Was it the intoxicated girlfriend or the crooked cops?
A controversial murder trial involving the mysterious death of a Boston police officer starts Tuesday in Norfolk, Massachusetts’ Superior Court — despite an ongoing FBI investigation into how local authorities handled the case.
Karen Read, a 44-year-old financial analyst and college professor, is facing second-degree murder charges in the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe. His body was found lying in the snow outside a house in suburban Canton, 14 miles south of Boston, on January 29, 2022.
Prosecutors say Read and O’Keefe, 46, argued drunkenly in her car as she was dropping him off at a friend’s house party after a night of barhopping. They allege she intentionally backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe in a rage, killing him and leaving him to die in the snow.
But Read — whose powerhouse legal team is led by attorney Alan Jackson, who represented Kevin Spacey when he was cleared on sexual assault charges in 2019 — has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence and leaving the scene. She denies killing O’Keefe and claims she’s being framed by people in the suburban party house.
The case has gripped Massachusetts. Many local stories claim O’Keefe’s death has “divided the town” and torn it apart in the months since Read’s arrest.
Among those who support Read are a flamboyant local blogger known as Turtleboy, who first sounded the alarm about the case, and his many “Turtle Rider” followers, as well as some veteran lawyers and retired detectives who have obsessively parsed the investigation on X and true crime forums for months.
Most extraordinary is the ongoing federal probe of a possible police coverup that has turned into a parallel investigation of the murder.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” a source close to the Read case told The Post about the feds’ shadow investigation. “It’s pretty crazy and yet the Norfolk DA is going ahead with the trial and no one’s stopping it. To me the [prosecutors] are on a suicide mission.”
According to Read, she and O’Keefe had been drinking with his friend Jennifer McCabe, who Read did not know well, at the local Waterfall Bar. Around midnight, McCabe invited the couple to the home of her brother-in-law Brian Albert, a retired Boston Police Fugitive Unit Commander Detective, the 60-year-old Gulf War vet had appeared on Donnie Wahlberg’s TNT reality show, “Boston’s Finest.”
Read dropped O’Keefe off there around 12:30 a.m.There were reportedly around a dozen people partying at the home, though he only really knew McCabe.
According to Read, she then drove the three miles to his home in Canton, where the officer lived with his orphaned niece and nephew, and went to bed.
Read claims she woke up around 4:30 a.m., panicked that her boyfriend of a couple of years had not come home. She tried calling him, then phoned McCabe — who claimed to have never seen O’Keefe arrive at the party — as well as an old friend of O’Keefe’s, Kerry Roberts.
When no one had answers, Read says, she went to Jennifer’s house in hysterics and the two women, along with Roberts, drove back to O’Keefe’s home and then to Albert’s.
When they finally got to the Albert home on 34 Fairview Road, it was still dark outside — but Karen saw O’Keefe’s body on the lawn and ran to give him CPR.
The first responders who arrived on scene after Read, McCabe and Roberts found the body claim to have overheard Read saying “I hit him. I hit him.”
Read disputed that, telling ABC News last August: “I said, ‘I hit him?’ It was preceded by a, ‘Did,’ and preceded by a question mark. What I thought could have happened was that, did I incapacitate him unwittingly, somehow, and then in his drunkenness [he] passed out?
“I did not kill John O’Keefe. I have never harmed a hair on John O’Keefe’s head,” Read told ABC.
She was arrested on February 2, four days after O’Keefe was found, and charged with manslaughter. Four months later, the charges were elevated to murder. She is now out on bond.
But Read’s highest-profile supporters believe that someone in the Albert house beat O’Keefe badly, dumped his body on the snow-covered lawn outside — and framed Read for his murder. Their take is a complicated conspiracy involving the partygoers as well as Canton police, the state police and the DA’s office.
“The cops knitted this together like a tight cap,” says one local resident who is too fearful of repercussions to be publicly identified. “That poor son of a bitch was beaten to a pulp, he wasn’t hit by a car. This is a bad, bad crime scene and the people trying to pin it on Karen are evil.”
Albert’s family has been in Canton for generations, and locals say the clan has enormous influence and connections in town, as well as Norfolk County and with the Boston Police Department. One of Albert’s brothers is a town selectman; the other is a Canton police sergeant.
The lead detective for the state police, who are officially investigating the case, is Michael Proctor, reportedly a close friend of the Albert family.
“I am 1,000% sure that Karen is innocent and what we have here is a botched crime scene investigation,” Sean McDonough told The Post. A 35-year veteran of law enforcement, he spent 28 years with the DEA and seven years as a Washington, DC-area cop and crime scene investigator.
“The Massachusetts state police planted evidence to frame Karen — there’s no doubt in my mind,” McDonough opined.
Read’s supporters have shown up in such large numbers at various hearings related to the case that a judge recently declared the need for a 200-foot buffer zone keeping #FreeKarenRead protesters away from the courthouse.
