Karen Read, pictured outside of the Norfolk Superior Court for a hearing in August. Her legal team tried for months to get her second trial dismissed.
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John Tlumacki/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman accused of running down her boyfriend, is going on trial for murder again, a year after her first trial ended in a hung jury — and threw her case into an even brighter national spotlight.
Read is accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, by backing her Lexus SUV into him and leaving him for dead in a snowstorm as she dropped him off at a fellow officer’s house after a night of drinking in January 2022.
Read’s supporters, however, allege that she is the victim of an elaborate cover-up by police. Her lawyers say O’Keefe’s law enforcement colleagues killed him, dragged him outside and framed Read for his death, including by planting evidence at the scene.
Read’s first trial, which began last April, divided their community and the jury.
It drew throngs of protesters on both sides — with Read’s wearing pink and waving “Free Karen Read” signs — outside the courthouse, past the 200-foot buffer zone imposed by the judge. Recaps and theories dominated Facebook groups and Reddit threads dedicated to the case.
The two-month trial spawned a separate case of witness intimidation against a local blogger, whose support of Read is prolific and controversial. It also led to the investigation — and eventual firing — of the state trooper who led the case against her, after he admitted to sending vulgar texts about her.
And, more than 600 pieces of evidence and 70 witnesses, it ended in a mistrial last July.
“The divergence in our views are not rooted in a lack of understanding or effort but deeply held convictions that each of us carry, ultimately leading to a point where consensus is unattainable,” the jury of six men and six women wrote to the judge after multiple days of deliberation.
The Norfolk County District Attorney’s office moved to retry Read on the same three charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene of a crime — to which she has pleaded not guilty.
Read’s attorneys have tried unsuccessfully for months to stop the second trial or at least have two of the charges dropped on double jeopardy grounds, arguing that multiple jurors came forward after the mistrial to say they had all agreed that she was not guilty of murder or leaving the scene but had been confused about how to deliver a partial verdict.
Intrigue in Read’s case has only grown since the mistrial, as she’s continued to share her story and proclaim her innocence.
Read has given interviews to local and national media outlets, and authorized a five-part documentary series now streaming on HBO Max. “A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read” reached more than 6.3 million viewers in the week after it was released on March 17, according to Investigation Discovery.
“I have nothing to hide,” Read told Boston 25 News in February. “My life is in the balance, and it shouldn’t be. The more information the public has, the more they understand what we already know.”
Read’s new trial is scheduled to begin on April 1 — likely under even more public scrutiny this time. Here’s what to know.
What do we know about that night?
A photograph from the Boston Police Department shows Officer John O’Keefe of Canton, Mass., who was found dead outside the home of a fellow officer in January 2022.
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AP/Boston Police Department
The central question of the case is what happened on that snowy January night in the Boston suburb of Canton.
Some of the facts are undisputed, as the Associated Press lays out. O’Keefe, 46, was a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department who was raising his niece and nephew. Read, now 45, had worked as an equity analyst and adjunct professor at her alma mater, Bentley University. The pair had been dating for about two years.
Read and O’Keefe went bar-hopping with a group of friends on the night of Jan. 28 and continued drinking into the early morning hours, according to a CBS News timeline. She dropped him off at a gathering at the home of Boston police officer Brian Albert shortly after midnight.
Between 4 and 5 a.m. the next morning, O’Keefe’s teenage niece called Jennifer McCabe — Albert’s sister-in-law and O’Keefe’s friend — to say he had not come home and wasn’t answering his phone. According to court documents, McCabe said she could hear Read’s voice in the background.
McCabe, Read and a third woman went to look for O’Keefe, and at about 6 a.m., found him lying unresponsive in the snow outside Albert’s house. First responders later testified that Read tried to perform CPR on O’Keefe.
O’Keefe was pronounced dead at a local hospital two hours later, with a medical examiner eventually ruling that the cause of death was blunt impact injuries to the head and hypothermia.
Police later say they found drops of blood, a broken cocktail glass and shards of a taillight at the scene.
What do prosecutors allege?
