Karen Read either hit her cop boyfriend John O’Keefe with her SUV and callously left him to die in a blizzard — or she is the victim of a massive conspiracy who is being framed for murder.
That’s how prosecutors and Read’s defense attorneys plan to present their cases in a trial that starts today and is expected to last six weeks.
It’s a case that has had a bit of everything: A sympathetic victim in John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer who dutifully stepped in to raise his niece and nephew when his brother and sister-in-law unexpectedly died; Read, the attractive college professor; a sizable social media presence with followers on one side — “Free Karen Read’ — hurling insults at the other side — “Justice for John O’Keefe” — on an hourly basis; and the separate but parallel investigation by U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Massachusetts that interviewed many of the same witnesses and hired its own traffic crash experts.
You can watch the case unfold live on LawandCrime.com and our YouTube channel.
Here’s a look at how each side will likely present its case.
The prosecution
The incident in question happened late on Jan. 28 and into Jan. 29, 2022, when Read and O’Keefe decided to go out for drinks at Waterfall Bar & Grille in Canton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. It was there they ran into O’Keefe’s friend Brian Albert and several other people. After several drinks, Albert invited Read and O’Keefe back to his house a few miles away for an after-party. Read drove O’Keefe to the Albert house where she dropped him off shortly after midnight.
Video shows Read backing up and taking off. This is when prosecutors say Read hit O’Keefe with the back of her SUV, busting her taillight in the process, during the heavy snow storm. The video does not capture Read striking O’Keefe. Read drove home and fell asleep.
Shortly before 5 a.m., O’Keefe’s niece called Jennifer McCabe, a friend and Albert’s sister-in-law who was at the bar and the after-party, and said McCabe and Read needed to talk. Read was hysterical, and had told O’Keefe’s niece that O’Keefe never came home and wasn’t answering his phone, the niece said. McCabe went to pick up Read to drive her back to the Albert house.
Boston police Officer John O’Keefe was found dead in front of this house in Canton, Massachusetts, owned by Brian Albert, on Jan. 29, 2022. Prosecutors say his girlfriend Karen Read hit him with his SUV after dropping him off. Her defense attorneys say he was killed by someone inside the home. (WHDH)
They made the startling discovery. Under some snow in the front yard of the Albert house was an unconscious O’Keefe. Paramedics arrived and rushed O’Keefe to the hospital where doctors pronounced him dead.
“Could I have hit him?” Read allegedly said when she arrived back at the scene. “Did I hit him?”
What’s the motive?
A police investigation ensued. Because Albert’s brother is a town selectman, the Canton Police Department ceded the investigation to the Massachusetts State Police due to conflict of interest concerns. The case was assigned to MSP Det. Michael Proctor.
As detectives investigated further, they found the relationship between Read and O’Keefe was on the rocks, if not over altogether. In expletive-laden voicemails and text messages Read left O’Keefe that night, she allegedly said “you are f—— using me right now, you are f—— another girl … you are a f—— loser, f— yourself.” She went on to call him a “pervert” and yelled “John, I f—— hate you!”
O’Keefe’s niece and nephew told cops that Read and their uncle often argued. The two allegedly couldn’t even get along in paradise — during a trip to Aruba about a month before O’Keefe’s death, his niece told prosecutors, Read accused him of kissing someone else which led to a 20-minute argument in their hotel room. A group of about 70 people had traveled to the island nation, and a friend’s sister told prosecutors about an encounter she had with O’Keefe and Read after she gave him a hug when seeing him in a hotel lobby.
“She heard the defendant yell, ‘John, who the f— was that,”” the district attorney’s office said. After O’Keefe told her the woman was a friend’s sister, Read allegedly said: “‘I don’t give a f—!” She then yelled to the woman, “f— you.”
O’Keefe wasn’t the only one accused of being unfaithful. Prosecutors reportedly recovered texts that were “romantic in nature” between Read and one of O’Keefe’s friends. She also allegedly tried to kiss a friend of O’Keefe’s named Brian Higgins, saying she knew where all the cameras in his house were so they could smooch undetected.
