A single line in a defense filing in the Brian Walshe murder case has Karen Read case fanatics reeling: Was Trooper Michael Proctor, the case officer for both, fired from the Massachusetts State Police?
“There is a court filing in the (Walshe) case that is not correct. Trooper Proctor remains on unpaid leave as he awaits the outcome of an internal affairs investigation,” MSP spokesman Timothy McGuirk told the Herald today.
The confusion comes from a filing by Walshe defense attorney Larry Tipton, who made an error in his summary of the career trajectory of Proctor. Proctor was almost immediately placed on leave when the Read trial earlier this year ended in mistrial as behavior that he admitted was extremely unprofessional came to light when he took the stand in that case. He was later suspended without pay, but has not been outright fired from the organization.
“The Proctor debacle resulted in Proctor being first suspended and then terminated from the State Police, but only after defense counsel exposed the serious issues,” Tipton wrote in a filing.
The filing, as the Herald reported, requests that the Walshe defense team be provided with the contents of Proctor’s work phone and cloud account that could provide some exculpatory evidence for Walshe. Norfolk County prosecutors filed notices earlier this year in this and other cases Proctor worked that the DA’s office had received an extraction from Proctor’s phone and cloud account and that the materials could impact these cases.
Walshe, 49, is charged with the murder of his wife, Ana Walshe, who the prosecutors say he slayed and then cut up on the first day of 2023 and then hid her body parts in dumpsters around Greater Boston. Since being indicted for her murder, he was sentenced in federal court to an unrelated international art fraud case, which he has appealed. He has been detained at the Norfolk House of Correction since his initial arrest.
Read, 44, of Mansfield, is charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter and leaving the scene of a collision causing the death of John O’Keefe, a 16-year member of the Boston police force and Read’s boyfriend of two years, in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022.
