Was it the corrupt police officers or the drunk girlfriend?
The Boston police officer’s mysterious death is the subject of a contentious murder trial that will begin in Norfolk, Massachusetts on Tuesday, Superior Court. The FBI is still looking into how the local authorities handled the case.
Charges of second-degree murder are being brought against 44-year-old financial analyst and college professor Karen Read in connection with the passing of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe.
On January 29, 2022, his body was discovered laying in the snow outside of a home in the suburban Canton neighbourhood, 14 miles south of Boston.
Prosecutors claim that after a night of bar hopping, Read and O’Keefe, 46, got into a heated argument in her car as she was dropping him off at a friend’s house party.
They claim that in a fit of rage, she deliberately backed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe, killing him and leaving him to perish in the snow.
But Read has entered a not guilty plea to charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter while operating under the influence and fleeing the scene. Read’s formidable legal team is headed by attorney Alan Jackson, who defended Kevin Spacey when he was found not guilty of charges of sexual assault in 2019.
She says she is being set up by people in the party house in the suburbs and denies killing O’Keefe.
Massachusetts is engulfed in this case. O’Keefe’s death, according to numerous local tales, “divided the town” and caused it to fall apart in the months following Read’s arrest.
Supporters of Read include flamboyant local blogger Turtleboy, who raised the first red flag regarding the case, and his devoted following of ‘Turtle Riders’, in addition to a few seasoned solicitors and retired detectives who have been meticulously dissecting the investigation on X and true crime forums for months.
The most remarkable is the federal investigation that is still underway and has evolved into a parallel murder investigation into a potential police cover-up.
Regarding the federal authorities’ covert probe, a person familiar with the Read case told The Post, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.” “It’s quite absurd, but the Norfolk District Attorney is moving through with the trial and nobody is standing in its way. I believe that the prosecutors are trying to commit suicide.
Read claimed that she and O’Keefe had been at the neighbourhood Waterfall Bar drinking with his friend Jennifer McCabe, whom Read was not familiar with.
At around midnight, McCabe extended an invitation to her brother-in-law Brian Albert, a 60-year-old Gulf War veteran who had previously starred on Donnie Wahlberg’s TNT reality series ‘Boston’s Finest’. Albert is a retired Boston Police Fugitive Unit Commander Detective.
Around 12:30 a.m., Read dropped O’Keefe off there. Though he was only really acquainted with McCabe, there were apparently about a dozen people partying at the house.
Read claims that she then drove the three miles to his Canton residence, where the officer resided with his nephew and orphan niece, and she 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.”
In August of last year, Read refuted that, saying to ABC News, “I said, ‘I hit him?'” It was followed by a question mark and the word “Did.” What I hypothesised was that, perhaps by accident, I rendered him incapable, and that’s when, intoxicated, [he] passed out?
“I didn’t murder John O’Keefe.” Read told ABC, “I have never hurt a hair on John O’Keefe’s head.”
Four days after O’Keefe was discovered, on February 2, she was taken into custody and accused of manslaughter. After four months, the accusations were increased to include murder. Now, she is free on bond.
However, the most well-known supporters of Read think that O’Keefe was brutally beaten by someone in the Albert home, his body was dumped outside on the snow-covered lawn, and Read was set up to be the murderer.
According to them, there is a convoluted conspiracy involving not only the state police, the DA’s office, and the Canton police, but also the party guests.
“The police officers stitched this together like a tight hat,” claims a local resident who is too afraid of the consequences to come forward. “That poor son of a bitch wasn’t hit by a car; instead, he was beaten to a pulp. The people attempting to link this crime scene to Karen are evil, and it is a bad, bad crime scene.
Residents of Canton, where Albert’s family has resided for many generations, claim that the clan has strong ties to the Boston Police Department, Norfolk County, and the town itself. Two of Albert’s brothers work as police sergeants in Canton and as town selectmen.
Michael Proctor, a close friend of the Albert family, is the official lead detective for the state police who are looking into the case.
Sean McDonough told The Post, “I am 1,000% sure that Karen is innocent and what we have here is a botched crime scene investigation.” He is a 35-year law enforcement veteran who worked for the DEA for 28 years and the Washington, DC, area police department for 7 years as a crime scene investigator.
“I have no doubts in my mind that the Massachusetts State Police planted evidence to frame Karen,” McDonough stated.
The number of Read’s supporters at various case-related hearings has been so great that a judge recently ruled that a 200-foot buffer zone is required to keep #FreeKarenRead protestors away from the courthouse.
Some of them, primarily those who support Turtleboy, have gone too far; they have heckled O’Keefe’s family in court and staged so-called “rolling rallies” at the residences of Proctor and witnesses.