Karen Read, at left, watches as Massachusetts State Police Trooper Joseph Paul testifies about her vehicle, which is shown in on the video display, during her first trial in June 2024.
Charles Krupa/Pool AP
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Charles Krupa/Pool AP
The prosecution alleges that Read hit O’Keefe while making a three-point turn and pulling out of Albert’s driveway and left him for dead in the middle of a blizzard.
They say pieces of plastic consistent with her taillight were found at the scene, and a single strand of his hair was on the bumper of her car.
Court documents point to texts between the couple that paint a picture of a strained relationship in the weeks and hours leading up to his death. Investigators allege that Read left O’Keefe a voicemail around 1 a.m. on Jan. 29, calling him a loser and saying, “John, I f****** hate you.”
Prosecutors say Read told the women during their search that she saw a crack in her taillight and wondered whether she hit O’Keefe, and that she said she didn’t remember anything because of how much they drank.
An emergency responder testified that Read, after O’Keefe’s body was found, repeatedly said, “I hit him.”
In an August 2023 ABC’s Nightline interview, Read said she had phrased that as a question but said it was “not possible” she had hit him unintentionally.
Further complicating the story, both sides agree that McCabe searched online for “hos [sic] long to die in cold” but disagree on when that happened. Prosecutors say the search happened at 6:23 a.m. and 6:24 a.m., after O’Keefe’s body was found, while the defense says the search was made hours earlier, at 2:27 a.m.
Read was arrested on Feb. 1, 2022, on charges of manslaughter, motor vehicle homicide and leaving the scene of a deadly crash, to which she pleaded not guilty the following day.
Months later, a grand jury indicted her on charges including second-degree murder, which is punishable in Massachusetts by life in prison with the possibility of parole.
What does the defense say?
Karen Read’s pink-clad supporters cheered as she left Norfolk County Superior Court after a mistrial was declared in July 2024.
Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images
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Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Read’s lawyers alleged in court that O’Keefe was involved in a fight inside Albert’s home, where one or more of his fellow officers beat him up and dumped him outside.
They suggested the perpetrator could have been Brian Higgins, a federal agent who had exchanged flirty texts with Read earlier that month.
The defense argued that a federal investigation into the case shows that the “damage on the car was inconsistent with having made contact with John O’Keefe’s body,” and that his injuries didn’t align with having been struck by a vehicle either.
Read’s lawyers also pointed to scratch marks on O’Keefe’s arms, which they say were caused by Albert’s German shepherd during the alleged fight.
And they offered two alternate explanations for the broken taillight: Either Read broke it by hitting O’Keefe’s parked car later that morning — even prosecutors acknowledge that home surveillance video shows her SUV coming close to it — or “the Commonwealth broke the taillight after it seized the vehicle and planted evidence at the crime scene.”
The defense alleges that local and state police were involved in a cover-up, with Read’s lawyers pointing blame at all of the people who were in Albert’s house that night. Read herself made a similar argument in her first public comments over a year later, outside a May 2023 pretrial hearing.
“We know who spearheaded this cover-up. You all know,” she told reporters. “I tried to save his life. I tried to save his life at 6 in the morning, I was covered in his blood. I was the only one trying to save his life.”
Prosecutors, however, deny a cover-up and say there is no evidence that O’Keefe even went inside Albert’s home.
Read’s lawyers pointed repeatedly to sloppy policing, including leaving the scene unsecured for hours and not searching the house. Officers borrowed plastic cups from a neighbor to scoop up blood samples in the snow and took them back to the police station in a paper grocery bag, according to WCVB.
Lt. Paul Gallagher from Canton Police Department acknowledged during the trial that it is not standard practice to collect evidence that way, but said officers had to improvise in part because of the weather.
Why was the lead investigator fired?
Michael Proctor, then a Massachusetts State Police trooper, opens an evidence box to show the jury a broken taillight while testifying in June 2024.
Kayla Bartkowski/AP/Pool The Boston Globe
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Kayla Bartkowski/AP/Pool The Boston Globe
The nine-week trial was chock full of dramatic moments. One of the biggest controversies involved Trooper Michael Proctor, the lead investigator for the case with Massachusetts State Police.
