Ana Walshe never told affair partner she would leave her husband
Even though she was having an affair, Ana Walshe made it clear that she cared very deeply for her husband, Brian, the man she was seeing testified Thursday at Brian Walshe 's murder trial.
On cross-examination, William Fastow, a Washington, D.C.-based real estate agent who had a relationship with Ana Walshe that spanned several months in 2022 , told jurors that she never told him she intended to leave her husband.
"You never had extensive concrete conversations about being together and when that would happen?" Defense attorney Kelli Porges asked. Fastow said that was correct.
On direct examination from prosecutor Anne Yas, Fastow said he and Ana Walshe did discuss what life might look like if they decided to make their relationship more serious.
But he said he urged her to figure out what she wanted her relationship with her husband to look like.
"I had always said to Ana that she needed to figure out how she wanted things to be with Brian, and what she wanted ... that to look like for her life before ... we could make any sort of commitments or decisions," he said.
Even by the time they were having those conversations, Fastow said, there was never a plan for Ana Walshe to tell her husband about the affair.
"She never told you, 'Hey, Will, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go home, I'm gonna talk to Brian, I'm gonna, I'm gonna blow up my marriage and come be with you. She never told you that?" Porges asked. Fastow said that was correct.
And Fastow admitted his own pending divorce and separation left him hesitant to make a major commitment to Ana Walshe.
Porges, the defense lawyer, pointed Fastow to a text message he sent Walshe, where he indicated his oldest son would be crushed if he began a new relationship.
"You had no intentions of having any immediate plans to openly start dating Ana Walshe with your two young boys?" Porges asked. Fastow said that was correct.
Fastow acknowledged that Ana Walshe always spoke about her husband in a positive light, despite the tension in their relationship stemming from his federal art fraud case.
"You knew from her, from her words, that she cared for him deeply?" Porges asked. "Very much so," Fastow replied.
Porges also asked Fastow a series of questions about whether Walshe ever feared her husband had found out about the affair.
He recalled one instance where Brian Walshe called him while he was out to dinner with Ana Walshe, which he found unusual. Brian Walshe later said one of his sons had called Fastow using his phone.
Whether Brian Walshe knew about his wife's affair is a major point of contention in the trial. Prosecutors say he did, and was motivated to kill his wife in part by that knowledge, while the defense says he did not know of the relationship.
"Ana never texted or called me and said that she felt that Brian knew that we were having an affair," Fastow testified.
Brian Walshe, 50, is accused of killing and dismembering Ana Walshe in the early morning of Jan. 1, 2023. He has admitted to moving her body and misleading the police investigation into her disappearance. Her remains have never been found.
Testimony in the trial is continuing on Thursday afternoon with a woman who taught an exercise class Ana Walshe took on New Year's Eve 2022.
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