A mysterious ransom note has turned up in the investigation into Ana Walshe’s disappearance – saying the Massachusetts mom would never be returned unless $127,000 was paid.
Details of the letter, sent to Cohasset Detective Harrison Schmidt on Jan. 7, were revealed in a new trove of records related to the case, the Boston Herald reported.
“We have the so named Ana Walshe with us here … we had a deal worth $127,000,” the note said.
“She messed up..we have her here with us and if she doesn’t pay the money..then she’ll never be back, and we know that the police and the FBI are involved.. Good luck finding us.”
The detective said he received the email from a Richard Walker just three days after Walshe’s name was entered into the National Crime Information Center database, CBS News reported.
Authorities said they immediately thought the missive was suspicious because it included no instructions on how or when to respond.
News about the note comes after court filings revealed that Walshe spent Thanksgiving in Dublin with a mystery lover about a month before her husband Brian Walshe allegedly killed the mother of three on New Year’s Eve.
Walshe, 39, a real estate executive, disappeared the next day and has been presumed dead, even though her body has not been found.
Brian, 47, has been charged with first-degree murder, after police said they found damning evidence that links him to the crime, including her clothes and Google searches about how to dismember and dispose of a body allegedly made on their son’s iPad.
He allegedly beat his wife to death after discovering her affair, then chopped her up in their basement.
Ana had told a friend days before she vanished that she thought her husband was going to prison — presumably on art fraud charges — and she planned to leave him and move to Washington, DC, court documents state.
Brian was arraigned Thursday in Norfolk Superior Court, where his attorney admitted that the defendant’s mother had hired a private investigator to tail Ana during a trip to DC because she suspected infidelity.
But the attorney alleged that his client had no reason to suspect his wife was cheating until she disappeared.
Prosecutors, however, argued that Brian obsessively checked the Instagram account of a DC man who he thought was his wife’s love interest.
The husband also had a lot to gain if Ana died, such as the $2.7 million in insurance payouts, according to prosecutors – though his attorneys argue that he was already loaded through his family.
Brian, who has pleaded not guilty to murder, misleading police, obstruction of justice and improper conveyance of a human body, is due back in court in August.