Trooper Proctor took the stand, and everything about him was wrong. His oblong face was marked by anger—not that he seemed particularly angry at this moment, just that anger was his aura, and I could see that at any moment, he could blow. He was tall and built like a man who hits his wife: beefy muscles that his towering height diminished, so I knew there was more iron-pumping in Proctor’s schedule than you might assume if he were shorter, the muscles protruding more.
Proctor answered Read attorney Alan Jackson’s first question, and just three words in, I saw every fistfight he’d initiated with an unhoused person, every time he’d yelled the b-word at a woman while in uniform. He had that je ne sais quoi, that piece-of-shit vibe we can all spot in the distance, some lining up right behind it and others steering our paths to avoid the trouble.
“We’re gonna pin it on the girl,” Proctor said, reading his texts from the witness stand, at the command of Karen Read’s attorney. Facing Read herself and the jury, Proctor’s face—already permanently flush with his just-under-the-surface anger—turned maroon.
“As the neutral, unbiased Massachusetts State Police investigator into the death of John O’Keefe, your unbiased, objective statement that you texted to your high school buddies was that you’d been searching Ms. Read’s phone. And what did you tell the people on the text chain about your search?”
“Again, it was a regrettable joke,” Proctor replied, his face crimson.
“I did ask for an explanation, Trooper Proctor. I asked what you wrote.”
“I’ve been searching Karen Read’s phone. No nudes yet,” Proctor read from the pages before him, his long torso too tall for his seat, his face growing longer and purpler.
I settled in, excited to watch Jackson continue his masterful grilling.
“Burn him,” I thought. “Burn Proctor to the stake.”