As both amateur and professional investigators concentrate on forensic details, extensive and in-depth analyses of that wintry early morning tragedy have flooded Twitter, YouTube, and individual blogs.
“This case has so much reasonable doubt in it that you could drive a truck through it,” stated Melanie Little, a trial attorney with 30 years of experience and a practice on Long Island who has handled hundreds of cases involving auto accidents. Over the course of more than 50 hours of videos on her YouTube channel, she has examined the Read case.
“It was handled terribly.Karen could not have hit him with her car. The main point is that the Albert family has spent many generations in Canton. The majority of the case’s witnesses are not only family members but also long-time residents.
The prosecution claims that when Read and O’Keefe left the Waterfall bar, they were both heavily intoxicated. Karen allegedly drove O’Keefe to the Albert residence, where Brian Albert and other guests were hosting an after-party.
They claim that after Read and O’Keefe got out of the car, she purposefully ran him over and left him there because they had been fighting.
Around 4:30 p.m., or approximately 11 hours after O’Keefe’s body was discovered, Massachusetts State Trooper Proctor claimed to have seen Read’s SUV at her parents’ house in nearby Dighton. The SUV’s broken tail light prompted him to arrange for the vehicle to be seized.
On the other hand, phone records indicate that Proctor had made a tow truck request over an hour prior.
In addition, he says that several hours after the body was found, he discovered fragments of her SUV’s broken taillight tainted with O’Keefe’s DNA on the lawn close to his body.
People at the party, according to the prosecution, say O’Keefe never entered the house.
Supporter of Read McDonough, who estimates that he has been working on the case for 15 hours a day since April 2023, provided time-stamped video evidence from the Ring camera at O’Keefe’s home to The Post, demonstrating that Read’s car’s tail light was still in place at 5:08 a.m., more than four hours after the alleged murder.
McDonough claimed he spent three weeks looking into the claim of a broken taillight, even visiting multiple Lexus dealerships for comparison, and that he reviewed the case’s leads and evidence with a group of retired law enforcement officers.
McDonough, who is acting voluntarily, stated, “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.”
According to McDonough and the defence team, no evidence connecting Read to the scene of the crime was discovered until the SUV was taken over by the state and Canton police.
Supporters of Read are particularly troubled by O’Keefe’s injuries, which were limited to his right arm and above the neck, as well as by the appearance of boxer’s fractures on the backs of his hands, which don’t seem to be consistent with a hit-and-run. There was little to no blood at the crime scene despite the fact that he also had a two-inch gash at the back of his head. Moreover, they assert that he has dog bite-like marks on his arms.
A few months after O’Keefe’s death, Brian Albert and his wife, according to Read’s defence team, tore up their basement floor and sold their home, which had belonged to the Albert family for years. Not long after, their German Shepherd Chloe—who apparently had a history of biting people—was placed in a new home.
The defence claims to have phone records proving that at 2:27 a.m., McCabe searched for “Ho(w) long to die in the cold” on Google.
Turtleboy, real name Adam Kearney, has written over 300 blog entries and produced over 300 videos about the case, including “Framed,” a half-hour in-depth analysis.
Since then, Kearney has been detained and charged with over fifteen felonies, including conspiracy and witness intimidation. He was jailed for sixty days after breaking a protection order, but he is now free on his own recognisance pending an undetermined trial date.
Kearney told The Post, “I’ve always been a back-to-the-blue guy and I’m not a conspiracy theorist.” “However, the case’s overwhelming evidence points away from Karen.”
In a video released in August of last year, Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey disputes the existence of any cover-up and criticises the “conspiracy theories” that Read’s supporters are allegedly spreading.
However, Josh Levy, the acting US Attorney for Massachusetts, informed all parties in a motion hearing that he “could not in good conscience allow this trial to go forward,” according to a January statement made by Read’s attorney David Yannetti to Judge Beverly Cannone, who is supervising Read’s case.
Subsequently, Levy made the unprecedented move of providing the prosecution and defence team with access to over 3,000 pages pertaining to the federal investigation into the Read case. Most of those federal materials are still covered by public protection orders.
Although the federal authorities have not disclosed their actions, they called the same witnesses who testified before the Norfolk County Grand Jury to a second grand jury.
The Post was informed by a number of sources with knowledge of the investigation that the FBI had questioned everyone who was present at the house on the night of the incident, and that at least one witness had claimed to have seen O’Keefe there. If this information is accurate, it could seriously undermine the prosecution’s case. The Post could not corroborate those allegations.
The Post was informed by Norfolk County District Attorney David Traub that the office was not formally aware of the FBI investigation and that they were “in the dark” about it. However, he exuded confidence that the trial would proceed this week.
He stated, “We’re excited to present the evidence to the jury.”
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