area, and she actually traveled from her home in Massachusetts weekly to go for this position. So she was last seen leaving her home with bags in hand, according to her husband. And what happened to her after that is the question. She has not been seen. She did not make the flight.

She did not make her new job. So they missed her in the office. That's when the questions began. That's where our investigation needs to begin. How do we start that timeline, Joe? I don't know that it's necessarily starting the timeline as much as it is location. I know that those two things are kind of married together. You've got a husband that's actually stating and he was very specific he said she left the house in either an uber or lyft let's back up to that because now

you've got again here we go again jackie we've got a digital footprint because if you're alleging that she left in an uber or lyft and so not only do you have a digital footprint you're what you're alleging means that you would have a digital footprint, what you're alleging means that you would have a physical witness to her getting into the vehicle with you to be transported somewhere. So if that's what is being put forth, then that would be solid information to go on. But there's no indication that she was seen by anybody getting into the vehicle to go somewhere. So where do we begin? Well, we begin in the home.

We begin where an individual lives, where they're domiciled. You know, you have to think that that's the last place she was seen. So what could have occurred within that home that would have essentially led to her total and complete disappearance. Like you mentioned just a second ago, it seemingly just vanishes off the face of the planet. Well, you pegged that one pretty well, Joe, because now we know that Anna Walsh's husband, Brian, has been charged in her disappearance. The beginning of that suspicion from police began in the basement of the home. It did.

And you begin to look for things like physical evidence that can begin to turn up. One of the things with death investigation, and I think that for many reasons it goes back to this. Certainly people in literature use this a lot as a device. You look for blood, don't you? Blood is always associated with either the loss of life or, you know, at least the diminishment of life to some degree, particularly if you wind up with, say, for instance, a tremendous amount of blood that you find at the scene. And there's a term that's used, we've talked about it before on body bags, but it bears repeating. And that is

the idea of the amount of blood that you have at a scene gives the appearance of an event being incompatible with life. However, at least to this point, I don't know that there is that much blood evidence, although there was blood evidence found at the home that would give an indication that something very troublesome happened there in the basement. I would think that a bloody knife found in the basement would indeed give an indication that something bad happened. From a forensic standpoint, we hear about this a lot in cases. There's a couple of cases out there right now where I think that many times the general public begins to think about, well, you have blood, so therefore you can go out, get an arrest warrant,

and arrest somebody. That's not the way it works, not in forensics at least. If you find something that you believe is in fact blood, you have to verify that, don't you? You have to do what is referred to as presumptive testing on an item that might have blood on the surface, say for instance with a knife or if you have a piece of cloth or even a droplet on the floor. You cannot just simply assume that that is, first off, that it is blood. So that's our first step. We have to go in and take a look at that sample and see if it is in fact blood. And then from that point, you can move on to the next level, which is where we're going to take a look at it from the perspective of, well, we verified that it is blood, but is it human blood? Because

you can have animal blood as well. If you have pets in the home, there's a couple of cases out there where people were deer hunters. They tracked blood into the house, and it turned out not to be human. It was actually deer blood. So you have to be able to whittle that down. Well, if you establish that it is, in fact, human blood, you go to the next level of testing, which, of course, begins to lead into, well, typing the blood. What blood grouping does it fall into? And if you have a missing person, if you try to say, okay, well, what blood group would Anna fall into? And hopefully you can establish that.

And then, of course, then you're going to have a DNA fingerprint as well relative to that. What about the age of the blood, Joe? I know you've probably told me this before. Can they tell, did this happen last week? This happened five years ago. What can they tell? Blood is a curious substance because it's multilayered.

It contains several elements to it that actually make it blood. And much of this, relative to attempting to determine how old it is, is going to be heavily dependent upon not so much time as it is exposure. What this sample has been exposed to over a period of time. You can go back and take a look at samples from long, long ago. As a matter of fact, famously, you were able to take a sample of President Lincoln's blood and actually do a DNA profile on it. So yeah, you can take historic samples even and essentially profile them. So in a case that is this fresh, remember, Anna has only been missing since January the 1st. So it's not like we've got someone that has been missing for six months, a year, two years.

This sample would still be viable at this point in time. And I think that that's what they're dealing with. But when the officers came into the basement and they see a substance that they think is blood, and given the amount of time that Anna has been missing, it would have more than likely been dried. So when they see that, based on the color, can they look at that and go, oh, that happened yesterday. Oh, that happened two weeks ago. Oh, that happened six years ago. How does what they see, what clues does that give an officer? There's a certain level of dehydration that occurs with blood, depending upon how long it's

been down. And again, it's completely dependent upon environmental factors. And you can kind of eyeball it and get an idea that if you've got a sample that has gotten to the point where it has gone from brilliant red to brown, and then there's another phase where it will essentially go to this kind of brown cracked appearance where it, and this is why this is so difficult when you're eyeballing what you think is a blood sample, because it can actually look like chocolate, believe it or not. And it goes from this kind of brown cracked appearance to flaking. But here's the problem. There is no, and I repeat, there is no definitive time marker that you can place on that where it is an absolute. Okay. You're going to have a lot of wiggle room.