In June, Proctor acknowledged from the stand that he had called Read a series of names — including “whack job” and other, more vulgar words — in texts to friends, family and fellow troopers. He wrote he wished she would “kill herself,” made fun of a medical condition she had and joked in texts to supervisors that he had not found any nude photos when going through her phone, WBUR reported.
Proctor apologized for his language in court, acknowledging his texts were “unprofessional and regrettable.” But he also insisted they had “zero impact on the facts and evidence and integrity of the investigation.”
Proctor also acknowledged he is friends with members of the Albert family, but similarly insisted that had no impact on the investigation. Read’s lawyers had long accused him of harboring conflicts of interest and not fully disclosing his personal relationships to multiple witnesses involved in the case.
The Massachusetts State Police confirmed during pretrial legal proceedings last March that Proctor was the subject of an internal investigation over a potential violation of department policy. The day after the mistrial was declared in July, Proctor was suspended without pay pending the results of the investigation.
Proctor was officially fired from his post on March 19 of this year — just two weeks before the start of Read’s second trial — for what Massachusetts State Police said was unsatisfactory performance and a charge related to alcoholic beverages, according to GBH News.
Proctor’s lawyer, Daniel Moynihan, said they would appeal the termination, calling it “a decision which was pre-determined months ago by the Department, following the mis-trial on July 1, 2024.”
Proctor’s family issued a statement saying he had been scapegoated and defamed.
“The [text] messages prove one thing, and that Michael is human — not corrupt, not incompetent in his role as a homicide detective, and certainly not unfit to continue to be a Massachusetts State Trooper,” they said.
What else has changed since Read’s first trial?
Karen Read supporters and counter-protestors, in pink and blue respectively, gather outside her July hearing at Norfolk Superior Court.
Kayla Bartkowski/Boston Globe via Getty Images
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Kayla Bartkowski/Boston Globe via Getty Images
There have been a number of eye-popping developments in the case itself, beyond Read’s legal battle to have it dismissed.
In the months after the mistrial, O’Keefe’s family filed a separate civil wrongful death suit against Read and two bars in Canton, alleging they overserved her. A judge granted Read a partial victory in November, ruling that she can’t be deposed in the case until her second criminal trial ends.
Read told Boston 25 News in February that she sold her home, moved in with her parents and liquidated her retirement funds to afford her legal fees, which are estimated around $5 million. She credited her supporters with donating to her defense fund and picking up her meals in public.
She said that while she initially felt “gut-punched” by the prospect of a retrial, she has embraced it as an opportunity for further preparation — and didn’t rule out the possibility of testifying, which she did not do the first time around.
“I’m not afraid of taking the stand,” she said. “And I’m clearly not afraid of speaking.”
There’s also the adjacent case of Aidan Kearney, a local blogger known as “Turtleboy.” Since well before Read’s first trial, he has posted hundreds of articles defending her innocence, sold pro-Read merchandise and raised money for her legal defense fund.
Prosecutors say that Read and Kearney communicated extensively in 2023, with a state police affidavit alleging that Read fed confidential information to Kearney in 189 phone calls lasting over 40 hours and other channels.
Kearney also filmed himself confronting witnesses in public and has been indicted on more than a dozen counts of witness intimidation since 2023, facing new allegations as recently as March. Prosecutors alleged that the two conspired together to intimidate witnesses during her trial, which Kierney’s lawyers have denied.
In mid-March, a judge granted the special prosecutor’s request to access data from Kearney’s two phones — seized through a warrant in his investigation — as evidence in Read’s trial.
Separately, just days before the start date, Read made the unusual move of adding an alternate juror from her first trial to her legal team, according to media reports citing court records.
“What happened to John O’Keefe was a tragedy,” the lawyer, Victoria George, told Vanity Fair on Wednesday. “But just because something is sad doesn’t mean that the person in the defendant’s seat is responsible.”
A version of this story was originally published in 2024.