After 8 years, a missing Malvern woman’s husband has been charged with her murder

Eight years after Anna Maciejewska disappeared from her Main Line home, leaving her son behind without a word, her husband has been charged with killing her, Chester County prosecutors said Wednesday.

Allen Gould, 60, disposed of Maciejewska’s body, hid evidence, and pretended to be his wife for weeks in text messages and other forms of communication with her family and coworkers, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

Maciejewska’s body, investigators said, has never been found.

Gould was arraigned Wednesday afternoon on charges of murder and related crimes in the death of Maciejewska, 43, who was reported missing in April 2017. But, the affidavit said, she likely had been killed two weeks earlier, in late March.

He remained in custody Wednesday, denied bail.

“Ultimately this is a sad situation,” Gould’s attorney, Evan Kelly, said Wednesday. “But after eight years of investigations and innuendo, Mr. Gould is anxious to clear his name in court.”

In announcing the arrest Wednesday, Chester County District Attorney Chris de Barrena-Sarobe credited the Pennsylvania State Police detectives who have handled the case since Maciejewska first disappeared.

“We always wanted to bring finality to the family in Poland, to everyone,” he said. “There’s a lot of pain in the community, seeing a young child’s mother disappear just like this, and everyone really came together.”

Gould was long considered a person of interest in his wife’s death, investigators said. He was the last person to see her, telling her family she disappeared on April 10, 2017.

Maciejewska’s coworkers at Voya Financial in West Chester reported her missing to police the next day, after she failed to show up for work twice in a row with no explanation, the affidavit said.

The coworkers called Gould, who said he was waiting to call the police for “one more night,” to see if his wife would return. Puzzled by Gould’s reaction, Maciejewska’s colleagues filed a missing-person report themselves.

They had received text messages from Maciejewska’s cell phone the previous week, saying she couldn’t come to work because of a stomach issue, the affidavit said. Police say they believe Gould wrote those messages.

A family friend of Maciejewska’s also called police, saying her family in Poland had not heard from her since March 27, weeks earlier.

When police later spoke with Gould, he told them his wife had been running late for work when he last saw her and left their Malvern home in a “panic,” according to court filings.

He told Maciejewska’s family he had no idea where she was, and said she had canceled a planned trip to her native Poland to surprise her parents due to issues with a layover.

Her family told The Inquirer in 2018 that they felt the sudden cancellation was strange, especially since she told them through an abrupt text message that said simply: “I’m sorry, I can’t come.”

They said they believed someone else had written that message, posing as their daughter.

In conversations with police, some of Maciejewska’s family and friends said her marriage to Gould had been fraught in recent months, according to the affidavit.

The two disagreed over how to raise their son, Andrew, then 4. Maciejewska had told her friends she was considering divorce — even taking a “divorce 101 class” at Chester County Night School — but was hesitant to do so, worried she might lose custody of her son.

Meanwhile, local investigators struggled to piece together Maciejewska’s final hours.

Through evidence gathered from her computer, credit card statements, and interviews with her friends and coworkers, it seemed that Maciejewska’s consistent, daily routine ended weeks before Gould said he last saw her.

Repeated searches of the family’s home, as well as a townhouse Maciejewska owned in West Chester, turned up empty. Investigators said her wallet, cell phone, and passport never left the family’s home, a detail that confused and alarmed her friends and coworkers, who said she never traveled without them.

The couple’s home, which was normally somewhat messy and unkempt, was uncharacteristically clean when house cleaners regularly hired by the couple visited after Maciejewska was reported missing, the affidavit said.

Pennsylvania State Police detectives found her Audi A4 a month later, parked in a lot not far from her home. A neighbor later told investigators she had seen Gould driving the vehicle not long before they recovered it.

Over the years, investigators said, Gould stopped cooperating with them, as their inquiry shifted from a missing-person case to a suspected murder.

He never outright denied killing his wife, investigators said, but a search of his home later in 2017 found he was keeping detailed notes about the police efforts to find her. And he had written a check to his attorney for $75,000 with the memo line “trial defense if needed,” the affidavit said.

Gould also searched for “top defense attorneys” on his computer and for information about strangulation. Investigators said those searches were “significant,” since police had not said they believe she may have been strangled.

As the years wore on, Maciejewska’s friends and neighbors fought to keep the story in the public eye, holding vigils, starting pages on social media dedicated to finding her, and sitting for interviews with local media.

The case captured national interest and was featured on podcasts and blogs about unsolved crimes.

Maciejewska came to the United States in 1997 to pursue a graduate degree in actuarial mathematics at the University of Louisville, her mother, Janina, told The Inquirer. She followed her then-boyfriend, who had come over from Poland to start classes there a year before.

The two broke up when she moved to West Chester to work for a company that later became Voya.

Maciejewska met Gould on a ski trip in the mid-2000s, her mother said.

“She thought he had no flaws,” Janina Maciejewska said in a 2018 interview. Gould seemed infatuated with Maciejewska, she said, and they married in 2006.

The marriage appeared to be a happy one, her mother said, until the couple’s son, Andrew, was born in 2013 and Gould seemed to pay more attention to the child than his wife.

Maciejewska thought her husband spoiled their son, and tensions flared over her wish that he retain his dual citizenship with Poland, something her family said Gould opposed, according to the affidavit.

After speaking with the divorce counselor Maciejewska was seeing, investigators said, it was clear she was unhappy with the marriage and was making plans to take her son with her to Poland.

That decision, the affidavit said, may have been the motive for her killing.