Prosecutors also say they have physical evidence. A few days after the crash, cops recovered Read’s taillight glass in Albert’s lawn. Investigators also found trace amounts of the taillight on O’Keefe’s body and his hair under the SUV. Crash experts who testified before the grand jury — and likely will do the same at trial — say Read’s vehicle hit O’Keefe and his injuries are consistent with being struck.
An autopsy determined his causes of death as blunt force trauma to the head and hypothermia, but the medical examiner could not determine a manner of death. According to prosecutors, Read’s blood alcohol level was between .13 and .29, which is over the legal limit to drive of 0.08.
As such, cops arrested Read a few days after the incident. Then in June 2022, a Norfolk County grand jury indicted her on second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of personal injury and death.
‘I did not kill John O’Keefe’
Read’s defense attorneys say just about everything the prosecution has revealed about the case is wrong. Enter high-powered attorney Alan Jackson. He’s represented everyone from Kevin Spacey to Harvey Weinstein. As a Los Angeles prosecutor, he won a murder conviction against music producer Phil Spector in 2009. A judge gave special permission for Jackson to practice law in Massachusetts for the case. Also in the fold is David Yannetti, a longtime Massachusetts lawyer who also has prosecuted high-profile cases who later became a defense attorney.
Their defense case boils down to this: After Read dropped O’Keefe off at the Albert house, he actually made it inside. At some point during the night, an argument between O’Keefe and someone inside the house became physical. O’Keefe was rendered unconscious and the people inside threw him in the yard to die in the cold.
The defense team has not been shy about its theory of the case, even going on ABC’s “Nightline” last August.
“I did not kill John O’Keefe. I have never harmed a hair on John O’Keefe’s head,” Read said.
In the interview, Read described how she and O’Keefe dated during their 20s, but lost touch. They rekindled their romance after she sent him a Facebook message during the pandemic. She told him how she admired that he stepped up to the plate to take care of his niece and nephew. Soon the two started dating once again.
Read admits they had an argument on the Aruba vacation but put the onus on him. She told “Nightline” he became too dependent on her to take care of the kids and went out by himself on New Year’s Eve and left her alone with the kids.
“I felt very much taken advantage of,” she told ABC News. “He apologized profusely for what happened on New Year’s Eve. And he said, ‘If you can’t get over it, then you need to spend some time at your house. I can’t keep apologizing. I don’t wanna keep rehashing this.’”
She recalls the night in question like this: At the bar, O’Keefe told her Albert invited them back to his house but Read wasn’t sure whether they were actually welcome. Read said she and O’Keefe drove to the Albert house and she watched him go inside. She wanted to make sure she was actually welcome before she went inside herself and when she didn’t hear her boyfriend after about 10 minutes she became upset and drove home.
Read claims she cracked her taillight before the night O’Keefe died. Yannetti suggested at hearing last week that Read’s SUV taillight may have been tampered with while in a sally port at the Canton Police Department, saying about 42 minutes of surveillance video is missing. Prosecutors countered by saying dashcam video from earlier that day showed damage to Read’s SUV.
Jackson told “Nightline” that he believes the autopsy photos show O’Keefe was in a fistfight. He had two black eyes, a cut over his nose and defensive wounds on his hands, Jackson said.
“This was a cover up … John was murdered inside that house. His body was placed outside,” Jackson said.
If not Read, then who?
Defense attorneys haven’t said who got into the physical altercation with O’Keefe, saying at last week’s hearing that they had no obligation to reveal who that person is. Yannetti said Albert, his nephew Colin Albert and Higgins, an ATF officer who was at the home that night, had the motive, means and opportunity to kill O’Keefe. In legalese, it’s called a third-party culprit defense.
