Karen Read is an adjunct professor, a financial analyst, and girlfriend to a well-liked cop in Massachusetts, but is she also a murderer?
That’s the question jurors will have to answer now that Read’s trial for allegedly killing her cop boyfriend, John O’Keefe, has begun.
O’Keefe was a Boston police officer who lived in Canton, MA, since 2014 to raise his niece and nephew, who had been orphaned after O’Keefe’s sister died of a brain tumor and her husband died of a heart attack shortly after. Read, an adjunct professor at Bentley University, lived in Mansfield, MA, but had been dating O’Keefe since 2020 and regularly staying in Canton to help O’Keefe with the children, Boston Magazine reported.
On January 28, 2022, Read and O’Keefe traveled to the Waterfall Bar & Grille in Canton after drinking at another pub. At the Waterfall, O’Keefe saw some of his friends and joined them with Read in tow. Chris Albert, O’Keefe’s neighbor and the town selectman, along with Chris’ brother Brian, another Boston Police Department officer, and Jennifer McCabe, Brian’s sister-in-law.
The five chatted and drank until midnight, when the bar was about to close and Brian suggested they all go to his house. O’Keefe wanted to go, but Read was tired and tipsy and unsure about continuing the party. She agreed to at least drive O’Keefe to Brian’s house. After dropping him off, she decided to go home, but has said that she woke up alone at 4:30 a.m. and worried about where her boyfriend was. She didn’t have McCabe’s number, so she woke up O’Keefe’s then 14-year-old niece to ask her to call McCabe’s daughter, with whom she was friends. McCabe said she didn’t know where O’Keefe was, and called Chris Albert’s wife to see if O’Keefe had passed out at their house, but she said he hadn’t. At the same time, Read called O’Keefe’s friend Kerry Roberts, who also had not seen O’Keefe.
Read, McCabe, and Roberts met up to look for O’Keefe, with Read in the backseat of Roberts’ car screaming about how O’Keefe was missing, Boston Magazine reported. A blizzard had rolled through town the night before, and it was still snowing as the women drove in the darkness.
They drove to Brian Albert’s home, and Read immediately said she saw O’Keefe and jumped out of the car to rush to his side, even though it was completely dark outside. O’Keefe was lying in the snow, ice-cold, and Read began performing CPR. He had blood on his face and a black eye, while his hat and shoes were missing. McCabe brought blankets to warm him up and called 911. It was 6:04 a.m.
Read cried and repeatedly asked if she had hit O’Keefe. An ambulance took O’Keefe to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 7:50 a.m.
Braintree, MA – February 6: Hundreds of Boston Police officers line up to attend the wake for Boston Police officer John O’Keefe, III at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree, MA on Feb. 6, 2022. (Photo by Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Read, according to court documents reviewed by Boston Magazine, said that she spent the next three days traumatized at her parents’ house, even asking her doctor for prescription sleep medication. She hired attorney David Yannetti and cooperated with police when they questioned her about the night O’Keefe died.
Read then returned to her home in Mansfield and was soon arrested and taken to jail. She was charged with manslaughter for allegedly hitting O’Keefe with her Lexus when she dropped him off at Brian’s house. The original charges stemmed from the belief that Read accidentally hit O’Keefe with her car.
But four months later, the charges were increased to second-degree murder. Part of the change came from the allegation that Read admitted to hitting O’Keefe on the morning she found him, which was overheard by first responders and police.
Karen Read. Courtesy WCVB-TV/ABC, Boston.
Read told ABC News last year, however, that she was questioning whether she could have hit him by accident.
“I said, ‘I hit him’? It was preceded by a ‘Did,’ and preceded by a question mark,” she said. “What I thought could have happened was that, did I incapacitate him unwittingly, somehow, and then in his drunkenness [he] passed out?”
Read’s attorney, Yannetti, reviewed the charging documents with her and questioned whether Read really could have caused all the injuries to O’Keefe just by backing into him with her car. A medical examiner found that O’Keefe had abrasions on his right arm, two black eyes, along with cuts on his face and a laceration to the back of his head, CNN reported. He also had several skull fractures.
The charging documents also contained interviews with McCabe and Roberts. McCabe told police that Read had told her she had gotten into a fight with O’Keefe at the Waterfall and didn’t remember driving him to Brian’s house. Roberts said Read told her she was so drunk she didn’t remember the night before. Roberts also told police that O’Keefe showed her and McCabe her cracked taillight and said she didn’t know how that happened.
Police found red and clear bits of plastic near O’Keefe’s body, consistent with Read’s broken taillight. When police seized the vehicle, they found damage to the right rear tailgate.
