Ana Walshe’s husband, Brian Walshe, is charged with murder

Brian Walshe has been charged with murder in the killing of his wife, Ana Walshe, nearly two weeks after she was reported missing, a case that has drawn national attention after he bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of cleaning supplies and allegedly misled investigators about his whereabouts.

Michael W. Morrissey, the district attorney of Massachusett’s Norfolk County, announced the murder charge Tuesday and said more details probably will be available at a Wednesday hearing.

Ana Walshe, 39, was reported missing Jan. 4. Her husband told police that three days earlier, she woke him up at their Boston-area home, saying she had to fly to D.C. for a work emergency, according to an affidavit obtained by the Boston Globe. He said she kissed him goodbye about 6 or 7 a.m. and told him to go back to sleep.

It was the last time anyone reported seeing her.

Walshe, 47, had already been charged with misleading police who are investigating Ana Walshe’s disappearance. They say he did not disclose a Jan. 1 trip to Home Depot, where he used cash to buy $450 worth of cleaning supplies. Police were unable to verify some of his whereabouts that day.

He has pleaded not guilty to a charge of misleading a police investigation and has been in custody in the Norfolk County jail.

Walshe will be transported to Quincy District Court on Wednesday for his arraignment, according to the district attorney’s office.

“Additional details of the investigation and the evidence in support of those charges are likely to be presented at the arraignment but will not be disclosed at this time,” Morrissey said in a video announcing the charges.

Tracy Miner, Walshe’s attorney, said in the arraignment for that charge that Walshe has cooperated with the investigation, giving several interviews to investigators and consenting to searches of his property and his cellphone. She declined to comment on the murder charge Tuesday.

Ana Walshe traveled weekly for her job as a regional general manager in the D.C. office of real estate investment firm Tishman Speyer. According to the Boston Globe, she was born in Serbia, where she attended college before working in hospitality in D.C. and Massachusetts, according to her LinkedIn profile. The Walshes have three children ages 2 to 6, authorities said.

According to charging documents filed in the misleading-police case, Brian Walshe told investigators that the couple had hosted a friend for a New Year’s Eve dinner at their Cohasset, Mass., home.

Walshe told investigators that after his wife left for a work emergency the next day, he spent Jan. 1 running errands at two grocery stores and a CVS. He had been on home confinement while awaiting sentencing in a federal fraud conviction involving phony Andy Warhol art. Walshe was allowed to leave his house with the court’s permission, but it was not clear Tuesday whether he had permission for those errands.

At least six police officers spent a day driving around to try to verify parts of Walshe’s New Year’s Day trip, prosecutors said, but his story did not check out. They said that Walshe was not recorded on surveillance cameras at stores he said he had visited and that he could produce no receipts to prove that he had bought anything.

While investigators were able to verify Walshe’s trip to a juice bar, they said they discovered that he had also stopped at a Home Depot that day. Surveillance video from the store shows Walshe wearing a black surgical mask and blue surgical gloves and buying mops, tarps, drop cloths and other cleaning supplies, prosecutors say.

Prosecutor Lynn Beland said at this month’s arraignment that a cellphone had pinged in their home on Jan. 1 and 2 - after Walshe said his wife had left the Boston area. Beland suggested that Walshe had intentionally tried to distract investigators.

A search of the couple’s home, prosecutors have said, turned up blood in the basement and a bloody, partly damaged knife.

In August 2014, before they married, Walshe told D.C. police that Brian Walshe had threatened to kill her and a friend, according to an incident report. No charges were filed.

David Traub, a spokesperson for the Norfolk district attorney’s office, told The Post last week that investigators had collected several items that would be tested to determine whether they can serve as evidence. He did not provide additional information about what was found.

On Tuesday, he had little more to add.

“There’s been no large-scale recovery of remains,” he said.

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The Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.