The baffling case of Karen Read

Every so often, a true crime case comes along that seems to be a Rorschach test — where there’s so much complicated, compelling, and contradictory evidence on all sides that it becomes easy to believe what you want to believe.

That’s arguably the best way to describe why the case of Karen Read, which deadlocked a “starkly divided” jury after an intense nine-week trial, has hypnotized and polarized the city of Boston, and increasingly the rest of the nation. Following Judge Beverly Cannone’s declaration of a mistrial, the prosecution immediately vowed to pursue a retrial. That likely means heightened public interest and further entrenchment of the bitter camps in this case.

The prosecution alleges that Read, a successful finance analyst and adjunct professor who’s far from the “typical” murder suspect, killed her boyfriend, 46-year-old Boston police officer John O’Keefe, in the early, snowy morning hours of January 29, 2022. According to prosecutors, Read, who stood trial for second-degree murder and manslaughter, deliberately backed into O’Keefe with her SUV while she was intoxicated, then drove home, leaving him lying in the cold. O’Keefe died from blunt force trauma and hypothermia.

Among the main pieces of evidence in the state’s favor: Read herself asking various witnesses, “Could I have hit him?” the next morning, after awakening and returning to the house to look for him.

Read, on the other hand, alleges that she’s been framed, in a spiraling conspiracy that began with a party full of witnesses lying about what happened and soon encompassing the entire Boston Police Department (BPD) and the prosecutor’s office. While from one standpoint, Read’s defense may be grasping at straws in its attempt to paint the case as a frame-up; from another, it’s the kind of police work Bostonians — and those in other cities across the country — have come to expect.

The trial has developed from what initially seemed to investigators like an open-and-shut case into a reckoning with a criminal justice system the public no longer trusts.

Read claims that after she and O’Keefe spent until around midnight drinking at a local bar, she dropped O’Keefe off to hang out at the home of retired BPD officer Brian Albert. Several people who were either members of the BPD or affiliated with the local justice system were also at the house, but no one who was there corroborates her story. Not one of them says they saw O’Keefe enter the building; instead, they all claim they had no idea O’Keefe had even arrived at the house until his body was located outside of it in the snow the next morning.

Read, however, maintains that she watched O’Keefe go into the house before she left the scene. She alleges that O’Keefe must have been injured inside the house, that the partygoers staged the crime scene to look like a hit-and-run, and that they have lied about it ever since. Her defense argues that the injuries O’Keefe sustained resulted from a physical fight and a dog attack from a German shepherd mix Albert owned.

The defense alleges the investigation was hindered from the start by a failure to treat the Albert house as a possible crime scene and a failure to treat the witnesses as possible persons of interest; two of the primary investigative team members also have personal links to the witnesses. Further undermining the police were the bizarre methods they used, including using leaf blowers to clear away snow (and potentially evidence) at the crime scene, and using solo cups and grocery bags to collect evidence. Add to that a parade of unprofessional conduct and comments from officers, particularly from a lead investigator who was fired immediately after the mistrial, and the case has morphed into a genuine public scandal.

Throughout the investigation and the widely publicized trial, a highly vocal contingent of supporters from Boston and beyond have made Read into a true crime cause célèbre; one Facebook group supporting her has over 50,000 members. Thanks to a decade of thriving interest in true crime, trial-watchers are hyper-vigilant to potential injustices and the shortcomings of law enforcement. In the eyes of many, the case has become a referendum on corrupt cops — a subject Bostonians know all too well after decades of police misconduct ranging from cover-ups to kickbacks.

Read’s relentless conspiracy defense has been driven by incendiary star lawyer Alan Jackson, a former prosecutor turned defense attorney who’s defended both Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. O’Keefe, the victim, has been fully overshadowed by the conversation around the case, with Read’s supporters allegedly harassing his family members.

