Michael Proctor Takes the Fifth and Every Case He Worked Inherits a Question, No Death Penalty for Nick Reiner, a Wagon in Largo

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Thursday, September 17th, 2026. In Largo, Florida, prosecutors put a piece of video in front of a judge that they say shows a plastic surgeon walking out of a murdered attorney's law office, pulling a wagon behind him. and an officer testified about what that same man was doing with his hands in the back of a patrol car afterward. In Massachusetts, a man named Michael Proctor was called to the witness stand this week in a murder case and refused to answer. He invoked the Fifth Amendment. You know his name because he was the lead investigator in the Karen Reed case and because he was fired over what was found on his phone.

0:53 The question now is what happens to every other case he ever touched. And in Los Angeles, the district attorney stood outside a courthouse and announced he will not seek the death penalty against Nick Reiner, who is charged with murdering his parents. He also explained how he got there, which almost never happens. Let's get into it. Stephen Causey was 41 years old. He was an attorney in Largo, Florida, and he was married to a man named Michael Montgomery. On March 21st, 2023, he stepped away from his desk to use the restroom at his firm. Surveillance video recorded him going into that building in a red sweater. Nothing ever recorded him coming out. His body has never been found. Tomasz Kosowski is on trial for his murder in Pinellas County. He has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, and the state is seeking the death penalty. He is representing himself. He fired four sets of lawyers, waived his right to a jury for both phases, withdrew his own motions to suppress evidence, and withdrew every objection to being executed. On day one, he gave no opening statement and cross-examined nobody. Here is where the state has taken it since. Prosecutors have now shown the court surveillance video that they say depicts Kasowski leaving Qadzi's law office, pulling a wagon behind him. That is the state's central image.

2:16 Their theory has always been that Stephen Causey was killed in that bathroom and moved out of the building in something, and now they have put a picture of a something in front of the judge. Then there was the cruiser video. An officer testified about footage from inside a police car after Kosowski's arrest, which shows him sucking on his fingers and scraping his fingernails against his teeth. The officer's testimony was that this appeared to be an effort to destroy evidence. Court TV's headline put it plainly, scraping his fingernails on his teeth to clean them. I want to be careful with that one because it is the kind of detail that does a lot of work on an audience and not much work in a courtroom. A man in the back of a police car doing something strange with his hands is consistent with trying to remove biological material from under his fingernails. It is also consistent with a person in the worst hour of his life in custody behaving oddly.

3:10 Juries and judges are asked to sort that out all the time, and the honest answer is that the video shows what it shows, and the interpretation came from a witness the defense is entitled to challenge. Except that in this trial, there is essentially nobody challenging anything. Although there is one small development, and I am noting it because it is the first sign of life we have seen. Court TV reported that Kosowski raised his hand during his own murder trial. A self-represented defendant who wants to be heard has to do something, and apparently what he did was put his hand up like a student. I do not know yet what he wanted. But after a first day in which he said nothing at all, a man raising his hand is at least a man participating in his own capital case. The state's evidence, as laid out in its opening, is substantial.

3:59 Cell phone data placing his phone on the law firm's wireless network on days he had no reason to be there. A maintenance worker who reported a masked man peeking through the firm's window and hiding in a utility closet in the weeks before. A telephonic court hearing that morning that Kosowski called into and Kazi did not. Blood in the bathroom, Kazi's DNA in the trunk of Kosowski's vehicle. And at his arrest, what prosecutors called a murder bag, a ballistic vest with Kazi's blood on it, duct tape, a paralyzing agent, syringes, brass knuckles, a taser, two passports, and roughly $ 280, 000 in cash. All of it is allegation until a judge says otherwise.

4:43 And in this case, one judge is the only person who will ever say. There is a version of this trial that ends very quickly. No jury means no selection, no instructions, no sending anybody out of the room to argue. No suppression motions means almost everything the state has walked straight in. And a defendant who does not cross-examine is a defendant who does not slow anything down. Stephen Causey went to work, walked to the bathroom, and his husband has spent three and a half years without a body to bury. One thing worth understanding about why this case was ever brought without a body. Florida does not require one. What the state has to prove is that a person is dead and that the defendant caused it. And that can be assembled entirely from circumstances. A man who vanishes mid-workday, whose car stays in the lot, who never touches a bank account or a phone again, is a man the law will accept as dead without anyone producing him.

