By Rebecca Armitage and Lucia Stein, ABC
Massachusetts woman Karen Read.
Photo: Screenshot / NBC
What started with too many drinks at a bar in the small US town of Canton during a snowstorm, has ended in an intense legal battle and allegations of a sweeping conspiracy among law enforcement.
On 28 January 2022, a severely wounded police officer was found close to death on the front lawn of a friend’s house in the midst of a blizzard.
No-one can agree how John O’Keefe got there.
Prosecutors in the state of Massachusetts allege that the off-duty Boston police officer was run down by his girlfriend during an argument.
But Karen Read insists she dropped John off at the house so he could keep drinking with his friends, and while she was angry at him, she did not mow him down with her car.
When she returned a few hours later to pick him up, she claims to have found him wounded, hypothermic and unconscious beneath a growing snow bank.
In a case that has scandalised a small town, fascinated true crime sleuths, and lured Netflix producers to Canton, Karen has emerged as a divisive figure.
Her supporters say she is the victim of an elaborate cover-up intended to frame her for the events of that night.
In court, her defence lawyers claimed that while Karen was asleep at home, her boyfriend was beaten by his own friends, attacked by a dog, and left for dead as heavy snow began to fall.
“I think things went too far. It was late, there was alcohol involved, but they’re all family and there’s many of them involved,” she told ABC America’s Nightline last year.
But where Karen’s supporters see conspiracy, her detractors point to a litany of evidence they believe proves she ran over her boyfriend: A broken tail-light on her car, blood in the snow and a controversial “confession” made at the scene.
Pandemic romance ends in tragedy
In the spring of 2020, during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, John O’Keefe performed a classic ex-lover’s move: he slid into Karen Read’s DMs with an innocuous message asking how she was doing.
Karen first met John at a birthday party in 2004 and the pair hit it off. They exchanged numbers and engaged in a brief fling before the romance petered out a few months later.
More than a decade elapsed before the two old flames rekindled their romance through social media. Their relationship progressed at hyper speed during a time of uncertainty, when social interactions were highly restricted and governed.
John was a single parent working at the Sex Offender Registry Information unit. He’d become a guardian to his niece Kalyey and nephew Patrick after being dealt the double blow of losing his sister to cancer and his brother-in-law after a heart attack.
Karen, who had separately battled her own serious health problems, was drawn to the O’Keefes and John’s selflessness in looking after his relatives.
An equity analyst at Fidelity Investments, she worked from home during the pandemic and offered to help the children as they did their schooling from the kitchen table.
Photographs of the pair shared with media outlets show them smiling and cuddling at bars, in lakes and on family trips.
But the relationship was not always picture perfect. Karen claimed she and John argued over who performed the lion’s share of the childcare and about their parental decision making.
The story Karen Read told of one awful night in January 2022 launched a drama that endures…
Watch tonight at 9/8c on an all-new 2-hour #Dateline mystery. pic.twitter.com/ZNsZK8ISmr
— Dateline NBC (@DatelineNBC) October 18, 2024
Tensions came to a head on a New Year’s vacation in Aruba. The couple got into an argument before John became “incoherently drunk”, leaving her alone to look after his niece and nephew.
“That was rough. I felt very much taken advantage of. He apologised profusely for what happened on New Year’s Eve,” she told Nightline.
“He said if you can’t get over it, you need to spend some time at yours. He said ‘I can’t keep apologising, I don’t want to keep rehashing this.'”
A few weeks later, John was pronounced dead in hospital after he was found on his friend’s front lawn, kicking off a police investigation into who killed him.
A crime scene ‘confession’
Prosecutors allege that shortly after midnight, Karen and John left the Waterfall Bar and Grill and made their way to a gathering at fellow officer Brian Albert’s house in a hilly neighbourhood in Canton.
They claim the couple got into a fight on the car ride over. Statements from witnesses suggest John had told Karen he wanted to break up.
Text messages and voicemails between the couple were also presented as proof of tensions in their relationship.
At 1.00am, Read allegedly left O’Keefe a voicemail that said: “… you are a f****** loser, f*** yourself” and “John, I f******* hate you.”
As he got out of the black Lexus SUV, prosecutors claim Read accelerated in reverse, deliberately hitting her boyfriend before fleeing the scene.
