What to know before Karen Read’s second murder trial – San Diego Union-Tribune

Karen Read will face a second trial beginning Tuesday after all her attempts to throw the charges out have failed.

Here’s what you need to know before it all begins. The Herald also has a guide to who’s who in the retrial.

Read, 45, is accused of striking John O’Keefe, her boyfriend of two years and a 16-year Boston Police officer, with her car and leaving him to die in a major snowstorm on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton on Jan. 29, 2022.

She was tried last year on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death, but that ended in mistrial on July 1, 2024, after the jury reached an impasse.

Efforts to dismiss

Read’s defense team, however, soon argued that the jury was not hung, as five of them had surfaced to say that the jury was ready to acquit on both the murder and leaving the scene charges and was only in disagreement over manslaughter. This, the defense argues, means that to try Read again on anything other than the manslaughter charge would violate Read’s constitutional Double Jeopardy protection rights.

So far, the courts have disagreed. The argument failed with trial Judge Beverly Cannone, who will also preside over the retrial; the Supreme Judicial Court, which upheld Cannone’s ruling; and U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, who in a nuanced opinion came to the conclusion that the argument did not rise to the level of the federal courts interjecting into state courts.

The defense then appealed to the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled Thursday to uphold Saylor’s ruling.

Cannone also denied a separate defense effort to dismiss for “extraordinary governmental misconduct.”

The quest for a jury

The retrial begins with the start of empanelment for a jury.

“The lawyers should get comfortable for the long haul because this is going to take a while,” retired Superior Court Judge Jack Lu told the Herald about his predictions for jury selection.

The “unprecedented pretrial publicity,” as prosecutor Laura McLaughlin called it in a recent hearing, could make seating an impartial jury an onerous task.

A trial court spokeswoman said 275 potential jurors will be called each day of the first week, with that dropping a bit to 243 a day thereafter. Ahead of the first trial, roughly 90 potential jurors showed up to court each day over five days before a jury was seated.

Boston-area defense attorney William Kickham told the Herald that seating a jury will be “quite challenging to say the least,” spurred on by social media and internet journalism that creates a much different environment than years ago.

“Now, information travels at the speed of light, and almost simultaneously across multiple social media and a variety of internet sources,” Kickham wrote in an email.

“The pretrial publicity, combined with the new documentary series, is going to make empaneling a jury that has no knowledge, bias, or opinions about this case complex at best. This case … could easily rival Sacco & Vanzetti and the Boston Strangler cases, in terms of widespread recognition,” Kickham continued.

Lu said he thinks the obstacle to seating a jury isn’t the publicity and the opinions still festering, but the expected length of the trial. He said while he appreciates companies like Verizon that pay their employees who are jurors their normal rates, that is rarely the case, and a multi-week commitment to the trial is a burden a lot of working people can’t bear.

Lu and Suffolk University Law School Clinical Professor of Law Christopher Dearborn agreed that it’s unrealistic to expect jurors to know nothing about the case.

“The goal is not to seat a jury that knows nothing about the case — a virtual impossibility given the breadth of the media coverage — but rather a jury that the judge is convinced can set aside any prior knowledge of the case and still be impartial,” Dearborn told the Herald in an emailed response.

He said that while “Read’s team has a legitimate concern about their ability to receive a fair trial in Norfolk County,” recent cases show it can be done.

“You don’t have to go very far geographically or very far back in time to find instructive analogs,” he added, saying that the James “Whitey” Bulger mob trial and that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev “were both cases that had extraordinary levels of regional and national prominence, raising similar concerns, but after a lengthy and exhaustive process, a jury was seated in both cases.”

Flurry of legal activity

While the defense team’s multi-pronged efforts to have the case thrown out made up for a huge number of pre-trial publicity — it wasn’t everything.

“Both sides have filed too many motions,” Lu said.

Kickham said that “both sides are doing what they are professionally obligated to do: secure the best legal footing they can … through exclusions of evidence and expert witnesses — which this case leans very heavily to.”

While Lu believes that a bulk of the defense motions and challenges are probably to “protect the record” for further appeals down the road, they still reveal a lot of strategy. Other experts agreed.

“Any tactical advantages for either side that existed from their adversary not knowing everything that was coming has been almost completely eliminated as virtually their entire playbooks have been revealed,” Dearborn said.

Lu said that the new lead prosecutor, Hank Brennan, challenging so many of the defense experts allowed him to get transcripts, “but exposed details of his theory of the case so that they can prepare.”

“I would have suggested that Mr. Brennan, a longtime defense lawyer, lay low, and use his defense-honed tactics to overwhelm the defense at trial, rather than by pretrial motion,” Lu added.

All three experts the Herald spoke with said that variously, statistics, experience, and “conventional wisdom” say a retrial favors the prosecution. Lu said he gives the prosecution “a whisker of an edge.”

“Given the straightforward and very linear nature of the Commonwealth’s case the first time around and the more creative and nuanced attack by the defense, I think that reality, in this instance, favors the Commonwealth,” Dearborn said.