This information led police to believe Read was intoxicated and backed into O’Keefe before driving away.
Soon, a tipster called Read’s attorney, Yannetti, and claimed that O’Keefe was “beaten up by Brian Albert and his nephew.”
“They broke his nose, and when O’Keefe didn’t come to, Brian and a federal agent dumped his body on the front lawn,” the tipster added, Yannetti told Boston Magazine.
An attorney for that tipster, however, denied Yannetti’s version of the tip to the outlet.
After this call, Yannetti and Read began looking into whether O’Keefe could have been killed at the party and left out in the cold to die.
Read believed that Brian’s nephew, Colin, could have been behind the attack, since, she told Boston Magazine, he and O’Keefe were in a feud dating back a couple years.
Then Read saw the photos of O’Keefe’s body and believed it looked like he had been beaten up and possibly even attacked by a dog. Brian Albert’s family had a German Shepherd.
Read then learned that the lead detective on the case, State Trooper Michael Proctor, was friends with the Albert family.
Read already believed O’Keefe was actually beaten up at the party, but now she believed Proctor was helping to frame her, including an alleged period where Proctor had access to Read’s vehicle and may have planted evidence.
Read hired another attorney – famous criminal defense attorney Alan Jackson, who had once represented Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.
Once Jackson joined the defense, they learned that Brian had gotten rid of his dog and sold his house after O’Keefe’s death. Months later, they found that McCabe had Googled “hos [sic] long to die in cold” at 2:27 a.m. – hours before she, Roberts, and Read found O’Keefe’s body. She made the same search again at 6:23 a.m. and 6:24 a.m. Roberts told police that Read asked her to make the searches.
A massive campaign began to support Read, reportedly dividing the town among those who believed she was innocent and those who believed she was guilty.
Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
In September of last year, the prosecution requested Read’s cellphone data, data they had been denied because it contained privileged communications with her attorney. The Prosecution argued that the cellphone could explain why Read’s arrival back at O’Keefe’s house wasn’t captured on his Ring camera system, or explain how surveillance footage showed Read driving toward the Waterfall bar at 5:11 a.m. and then away from it at 5:15 a.m. That surveillance data further showed Read driving toward Brian Albert’s house before going to McCabe’s home in the morning, leading to questions that she had already looked for and found O’Keefe’s body before going to McCabe’s.
But the prosecution also has other evidence that pokes holes in the idea that Read was framed, Boston Magazine reported. For starters, the “framed” concept relies on a feud between O’Keefe and Brian Albert’s nephew Colin, but sources told Boston Magazine that the issue that led to the alleged feud that Read pointed too actually involved O’Keefe and a different teenager, and that he never had any issue with Colin.
As for the Alberts getting rid of their dog and selling their home, a source told the outlet that Brian got rid of the dog after it fought with another dog, and that they had contacted a real estate agent to sell his house before O’Keefe died.
The idea that Proctor planted evidence in Read’s car also has issues. The district attorney says the time discrepancy in police reports was just an error and was corrected in later reports and filings. These reports, and the DA, show that Proctor was never alone with Read’s car, according to Boston Magazine.
Further, microscopic pieces of Read’s taillight were found on O’Keefe’s shirt, and the timestamp on McCabe’s Google search can be explained by a technicality. McCabe made the search on a search bar of a tab that was opened at 2:27 a.m., which is why it appeared she made the search before she ever heard from Read.
A medical examiner also testified to a grand jury that the injuries from O’Keefe weren’t from a fight and that data from Read’s car showed that it had reversed at high speed before striking O’Keefe, continuing to reverse, and then leaving.
O’Keefe’s niece also told police that Read’s story about her night changed multiple times the morning she went to look for O’Keefe. Read also reportedly told Proctor that she dropped O’Keefe off but never saw him enter the house, but she told Boston Magazine that she saw him enter the house and waited for him to tell her it was okay for her to join his friends. When she didn’t hear from him, she left.
The prosecution has also argued that evidence from O’Keefe’s phone showed Read called him around 50 times the night he died and left him angry voicemails telling him she hated him. It also appears that the “federal agent” referred to by the tipster who originally started the framing theory may have had a romantic relationship with Read.
Nevertheless, there is a federal investigation into whether there was a police cover-up in the case, according to The Boston Globe.
Sources told the New York Post that the FBI had interviewed everyone at Brian Albert’s house that fateful night, and that at least one said O’Keefe had been there. If that person is correct, it could corroborate Read’s story.
Even with everything known in the case, the prosecution has said it has evidence that has not been released yet, and will only be revealed during the trial. That evidence could sway the jury toward finding Read guilty, but only time will tell.