The long-dormant murder case against Cohasset’s Brian Walshe will one day go to trial likely without one increasingly recognizable figure: Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor.

“As of the time of this filing, the Commonwealth does not intent to call Michael Proctor to testify in this matter,” Norfolk Assistant District Attorney Greg Connor states in a notice filed with the court.

Proctor was one of two designated case officers in investigating the disappearance and murder of Ana Walshe in Cohasset in January 2023. It’s the same role he had in the investigation of the homicide of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe in Canton a year earlier.

O’Keefe’s girlfriend Karen Read, a college lecturer and financial analyst from Mansfield, was charged with O’Keefe’s murder.

Proctor became an embarrassment to the Massachusetts State Police and to prosecutors in the Read case when he admitted to seriously inappropriate conduct — including describing Read, the girlfriend and suspect in O’Keefe’s death, in text messages as a “whack job,” “a babe” who had “no (butt).” He also texted his sister that “hopefully (Read) kills herself.”

Hours after the Read murder trial ended in mistrial, the MSP announced it had pulled Proctor off duty. He would soon be suspended without pay. Read is scheduled to be retried in January.

Then on Friday, prosecutors announced across several cases he was involved in as an investigator that the Norfolk DA’s office had an extraction of Proctor’s work phone and his cloud storage account and that the information they contained, if subpoenaed, could have serious consequences to numerous outside cases, as the Herald previously reported.

The version of the notice filed in the Walshe case indicated that prosecutors have no intention of calling Proctor — the “case officer,” or officer who organizes the investigation — to the stand. He served in this capacity alongside Cohasset PD Sgt. Harrison Schmidt, whose own participation in a future Walshe trial was not commented on in the disclosure, but who does not have known controversy surrounding him.

“Trooper Proctor testified in (the Read case) on June 10 and 12, 2024, and was subject to cross-examination relating to alleged conflicts of interest, communications with non-involved civilian persons regarding the Read case, and statements regarding the defendant from which defense counsel argued a bias could be found,” prosecutor Connor wrote in the notice.

Brian Walshe, husband to Ana Walshe, was initially said to be cooperating well with the police regarding her disappearance on Jan. 1, 2023, but that quickly changed and by mid-January he was arrested. He was indicted on March 30, 2023, on charges including murdering his wife in their Cohasset home and pleaded not guilty to the charges the following month during his arraignment before Norfolk Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone — the same judge as the Read matter.

The case was red hot even before the indictment, as people learned of a number of of alleged Google searches regarding body disposal and cleaning up the evidence when they were read in court by the prosecutor at his lower court arraignment. Those searches were preceded by others including which states are best for men to divorce in, as prosecutors say Brian Walshe suspected his wife of having an affair.

But the case cooled as very little happened after that. Brian Walshe was found indigent in December and his private attorney Tracy Miner, who had represented him in a federal art fraud case he lost and is now appealing, withdrew. The court appointed attorney Larry Tipton as Walshe’s new lawyer. Walshe last appeared in court for a brief hearing in the same room as the Read murder trial just hours after the defense rested their case.

While both the Read case and the Walshe case were hot, the interest levels in the time since are much different. A simple glance at the case dockets, which are the sheets tracking filings and events in each case, show the difference: 389 total entries in Read compared to 17 in Walshe, including the Friday filings in each.