The Irresolvable Tragedy of the Karen Read Case

On the eve of a blizzard in January, 2022, Karen Read and her boyfriend, the Boston Police Department officer John O’Keefe—both in their forties, their relationship troubled—went out drinking with some friends at a couple of bars in Canton, Massachusetts. At around midnight, one of the friends invited the group back to his place on Fairview Road, a short drive away. As snow was lightly falling, Read, a trim financial analyst who allegedly consumed between four and nine drinks that evening, drove O’Keefe to the friend’s house, arriving around 12:24 A.M. By 12:37 A.M., Read had left and driven to O’Keefe’s place nearby, by herself, and left him a succinct voice mail: “John, I fucking hate you!” In another voice mail, recorded about a half hour later, Read screamed, “You fucking pervert! You’re a fucking pervert!” Seven minutes later: “You’re fucking another girl!” There was more. Read called O’Keefe fifty-three times in total that morning.

Sometime before 5 A.M., after about six inches of snow had accumulated in Canton, Read woke up at O’Keefe’s place, but he wasn’t at home. She phoned one of his friends, Kerry Roberts, who later testified that Read screamed, “John’s dead!” According to Roberts and another friend, Jennifer McCabe, Read was semi-coherent, possibly still drunk, and, at first, seemed to think she had left O’Keefe at the bar. McCabe reminded Read that her S.U.V. had been parked outside the Fairview Road house a few hours before.

When the three women drove back together to Fairview Road—the sky black, snow churning, roads and visibility terrible—Read immediately spotted O’Keefe lying in front of the house, dying or already dead beneath a mound of snow. Multiple witnesses recalled Read exclaiming, repeatedly, “I hit him!” Earlier, Read had pointed out that her car’s tail-light had been broken, suggesting that she might have backed the vehicle into O’Keefe as she was dropping him off at the house. When officers measured Read’s blood-alcohol level later that morning, more than eight hours after she had left the bar, it exceeded the legal driving limit. A medical examiner later determined that O’Keefe had suffered blunt-force head trauma and that hypothermia had contributed to his death.

The question of what exactly happened to John O’Keefe after 12:24 A.M. on January 29, 2022, has powered quasi-forensic Reddit threads, innumerable group texts, and a gallery of Boston Herald covers since Read was indicted, two years ago, for second-degree murder, motor-vehicle manslaughter while under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident. The tragedy of O’Keefe’s death was heightened by the mystery of whether he might have been saved had he been found and treated earlier. And his family’s misfortune was multiplied to gothic levels by O’Keefe’s station as guardian to his niece and nephew, who were orphaned years ago after their mother, O’Keefe’s sister, died of brain cancer and their father died of a heart attack.

In Commonwealth v. Karen Read, which began in April—the Law&Crime Network, which provided wall-to-wall coverage, called it the “Boyfriend Cop Murder Trial”—the prosecution outlined a simple and rather pathetic tale: a drunk woman either accidentally or intentionally backed over her boyfriend with her car, left him for dead, and admitted it. But Read later insisted that she never struck O’Keefe, and many observers believed her. A counter-hypothesis emerged, positing that Read had been framed for murder—that O’Keefe was badly beaten inside the Fairview Road residence after Read dropped him off, and then he was dumped outside, or maybe attacked by a dog, or both; the medical examiner determined that O’Keefe had no major injuries below the neck, but he did have lacerations to his arm that, according to expert testimony, appeared to be dog bites or scratches. These sharply diverging theories may have been reflected in the outcome of the case, which ended on Monday with a deadlocked jury and a mistrial.

Each day of Read’s trial, throngs of protesters with “Free Karen Read” signs gathered outside the courthouse, clad in pink, galvanized by the muckraking of a local blogger, Aidan Kearney, who goes by the unforgivable nickname Turtleboy. His zealous advocacy of Read led to his own arrest and indictment on charges of witness intimidation and wiretapping. (Turtleboy has pleaded not guilty.) “I’m here right now because I’m exposing corruption,” Kearney told reporters, outside a district court, in October. “I’m exposing what really happened to John O’Keefe, and the powerful, the well-connected people who murdered him and covered up his murder.” Kearney’s private Facebook group, Justice for Officer John O’Keefe & Karen Read—Turtleboy Official, has more than fifty thousand members, who have raised nearly four hundred thousand dollars for Read’s defense fund.