5:40 Those prosecutions are hard. This one is being tried against a defendant who has removed nearly every obstacle in the state's way. We are on this every day. Someone has to say his name. When we come back, the investigator from the Karen Reid case refuses to answer questions in somebody else's murder case. Marquis Simmons was 25 years old. On the evening of July 11th, 2021, he was shot and killed on Belvoir Road in Milton, Massachusetts. A man named Miles Omari King, who is now 26, has been charged with his murder.

6:25 He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and weapons charges, and he is presumed innocent. The lead investigator on that case was Michael Proctor. If you followed the Karen Reid trials, you know that name. Proctor was the lead investigator in the death of Boston police officer John O'Keefe. During Reid's first trial, he was made to read aloud in open court a series of text messages he had sent about the defendant. He called them unprofessional on the stand. They were considerably worse than that, and I am not going to repeat them here. He was relieved of duty, suspended without pay, and eventually dishonorably discharged from the Massachusetts State Police.

7:05 Reed's first trial ended in a hung jury. She was retried, and in June of 2025, she was acquitted of second-degree murder and manslaughter. She was convicted of operating under the influence and got a year of probation. Proctor has consistently denied doing anything corrupt. He told Dateline the accusations that he helped frame her were ridiculous and said there is not one piece of evidence to support it. Then, in June of this year, more of his communications came out in Reed's civil litigation. And that is when this stopped being about one case. Because Michael Proctor did not investigate one homicide. He investigated many. And defense attorneys across Massachusetts have been going back through every one of them. Which brings us to Monday in Norfolk Superior Court. Miles King's attorney, Rosemary Scapicchio, has been trying to get his charges dismissed.

7:57 Her argument is not that the evidence is thin. It is that the investigation itself was conducted by a man whose own messages, in her words, show he does not acknowledge black and brown. People as people. Her client is black. Her position is that you cannot have someone that fundamentally biased constitutionally investigate a case. She wanted Proctor on the stand to answer for each message, each photo, each voicemail. According to Scappicchio, Proctor's attorney had indicated twice to the court that he would testify and would not invoke the fifth. Then everybody walked into the courtroom on Monday and he did. Judge Peter Krupp held a sidebar proceeding to determine whether Proctor had a valid privilege and concluded he did. Proctor will not be answering questions. Scapicchio's reaction was that the whole world blew up. She said she came in that morning expecting to confirm everybody was ready to testify. Now, I want to be precise about something, because this is where people get it wrong in a way that is genuinely unfair. Invoking the Fifth Amendment is not an admission of anything. It is a constitutional right that belongs to everybody, including people who have done nothing at all. It exists precisely because a person can be truthful and still hand a prosecutor something that looks bad out of context. Michael Proctor has not been charged with any crime. Nothing about Monday means he committed one. It is also true that a witness cannot invoke it just because testifying would be

9:29 embarrassing or career-ending. There has to be a real possibility of criminal exposure, and a judge just found there was enough of one to allow it. Both of those things are true at. The same time, and I am not going to pretend the second one is not interesting. Prosecutors, for their part, filed a response acknowledging his messages were troubling and arguing they have nothing to do with the case against Miles King. They say they can try King without ever putting Proctor on the stand. And Scapicchio's answer to that is the question that this segment is actually about. She said yes, the Commonwealth could do it without him, and then she asked whether they should. Whether that is really seeking justice, that is the problem, and it is bigger than one defendant.

10:15 When an investigator is disgraced, the evidence he collected does not disappear. The scene photographs are still real. The forensics are still forensics. The witnesses he interviewed still said what they said. But an investigation is a series of choices. What to look at, who to believe, which door to knock on, which video to pull, and which to leave. Nobody audits the roads not taken, because by definition, there is no record of them. So when the person making those choices turns out to have written what Michael Proctor wrote, every case he touched inherits a question that can never be fully answered. What did he not do and why?

