Accused killer fights art fraud conviction

Brian Walshe, the Cohasset man accused of killing and dismembering his wife on the first day of last year, has appealed his unrelated federal art fraud conviction.

Walshe, 49, was indicted in 2019 on charges that he sold a series of fake Andy Warhol paintings and ripped off a friend who owned the originals and pleaded guilty in 2021 to wire fraud, interstate transportation for a scheme to defraud and unlawful monetary transaction.

On Feb. 20, U.S. District Judge William G. Young sentenced Walshe to three years and a month in prison — which would run concurrent to any state-imposed sentence should Walshe be convicted in his upcoming murder trial. Walshe is in state custody in Norfolk County.

On Monday, Tracy Miner, Walshe’s attorney for the federal fraud case and former attorney for the murder case, filed a notice that Walshe was appealing his conviction to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, based in the same federal courthouse in Boston’s Seaport district.

“Defendant Brian Walshe hereby appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit the Final Judgment and Commitment Order entered by this Court on September 22, 2021 sentencing him to 37 months of incarceration,” Miner wrote in the notice filed in the District Court docket.

There was no entry late Tuesday afternoon under Walshe’s name in the First Circuit. Miner did not immediately return a request for comment.

Walshe was indicted in Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham in March 2023 for the murder of his wife, Ana Walshe, 39.

Ana Walshe disappeared New Year’s Day 2023 and her body has never been found, but a series of grisly Google searches prosecutors say Walshe conducted beginning that day made him a murder suspect and — when first read at his lower court arraignment — made him a practically overnight true crime national celebrity.

“Can you be charged with murder without a body?” Brian Walshe allegedly searched soon after his wife disappeared and before her employer in Washington D.C. reported her missing.

Other alleged searches followed: “10 ways to dispose of a body if you really need to.” “Can you throw away body parts?” “What does formaldehyde do?” And then even more, of an increasingly dark nature.