The state’s case against Read did have glaring weaknesses and lacunae. People were in and out of the Fairview Road residence for hours on the night of O’Keefe’s death, yet there is no eyewitness account of Read’s S.U.V. striking O’Keefe. Brian Higgins, an A.T.F. agent who had been flirting in person and over text with Read, left the residence at some point after 12:30 A.M., but said that he did not see O’Keefe lying on the ground. Five other guests who left the house in the early-morning hours said the same (although one recalled a “black blob” of some kind). The snowplow driver who cleared the area around the house in the wee hours of January 29th didn’t see O’Keefe, either.

One might have expected a vigorous probe into the death of O’Keefe, given that he was a Boston police officer. But so, too, was Brian Albert, the owner of the Fairview Road house. Oddly, even though Albert had invited a fellow-cop to his home who was later found dead on the lawn, his residence was never searched for evidence. Nor was much interest taken in the Alberts’ dog, a German shepherd, despite the injuries to O’Keefe’s arm; the family rehomed the dog a few months after O’Keefe’s death. And, while Albert was trained as a first responder, he was not roused from his bedroom while E.M.T.s and police were gathered in front of his house on the morning of January 29th. Less than twenty-four hours after O’Keefe was pronounced dead, the lead investigator on the case, a Massachusetts state trooper named Michael Proctor, shared his peremptory impressions of Read over texts with friends, which he was forced to read aloud on the stand. Read was, in Proctor’s estimation, a “whack-job cunt” with a “weird Fall River accent” and “no ass.” “Zero chance she skates,” he predicted. “She’s fucked.” In a reflective moment, Proctor also said, “Hopefully she kills herself.”

That last appalling quip has a resonance that Proctor could not have intended. In a town a few miles southeast of Canton, three police officers are facing a wrongful-death lawsuit from the estate of Sandra Birchmore, a twenty-three-year-old pregnant woman who was found dead in her apartment in 2021. Birchmore, who joined the local police department’s youth program at age thirteen, was allegedly sexually exploited by the three officers. One of them, a detective named Matthew Farwell, allegedly began a sexual relationship with her when she was fifteen; before she died, Birchmore told friends that Farwell was her unborn baby’s father. He was also the last person to see Birchmore alive. (Farwell and the other officers have denied the allegations against them.) The state medical examiner concluded that Birchmore had died by suicide, and, in a separate investigation, the same district attorney’s office that pursued the charges against Karen Read found no evidence of foul play in Birchmore’s death. But, earlier this month, a forensic pathologist hired by Birchmore’s estate concluded that she had been strangled to death. The report also noted that a rape kit and fetal tissue taken from her body were never sent for DNA analysis.

For many local observers, the deaths of Birchmore and O’Keefe are twin exhibits of institutional decay: of a law-enforcement apparatus rigged with malfeasance, ineptitude, and indifference, leaving behind two victims whose final moments may never be known or understood. In fact, before Read’s trial had even begun, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Massachusetts launched an investigation into how law enforcement had handled the O’Keefe case. An engineering consulting firm hired by the Department of Justice to reconstruct the alleged crash concluded that O’Keefe’s injuries were not consistent with being struck by a vehicle.

Proctor’s texts, though ill-advised, turned out to be somewhat accurate: Read did not “skate,” despite the apparent toddler-level proficiency of state and local investigators. Blood was collected from the scene in red Solo cups and placed in a Stop & Shop bag. (On TikTok, CBS Boston shared an interview with a Read supporter who wore Solo-cup earrings.) One police lieutenant trawled for evidence using a leaf blower. During cross-examination, one of Read’s attorneys performed a ritual disembowelment of Joseph Paul, the state trooper who was tasked with reconstructing the alleged crash. On the stand, Paul admitted to having only rudimentary knowledge of kinematics, could not identify kinematics as a subfield of physics, and could not parse a definition of the word “acceleration.” How, Read’s lawyer asked, after O’Keefe had allegedly been struck by a two-ton vehicle, did his cell phone end up beneath his body? “It just did,” Paul testified.

