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Special prosecutor Hank Brennan may have dulled the impact of inappropriate text messages the lead homicide detective sent regarding Karen Read days before she was charged with the murder of John O’Keefe – but they’re still damaging to the state’s case and not just because he used vulgar and obscene language, experts say.
The texts were a bomb that blew up the first trial when they were read with Michael Proctor on the witness stand, and it ended with a deadlocked jury last year. This time around, prosecutors decided not to call him as a witness, and it was his childhood friend Jonathan Diamandis who – visibly uncomfortable – walked the jury through the conversation.
But beyond the crass remarks about Read, experts say less explosive messages about Proctor’s early opinions of the investigation could be damning.
“Proctor is mentally begging [the defense] to call him,” retired Massachusetts Superior Court Judge and Boston College law professor Jack Lu told Fox News Digital. “Now that the texts are in, they will not call Proctor unless they are convinced they have lost – the old ‘Hail Mary’ pass.”
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Lu said the defense team gained some ground with Diamandis on the stand, but with Brennan facing the text chain head-on, the messages were likely not a significant shift in Read’s favor.
“Will the jury be truly shocked by abusive texts from a police officer investigating a person they think is a murderer?” Lu said. “I doubt it.”
Read is accused of hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with her Lexus SUV during a drunken argument before leaving him to freeze to death in the front yard of a friend’s home in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022.
Diamandis testified he has been in a group chat with Proctor for more than a decade and was privy to text messages sent during the investigation into O’Keefe’s death.
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The Massachusetts State Police fired Proctor in March after an internal investigation found he had shared sensitive and confidential information about the case with people outside of law enforcement.
Read’s first trial revealed inappropriate text messages the lead investigator sent as the case was unfolding.
“The messages prove one thing, and that Michael is human – not corrupt, not incompetent in his role as a homicide detective and certainly not unfit to continue to be a Massachusetts State Trooper,” his sister, Courtney Proctor, previously said in a statement.
On cross-examination, Brennan asked Diamandis to read to the jury Proctor’s messages from the day O’Keefe’s body was discovered.
“She waffled him,” Proctor wrote, referring to Read. “I looked at his body in the hospital.”
Proctor weighed in with his own observations of what may have happened to O’Keefe, initially agreeing with another member of the group chat that the Boston police officer may have been beaten to death.
“That’s what I initially thought after talking to [a] Canton paramedic,” Proctor wrote. “Then I saw the guy.”
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Asked for more details, Proctor replied with a message implicating Read, telling his friends, “she hit him with her car.”
“Gotcha,” one pal wrote. “[O’Keefe] was frozen in the driveway, and she didn’t see him.”
“That’s another animal we won’t be able to prove,” Proctor replied. “They arrived at the house together, got into an argument, she was driving and left.”
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The text messages raise the possibility that Proctor reached a conclusion on O’Keefe’s death before the investigation finished, according to Massachusetts defense attorney Grace Edwards. He sent them around 11 p.m. on Jan. 29, 2022 – the day O’keefe had been found. An autopsy wasn’t completed until two days later.
“These text messages were from the night of John O’Keefe’s death, and it appears that Michael Proctor has already come to a conclusion about the case – before the medical examiner’s report,” Edwards told Fox News Digital. “His conclusion was premature.”
Proctor’s alleged rush to implicate Read could have caused him to ignore evidence pointing to other possibilities surrounding the cause of O’Keefe’s death, according to Edwards.
“Michael Proctor is not qualified to make a determination about how John O’Keefe died,” Edwards said. “That is what we have medical examiners for. Based on the text messages, Michael Proctor had come to that conclusion all on his own within hours of O’Keefe’s death.”
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Criminal defense attorney Mark Bederow also pointed to Proctor’s professional inability to determine what – or who – killed O’Keefe, and how the immediate assumption could have been detrimental to the investigation.
“[Proctor] is not qualified to say that,” Bederow told Fox News Digital. “There is an abundance of evidence of Proctor’s investigative tunnel vision and bias.”
As the tone of the texts shifted, Diamandis told the courtroom he did not want to continue reading the messages aloud because they contained “uncomfortable words,” prompting Brennan to read them and ask Diamandis to confirm that what he was reading was an accurate depiction of the texts on the chain.
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“Yeah, she’s a babe,” Proctor wrote. “Weird Fall River accent though. No a–.”
The text chain turned obscene at points, including mocking Read over a purported medical issue.
Proctor is subject to witness sequestration and declined to comment.
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Proctor is on the defense witness list, but Read’s team called Diamandis instead, in what Edwards believes is a risky move by the defense.
“Brennan has now taken the wind out of the sails of the defense because the reading of those texts did not have the impact that they did during the first trial when Michael Proctor read them himself,” Edwards said.
The choice to call Proctor’s childhood friend could be viewed as a safe way for the defense team to drop the bombshell text chain without risking cross-examination by the state.
On the other hand, the defense can now point to the fact that prosecutors declined to put their lead investigator on the witness stand, Bederow said.
“They’ll likely pursue a ‘missing witness’ instruction from the court in which the judge will inform jurors they may draw an adverse inference against prosecution for their failure to call Proctor,” he said. “It is virtually unheard of for the prosecution not to call the lead investigator in a murder case, but of course it’s also extraordinarily rare that the lead investigator was terminated for unprofessional behavior and bias on [the same] case.”
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