Early on a winter morning in 2022, Karen Read found her boyfriend’s body sprawled frozen on his friend’s lawn. Bloodied and severely bruised, John O’Keefe — a Boston police officer — had ostensibly spent hours lying outside in a blizzard. Law enforcement pinned his death on Read, whose two-month trial went to jury deliberations on Thursday.
Over eight weeks of witness testimony, attorneys unfolded two wildly different theories of O’Keefe’s death: According to prosecutors, a drunken Read backed into O’Keefe while dropping him off at a fellow cop’s house after a night at the bar, knocking him out and leaving him to freeze in a snowstorm. According to the defense, however, O’Keefe died inside the house at the hands of his fellow officers, whom Read’s lawyers accused of orchestrating a massive cover-up: They allegedly beat O’Keefe and set a dog on him before dragging him outside and setting the scene to frame Read as his killer. In service of their hypothesis, the defense pointed to sloppy investigative methods by responding officers — who, according to CNN, collected some of their evidence in party cups — and offensive texts about Read from one state trooper to his colleagues. With a local true-crime blogger called Turtleboy fanning the flames, controversy over the case has reportedly torn the couple’s suburb in two. One newcomer to the community told CNN that residents familiar with O’Keefe’s death fall into one of two camps: “There is the ‘She is guilty’ side and the ‘There was a fight in that house’ side. There is pretty much no one on the fence.”
Here’s what we know about the case.
O’Keefe’s body was found on another cop’s lawn after a night of drinking.
On the night of January 28, 2022, Read and O’Keefe hit two bars in Canton, Massachusetts, with a group of their friends, according to CBS News; after several hours and several drinks, Read drove O’Keefe to the home of another police officer, Brian Albert, for an after-party. She didn’t go inside. Citing a voice-mail Read left for O’Keefe around 1 a.m. — in which she can reportedly be heard shouting at her boyfriend of two years, “John, I fucking hate you!” — investigators concluded that the couple had an argument, and sometime after midnight, O’Keefe got out of the car alone. About four hours later, Read began placing “distraught” calls to her boyfriend’s friends and family, according to CBS. “John didn’t come home. We had a fight,” she allegedly said on the phone with a woman named Jennifer McCabe, Albert’s sister-in-law and O’Keefe’s friend. McCabe and another woman went out in a developing blizzard to help Read look for her boyfriend. “‘What if he’s dead? What if a plow hit him?’” they recalled her wondering while they searched. “‘I don’t remember anything from last night, we drank so much I don’t remember anything.’” They allegedly also heard her worrying that she’d hit O’Keefe with her car, accounting for a cracked taillight on Read’s SUV, which she couldn’t remember breaking.
Ultimately, the women found O’Keefe’s body in Albert’s front yard: According to CNN, he was partially blanketed in snow, missing a shoe, and surrounded by blood splatter. Read ran out of the car to perform CPR, the outlet said, but couldn’t revive him. The firefighters who responded to the 911 call, meanwhile, reportedly told investigators that Read had admitted to hitting O’Keefe.
The autopsy did not point to a definitive manner of death. O’Keefe apparently died from “blunt impact injuries of the head and hypothermia,” though whether his injuries were deliberate or accidental wasn’t clear: He reportedly presented with multiple skull fractures that resulted in bleeding in the brain, as well as two swollen black eyes, wounds on his arms, and blood trailing from his nose and mouth.
The prosecution alleged that Read hit O’Keefe with her car and drove away.
Norfolk County prosecutors charged Read with manslaughter, motor-vehicle homicide, and leaving the scene of a motor-vehicle collision causing death, to which she pleaded not guilty. They believe Read hit him while pulling out of Albert’s driveway in a three-point turn, knocking him out and leaving him to die in the storm. The district attorney’s office pointed to security-camera footage from the bars the couple visited ahead of Albert’s party, alleging that Read had at least nine drinks before she got behind the wheel, according to CNN. One of the women who helped Read search for O’Keefe said she still seemed drunk, while both recalled Read recognizing O’Keefe’s body well before they spotted it, despite limited visibility from the storm and a stand of trees allegedly blocking it from their view. Shards of Read’s taillight were allegedly found at the scene, while at trial, first responders testified that they heard her exclaim, “I hit him. I hit him. Oh my God. I hit him.”