Competing theories

The first trial offered jurors two completely different versions of events.

The prosecution’s view was that Read, perhaps nine drinks deep, got into yet another fight with O’Keefe in their fraught relationship just before O’Keefe exited her SUV to go to an afterparty at the Albert residence at 34 Fairview Road. She began a three-point turn, prosecutor Adam Lally argued, and then slammed the vehicle in reverse, striking O’Keefe and spinning his body around where he lay to rest on the frozen lawn where he would freeze and die.

The defense countered the physical and social evidence of that theory, as expected, but said that not only does the evidence not show Read struck O’Keefe with her vehicle but that the evidence suggests that someone else — or multiple other people — killed O’Keefe and then engaged in a conspiracy with local and state police to make Read the patsy.

Under Brennan, the prosecution’s theory appears to remain intact for the second trial, but he has shown that he may be taking a different approach. For one, he announced in a pretrial hearing that he doesn’t intend to bring up the trip Read and O’Keefe took to Aruba just weeks before O’Keefe would die.

That trip was a centerpiece of Lally’s presentation that the relationship between Read and O’Keefe was splintering. On that trip, Read accused Marietta “Etta” Sullivan of “making out” with O’Keefe and it led to a blow-up where yelling and swearing were exchanged between the two women.

Yannetti named three people whom he said had motive and opportunity to kill O’Keefe: Brian Albert, Brian Higgins and Colin Albert. There’s also Brian Albert’s dog, Chloe, who the defense has said could have contributed to scratches and puncture wounds to O’Keefe’s arm.

Neither story completely convinced the jurors, who returned multiple notes indicating a deadlock. Upon the third note, Judge Cannone declared a mistrial.

If the defense’s argument that the jury was actually ready to acquit on all but the manslaughter charge is true, Lu said that still wouldn’t be a win if that happens in trial two: “Conviction of any charge is a loss to the defense in this case.”

Dearborn said that the conclusion suggests “both sides should consider simplifying and streamlining their cases considerably.”

“The message from that first jury seemed clear to me: ‘We don’t believe Karen Read should be found guilty of the most serious charges because we had clear disagreement about her intent,’” Dearborn said. “‘However, we believe she did hit John O’Keefe with the car.’”

“Oversimplified, that jury did not seem to be swayed by the defense theory about a 3rd party culprit, but rather they were trying to decide if it was accidental or not,” he said.

The evidence and figures

Given the wide gap between the two theories on what happened, there is a wider than usual amount of evidence for the jury to look at: both the evidence for or against a vehicle strike and the same for the third-party killer idea.

The defense’s theory of a conspiracy is based on the when a Google search for “hos long to die in cold” from Jennifer McCabe, homeowner Brian Albert’s sister-in-law, was performed. The defense expert says that she made the search at around 2:30 a.m. the day O’Keefe died. If she did, then that would indicate knowledge that something bad had happened to O’Keefe hours before his body was discovered.

The prosecution, and McCabe herself, says that she actually made that search in the 6 a.m. hour, at the request of Read, after the two women and a third, Kerry Roberts, found O’Keefe’s body in the heavy falling snow.

Whether the jury buys the conspiracy will hinge on whether it trusts the defense or prosecution’s computer forensics experts.

“Armed with hindsight, time, and transcripts, both sides should be even more (effective) in blunting the impact of their adversaries’ experts the second time around,” Dearborn said.

The prosecution’s case will rest on the state of Read’s SUV’s taillight and when it shattered. In the days following O’Keefe’s death, taillight pieces were discovered in the area where O’Keefe’s body was found on the lawn. Surveillance footage from around Canton will suggest that Read’s taillight was intact until the drop-off and then was shattered. A State Police trooper will also testify that Read’s vehicle’s system tracked a sudden backward acceleration at the time the prosecution says O’Keefe was hit.

The defense, like last time, has indicated that it will challenge when Read’s taillight was shattered. In the last trial, camera footage from O’Keefe’s home showed that Read backed into O’Keefe’s parked car when she left to go to search for O’Keefe when he didn’t come home that night.

The defense says this is what cracked the taillight — and footage from the Canton Police Department’s sallyport garage, they say, will show that the case’s lead investigator was hanging around the taillight, possibly messing with the evidence.

The lead investigator is Michael Proctor, who was relieved of duty hours after the mistrial. He was fired earlier this month. His downfall came when he was forced during trial to read text messages he sent to friends and family in the early days of the Read case that he admitted on the stand were “inappropriate.”

They included reporting he found “No nudes so far” in Read’s phone and calling Read both a “babe” and a “whack job.” He also texted his sister that he hopes Read “kills herself.”

Proctor became a touchstone for those who believe Read is innocent and that the investigation was flawed. The disgraced Proctor, as the “case officer” in the investigation, is expected to take the stand again in the retrial.

Nancy Lane/Boston Herald

Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney speaks to supporters of Karen Read and Sandra Birchmore at a rally outside the State House last September. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)

Originally Published: March 31, 2025 at 11:09 AM PDT