Just days before Karen Read returns to court to defend herself against charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter, she’ll tell her side of the story in the Investigation Discovery docuseries A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read, debuting on Monday, March 17, at 9/8c on ID and Max.
Read stands accused of killing Boston police officer John O’Keefe, her boyfriend at the time, by reversing her Lexus SUV into him on a snowy January 2022 night in the Boston-area town of Canton, Massachusetts. But her defense has alleged that a law enforcement coverup is at play. Read’s first trial ended with a hung jury; her second is slated to begin on April 1.
A WBZ News timeline lays out the chronology of O’Keefe’s death and Read’s legal saga. O’Keefe died on January 29, 2022, in the hours after he and Read went out for drinks with friends at a Canton bar. At 6 a.m. that morning, Read found O’Keefe’s body in the snow outside the Canton home of then-Boston police officer Brian Albert, where the friend group was due to reconvene after their bar outing, police said. An autopsy revealed O’Keefe died from blunt impact injuries to the head and hypothermia, and police said they found a broken cocktail glass and pieces of a taillight at the scene.
Read was arrested the following month, and she pleaded not guilty to charges of manslaughter, motor vehicle homicide, and leaving the scene of a motor vehicle collision causing death. That June, however, a Norfolk County grand jury indicted Read on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. Read again pleaded not guilty.
In May 2023, Read’s defense attorneys claimed that O’Keefe was beaten in an altercation inside Albert’s house and that his body was dumped outside the house, pointing to wounds on O’Keefe’s arm that the attorneys said evidenced an attack by Albert’s dog.
“That’s an animal attack,” defense attorney Alan Jackson told Read over the phone after seeing a photo of O’Keefe’s arm, per Vanity Fair. “If there’s any medical examiner or DA or lead investigator out there claiming that’s from a car, that’s bulls***. And if that’s not true, what else isn’t true?”
That same month, the defense attorneys alleged that there had been a law enforcement coverup, one that involved Massachusetts State Police and Albert, as well as Jennifer McCabe, Albert’s sister-in-law, per WBZ News.
Days after O’Keefe’s death, an anonymous man called Read’s attorney David Yannetti to say Brian Albert and his nephew had assaulted O’Keefe on January 29 and that Albert and an unnamed “federal agent” dumped the unconscious O’Keefe outside the house. The man later recanted his tip, but details from his account lined up with details that emerged later in the case, according to Vanity Fair.
Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey stated in an August 2023 video statement that “the idea that multiple police departments, EMTs, Fire personnel, the medical examiner, and the prosecuting agency are joined in, or taken in by, a vast conspiracy” was “completely contrary to the evidence and a desperate attempt to re-assign guilt,” per WBZ News.
Prosecutors on the case said in February 2024 court filings that DNA on a broken taillight linked Read to O’Keefe’s death. But Read, her family members, and a police officer recalled seeing Read’s taillight cracked, not broken, per Vanity Fair. Plus, Massachusetts State Police trooper Michael Proctor said in an affidavit that he seized Read’s SUV more than an hour after the Read family’s security camera showed him seizing the car. Read thinks her SUV’s taillight was smashed while the vehicle was in police custody, she told the magazine.
Security footage from inside the Canton Police Department garage appeared to show a man identified as Proctor in the proximity of only the SUV’s left taillight — not the damaged right taillight — but Read’s legal team realized the word “police” on a nearby cruiser was displayed backward, meaning the video was inverted and Proctor was near the right taillight after all, Vanity Fair reported. And yet the timestamp on the video wasn’t mirrored. Jackson said that fact “means somebody had to put that [timestamp] on the inverted, the manipulated, the altered video, on purpose.” (Proctor’s supervisor testified he didn’t know how the video had been inverted.)
Read’s first trial started in April 2024. During that trial’s proceedings, an emergency responder recalled hearing a woman repeatedly saying, “I hit him, I hit him,” outside O’Keefe’s home. Albert and McCabe took the stand the following month, with Albert testifying that O’Keefe and Read didn’t come inside his home on the night of O’Keefe’s death. McCabe testified that Read asked her after finding O’Keefe’s body to Google how long it would take someone to die in the cold. But an expert witness for Read said McGabe made that Google search hours earlier, around 2:27 a.m. that morning, per Vanity Fair.
The trial also exposed messages Proctor sent his friends. “There will be serious charges brought on the girl,” Proctor said via text message 16 hours into his investigation, per Vanity Fair. “She’s a whack job c***. Zero chance she skates. She’s f***ed.”
Proctor also texted, “Waiting to lock this whack job up,” and, “Hopefully she kills herself.”
After weeks in the courtroom and days in deliberation, the jury in the first trial failed to reach a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. A juror told WBZ-TV the jury was unanimous in finding Read not guilty of two of the charges, second-degree murder and leaving the scene of personal injury and death, but didn’t know how to communicate those decisions to the judge.
Meanwhile, another legal case is playing out alongside Read’s: Massachusetts blogger Aidan Kearney, better known online as Turtleboy, is facing witness intimidation charges in connection with his coverage of Read’s case, per WBZ News.
Earlier this month, a federal probe into the case ended without charges filed against police, per The Independent. The probe, run by the U.S. Attorney’s Public Corruption Unit with an assist from FBI agents, focused on allegations that law enforcement framed Read for O’Keefe’s death, per Boston 25 News.
And just last week, a federal judge denied Read’s request to have her charges of second-degree murder and leaving the scene of personal injury and death dismissed, according to Boston.com. Read’s team, citing juror’s statements that the first trial jury was unanimous in finding Read not guilty of those charges, had argued that the rules of double jeopardy precluded prosecutors from retrying Read on those counts.
By the time Read sat down for the Vanity Fair interview, she had lost her jobs as an equity analyst and an adjunct professor, her health insurance, her car, and her life savings and was living off her 401(k), and after the interview, she sold her house but still owed more than $5 million in legal expenses. But she was committed to proving her innocence at the second trial. “I’m not backing down now,” she said. “As scary as a potential conviction is, I will go to jail for something I didn’t do before I plea out. I will never give them that win.”
A Body in the Snowdirector Terry Dunn Meurer (Unsolved Mysteries) told The Hollywood Reporter that she took on the project after Read’s attorneys looked for someone to follow them through the pretrial and trial process. And Meurer was excited about the “incredibly, really unprecedented” access she got from Read and her representation.
“In the documentary [Read] says, ‘This is my testimony,’” Meurer explained. “Karen liked to talk, and she’s been muzzled for two years. She’s done a few interviews here and there. But she’s never felt like she could tell her entire story from beginning to end. And that’s what she wanted to do.”
Meurer was also intrigued that there were “very, very strong theories on both sides of the case,” she said.
“The prosecution has really interesting points to make, and the defense has really interesting rebuttals,” she observed. “I’ve not seen a case either where there’s so much suspicious behavior on both sides.”
A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read, Series Premiere, Monday, March 17, 9/8c, ID & Max