Further, witnesses for the prosecution claimed that O’Keefe never made it into the party. “From all of those people within that house that evening, none of them at any point in time observed John O’Keefe come into that house,” assistant district attorney Adam Lally told the jury in his opening statements, according to CNN. “They saw the vehicle pull away and they just assumed that they (O’Keefe and Read) left and that no one was coming.” Read, Lally argued, was drunk and “seething in rage” at her boyfriend as she drove off. Investigators would find O’Keefe’s hair clinging to Read’s bumper along with bits of glass, Lally said, which he believes to be the wreckage of a cocktail O’Keefe carried out of the final bar. “What the constellation of the facts and the evidence ineluctably demonstrate here,” Lally reportedly said in his closing argument, “is that the defendant drove her vehicle in reverse at 24.2 miles per hour for 62.5 feet, struck Mr. O’Keefe, causing those catastrophic head injuries, leaving him incapacitated and freezing him to death.”
The defense presented a more complicated theory: a murder and cover-up by Canton police.
At trial, the defense team spun out a very different explanation for O’Keefe’s death: that he had gotten into a “confrontation” with someone after entering Albert’s house, things turned “physical, and he was beaten to a point of unconsciousness,” Alan Jackson, one of Read’s lawyers, told CNN. “This was a cover-up … he was murdered inside that house and his body placed outside.” O’Keefe, the defense pointed out at trial, had scratches and marks on his arms that resembled dog bites; the Alberts owned a German shepherd at the time, though they subsequently rehomed it. Also suspicious, according to forensic experts called by the defense, were O’Keefe’s head injuries, allegedly inconsistent with the damage to the car and the speed at which it was traveling — they should have been worse, these witnesses indicated, if he had been hit at close range with an SUV going 20-plus mph. Albert and many of his guests, Read’s team emphasized, were police officers or people who had ties to the department; Read, a financial analyst and former adjunct professor, was a “convenient outsider.”
Bolstering the frame-job proposition, the defense pointed to the unorthodox investigative methods deployed by officers collecting evidence from the scene: According to WCVB, they got red plastic cups from Albert’s neighbor to sample the bloody snow around O’Keefe’s body and brought those back to the station in a paper bag from Stop & Shop. While a lieutenant confirmed at trial that such a procedure was not protocol, he said they didn’t have any other means of collection and therefore got creative. The defense also presented a snippet of the since-deleted search history from McCabe’s phone, in which she Googled “Ho[w] long to die in cold” hours before she heard from Read. McCabe, again, is Albert’s sister-in-law, though her lawyers have characterized the suggestion that she was involved as a smear.
“These people were not part of a conspiracy and certainly did not commit murder or any crime that night,” Norfolk County district attorney Michael Morrissey has countered the defense’s argument. “The idea that multiple police departments, EMTs, fire personnel, the medical examiner, and prosecuting agencies are joining in … a vast conspiracy should be seen for what it is — completely contrary to the evidence and a desperate attempt to reassign guilt.” Albert, for what it’s worth, maintained that O’Keefe never came inside, but said that if he had, he would’ve been “welcomed with open arms.”
Still, the sexist texts one investigator wrote about Read do look bad.
Another embarrassing element of the investigation came from Massachusetts state trooper Michael Proctor, a lead on the case who testified to sending some pretty damning texts about Read to co-workers and family members. On the stand, he admitted to calling Read “retarted,” a “whack job,” and “a cunt” in his messages, according to WCVB, and to making fun of her medical condition. (She has multiple sclerosis.) He also acknowledged that he’d written “no nudes so far” to his supervisors while searching Read’s phone, describing his comments as “very regrettable,” “juvenile,” and “unprofessional.” Still, he insisted his attitude had no bearing on the investigation. But Proctor also knew the Alberts personally, a connection the defense viewed as a conflict of interest.
The case has ignited controversy in Canton, fanned by the local blogger Turtleboy’s coverage.
For months, blogger Aidan Kearney — known to many Canton residents as Turtleboy, purveyor of Turtleboy Daily News — has been posting about the so-called “Canton Coverup.” Kearney appears to have authored over 360 articles on the case, coming down firmly on the side of conspiracy. Last October, he received charges of his own for the alleged intimidation of witnesses. Kearney has evidently made a habit of confronting people involved with the case in person and sometimes on-camera. He claims he has merely been exercising his First Amendment rights, but meanwhile, the theories he backs have gained traction among a certain sect of Canton’s population. Protesters dressed in pink have gathered daily outside the courthouse, holding signs saying, “Free Karen Read.” According to the Washington Post, an opposing group of “Justice for John” proponents have also assembled to challenge them, but it’s the “sidewalk jury” of Read’s supporters that seems to be making the bigger impression. One has reportedly been dressing like the judge presiding over the trial, who instituted a buffer zone of 200 feet to keep protesters away from witnesses that has done little to deter Read’s fans.
“She was unjustly charged and we are hoping she can go home today,” one of the defendant’s local champions, Vicki Walkling, told the AP following closing arguments. “This case has enraptured everybody because it’s unfair. It could happen to any one of us. Any one of us could be framed for a murder we did not commit.”
