School Teacher Leah Walsh Missing, Unidentified Body Found

 

On Monday 29-year-old Leah Walsh, a Bethpage school teacher who teaches autistic kids, went missing and never made it to work. Reports say she texted her husband around 6:30 am saying her car broke down and she had a flat tire on the freeway.

Amid a search for Leah, the body of a white woman was found Wednesday morning in a wooded area in North Hills, police said.

The discovery was made while police looked for Leah Walsh, a 29-year-old teacher from Bethpage who’s been missing since Monday morning, when her car was found abandoned on the shoulder of the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway by her father, a school bus driver.

Det. Lt. Kevin Smith said the body was of “an unknown victim” of “an undetermined homicide.”

“The body is of a female white,” Smith said. “Other than that, we haven’t been able to identify the body at this time. We believe the body has been there over 24 hours.”
Smith declined to go into detail as to why the body was unidentifiable.

A staff member with the North Hills Country Club found the body at 7:58 a.m., Smith said.

It was found in an embankment not more than 50 feet off the Northern Service Road of the Long Island Expressway, in a wooded area with debris like leaves and branches, Smith said.

The body is not on country club property, he said.

“It’s too soon to say” whether the body is Walsh, Smith said.

Walsh’s disappearance was still being treated as a missing persons case, and police were searching in an area of the Seaford-Oyster Bay, Smith said.

The body was found about 13 miles away from where Walsh’s car was found.

Walsh’s husband, William Walsh Jr., 29, has pleaded for the public’s help in finding his wife. He spent hours speaking with police Tuesday.

A close friend of the woman told the Daily News she was distraught after a “blowup” with her husband on Saturday.

Lucas Bean, who has known Leah Walsh since they were in college at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, said she text-messaged him while driving from her parents’ house in Rockville Centre to her apartment in Bethpage.

“She was telling me that things are not going to work out with her and her husband, and she had to tell me something very important, but she needed to wait till she got out of the car with him,” he said.

“She was in the car with him texting to me,” Bean said. “That was Saturday around 7 p.m. They were in a huge fight.”

Bean, 32, who lives in Los Angeles, said he never found out what the fight was about and didn’t learn that Walsh was missing until a reporter called him.

“I’m the last person to talk to her,” Bean said after talking to the detective in charge of the probe.

He said Leah and Bill Walsh had been married for a few years, had separated once and had reconciled only recently.

Bill Walsh told reporters he got a text message from his wife - “Have a great day” - just before 6:30 a.m. Monday while she was on her way to work.