Michael Proctor's Career of Alleged Cover-Ups In Memoriam
Michael Proctor had everything a cop could want—respect, power, and a reputation that, for years, seemed untouchable. But by March 2025, he wasn’t just out of a job—he was a liability. Fired. Disgraced. Publicly humiliated in a way few law enforcement officers ever are. And it all comes back to one thing: the way he handled the Karen Read case. Or rather, how spectacularly he mishandled it.
Proctor’s downfall wasn’t a quick and clean dismissal. This wasn’t one of those “effective immediately” situations where a cop gets caught doing something catastrophic and is gone by the next morning. No, this was a slow-motion train wreck. A case study in watching someone who thought they were untouchable get tangled in their own arrogance, their own bias, and their own mistakes.
It started with a mistrial in July 2024—a high-profile, publicly scrutinized moment where Proctor didn’t just look bad on the stand, he became the story. His testimony wasn’t just shaky; it was an unmitigated disaster. Prosecutors must have known it was coming because the moment his text messages came out, it was game over.
These weren’t just any texts. Proctor, the lead investigator in the Karen Read case, the man responsible for gathering evidence and ensuring a fair and unbiased investigation, repeatedly called the defendant a "wack-job ct," openly mocked her, laughed about digging through her phone for nude photos, and, in one of the most damning moments, said he hoped she would kill herself.**
Think about that for a second. The guy responsible for finding out what actually happened had already made up his mind before the investigation even started. And he wasn’t keeping that bias to himself—he was texting it to people. Joking about it. Making it impossible to argue that he had conducted an objective investigation.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Proctor had undisclosed personal connections to key people involved in the case. His own sister was friends with members of the Albert family—the same family that owned the house where John O’Keefe was last seen alive. His family knew them socially. And yet, he never disclosed this. He took the case, took control of the evidence, and built a case against Karen Read while having direct ties to the very people who could have been alternative suspects.
Then there was the taillight evidence. The prosecution’s whole theory hinged on the idea that Karen Read backed into John O’Keefe with her SUV, breaking her taillight and leaving him outside to die in the snow. But the glass fragments that allegedly proved this theory didn’t make it to the crime lab for six weeks.
Six weeks.
And guess who was in charge of that evidence? Michael Proctor.
When asked about the delay, there was no good answer. No chain of custody explanation that made sense. No reasonable justification for why a critical piece of forensic evidence in a high-profile murder case sat around for over a month before it was analyzed. The defense didn’t even need to prove that the evidence had been planted—they just had to point out how incompetent and sloppy the investigation was. And Proctor had done all of their work for them.
The mistrial was a disaster. But the fallout was worse.
Within hours of the decision, Proctor was suspended. That was the first clue that even his own department knew he was a problem. The Massachusetts State Police don’t just throw their own under the bus. It takes serious misconduct for them to cut someone loose. And by this point, they had no choice.
Because once Proctor went down, he took a whole lot of other cases with him.
One of the first dominoes to fall? The Ana Walshe murder trial.
This was another major case where Proctor had been deeply involved—investigating the disappearance and presumed murder of Walshe by her husband, Brian. But after the Read mistrial, prosecutors dropped Proctor from their witness list.
They weren’t even willing to put him on the stand.
Think about what that means. Prosecutors, who normally go to great lengths to protect their investigators, decided it was better to move forward without their lead detective rather than risk having him testify.
Then came the defense attorneys lining up to challenge other convictions.
Proctor had worked on multiple murder cases, and now, anyone convicted in those cases had a potential argument for appeal. If Proctor had lied, manipulated evidence, or acted with bias in the Read case, who’s to say he hadn’t done it before?
By late 2024, the Massachusetts State Police were scrambling.
They launched internal investigations not just into Proctor, but **into his superiors—**the people who had allowed him to operate without oversight.
They needed to figure out who knew what and when. And once they started digging, it became clear that Proctor wasn’t the only problem.
The truth is, he was never operating alone.
And that brings us back to Sandra Birchmore.
Sandra Birchmore was 23 years old, pregnant, and terrified. She had been manipulated for years by a man with a badge—Officer Matthew Farwell, a cop she had known since she was a teenager, a man who had groomed her since she was 13 or 14 years old under the guise of a police mentorship program.
By 2021, she was pregnant with Farwell’s child. Days later, she was found dead in her apartment.
The official cause? Suicide.
The police wasted no time shutting the case down. No suspicious circumstances. No deep dive into her relationship with Farwell. Just a quick, convenient conclusion that kept everything under wraps.
And guess who oversaw that investigation? The same Massachusetts State Police unit that Michael Proctor worked for.
It would take three years for the truth to come out.
When federal investigators finally stepped in, they re-examined the crime scene, the autopsy, and Birchmore’s relationship with Farwell. What they found contradicted the original ruling completely.
Sandra Birchmore hadn’t died by suicide.
She had been strangled.
Her death had been staged. The scene manipulated to look like something it wasn’t. And when that became undeniable, Matthew Farwell was arrested and charged with murder in August 2024.
This should have been the moment when the Massachusetts State Police admitted failure. But instead, they scrambled to explain how they had gotten it so wrong.
And that’s where things start to look uncomfortably familiar.
The same people involved in burying the Birchmore case had direct ties to the Read investigation.
Lieutenant John Fanning, Detective Brian Tully, and Sergeant Yuri Bukhenik—all senior officers **in Proctor’s chain of command during the Read case—**had connections to the Stoughton Police Department, the same department where Farwell worked.
This wasn’t a coincidence.
By the time Proctor was fired in March 2025, it wasn’t about just him anymore. It was about all the people who had allowed him to operate unchecked for years.
And the fallout was just beginning.
Because once people started asking who had protected Proctor, they started realizing he was just one piece of a much bigger problem.
A problem that wasn’t going away.
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