A confession uttered shortly after Karen discovered John’s body later that morning immediately identified her as a suspect.
A Canton firefighter told her trial he heard her say: “I hit him, I hit him. Oh my God, I hit him.”
Three days after the death, Karen Read was arrested as a suspect and charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter while driving under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing injury or death.
But Karen has denied killing John, claiming that in her shock, she had not uttered a confession, but had instead asked a question: “Had I hit him?”
In her account of what happened that day, she dropped her boyfriend off at the Albert house and waited for him for 10 minutes to see if he safely made it inside before growing frustrated and leaving.
She then drove over to John’s house, called him a couple of times to check in and fell asleep on his couch.
When she woke four hours later and discovered John had not returned home, she grew worried and made a series of calls to his friends to find him.
But when she realised no-one had seen her boyfriend and with his phone ringing out, she went with two friends back to where she dropped him off and found him injured and bleeding in the snow.
The trial of Karen Read
When paramedics descended on 34 Fairview Road on 29 January, they found three women waving at them in blizzard-like conditions.
Among them was Karen Read, who became hysterical and climbed over her boyfriend’s body to try to keep him warm.
Someone on the lawn googled: “hos (sic) long to die in cold.”
Prosecutors and defence attorneys disagree about the time the Google inquiry was made.
One side argued the search was performed at Karen’s request between 6.00am and 6.30am, shortly after John’s body was found.
But Karen’s defence team argues it was made at 2.30am, hours before her boyfriend was discovered. They used it to support their claim another party may have been behind John’s death.
It was not the only hotly contested issue in Karen Read’s trial, which began on 16 April and included more than 70 witnesses.
She was charged both with intentional homicide and with recklessness for driving drunk and accidentally killing her boyfriend.
It struck law experts watching the case as odd that two somewhat conflicting theories had been put forward.
“It feels like it should be one or the other in terms of the theory, either she was really angry with him and they got into a fight and she did this on purpose, or she honestly was so drunk that it was just a huge mistake,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University.
The most crucial piece of primary evidence revolved around a broken tail light, which was used to support claims Karen had backed into her boyfriend in a fit of anger.
Police reported finding broken pieces of a tail light near where John O’Keefe died as well as a splattering of his blood.
During the trial, a police sergeant said he noticed some damage to the right rear on Karen Read’s SUV when he interviewed her at her parent’s house that night.
“That tail light was not completely damaged, it was cracked and a piece was missing, but not completely damaged,” Dighton police sergeant Nicholas Barros testified.
John O’Keefe’s DNA was a match for a piece of hair pulled from the rear of Karen’s SUV, according to an expert who testified at the trial.
But the defence team alleged the hair was planted at the crime scene and questioned how it could have remained on the car during extreme weather conditions.
“The question is how did that magic hair survive a 30-mile drive through a blizzard?” Karen Read’s attorney David Yannetti said one day outside court.
Karen’s lawyers put forward a different theory for John’s death: his injuries occurred during a fight with someone inside the house.
They allege he was then attacked by the homeowner’s German shepherd, dragged outside and left to die in the snow.
The attorneys claim the gashes on O’Keefe’s arm were more consistent with a dog attack, than an injury received from a car.
The defence team questioned witnesses about John’s lack of winter clothing – he was found without a coat despite the freezing conditions – and a missing shoe, which was later discovered near his body.
“You’re also aware that a body, when being dragged by its shoulders, can lose a shoe?” defence attorney Alan Jackson asked Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Brian Tully during the trial.
The court also heard that Brian Albert’s house was never searched by police, even though John died on his front lawn. The attorneys claimed that a web of people were involved in a cover-up of the crime, including law enforcement and the people inside the home.
Through their attorneys, Albert and another man present at the house on the night denied involvement in John’s death.
At the trial, Norfolk Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally argued that John never went in the home.
“There is no evidence that Mr O’Keefe was beaten and left for dead,” he said.
The case divides a jury and a city
With a glamorous defendant in the dock, and wild accusations of conspiracy, murder and police corruption, Karen’s trial in June quickly became a national obsession.
True crime sleuths argued the merits of the case on Reddit, America’s media breathlessly covered every development, and the town of Canton divided into two camps – those who believed in Karen’s innocence, and those who didn’t.
