Family friend who spent New Year's Eve with Ana and Brian Walshe says he suspected nothing wrong
COHASSET, MASSACHUSETTS: A family friend of the missing Massachusetts mother Ana Walshe who spent New Year's Eve with the couple said there was no indication of anything wrong. Gem Mutlu claimed, "We hugged and celebrated and we toasted just what you do over New Year's."
The home of Ana, 39, and her husband Brian, 46, in Cohasset was festive and the couple even served an "elaborate feast" for guests, CBC Boston quoted the friend as saying. Hours before the realtor went missing from her home, she along with her husband, now a suspect, toasted the New Year.
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"There was a lot of looking forward to the new year. There was no indication of anything other than celebrating the new year, problems on hold," Mutlu said. Mutlu was among the friends who Brian had called inquiring about her whereabouts. The call, however, left Mutlu in shock. "I said what's wrong? Is there something wrong? He said yeah Ana is missing,"
He had stayed up at 1.30 am with the pair on New Year's Eve and also hugged them goodbye. "She was texting with friends," Mutlu said. "She was sitting next to me at the barstool at their kitchen. There was absolutely no indication that any modicum of a tragedy, of disappearance, or anything else could have happened that night."
Ana was reportedly last seen walking out of her house at 4 am on January 1, which her husband claimed was she left for work in Uber while he slept. She was allegedly heading to Washington, DC for her work. Though she never boarded the plane and after four days her employer reported her missing. Ana was supposed to leave on January 3 but was rescheduled for January 1 as police were told she had some work-related emergency.
The investigators after obtaining the search warrant of the house claimed to have found a broken knife with blood on it in the house basement. Besides that surveillance footage obtained from the shopping center investigators say, shows Brian wearing surgical gloves and masks as he buys $450 worth of cleaning material, the prosecutors have said. Initially, Brian had told investigators he never left the house, but he retracted by saying that he had gone out to buy ice cream for the children.
So far, Brian is being held for "misleading investigators" about her wife with investigators even revealing that her phone following the days of her disappearance pinged near the house.
"Both Ana and Brian have been individually and together very impactful on my life. My biggest fear had shifted towards the children, I wondered if the children were safe," Mutlu said. Besides having found traces of blood, investigators found a hatchet, a hacksaw, a rug, and used cleaning supplies while searching dumpsters near her mother-in-law's home. The new development follows the revelation that Walshe had searched the internet for "how to dispose of a 115-pound woman's body," as per the Daily Mail.