Why does the role of Trooper Brian Tully in the Karen Read case get so little attention from the media? Michael Proctor was fired by the Massachusetts State Police, in part for running a biased investigation, but Tully was his boss and allowed him to get away with what he was doing (and not doing, investigatively). Proctor’s reports were written to Tully. If there were investigative gaps, that was ultimately Tully’s fault (or, perhaps more likely, Tully's plan). One might think that the MSP officer in charge of Norfolk County would have noticed the lack of pictures, videos, witness interviews and chain-of-custody reports, and ask why those were missing. One would also think that Tully would have some degree of knowledge about how police stations handle preservation of their videos, especially where there is apparently a 30-day overwrite. Where there was a short deadline for retrieving any missing or deleted Ring videos from John’s house, one might think Tully would have known that deadline.
Brian Tully should receive at least as much heat as Michael Proctor for the inadequate investigation. After all, Tully was involved in the case early on day 1. Tully began arranging in the middle of that afternoon for a scene search, but did not take action to secure the scene, then for some unexplained reason delayed beginning the search until 5:45 PM. Tully also arranged for Karen’s car to be towed past available MSP lots and to the Canton PD sally port, with the car arriving a few minutes before he allowed the scene search to begin. Tully then stopped the scene search after about a half hour, with not all that much evidence having been found, and again did not arrange for securing the scene. When many more taillight pieces were supposedly being “found” on various occasions in the days and weeks afterwards (all, perhaps not so coincidentally, by officers who were in the sally port when the car had arrived there), Tully never arranged for a follow-up scene search. If there was taillight planting at the crime scene, it is probably unfair to blame Michael Proctor, because Brian Tully appears to have played a much larger role.
When Brian "Lucky" Loughran told Proctor about the suspicious Ford Edge he saw at 3-4 AM parked exactly where John was later found, it was Tully who decided that this information did not warrant following up on. For investigative purposes, Tully completely ignored this eye witness whose information was not only potentially exculpatory, but could have also possibly led to the Ford Edge driver as another eye witness. This is probably why the average homicide crime solve rate in the country is 50%, yet in Massachusetts it's somehow 94%; Tully had decided who was guilty, and put blinders on for any information that contradicted his knee-jerk decision on day 1 about who was going to take the fall.
What should speak loudly to the media is that when a new MSP Colonel took office, one of his first actions was to remove Tully from his Norfolk County duties. The MSP Colonel unceremoniously demoted him, yet the Boston and national media barely mention the name of Brian Tully when the investigation is criticized. That needs to change, for whatever Michael Proctor did to get himself fired, he did with the implicit support of his MSP boss, Brian Tully.