Experts say dirty investigations reveal problems in policing that the public barely notices

Jurors in the murder case of Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman accused of running over and killing her police officer boyfriend in 2022, ended the week without a verdict on Friday. It was their fourth day of deliberations after a trial that included dozens of witnesses and allegations of botched investigative work.

Read’s defense attorneys argued that the investigation was flawed, with undisclosed conflicts of interest, offensive text messages and a failure to consider alternative suspects. They claimed there was a conspiracy among police officers to cover up the death of Boston police officer John O’Keefe by one of their own and to blame Read for his murder.

Regardless of the outcome of the trial, legal experts say the proceedings have revealed an often hidden side of law enforcement that can be fraught with problems.

“One of the consequences of the Karen Read murder trial is that it has shone a spotlight on some of the deficiencies and missteps in the police investigation,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University and an expert on wrongful convictions.

“If there are missteps and sloppiness in the investigation of a murder case involving the death of a police officer, what does that say about the handling of a more ordinary case involving a civilian victim?” he asked.

“This should be a cause for concern and lead to further scrutiny,” he added.

Stara Roemer, a former Dallas County prosecutor who now works as a criminal defense attorney in Texas, said the actions of the lead investigator in the case, Massachusetts State Police Detective Michael Proctor, reflected a problem with some police officers who showed little respect for the subjects of an investigation.

In court, Proctor admitted to making derogatory comments about Read and sharing details of the investigation with friends and family. He said the comments were unprofessional but did not interfere with the investigation.

“I’ve never seen such an appearance of impropriety,” Roemer said. “I’m sure it happens every day. The difference between this case and other cases is that investigators generally go home and talk to anyone about the case – they don’t talk about it with people who know the people involved in the case and are potential suspects.”

“If I were a police officer and saw this, I would ask myself: How am I supposed to go out there and do my job?” she added. “How can you trust the police?”

Massachusetts State Police did not respond to a request for comment. A message left at a number listed for Proctor was not returned.

A night with after-party

Read and O’Keefe, 46, who was a Boston police officer for 16 years, had been at a bar with other current and former police officers the night before his killing. O’Keefe had planned to go to an after-party at the home of a now-retired Boston police sergeant, prosecutors said, but never made it inside.

O’Keefe was discovered in the front yard of Brian Albert’s home around 6 a.m. on January 29, 2022.

He was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. The medical examiner ruled his cause of death to blunt force trauma to the head and hypothermia, and Read was later charged with first-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and other crimes. She pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors allege that Read, drunk and angry over her difficult relationship with O’Keefe, drove her SUV into her boyfriend as she dropped him off at the after-party.

During the trial, Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally said vehicle data from Read’s Lexus showed her SUV backed up 65 feet in front of Albert’s house at 24 mph. The SUV’s taillight was broken, Lally said, and pieces of it were later found outside Albert’s house.

Forensic tests revealed that O’Keefe’s hair was on the car’s bumper and his DNA was on the taillight, Lally said.

Lally also referred to Read’s own comment – “I hit him” – which rescue workers recalled her saying on the morning of January 29.

Read says she was duped

Read denied hitting O’Keefe, and her lawyers said she dropped him off and he went to Albert’s house.

Read later realized that her boyfriend never came home, her defense attorney said. Hours after Read dropped him off, she and two other women went looking for him and found him in Albert’s front yard.

Read’s defense attorneys have challenged key pieces of prosecution evidence, including the broken taillight. Citing surveillance video showing Read backing into O’Keefe’s car on the morning of Jan. 29 as she drove off to look for him and discrepancies in Proctor’s police reports, they suggested that the pieces of the taillight found outside Albert’s home could have been placed. (Proctor testified that the discrepancy was a typo.)

And the defense team said Read’s comments on the morning of Jan. 29 were twisted from a panicked question – “Could I have hit him?” – into a statement.

Medved, the Northeastern professor, said the way those comments were used could indicate confirmation bias among authorities.

“She’s upset and speculating,” he said. “She can’t remember what happened because she was so drunk, and maybe she thinks she hit him.”