“It’s like a perfect storm. The combination of the killing of a police officer, a woman defendant who is telegenic, then you add allegations of police misconduct and the emphasis on conspiracies … it really feeds into a lot of different trends and different ingredients that could make it very popular,” Medwed said.
For each day of her trial, members of the Free Karen Movement gathered outside the courtroom, dressed in pink and wielding their placards in support of the defendant.
A Boston-based blogger known as Turtleboy, who believed passionately that Karen had been framed, began confronting witnesses and staging what he called “protests” outside their homes.
Last month, he was charged with witness intimidation.
“They will never shut me up, they will never, ever, ever stop me from reporting the truth about what happened to John O’Keefe,” Turtleboy said at a press conference.
The jury hearing the case against Karen was divided too.
They heard from the defence team that the lead investigator in the case, State Trooper Michael Proctor, sent lewd and offensive text messages about Karen to his friends.
The house where John died was sold and the German shepherd, which Karen alleges was somehow involved in the incident, was rehomed a few months after John’s death.
After a nine-week trial and five days of deliberations, the jurors sent a note to the judge.
“Our perspectives on the evidence are starkly divided,” the six men and six women wrote.
“The deep division is not due to a lack of effort or diligence, but rather a sincere adherence to our individual principles and moral convictions.”
The judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial.
The idea there is an elaborate conspiracy fuelling the prosecution of Karen Read may seem far fetched.
But the claims appear to have found an audience primed to be sceptical of cops and to doubt the system built around them.
Scandals involving claims of bribery within the Massachusetts police force date back to the late 1980s.
“There is a relatively long-standing concern here locally with our state police,” Professor Medwed said.
“The Massachusetts State Police have had a number of controversies in the last 10 years related to … different things, but including billing scandals and various other issues specifically related to the State Police.
“… I think the conspiracy theory [around the case], it ties into both specific issues in this community and also more general themes about distrust of government.”
American attitudes towards police have also shifted considerably in recent years.
At a national level, a Gallup poll found faith in the police fell in 2020 to 48 percent after George Floyd was murdered while in police custody, though it has increased over the last year.
“I think people are questioning the police a little bit more. Plus, here you have the added, very unusual factor of the victim being a police officer,” Mr Medwed said.
“So wherever you are politically, if you’re sceptical of the police, or you’re more pro-law enforcement, you want justice to be done for the victim here.”
Prosecutors say they intend to retry the case, with a fresh trial scheduled for early next year.
Professor Medwed said he was surprised it was going ahead for a second time.
“I think the defence team is very strong and there are enough conflicting facts and missing details to really provide fodder for [the conspiracy theories],” Medwed said.
Ultimately it will be up to a jury to work out the facts of the case and make a judgement based on the evidence before them.
A Netflix deal and a hunt for answers
In the meantime, Karen, who faces life in prison if convicted, is out on bail.
While she awaits her fate, Netflix producers have announced plans for a three-part documentary on the mystery of what happened to John on that snowy January night.
“The ongoing case has inspired plenty of conversation, and the as-yet-untitled documentary series will explore what happened in the days leading up to O’Keefe’s death,” the streaming giant said.
In death, John O’Keefe has reached a level of fame that far eclipsed his ordinary suburban life.
His name has joined a long list of other victims whose tragic deaths are debated at length in the office, over kitchen tables and in heated exchanges in group chats.
Overlooked in the twists and turns of his murder investigation, however, is his grief-stricken family and the small town divided in the wake of the tragedy.
“The larger the crowds and the wider the media coverage, the more it seemed as though John’s legacy was fading into obscurity,” Tara Kerrigan, a friend of the family recently reflected in a piece for Boston Magazine.
“That, for the family, has been the most enduring pain of all.”
It was the O’Keefe family’s hope that the search for John’s killer would be an open and shut case. What followed was anything but.
More than 56,000 people have now joined a Facebook group devoted to the Karen Read case, with the aim of “raising funds, spreading awareness, and fighting for the truth”.
“Justice for Officer John O’Keefe. Free Karen Read,” the tagline said.
With so many people divided over what really happened that night, however, the possibility of satisfying both may prove elusive.
– ABC