What Do the Cops in the Sandra Birchmore and Karen Read Cases Have in Common?

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This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:06)
According to a lawsuit filed in Bristol County Superior Court, a Canton police sergeant looked at what happened to Sandra Birchmore, a woman who, according to federal prosecutors, was allegedly pursued by officers starting when she was a young teen, and later killed by one of them.
And his response in a text to a fellow officer was to call her a deeply derogatory name, borderline re- yeah, that's what was said. Not outrage, not horror, not even silence. Contempt for a dead woman who was allegedly failed by people carrying the same badge he carried. That sergeant allegedly was Sean Goode, wasn't some outsider commenting on a case he had nothing to do with. He responded to the scene where Boston police officer John O'Keefe was found dead in Canton. He testified in the Karen Read trial. And according to the 87 page complaint, Read filed against the town of Canton in Massachusetts State Police. Goode had been exchanging messages with the lead state police investigator on that case. Fire tripper Michael Proctor, you know, the kind of guy everybody just wants to be around for more than a decade, a decade of messages. And when the subject of Sandra Birchmore came up, the response from a sworn officer wasn't empathy. It was derision.
That text is a window, not into one officer, not into one department, into a mentality officers who allegedly believed they could do whatever they wanted, say whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted, and nobody would ever check them on it. And the documented record across two cases, two departments and multiple agencies in the same corner of Massachusetts suggests they were right about that belief. For years, they were right. Remember all the phones that got destroyed mysteriously in the Karen Read case? Hmm, this might tell you why.
I want to be clear about something before we go any further. This piece is not about litigating guilt or innocence, not in the Karen Read case, not in the Matthew Farwell case. Courts handle that, and both of those matters are still moving through the legal system in their various ways. This is about a pattern of documented behavior, the texts, the filings, the decertifications, the institutional responses, and what that pattern reveals about the culture that produced it. And the question, I keep coming back to the one I think you're probably asking too is, is it still happening right now? Let's start with what's in the record. On the Karen Read side, Proctor was the lead investigator into the death of John O'Keefe. According to testimony and court filings, on the same day O'Keefe's body was found before the autopsy had even been completed, Proctor allegedly texted friends his conclusion about what happened. The investigation, based on his own messages, arguably started with its ending already written. In other messages exposed during the first trial, Proctor allegedly texted that he hoped Read would end her own life. He allegedly joked about looking through her phone for compromising images. He allegedly mocked her medical condition. After she was indicted, he allegedly texted his wife that he was waiting to lock her up. And that's putting all of that very nicely. This was the lead investigator, the person entrusted with finding the truth. On the Sandra Birchmore side, the documented conduct is different in nature, but built on the same foundation. Officers who allegedly treated the people in their orbit as less than human. According to federal prosecutors, former Stoughton detective Matthew Farwell allegedly met Birchmore through the Stoughton Police Explorers program, when she was 13 years old, and allegedly began pursuing her at 15
When he was her instructor, his brother William Farwell also allegedly wanted to get in on the action, had what has Stoughton Internal Affairs reports described as multiple inappropriate physical encounters with her, and allegedly sent her inappropriate messages while on duty. Their supervisor, Deputy Chief Robert Devine, is also accused of an encounter with Birchmore while on duty. Three officers, same department, same young woman. A program that was designed to build trust between the police and the community they serve. And according to prosecutors, she trusted them. That trust, according to the federal case, is what allegedly got her killed. Now broaden the lens a little bit, because the June lawsuit didn't just rehash what was already known from the first Read trial. According to the complaint, those earlier messages were, in the lawsuit's words, just the tip of the iceberg. The lawsuit alleges that Proctor and Goode exchanged messages spanning back to 2013, more than ten years of a communication that, according to the filing, include racial slurs, anti-Semitic statements and misogynistic language directed at everyone from the woman, or from the woman they investigated to elected officials. Everybody, everybody's, everybody's in there.