Brian Walshe, the Cohasset man accused of murdering his wife Ana Walshe on the first day of this year, has lost his private attorney and has been assigned a court-appointed one.

Walshe was the subject of a brief hearing conducted by Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone over Zoom Thursday afternoon. It was the first hearing in the once very active case held in several months.

In the hearing, Cannone found Walshe indigent and approved his attorney Tracy Miner’s motion to withdraw. Attorney Larry Tipton will now take on the role on the taxpayer dime.

It was a quick fall to indigency status. In March of 2022, he and his wife pocketed nearly $1.4 million from the sale of their oceanside home on Cohasset’s Jerusalem Road. That home mysteriously caught fire just days after Ana Walshe went missing on New Year’s Day 2023 — though authorities have said that it’s merely a coincidence and the fire has nothing to do with her disappearance.

Just a day before that fire, on Jan. 5, Cohasset Police issued a bulletin asking for the public’s assistance locating the 39-year-old Ana Walshe, who had been reported missing first by her employer in Washington, D.C., and then by her husband, Brian Walshe.

The story at that time, as provided to police by Brian Walshe, was that Ana Walshe had called a rideshare company in the early hours of Jan. 1 to take her to Logan Airport, where she was to board a flight to D.C. for some emergency work business at Tishman Speyer, a property management company where she worked as a regional manager.

Cohasset Police Chief William Quigley would say the next day that she did not board an airplane on any airline that morning and that he didn’t believe she had taken a car anywhere at all. Her employer would tell investigators that she had no emergency business there.

Within days, which included massive and fruitless ground searches for the missing mother of three, Brian Walshe — a convicted globe-trotting fraudulent art dealer under deep suspicion for messing with his father’s will — was no longer described as a cooperative and worried husband of a missing woman, but a suspect in a heinous deed. Police arrested him on Jan. 8 on an initial charge of misleading the police about his activities on the first two days of the year.

Authorities used his arrest as an opportunity to search the Walshe home. Police found blood and a damaged, bloody knife in the home; Brian Walshe had gone on a $450 shopping spree at Home Depot for extensive cleaning supplies.

But the really horrifying disclosures would come out after authorities charged him with the murder and dismemberment of his wife on Jan. 17. During his arraignment the next day, prosecutor Lynn Beland read out a laundry list of grisly internet searches she says Brian Walshe conducted starting when Ana Walshe was purportedly on her way to the airport on Jan. 1: “Can you be charged with murder without a body?” and “10 ways to dispose of a body if you really need to” being some choice examples.

Another search for where the best state is for a man to divorce and affidavits revealing that Ana Walshe had a lover in D.C. suggested motive.

The court set the next hearing date for March 4 at 2 p.m.