Some of them, mostly Turtleboy’s followers, have gone overboard— heckling O’Keefe’s family in court and going on so-called “rolling rallies” to the homes of witnesses and also Proctor.
Voluminous and detailed analyses of that wintry early morning tragedy have filled Twitter, YouTube and individual blogs, as the amateur and professional sleuths focus on forensic details.
“There is so much reasonable doubt in this case that you could drive a truck through it,” said Melanie Little, a Long Island-based trial lawyer with 30 years of experience who has litigated hundreds of auto accident cases. She has analyzed the Read case over more than 50 hours of videos on her YouTube channel.
“It was totally mishandled.There’s no way Karen hit him with her car. But the crux of it is that [the Albert] family has been in Canton for generations. Most of the witnesses in the case are not only related but are longtime locals. Karen is not,” Little said.
Prosecutors say that both Read and O’Keefe had been drinking a lot when they left the Waterfall bar and Karen drove O’Keefe to the Albert house where Brian Albert and others were having an after-party. They say Read had been arguing with O’Keefe and when he got out of the car, she rammed into him on purpose and left him there.
Massachusetts State Trooper Proctor claimed to have seen Read’s SUV at her parents’ home in nearby Dighton around 4:30 p.m., some 11 hours after the discovery of O’Keefe’s body, and that it had a broken tail light, prompting him to arrange a seizure of the vehicle. However, phone records show that Proctor had called for a tow truck more than an hour earlier.
He also claims to have found pieces of her SUV’s broken taillight on the lawn near O’Keefe’s body and tainted with his DNA, many hours after the body was discovered.
Prosecutors say people at the party claim O’Keefe never entered the house.
Read supporter McDonough, who estimated he’s spent 15 hours a day investigating the case since April 2023, gave The Post time-stamped video evidence from the Ring camera at O’Keefe’s residence showing Read’s car’s tail light was intact at 5:08 a.m — more than four hours after the alleged murder.
McDonough said he and a team of retired law enforcement officers went over evidence and leads surrounding the case, and that he spent three weeks investigating the alleged broken taillight, even visiting numerous Lexus dealerships for comparison.
“I’m sure they planted it because when Proctor seized Karen’s vehicle, he did not take a photograph of the tail light that he claims was totally shattered with a large piece missing,” said McDonough, who is doing this all on his own volition.
McDonough — and the defense team — have said that no evidence linking Read to the crime scene was found until after the SUV was in the possession of the Canton police and the state police.
What especially bothers Read supporters were that O’Keefe’s injuries were above the neck and isolated to his right arm, and that the backs of his hands looked like boxer’s fractures — all seemingly inconsistent with a hit-and-run. He also had a two-inch gash at the back of his head yet there was little to no blood at the crime scene. Furthermore, they claim, marks on his arms consistent with dog bites.
Brian Albert and his wife ripped up their basement floor and sold their home, which had belonged to the Albert family for years, a few months after O’Keefe’s death, according to Read’s defense team. Their German Shepherd Chloe, who reportedly had a history of biting people, was re-homed not long after.
The defense claim to have found phone records showing that McCabe Googled the phrase “Ho(w) long to die in the cold” at 2:27 a.m.
Turtleboy, aka Adam Kearney, has written more than 300 blog posts and videos on the case, including a half-hour deep dive titled “Framed.”
Kearney has since been arrested and indicted on more than 15 felony charges involving witness intimidation and conspiracy. He served 60 days in jail for violating a protective order but is now free on his own recognizance with a trial date as yet unscheduled.
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I’ve always been a back-the-blue guy,” Kearney told The Post. “But the evidence in this case is overwhelming and it doesn’t point to Karen.”
Last August, Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey released a video in which he insists there was no cover-up and decries the “conspiracy theories” he said are being spread by Read supporters.
But in January, Read’s attorney David Yannetti told Judge Beverly Cannone, who’s overseeing Read’s case, that Josh Levy, the acting US Attorney for Massachusetts, had told all parties in a motion hearing that he “could not in good conscience allow this trial to go forward.”
Levy then took the extraordinary step of releasing more than 3,000 pages related to the federal investigation of the Read case to the prosecution and defense team. The majority of those federal materials remain under protective order from the public.
The feds have been tight-lipped about what they’re doing — but they convened a separate Grand Jury and called the same witnesses who testified in the Norfolk County Grand Jury.
Several sources familiar with the investigation claimed to The Post that the FBI has interviewed all people in attendance at the house the night of the incident, and at least one witness reportedly said O’Keefe had been there — information that, if true, would throw the prosecution’s case into disarray. The Post was unable to verify those claims.
Norfolk County DA spokesman David Traub told The Post that the DA’s office was “in the dark” and did not officially confirm the existence of an FBI probe. But he seemed confident about the trial going ahead this week.
“We’re looking forward to putting the evidence in front of the jury,” he said.