10:56 That is not a reason to throw out every conviction he was ever part of. Marquis Simmons is dead and his family is entitled to a prosecution. Evidence is not contaminated by the character of the person who collected it and a rule that said otherwise would let one bad investigator vacate a hundred legitimate cases. The workable answer is somewhere in the middle, and it is unsatisfying. Case by case. Hearing by hearing. A judge looking at each one and asking whether this particular investigation shows signs of the bias in question, or whether it is just a case a bad person happened to work on. But it is a reason why hearings like Monday's exist, and why they should.

11:38 The evidentiary hearing in King's case continues. A retired state police lieutenant who oversaw the Reid investigation is expected back on the stand, along with Milton police officers and a defense expert on bias. Proctor was also the lead investigator in the case against Brian Walshey, who is charged in the death of his wife, Anna Walshey. Prosecutors there have already said they do not intend to call him either. Marquis Simmons was 25 years old and was killed on a road in Milton five years ago. Almost every word written about this story this week has been about a former trooper. Someone has to say his name. When we come back, a district attorney explains out loud how he decided not to ask for an execution. Rob Reiner was a filmmaker. Michelle Singer Reiner was a photographer.

12:36 They were married for 37 years. On December 14th of last year, they were found dead in their home in Brentwood in Los Angeles. They were found by their daughter. Hours later, their son was arrested. Nick Reiner is 33. He turned 33 on Monday. He has been charged by a grand jury with two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstance allegations of multiple murders, and of lying in wait, plus a special allegation that he personally used a knife. He has pleaded not guilty twice. He is being held without bail and no trial date has been set. I'm not going to describe how his parents died. The medical examiner's finding is a matter of public record if you want it. On Tuesday, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman stood outside a downtown courthouse and announced that his office will not seek the death penalty. The maximum Nick Reiner now faces, if convicted of everything, is life in prison without the possibility of parole. And this is why the segment is on the show, because Hockman did something prosecutors almost never do. He explained the process. Here is what that process actually is, and most people have no idea.

13:51 In a capital eligible case, a district attorney's office runs what is essentially an internal trial about whether to ask for a death sentence. They weigh aggravating factors, meaning the things that make a killing worse. They weigh mitigating factors, meaning everything about the defendant's life, history, and mental state that argues against it. The most experienced Capitol prosecutors in the office participate. And in Hockman's office, defense attorneys are formally invited to make their case in writing and in person before the decision is made. That is a real proceeding. It has no jury, no judge, no public record, and no appeal. And it determines whether the state will try to kill somebody. Think about that against everything else on this show. A defendant gets a trial, an appeal, a post-conviction process, and years of review. The decision about whether he faces execution in the first place gets made in a conference room by the people prosecuting him, and nobody outside that room ever learns why. which is what makes Tuesday unusual. Hockman came outside and told us, Hockman said his office went through a rigorous review of the aggravating and mitigating factors and concluded capital punishment should be reserved for the most egregious instances and that this was not one of them. He said the decision reflects careful judgment about the appropriate path and does not diminish the severity

15:21 of the crimes. And he said he spoke to the family, Rob and Michelle Reiner had three children. Nick is the second. His siblings, Jake and Romy, made their views very clear. And Hochman said his office took those views into consideration in deciding not to seek death. He would not say what they asked for. That is the correct call, and I am glad he made it. Now, here is the context that makes this significant rather than routine. Nathan Hochman is not a district attorney who is opposed to capital punishment. He reversed his predecessor's blanket policy against ever seeking it. He is a prosecutor who will ask for a death sentence in the right case. And in a double murder with a lying in wait special circumstance against a defendant accused of.

16:07 Killing both of his parents, he declined. Put that next to the first segment of this show for a second because the contrast is hard to miss. In Florida, a man is on trial for his life and is actively dismantling every protection standing between himself and an execution chamber. He withdrew the motions challenging the death penalty. He has said he will present no mitigation at all. In California, a defendant's lawyers were formally invited to make the mitigation case before charges were even set, and a district attorney who is willing to seek death looked at it and said no. Same punishment. Two entirely different paths to the question of whether the state should pursue it, and in one of them, the defendant is the one arguing against himself. There is also a practical reality sitting underneath it. California has not carried out an execution in two decades, and the governor imposed a moratorium in 2019.