This polarization outside of the courtroom seems to have been reflected in the jury. After deliberating for less than a week, the jury tried repeatedly to declare themselves deadlocked to Judge Cannone, sending her notes to that effect. “We find ourselves deeply divided by fundamental differences in our opinions and state of mind,” a note from the day of the mistrial read, citing “deeply held convictions that each of us carry, ultimately leading to a point where consensus is unattainable.”

A deadlocked or hung jury results in a mistrial, after which the prosecution has to decide whether to retry the case. In this case, the prosecution seems intent on a retrial — despite the many, many problems with their arguments.

Despite presenting over 70 witnesses at trial, the prosecution’s primary evidence against Read remains largely circumstantial — meaning there’s very little direct or physical evidence backing their theory of what happened — and Read’s defense has offered up alternative theories for much of it. The timeline of the evening goes like this: After leaving a bar in Canton, Massachusetts, Read — whose blood alcohol content was likely over the legal limit — drove O’Keefe to Albert’s house. There, she either saw him safely inside or backed over him in the snow. In either event, she left the scene and drove home.

Afterward, she left him an angry voicemail declaring, “John, I fucking hate you.” Throughout the night, Read called O’Keefe and numerous other people. Early the next morning, she met up with two friends, including major prosecution witness Jennifer McCabe, who is also Albert’s sister-in-law, and drove back to Albert’s house, where they discovered O’Keefe in the snow. According to witnesses, Read repeatedly asked whether O’Keefe could have been hit by a snow plow, or whether she could have hit him. Multiple first responders also testified to hearing Read repeatedly exclaiming that she hit him, though none of them noted this in their initial reports from the scene.

This alleged repeated refrain of, “Could I have hit him?” and “I hit him,” was one the prosecution leaned on heavily as an argument for guilt. However, per witness accounts, Read also appeared to have no clear idea what had happened to O’Keefe.

What concrete evidence the prosecution did offer was hotly contested inside as well as outside the courtroom. One crucial piece: a broken taillight. An investigator who interviewed Read at her parents' house that night reported seeing “some damage” to the right rear light of Read’s SUV; he testified that it was allegedly “cracked and a piece was missing.”

Nearly three weeks after O’Keefe’s death, the state’s lead investigator, Michael Proctor, allegedly located more fragments of a tail light at the crime scene and transported the evidence to the crime lab. Prosecutors say they found minute traces of O’Keefe’s DNA on those fragments, as well as tiny particles from the tail light on some of O’Keefe’s clothes. Yet the defense hammered home the enormous delay in locating what would have been an incredibly significant piece of evidence, as well as the unreliability of evidence suddenly unearthed by Proctor.

That’s because Proctor has multiple personal ties to both the victim and the witnesses. In texts he sent a day after the investigation began, he used a misogynistic slur to refer to Read, made it clear he thought Read’s guilt was obvious from the beginning, and even texted his sister that he hoped Read would kill herself. The defense alleges Proctor helped frame Read for the murder, deliberately damaging her tail light in order to claim the damage was caused when she hit O’Keefe with her car. In fact, a mysteriously altered video of Read’s car that purportedly showed the damage made it all the way to trial before the defense pointed out that the image was misleadingly altered — a “mirror” video with the tail light in question inverted from its actual position.

It doesn’t help any of these optics that Proctor’s sister texted him that Albert’s wife Julie wanted to send Proctor “a gift” after the investigation was over. Proctor protested on the stand that none of these texts impacted the integrity of the police investigation, but given Monday’s mistrial, some jurors may have disagreed with him. They evidently weren’t alone: State police announced that they had fired Proctor immediately after the mistrial based on “information about serious misconduct [that] emerged in testimony” — an extraordinarily rare move on their part.

Other facts of the case that on their surface might have supported the prosecution proved murkier on closer inspection. O’Keefe died of blunt-force trauma from a skull fracture and hypothermia, according to the medical examiner. He also had gashes on his arms that seemed unlikely to have been made from a car impact. The defense alleged these resulted from a dog attack on O’Keefe inside the house. O’Keefe also lacked many of the injuries you’d expect to see from a car impact, such as broken bones or significant bruises.