Stranger still was the whirl of phone calls in the early-morning hours of January 29th among McCabe, Higgins, Albert, and Albert’s wife. These calls were, according to the witnesses, mostly “butt dials”—even the ones that didn’t go to voice mail. Albert implied on the stand that he was being “intimate” with his wife at a moment when records show he “butt-dialled” Higgins; in a delightful coincidence, Higgins butt-dialled him back. (The exchange evokes the emoticon ))<>((, popularized by Miranda July in the film “Me and You and Everyone We Know.”) Albert disposed of his phone the day before a court order was issued compelling him to preserve its contents. (He said he’d simply traded it in for a newer model.) Higgins went so far as to destroy his phone and SIM card and leave them in a dumpster on a Cape Cod military base. (He claimed that the target of an investigation had got hold of his personal number.)

But, for the single eeriest act allegedly performed by any witness in this case, the distinction belongs to Jennifer McCabe, who is Brian Albert’s sister-in-law. McCabe was part of the bar-hopping group on January 29th, gave O’Keefe directions to Albert’s house, and repeatedly texted and “butt-dialled” O’Keefe when he didn’t show up. According to an expert analysis of McCabe’s phone, at 2:27 A.M.—hours before O’Keefe’s body was discovered—McCabe entered a search into Google that she later deleted and that, whatever its provenance, may haunt her for the rest of her days: “hos long to die in cold.”

On the stand, McCabe firmly denied making the “hos long” search at 2:27 A.M. She maintained that she had actually done a similar Google search hours later, only after they’d found the body, and at Read’s specific request. But, whoever wished to know how long it takes to die in the cold, and whenever they asked, they had their answer soon enough.

A bone-chilling gust of incompetent collusion swirls around this extremely outer-Boston saga, like a Dennis Lehane novel adapted by the Coen brothers. The bumbling attempts to close ranks, the incestuous conflicts of interest, the Wahlbergian “R”s and vowels, the incantation of technical terms such as “butt-dial”—all of it can almost make you forget about the man freezing to death at the foot of the lawn. The cast of characters is neighborhood-specific and yet hard to place, class-wise: there’s Albert, the bullet-headed, salt-of-the-earth cop who lived in a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar house; there’s McCabe, the basketball mom in a smart blazer with a perfect blowout, a flinty Mayor Quimby accent, and a wonky tooth. Everybody has an Irish last name, everybody went to kindergarten with the other guy and is this other lady’s brother-in-law.

And everybody drinks and drives. Spend enough time mucking through the “Cop Land”-in-Canton bog of this case and you will never get into a car after 8 P.M. in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ever again. A quintessential episode: while Proctor was leading the investigation into O’Keefe’s death, in which Brian Albert was a key witness, Proctor also worked a case with Albert’s brother, Kevin, a cop in Canton. One summer’s night, the two comrades went out for beers, then drove home in Proctor’s police cruiser. The next day, Proctor texted his colleague: “Found your badge in my cruiser this morning.” In return texts, Kevin Albert asked if he’d left his gun in the car, too, and complained about his hangover: “It’s bad!! I was hung over for sure today!! Couple tonight to make me feel Good.”

Above all else, a totalizing drinking culture is what both defined and obscured this unresolved, perhaps irresolvable case. It opens the elevator shaft onto a bottomless enigma. Did Read—who allegedly woke up thinking she’d last seen O’Keefe at a bar—ever piece together any reliable memory shards from that night? Or did her mutating account of events generate itself from a primordial soup of liquor, panic, guilt, and conjecture? Did visitors to Fairview Road miss O’Keefe’s body on the lawn because it wasn’t there, or because they were too drunk to notice? Do any of these people really remember what happened?