“If you believe Karen Read is guilty, then all of these facts would support that theory,” he added.

Read’s lawyers, who were allowed to present an alternative theory of O’Keefe’s killing at trial, argued that O’Keefe may have gotten into a fatal scuffle at the party with another law enforcement officer – an agent from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives with whom Read exchanged flirtatious text messages and then made off.

Attorneys have claimed that partygoers then dumped O’Keefe’s body outside and framed Read to cover up the incident. She was “a convenient outsider” in law enforcement’s attempt to protect one of their own, her attorneys said.

Lally dismissed this claim as “wild speculation.”

Language, relationships under scrutiny

Proctor admitted during the trial that he used profanity and abusive language to describe Read in text messages to family, friends and superiors. During his testimony, Proctor also admitted that he had unspecified personal and professional ties to Albert, the former Boston sergeant who owned the house where O’Keefe was found.

He testified that his comments and relationships did not interfere with the investigation.

Proctor testified that he had been working with Albert’s brother, a Canton Police detective, on a cold case investigation and had gone out drinking with him. In addition, Proctor’s sister was close friends with Albert’s sister-in-law. The investigator testified that he had previously asked the sister-in-law to watch his children.

During the investigation, Proctor testified, he interviewed the sister-in-law – who had gone out for drinks with O’Keefe and Read before the party – and admitted to discussing that conversation with his sister. The sister-in-law later offered Proctor, through his sister, a thank-you gift “when this is all over,” according to text messages between the siblings that were presented as evidence in court.

In his testimony, Proctor said he never asked for or received a gift. He denied informing his sister about the progress of the murder investigation, adding that he only alerted her to “newsworthy things.”

Proctor shared details of the investigation with several high school friends. In a group chat on the evening of Jan. 29, hours after O’Keefe’s body was found, one of the friends wrote that the owner of the house where O’Keefe’s body was discovered was “going to get some sh*t.”

“Nope,” Proctor replied, referring to Albert. “The owner of the house is also a police officer in Boston.”

Proctor poses a serious problem for the state’s prosecution, said Roemer, the former prosecutor and now a criminal defense attorney in Dallas.

“Everything about Trooper Proctor was a problem,” she said. “He should not have been involved in this case. He should have removed himself from circulation because he knew people who were witnesses in this case.”

To avoid a potential conflict of interest, state police led the investigation into O’Keefe’s death, but Proctor hampered that effort by sharing details about the case with others, Roemer said.

“When someone like Trooper Proctor goes around telling everyone in town confidential details of the investigation, you compromise it,” Roemer said. “Even if there’s no conspiracy, you compromise it. He doesn’t know who these people are talking to. But what he does know is that the people he’s talking to know the people who live in the house where this happened.”

Two calls early in the morning

In court, Proctor said he had no knowledge of two phone calls between Albert and ATF agent Brian Higgins that the defense called “odd” and possibly significant. The calls were made at 2:22 a.m. on Jan. 29, about four hours before O’Keefe was found dead.

Higgins said he did not remember the calls. Albert said a one-second call from his phone to Higgins was an oversight. He said he did not return a call back moments later that lasted 22 seconds. Proctor said he was unaware of the calls because investigators do not typically seize witnesses’ phones.

Chatting with his friends, Proctor said Read, whom he called a “nutcase” and called a slur, had “screwed” O’Keefe or hit her with her SUV, adding that “serious charges” would be brought against her.

When asked if he had closed the case before the full investigation, Proctor replied that even in those early morning hours he had compelling evidence that Read had struck O’Keefe with her vehicle.

Medwed said the revelations about Proctor’s investigation showed what he often observes in miscarriages of justice: a tendency among investigators to develop “tunnel vision,” or to resist pursuing possible evidence or information that does not fit their theory of what happened.

“The way we view the evidence is shaped by our expectations and our theory of the case,” he said. “It seems that the police developed a theory fairly early on that Karen Read committed the crime. As the case progressed, there may have been other lines of inquiry that they did not pursue.”