The prosecution’s witnesses are also controversial. In addition to Read's former friend McCabe, who had ties to both O’Keefe and the Alberts, the party attendees included several people that Read’s defense argued should have been investigated by police before taking the stand. Among them: Brian Higgins, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who’d been sporadically flirting with Read in the lead-up to O’Keefe’s death, and Albert’s son Colin, who as a teenager had made violent threats against other teens.

Many of the witnesses who were at the party, including McCabe and the Alberts, exchanged a litany of phone calls to one another throughout the time O’Keefe supposedly lay on the lawn, per phone records. Several later testified that the calls were “butt dials,” placed randomly and by complete mistake. As circumstances go, it’s eyebrow-raising, to say the least.

Despite all the problems with the prosecution’s case, the strongest evidence for the defense is likewise fully debatable. One of the defense’s key witnesses was a veteran snowplow driver who made multiple trips past the Alberts’ house during the time O’Keefe was allegedly wounded in the snow, yet claimed he saw no body lying anywhere on the lawn. However, snow impedes visibility, even with a bright snowplow light, and eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.

Another piece of crucial evidence that many Read supporters consider a “smoking gun” for the defense has also been fully debunked by prosecution analysts. At issue: Two searches McCabe made on her cellphone at some point during the early morning hours surrounding O’Keefe’s death, including a misspelled query, “Hos long to die in cold.” The prosecution claims, and McCabe testified, that she made the searches around six in the morning when she and Read found O’Keefe lying in the snow. The official cellphone records for the search, however, show the timestamp for the search at 2:27 am.

The implication is that if McCabe searched for this then, she was part of a conspiracy to stage the scene and frame Read. But McCabe claims she merely opened that tab on her phone browser at 2:27 am, left it open, and searched the phrase hours later, after she and Read found him together. Multiple data analysts for the prosecution corroborated this interpretation of the cellphone data. Still, the defense scored a point in their favor by noting that their expert witness, who argued the search occurred at 2:27, arrived at his conclusion by using a method developed by one of the prosecution’s witnesses.

Other findings that leaned toward the defense included O’Keefe’s fitness tracker app, which showed him taking about 80 steps around the time Reed claimed she dropped him off. Yet here again, nothing about the timeline or O’Keefe’s activity is clear or corroborated by witnesses. The defense’s argument that O’Keefe was attacked inside the house, including by the family dog, is also speculative and unsupported by much evidence — which they claim is because the police never properly investigated. A medical expert testified on the stand in support of the dog bite theory, but forensic bite mark evidence is incredibly unreliable and has been more or less fully debunked, at least in cases involving humans.

So where does all of this leave us?

Ironically, outrage for the police’s conduct in this case has united Bostonians across political lines, with community activists joining the likes of local conservative pundit Howie Carr. Meanwhile, hundreds of Read supporters traveled from across the country to protest for her freedom outside the courthouse. They sometimes clashed with O’Keefe’s family and their supporters, who argue Read’s defense has turned a clear case of murder into a distorted media circus and fueled unfounded accusations of conspiracy.

The mistrial means that the narrative of the case has also expanded.

On the one hand, popular resistance to the idea that a successful, articulate white woman could commit such a brutal murder might be fueling a good deal of the support for Read — which speaks to lots of assumptions about how we view class, privilege, and who gets to be seen as a victim. We’re accustomed, after all, to seeing women like Read in the role of the victim, no matter that she is the one on trial here. When it comes to true crime, the media gives more attention and sympathy to attractive middle-class white women than it does to male victims, much less victims who are poor or people of color.

On the other hand, Boston police are famously corrupt, with a long history of bribery, fraud, and racial bias. The Read case is being compared to another possible homicide involving a horrifying allegation of police conspiracy in nearby Stoughton, but this isn't just a regional issue. American cities are frequently beset by actual, proven police corruption. Boston isn’t unique. What does feel unique is the amount of public attention and scrutiny being given to the role of potential corruption in such a high-profile trial. It all adds up to what may well be a hopelessly irreconcilable pursuit of truth.