Fired Karen Read Investigator Michael Proctor Appeals

Michael Proctor told Civil Service Commission Board he is ‘scapegoat’ targeted by Read and her LA lawyers

Fired Massachusetts State Police Detective Michael Proctor – the lead investigator on the case of a Massachusetts woman who was acquitted this summer on charges she murdered her Boston cop boyfriend – argued to a state agency Thursday that Karen Read and her L.A.-based attorneys “conspired” with federal officials to get him fired.

In the first of two hearings scheduled for Proctor Tuesday – who is fighting to get reinstated to the Massachusetts State Police after he was fired in March for a slew of missteps including sending derogatory text messages about Read, sharing information about the murder case he charged her in with people outside the department and drinking alcohol on the job in his department vehicle – his attorney said his client was “an exemplary member” of his department.

Proctor’s attorney, Daniel Moynihan, told the Civil Service Commission who will hear the former trooper’s appeal, that his client’s “privacy was violated” by federal investigators who “infiltrated” Proctor’s cell phone at the urging of Read’s legal team, which included Los Angeles-based partners Alan Jackson and Elizabeth Little. Proctor, Moynihan said, is a “scapegoat,” targeted by Read’s supporters and then fired by his department to appease the loudest critics and “the whims of politics.”

HAPPENING NOW: Fired Karen Read investigator Michael Proctor trying to get his job back. https://t.co/pJqdbaGHd8

— Boston 25 News (@boston25) August 26, 2025

Proctor’s firing came after a long, unpaid suspension from his job as a homicide investigator for the Norfolk County District Attorney’s office in Massachusetts that was handed down to him in the weeks after Read’s first murder trial, connected to the death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, ended in a mistrial in 2024. Proctor’s text messages about Read, in which he called her a “wacko cunt,” along with other infantile remarks, came to light during the trial. He was not called for her second trial, which ended in an acquittal on the most serious charges in June.

Stephen Carley, the attorney representing the state police, defended the department’s decision to fire the investigator by reminding the agency’s board members how Proctor described his own actions on the stand in Read’s trial.

“Distasteful. Unprofessional. Inappropriate. In poor taste. Juvenile. Sexist. Disgusting. Dehumanizing. This selection of words comes not from the public comment section of a website, an Op/Ed columnist or a protestor outside the Norfolk County Courthouse. No, indeed, one would be forgiven for not immediately recognizing this is Michael Proctor’s accounting of his own conduct in his case.”

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