The jury selection for Karen Read’s retrial started last week and round two of this saga looks to be equally explosive. For all of you newcomers to the case, Karen Read was accused of backing her Lexus into her boyfriend, a Boston cop, and killing him in front of another Boston cop’s house, Sgt. Brian Albert.

As many of you might or might know, I’ve been a tad bit obsessed with this case. I’ve studied all the evidence and listened to dozens of podcasts about it. I watched almost every day of the trial last year and heard all the defense and prosecution witness testimony.

Let me just say straight up that I believe she’s not guilty. In fact I know she didn’t do it. The first trial was somewhat of a farce. Even the judge’s declaration of a mistrial seems a terrible decision and flies in the face of double jeopardy. Of the three counts, the jury had decided in deliberation that Karen Read was not guilty of the two most serious charges. And yet they were hung on the lesser charge, despite the judge giving them ample opportunity to come to a decision. But at the end of the trial, the judge did not require the jury to come to a decision on each individual charge. Instead, she called a mistrial on all three charges based on their split decision on the lesser charge. To me, that’s clearly double jeopardy, and because the Mass State Supreme Court turned down the appeal, the defense appealed to the federal courts. Just yesterday Brown denied the request, so the retrial will go on.

Since the first trial started, the lead detective in the case has been fired by the Maine State Police for actions unbecoming an officer. Trooper Proctor not only mishandled the case, but he took Karen Read’s phone and boasted that he was looking for nude pictures of her. Even before meeting the one-time Bentley College professor, Proctor called her a series of rude and profane names that clearly showed police bias. Making matters worse, the defense demonstrated that he was close friends with some of the key witnesses for the prosecution (witnesses that were close friends with Brian Albert, a person who the defense believes actually killed John O’Keefe). This alone should have caused the case to be dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct.

A recent audit of the Canton PD shows that they badly mishandled the case, from faulty evidence collecting to not interviewing the crime scene witnesses separately at the Canton PD. The crime scene was left unattended for hours at a time. Leaf blowers were used to remove snow so that they could look for tail light fragments, and yet no fragments were found until a few days later after more snow had fallen. These additional fragments were never photographed or recorded in a log, leading many to believe that they were planted in order to set Karen Read up. And since the crime scene was not locked down and supervised, it leaves open the possibility of evidence tampering.

This second trial will be interesting. The DA, led by Michael Morrissey, chose to hire an outside lawyer rather than use one of the seventy attorneys in his office. And not just any old lawyer, but one who once defended the notorious criminal, Whitey Bulger, and at a cost of over seven hundred thousand dollars to the taxpayers. Why would a DA do that? It seems wasteful of taxpayer money, especially after watching the new prosecutor in action. He fumbled and tripped over himself more than a few times in the pretrial hearing, leading many to believe he was woefully unprepared.

There’s so much more to this case that will come out during the retrial. As in the first trial, the Karen Read’s lawyers will be using a third party defense, arguing that the two cops who were inside the house when John died, were the ones who actually killed him. Maybe this time around the judge will let the defense tell the jury that the Feds had been actively investigating the Karen Read case for corruption (they’ve since ended the investigation). To that end, the Feds hired two of the most knowledgeable accident and crash reconstruction experts in the country (both have PhDs), and both experts stated that, based on the physics, there was no way Karen Read could have backed her Lexus into John O’Keefe and killed him. The prosecutions crash expert was a bumbling State Trooper named Joseph Paul who embarrassed himself on the stand and made the Mass State Police look like the Keystone cops. O’Keefe had no major injuries below his neck, other than a series of lacerations on his arm that look suspiciously like dog bites. If he’d been backed into At 25 MPH by a Lexus SUV, the bottom half of his body would have been severely injured. Oh, and the cop who owned the house had a German Shepherd with a known history of attacking people. He later got rid of his dog and re-homed it. He changed out all the floors in his basement. Then he sold his Canton home way below market value — and this during Covid when Massachusetts homes were selling for a premium.

I could go on and on about this strange and titillating case, but it would take up too many blog pages. It will interesting to see where the defense and prosecution go in the retrial and if their strategies will dramatically change. If you get a chance, tune in one day to one of the crime channels and watch the trial for yourself. It is one of the most unbelievable and egregious cases of injustice you will find anywhere. Poor Karen Read has been put through the wringer, and in the process has lost a lot of money.

If you want to learn more about the case, there’s a documentary on a Netflix about it called, A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read (2025). I haven’t seen it yet, but I hear it’s not bad.

And if you haven’t picked up my newest crime novel, CRUEL & BITTER THINGS Book 1, I hope you do. It’s on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Have a great day,

Joe