“It is not our job to solve this case for the prosecution,” Yannetti said. “It is our contention that they had the opportunity to do that but they failed, it is not our job to name a specific third-party culprit. We do not have to prove that Brian Albert or Colin Albert or Brian Higgins or some combination of them intended to kill John O’Keefe. We don’t have to prove that any of them attacked John O’Keefe such that he died. They have to prove that they didn’t beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Yannetti claims that Higgins had a “prior romantic interest” in Read and wasn’t expecting her and O’Keefe to show up at the Waterfall that night. Yannetti told the judge last week that they believe Higgins “coaxed” O’Keefe to the house that night and later destroyed his phone which is evidence of “consciousness of guilt.”
In an interview with Boston Magazine, Read said Colin Albert and O’Keefe got into a verbal argument in 2020 outside O’Keefe’s home. Colin Albert, then 16, used to cut through O’Keefe’s yard without permission and threw beer cans in his yard which ticked off the Boston cop, Yannetti said. Albert lived with his parents down the street from O’Keefe, according to Yannetti. Prosecutors said that Colin Albert left his uncle’s home on Jan. 28, 2022, before O’Keefe arrived but Yannetti said he doesn’t believe that to be true.
Yannetti described Brian Albert as “well connected” and “powerful.” The defense attorney said Brian Albert had “expressed hostility” toward O’Keefe.
Read’s attorneys note that police investigated none of the previous beefs or issues between the people in the Albert home and O’Keefe. This is where Proctor, the lead investigator comes in. Jackson said the Proctors and Alberts were like family. Proctor had asked Brian Albert’s sister-in-law to babysit his kids about 10 days before O’Keefe’s death, Jackson said.
Jackson has also highlighted the close friendship between Brian Albert and Canton police Sgt. Michael Lank, one of the first officers on scene after the discovery of O’Keefe. Jackson claimed Lank helped Brian Albert out of trouble after a bar fight in 2002.
Jackson said prosecutors never presented any of this evidence to the grand jury that indicted Read.
“It just wasn’t fair, that’s the easiest way to say it. It just didn’t give Karen Read a fair shot,” he said at a court hearing earlier this year.
Another piece of evidence that could prove key at the trial is what time McCabe made the Google search “ho[w] long to die in the cold.” Defense attorneys say their experts, including an FBI agent, discovered she made it at 2:27 a.m. — well before O’Keefe was reportedly found which would implicate her in the conspiracy. But prosecutors say McCabe actually made the search around 6:23 a.m., after the discovery of the body. They say the man who created the computer program that can trace what time the search occurred will testify for the state.
The federal investigation
Unbeknownst to either prosecutors or defense attorneys, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts in late 2022 began an investigation into the O’Keefe case, apparently about potential police misconduct. The Norfolk District Attorney’s Office caught wind of the investigation in Spring 2023 after some of its witnesses were subpoenaed to testify.
District Attorney Michael Morrissey called the investigation “unprecedented” and wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Professional Responsibility asking that they intervene and remove the District of Massachusetts from the case. Morrissey suggested the USAO may have started the investigation as retribution for the DA’s office’s perceived demotion of the U.S. Attorney’s wife who had been hired to work for him, but was moved to a different position after some senior prosecutors expressed concern she didn’t have enough experience for the job. That former federal prosecutor has since resigned.
Letters between feds, Norfo… by Boston 25 Desk
The Office of Professional Responsibility said it could not intervene. Earlier this year the U.S. Attorney’s Office released some 3,000 pages of grand jury testimony and evidence to prosecutors and defense. Most of it is under seal but Jackson at a court hearing last month did reveal a potentially explosive tidbit: Federal investigators hired an accident reconstruction expert who concluded that O’Keefe was not hit by Read’s car. Jackson said the expert believes that the damage on the car was inconsistent with hitting someone and O’Keefe’s injuries were not consistent with being hit by a car.
“In other words the car didn’t hit him and he wasn’t hit by the car. Period. Full stop,” said Jackson.
That could be important because while the prosecutors and defense will have their experts touting their versions of the case, the feds’ expert can be viewed as independent.
Could that be enough to give jurors reasonable doubt? Only time will tell.