17:04 A death sentence in California today is, functionally, a different and more expensive kind of life sentence. That does not make the decision meaningless, but any honest accounting includes it. Nick Reiner's deputy public defender, Kimberly Green, called it the right decision and said her client has a serious mental illness and a long history of struggling with self-medicating. That is a defense attorney's statement, and it has not been tested. But it is the kind of thing that belongs in a mitigation file, and it is very likely part of what was in front of Hockman's office. One more thing from Tuesday, and it is a quieter fight. A grand jury indicted Nick Reiner in July, which put this case on a faster track and bypassed a public preliminary hearing.

17:51 That means the transcripts of those grand jury proceedings contain a great deal of detail about the killings that has never been public. The defense wants them sealed. Jake and Romy Reiner want them sealed, and Hockman read their position into the records. that disclosure of the details and evidence of their parents' killing would cause them additional trauma and harm. The district attorney's office is not opposing release. Hockman said his office does not believe unsealing would prejudice either side, and he is deferring to the court. Anyone who wants to oppose sealing has until September 22nd. The hearing is October 7th. So in two weeks, a judge in Los Angeles decides whether the public gets to read the evidence.

18:33 over the objection of the two surviving children. Look, I do this for a living and I'm going to be honest about the tension. I believe in open courts. This show exists because proceedings are public and sealing records is how bad outcomes get buried. The presumption should always be disclosure and the press has every right to fight for it. And Jake and Romy Reiner lost both parents in one night and have a brother charged with it. And they are asking one thing. That they not have to read the details in a newspaper. I do not think there is a clean answer. I think a judge is going to have to weigh a real public interest against two people who have already lost more than anyone should, and I do not envy him.

19:15 Rob Reiner was 78. Michelle Singer Reiner was 69. They were married for 37 years, and they were found in their own home by their daughter, who then had to live in the world afterward. Someone has to say their names, and it should not only be his. That's the show for Thursday, September 17th. If you listen on Apple, look at the top of your screen for the button that says Listen Uninterrupted. five dollars a month no ads and it covers thousands of shows across calaroga media 30 days free if you want to try it before you commit everybody who already has thank you and on spotify leave a comment on the massachusetts case if an investigator is disgraced what happens to every case he ever worked Do you throw them all out?

20:06 Do you keep them all? Or is there something in between that actually works? Tomorrow we are doing something different. Elizabeth Holmes is everywhere again, and there is a documentary, a revived social media account, and a clemency petition sitting at the Justice Department. We are going to go through what she was actually convicted of, and the four counts almost nobody talks about. We are in Largo every day. Matthew Exton is sentenced Monday. And a week from Tuesday, Lindsay Clancy is back in front of Judge Sullivan. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Florida trial, Tomasz Kosowski has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. The surveillance video, the forensic findings, the items recovered at his arrest, and the officer's interpretation of the cruiser footage are all the state's evidence and allegations, and the trial is ongoing. A defendant has no obligation to cross-examine any witness. A judge who has presided over this case for three years has found him competent to waive counsel and a jury, and nothing here is a suggestion otherwise or a diagnosis of anyone. On the Massachusetts case, Miles Omari King has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent.

21:21 Michael Proctor has not been charged with any crime, and invoking the Fifth Amendment is a constitutional right that is not evidence of wrongdoing and cannot be held against him. His dishonorable discharge followed an internal disciplinary process, not a criminal one. He is publicly denied acting corruptly. The characterizations of his messages in this episode are the defense attorney's arguments to the court. Prosecutors have said the messages have no bearing on the King case, and no court has ruled on the dismissal motion. On the California case, Nick Reiner. Has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is presumed innocent. The statement about his mental health comes from his deputy public defender and has not been tested in court. The district attorney's decision not to seek the death penalty is not a finding about guilt. The hearing on whether to unseal grand jury transcripts is scheduled for October 7th. This episode discusses homicide, family violence, and mental illness. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifelines.