Paula Borrows
speaker
132 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Paula Borrows’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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From Law & Crime, I'm Paula Borrows, and this is Karen. It would be an understatement to say that Michael Proctor's reputation preceded him. He was arguably the most anticipated and buzzworthy witness in the case of the Commonwealth versus Karen Reed.
In the two years leading up to this moment, Proctor had been portrayed by the defense and their supporters as the central figure in the cover-up theory, accused of planting and tampering with evidence, having close ties to the Albert family, and harboring a bias against Karen Reid.
And after being invoked in multiple reports and testimonies, on June 10th, day 22 of the trial, prosecutor Adam Lally called him to the stand in an attempt to clear his name. In the witness box, donning a navy blue suit, you got a sense that Proctor knew all eyes were on him.
In an attempt to loosen him up, Lally began the direct examination with basics from the early days of the investigation. Proctor describes seeing John O'Keefe's body for the first time in the emergency room.
After observing John at Good Samaritan Hospital, Proctor and Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Yuri Bukenik then made their way to Dighton to interview Karen at her parents' home. That's when he first observed the alleged murder weapon, Karen's SUV.
Karen's car was put on a tow truck for transfer to the Sally Port garage, where the defense had previously alleged Proctor and Buchanek tampered with the taillight. With that allegation in mind, Lally got right in front of it.
While Proctor claimed to have never come into physical contact with the SUV, another piece of evidence was seized that day he wouldn't be able to deny having his hands all over.
Suddenly, Proctor's direct examination took a hard pivot. His opportunity to settle the score on the allegedly botched investigation would soon be fully eclipsed by a nearly two-day deep dive into what came after getting that warrant signed off.
In an ironic turn of events, Karen's phone wasn't the one on trial, and Lally made both a bold and curious choice to dive headfirst into the suggestion made in the defense's opening remarks.
Presented with a thick stack of papers, records of nearly two years' worth of his personal text messages verbatim, Proctor looked like a deer in headlights.
External investigations, both internally at the Massachusetts State Police and by the federal government, are what brought said text messages to light. And they would completely change the course of Proctor's long-awaited time on the stand.
At the request of Adam Lally, Michael Proctor began by reading texts exchanged with childhood pals the night of January 29th, 2022, the night John O'Keefe died.
From this exchange, one could discern that Proctor was not only asserting that because the homeowners were law enforcement, that they would be impervious to further investigation, but that he'd also already made up his mind, mere hours into the developing case, that Karen was the culprit.
Legal analyst Rich Schoenstein says these texts made one thing crystal clear.
And the more he read from his own text exchanges, the deeper the hole that Proctor was digging for himself became.
The text had gone from bad to worse. In what world could this ever be perceived as appropriate behavior by a law enforcement officer? Lally wanted to know.
Lally also got clarity on just how long it took Proctor to arrive at his decision that Karen Reed was undeniably John's killer.
On the stand, Proctor may have displayed regret for his disparaging and inexcusable remarks, but one could argue that was merely hindsight because days following the death of John O'Keefe, he continued to text with his buddies, this time with pictures.
Karen Reed suffers from both multiple sclerosis and Crohn's disease, two chronic and debilitating illnesses. How would Proctor even begin to explain himself for mocking something so private and sensitive?
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