The disappearance of Ana Walshe, a real estate executive and mother of three from suburban Boston, has dominated headlines in Massachusetts and on national cable news this month as investigators have revealed gruesome evidence found in her home and reporters have dug into her husband’s criminal past.

On Tuesday, prosecutors said that police had obtained an arrest warrant charging Walshe’s husband, Brian R. Walshe, with her murder. Walshe is already in jail after he was arrested on Jan. 8 on charges that he had misled investigators in an effort to cover up or dispose of evidence.

The intense national attention on the case has prompted criticism that it is another example of “missing white woman syndrome,” or the news media’s tendency to focus on cases of missing white women while ignoring similar cases involving people of color.

Ana Walshe, 39, was last seen at her home in Cohasset, Massachusetts, a small seaside town southeast of Boston, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, according to police. But she was not reported missing until three days later when she did not show up for work in Washington, where she was an executive with the real estate investment firm Tishman Speyer. Scrutiny soon focused on Brian Walshe, 47, the son of a wealthy family who pleaded guilty in 2021 to charges that he had sold fake Andy Warhol paintings to a California art dealer.

Prosecutors said that Walshe had initially told police that his wife had taken an Uber or Lyft to the airport early on New Year’s Day because of a work emergency.

But her cellphone pinged in the area of her house on Jan. 1 and Jan. 2, after Walshe said she had left, a prosecutor, Lynn Beland, said in court on Jan. 9. Investigators who executed a search warrant at the home found blood in the basement as well as a bloody knife, part of which was damaged, Beland said.

Walshe was seen on surveillance video on Jan. 2 buying $450 in cleaning supplies — including mops, a bucket, tarps, drop cloths and tape — from a Home Depot, Beland said. He had told police that the only time he had left home that day was to buy ice cream for his son, she said.

Some drew comparisons to the case of Gabrielle Petito, who disappeared on a cross-country van trip in late 2021. Her body was eventually found in a national park in Wyoming, and the chief suspect, Brian Laundrie, her fiance, took his own life while he was a fugitive in Florida.

In The Boston Globe, which has covered the Walshe case extensively, columnist Joan Vennochi wrote that it “illustrates yet again — if you are young, white and pretty, and live in a place where horrific crime is not supposed to take place, you are very newsworthy.”

Walshe, prosecutors said, was under house arrest and awaiting sentencing in the Warhol fraud case when he killed his wife. In that case, federal prosecutors said, Walshe took two of Warhol’s authentic “Shadows” paintings from a friend and then sold two forged renditions to a California art dealer for $80,000.