Aidan Kearney, who writes the “Turtleboy” blog and advocates for accused murderer Karen Read, was charged with witness intimidation on Oct. 11, 2023. During an arraignment, a judge ordered him not to have any contact with the witnesses he’s accused of intimidating. (WFXT/YouTube)
Turtleboy vs. Towel
The publicity has spurred the judge to an enact a 200-foot buffer between the Norfolk Superior Courthouse and from where people can protest. People in “Free Karen Read” T-shirts have often protested on the courthouse steps before previous hearings.
The blogger known as Turtleboy has perhaps drummed up more interest in the case as anyone else. He has become the de facto leader of the “Free Karen Read” movement. He’s riled up his followers, known as “Turtle riders,” to take part in a 100-car caravans to drive by Albert’s home with him on a loudspeaker calling them “cop killers” and has told people to call a restaurant owned by one of the witnesses and order food but not pay for it.
Turtleboy, whose real name is Aidan Kearney, also showed up to a high school sporting event of one of the witnesses’ children. He proudly wrote of the incident on his blog, saying he got kicked out because he kept calling the witness a cop killer.
Kearney’s antics have landed him in hot water: He’s now charged with witness tampering and ended up in jail after allegedly violating his bond conditions. He’s denied any wrongdoing and said he’s merely practicing his First Amendment right as a reporter.
With Turtleboy drumming up quite the social media following, a side supporting the prosecution’s version of events has grown organically. Among the most vocal proponents is Grant Smith Ellis, known as “Towel.”
Ellis says the “Free Karen Read” movement is baloney. The evidence shows Read killed O’Keefe and Turtleboy is merely doing her defense attorneys’ bidding in the court of public opinion, he said.
Turtleboy and Towel even had a debate moderated by Law&Crime’s Angenette Levy. Towel declared victory.
“Yes, I entirely owned him and, at one point, I literally pulled out a copy of the Federal Rules of Evidence and said these are the reason #KarenRead brought Aidan #TurtleBoy Kearney in to do her PR,” he tweeted.
That was fun, @DoctorTurtleBoy.
Let’s do it again soon.
(Yes, I entirely owned him and, at one point, I literally pulled out a copy of the Federal Rules of Evidence and said these are the reason #KarenRead brought Aidan #TurtleBoy Kearney in to do her PR.#JusticeForJohnOKeefe https://t.co/DXc01TlxEG pic.twitter.com/sZxa2dgCfC
— Grant Smith Ellis (@GrantSmithEllis) April 11, 2024
In response to Kearney and Read’s interview with ABC News, Morrissey took the highly unusual step of releasing a statement about the case via video last August. In the video, Morrissey railed against the “harassment of witnesses” in the case. He said the people who were in the cop’s home that night were witnesses, not suspects as the defense contends.
“These people were not part of a conspiracy and certainly did not commit murder or any crime that night,” he said. “They have been forthcoming with authorities, provided statements, and have not engaged in any cover-up … To have them accused of murder is outrageous.”
Read’s lawyers accused Morrissey of violating the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct pertaining to pretrial publicity and asked Superior Court Judge Beverly J. Cannone to remove Morrissey’s office from the case.
The rules say, in part, that an attorney involved in a matter “shall not make an extrajudicial statement” about a case that would have a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter.” Specifically addressing prosecutors, the rules say they should “refrain” from making comments that could heighten “public condemnation of the accused.”
In the end Cannone declined to remove the district attorney’s office from the case, but said some of Morrissey’s comments “crossed the line” and were in “poor judgment.” She also rejected Read’s lawyers attempt to have the case dismissed.
Despite all the hullabaloo, prosecutors have remained steadfast that they believe Read killed O’Keefe. Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally said all the talk about relationships between the Alberts and investigators is just distracting from the heart of the case.
“What the defense is obfuscating from is the overwhelming evidence that was presented to this grand jury from a multitude of sources: 42 separate witnesses, 56 exhibits, over 1,400 pages of transcripts which clearly demonstrate and indicate that the defendant Karen Read killed John O’Keefe,” he said.
Did Karen Read kill John O’Keefe or was it someone else? Perhaps the jury buys enough of the defense theory that they have reasonable doubt. Either way, the path to the truth starts now.
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