And one of the reasons is, is that you cannot account for all of the environmental influences that have taken place in surrounding that environment. We're talking about Massachusetts. Yeah, it'd be cold outside, but conversely, are you running the furnace in the house and you've got the sink cranked up so that it's so hot in there that it's going to cause changes in any kind of biological element that you have around. If you've got garbage that's got, I don't know, a piece of chicken in it, for instance, and you've got the heat jacked up in the house, it's going to promote the decomposition of

that piece of chicken, whereas if it was cooler, it would preserve it longer. So it's going to be completely and totally environmentally dependent. you've got a missing wife as an investigator where do your eyes go first i'm not talking about at the scene i'm talking about information i'm talking about where are you going to go what's the wellspring of data here to find out what exactly happened? And in this case, Jackie, I think that those answers are going to rest with the husband. They are, and police again have taken the husband into custody. And it's strange to me, if you look at what friends, neighbors, family say about this man, They all received a strange vibe about him. He didn't want his picture taken. He wasn't friendly. The town there where the Walshes lived, people in the shops there,

shop owners like Pizza Parlor and another restaurant there say when they came in that Anna was extremely quiet. She didn't speak a lot. And that he as well just kind of gave off a creepy vibe is how they describe it. So she goes missing. The police find blood in the home that they now believe shows that he murdered and dismembered Anna. Where do you go from here, Joe? Her body is missing. I mean, you can get rid of a body a thousand ways. How do you track what he did next? When you go to the scene and you begin to dig around at the scene and you suddenly realize that you don't have what's referred to as a corpus delecti, that is the body of the

evidence, you're going to have to expand your search from there. If the police were to suspect that the husband was involved in any level, they have to begin to track his movements. You know, you had mentioned, and rightly so, just a moment ago, they found this knife in the basement. And one little piece to this that we didn't mention is that this knife was bent. You get a bent knife and it's got blood on it, that means that probably you could make an intellectual leap scientifically and say this knife was probably involved in some kind of vigorous behavior, that the knife was not necessarily meant for this purpose. And when you begin to think about taking apart a body, which is what the police are at least thinking has happened, that goes to this

idea of you're in a fever, you're using the tools that you have at hand, and the tool is not meant for the job. So therefore, it's going to bend and it's going to potentially break. In this case, it didn't. But what other elements are you looking for? Well, there's a rug that they've apparently found that had blood on it. And here's one more thing, and this is key. There's evidence that the husband had gone to a store and has purchased about, now get this, I don't know how much you spend on cleaning supplies, Jackie. He spent $400 allegedly on cleaning supplies. You know, how much cleaning supplies do you need in order to accomplish a task? That gives you an indication that maybe in this fevered state, he's just attempting to cover all of his bases.

He's going to use everything that he possibly can in order to clean up this mess. And it would have been a big, big mess. Well, as police continued their investigation into things that Brian Walsh had bought, we also find that he bought a hacksaw. You know, we've talked about the use of hacksaws in the past on body bags. When you begin to look at this in total, you think, well, what's the purpose? Why would you choose this particular instrument? Why would you bring it to bear as opposed to, say, for instance, a carpenter saw or a limb saw?

With hacksaws, they have different blades that can be applied to them. Now, we don't necessarily know at this point in time the specifics about the type of blade that was on this particular hacksaw, but it is essentially something that you can work with in a very tight, fine space. It's not going to leave as big a mess. Say, for instance, if you really go over the top and you're using some kind of electrical saw, a sawzall or maybe a circular saw and this sort of thing, so you can kind of keep it contained. You have to think, well, was he thinking about this? Was he thinking about using a hacksaw where you can kind of diminish the amount of evidence that you're going to leave behind or not.

And that's kind of a fascinating point here. I'm going to ask you something that's kind of morbid, but then again, what we talk about is kind of morbid. If you were going to dismember a body, what is the end result going to be if you do it when the body has only been deceased for a couple hours, as opposed to if the body has been deceased for days? Well, that's an excellent question. Here's what my thought is on this. First off, you've got two sides to think about here. If it is immediately afterwards, the blood that remains in the body is not going to be, see how can I term this, not as viscous or thick as it would be after the body has been decomposing

for a while. So therefore, it's going to be in more of a liquid state, closer to life than it is to a decomposition, an advanced decompositional state. So, that's going to create a problem. You'll have more blood to clean up, if you will. All right. Now, we're not even talking about any kind of injuries that this individual would have sustained prior to death because that, if you're talking about gunshot wounds or stab wounds and that sort of thing, that's a completely different set of problems that you have there.

We're just merely talking about the dismemberment of human remains. So, in the early state like this, you can still have quite a bit of blood seeping out. And so, that is going to pose a problem for anybody that is doing a dismemberment like this. And so, you'll have blood everywhere. You'll have contact blood, obviously, on the instrument that you're using. The individual cannot escape this event without having blood all over them. Even if they're wearing gloves, you're still going to get blood on you. Let's say, for instance, a hacksaw, all right, and a knife that you might use in your kitchen. They ain't got the tools to use. And my suspicion is that they don't have the anatomical knowledge in order to facilitate this. We have specific instruments that we use for these purposes. That's certainly something that you have to factor in.

You're going to have quite a big mess early on. Now, the further you move down range and say, you ask the question, Jackie, if you have a body that is in moderate to advanced state of decomposition, you're going to have to deal with smell. You're going to have to deal with the changes in the tissue itself. But I guess I hate to use the term upside, but if there is an upside with dismemberment of decomposing remain, the joints become much more malleable because of the breakdown of the tissues, all the connective tissues and everything that are in there. So if you go into, say, for instance, a shoulder joint or to the elbow or to the wrist, those are going to be much easier to access and kind of take apart,

if you will. It's just that you're going to have to deal with all of the problems that come along in the messiness of a decomposing body. For investigators, it's certainly one thing when you have an intact human remain. I'm not going to say it's easy because that's kind of a diminishment of what all is involved in a death investigation. However, I think that we can all agree on the fact that if you're talking about a case that involves possible dismemberment, what's happened? What's happened to all of those various dismembered remains? Are they in one location or are they spread out over a vast area? And that's certainly something that the police are faced with right now, Jackie. This case reminds me so much of the Jennifer Dulos case. Mom goes missing.

Husband is arrested. He is caught on videotape and with evidence, putting evidence into dumpsters and trash cans around the city and away from the home. So my question is, and again, in the Dulos case, the idea of dismemberment was also brought into play. How do you start this kind of an investigation where you believe the body has been dismembered and taken to separate locations. The dumpster at Brian Walsh's mother's apartment was searched. So your area of search has become massive.

And at what point do you stop and say, okay, sorry, we've gone out 15 miles. We're not going out any farther. Very difficult. It's kind of like stopping a battleship. You can't snap your fingers and have it stop. Right now, I'm thinking about what kind of logistics are involved in this for the police. And I've been involved in cases where I've had to go to landfills, and they are an absolute nightmare. I mean, it is a nightmare. You remember when we were kids, we used to play that game called red light, green light. Everybody would be moving in the yard

you'd be all together and somebody said green light red light and you'd have to stop well trying to stop the process of okay i'll repeat it the process of processing garbage is monumental where are the the receptacles and then on what kind of schedule are the trucks on, they're going to pick this stuff up. And then once the trucks, if they're serviced by specific service, what landfill are they going to go to? Because various different locations, and depending upon the region of the country you're in, they might be serviced by private companies, might not necessarily the city or the county that's doing this. And so, they have different areas they're going to go to. And again, that adds another layer to this. So, from that moment in time, we do have a starting place. We have, obviously, the Walsh's trash.

And then you were referring to the husband's mother's location. Where would her trash go? How would you track that down? Oh, and by the way, between his house, the Walsh's home, and his mother's home, where else is there that he could have gone to? Or did he take some kind of detour in going there? Is there some kind of other location where items could be deposited along the way? And all of that has to be factored in and listen you've got a very tight window to do this in because if this stuff makes it out to a landfill jackie they put it out into grids and those grids are subsequently covered up you've got this stratification that's going on with this very very fragile biological evidence that begins to break down very quickly. I'm going to throw one more thing out that I want our listeners to understand.

When you are in a landfill, this is a highly aerobic environment, which means that you've got a lot of microscopic activity going on, and it's made that way so that things break down. And that's why they periodically turn the trash out there. They're always running over it with these big trucks and equipment and stuff. So, time is of the essence. If you don't capture it at that moment in time, your entire case could be lost and all of the physical evidence can be lost as well. You brought up a really good point talking about the time factor in finding things in the trash and how important it is.

We can see this in the Idaho murders case with Ryan Koberger. He was caught putting trash into his neighbor's bin at four o'clock in the morning wearing gloves. It just so happened that the police were staking him out and caught him, saw him doing that so that they were able to retrieve that in case there was any evidence in there. The idea that that's a possibility makes a forensic expert's job a thousand times more difficult. How do you say, okay, check this neighbor, but don't check that neighbor? Or do you just check them all? Well, I think that a lot of this goes back to the police having to look at who their primary suspect is and what kind of behaviors is this individual normally engaged in. Here's kind of a

a salient point, I believe. People have, as you well reported, Jackie, earlier, you talked about how people viewed him as kind of the standoffish figure. The question would be for me is, who did he talk to? Not where didn't he go, but where did he go on a regular basis? And that's within a comfort zone for this individual. Most people that perpetrate a crime, and they're not an arch criminal out there, which most of those types of people don't truly exist. They do in comic books. But when you find yourself in the midst of having been involved, allegedly involved in something so horrific, you need those things you're going to feel comfortable with. And you're going to feel most comfortable going to locations that you frequent, things that you pass by every day that you would see.

Hey, look, there's a dumpster behind that convenience store. Or hey, look, there's a trash can. This person never takes in their trash can. They just leave it out there all week long. It always sits by the road. I'm going to arbitrarily throw this in. My gosh, all we have to do is think back. Jackie, this is one of our earliest cases that we covered on body bags.

And that was the infamous Ingrid Lynn case out of Seattle where she'd met this guy on a dating app. And he brought her home that evening and wound up killing her and actually dismembering her body in a bathtub in that house. And he went to places that were convenient for him along his route. He actually deposited parts of her body all over the city in recyclable trash cans. It just so happened, I think, that they would have had a hard time with this case, even more difficult than they wound up having. If this random citizen had not walked out to their trash can to retrieve it and noticed that it was heavy, looked down in there, and can you imagine this, looks down in there and discovers, I think it was a foot sticking out.

So you just never know about what a perpetrator is going to do. They're going to do, I think, those things that make them feel most comfortable because this is already complicated enough when you begin to think about what kind of intellectual energy has to go into this in order to facilitate this, pull it off. And you've always got it in the back of your mind, I would imagine, that somebody is always watching, that they're going to get on to you, that you're going to leave a trace behind. And of course, they always do. But going back to my question, I think I'm kind of hung up on the fact that while you say most people go where they're comfortable with what they know,

when you've got that one person, Israel Keys, for example, traveled the country, setting up kill kits in strange locations. So you've always got that one person that goes, I'm smarter than everybody else. And then you have to worry, is he really smarter than anybody else? And does that mean he's going to drive two hours away to dispose of a body? And this ties back into my original question. How far out, at what point in an investigation, five miles, 10 miles, 15 miles from home, do you say, okay, we've gone out far enough? I'll plainly say that I don't know. I don't know how you take the measure of that as an investigator.

As much as I hate to say this as a scientist, some of it just relies on intuition. I hate that term. I hate it when it comes. I hate things like intuition and gut feeling because I think that they'll fail you most of the time. But in this particular case, the police will exhaust every possibility that they can. And at some point in time, you just have to call it quits. But was the iPad, that was found in the home per search warrant. This is what was left behind on the iPad. Just listen. This is kind of these little bulleted points that I have here. Ten ways to dismember a body.

Does baking soda make a body smell good? How long is someone missing before you can inherit? Can you throw away body parts? Can you be charged with a murder without a body? Dismemberment and the best ways to dispose of a body. A little light Saturday afternoon reading, huh? You know, who searches these things out? And when you begin to couple that with her disappearance.

Well, and don't forget the fact, Joe. Don't forget the fact that she had said before that her husband had threatened to kill her. Yeah. And, you know, her mother, who I think is from Eastern Europe, maybe Serbia, was not even aware of this. And that came out later that he had threatened her, I think, many, many years ago. And the mother was astounded to find this out. And who knows, you know, what might be the motivation behind all of this. And again, he's innocent until proven guilty. He's merely been charged at this point in time. But you have to look at the totality of the circumstances

and who would have had the opportunity in order to perpetrate such a heinous crime. I look at this and I begin to think deep down in my heart of hearts. I've been married for a long time. I've got kids. Many of us can identify with this. At what point in time do you get in a relationship where you say, okay, I'm going to kill the person that I've been married to. And oh, by the way, not only married to, but created life with and have attempted to build a life with. At what point do you get to? And I think that that's currently what the police are

trying to explore. What would be the overall motivating factor for somebody to have done this, to do this with a person that you've built a life with and completely destroy it. Brian Walsh has pleaded not guilty to charges of murder and disinterring a body he is being held without bail. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.