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‘I’ve got to save myself now’: Karen Read reflects on mistrial, addresses John O’Keefe’s family in Part 2 of Vanity Fair profile
Read spent $1.2 million on trial costs, dodged another attempted indictment in March, and holds complex feelings about her time with O'Keefe, according to Vanity Fair's second installment.
When a second day of jury deliberations ended with no verdict in sight, Karen Read began to bargain with God, according to the second installment of her highly anticipated Vanity Fair profile.
“I’ll take a mistrial,” Read allegedly pleaded that day in June. “You can keep me in limbo for 10 more years. Just please let me go home tonight.”
The request proved oddly prescient; days later, Read’s high-profile murder trial ended in a mistrial, leaving her stuck in a state of uncertainty as she awaits her retrial this January.
Accused of drunkenly and deliberately backing her SUV into her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, the 44-year-old opened up to Vanity Fair’s Julie Miller for an unconventional series of interviews that formed the basis for the magazine’s two-part series.
Revisiting ‘hos long’ Google search
The profile also delves into the theory promoted by Read’s team of high-powered attorneys, who say their client was framed in a coverup. According to the lawyers’ theory, Read dropped O’Keefe off at a house party in Canton shortly after midnight on Jan. 29, 2022, and other guests attacked O’Keefe before dumping him outside in a blizzard.
More on Karen Read:
Among their evidence: A contested Google search homeowner Brian Albert’s sister-in-law Jennifer McCabe allegedly made at 2:27 a.m. for “hos [sic] long to die in cold.” McCabe testified that she made the search hours later at Read’s insistence, and two digital forensics witnesses — including an expert who created one of the tools used to analyze McCabe’s phone data — testified the 2:27 a.m. timestamp actually indicates when the Safari tab was opened.
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However, defense digital expert Richard Green stood by the 2:27 a.m. timestamp in his own testimony. At Vanity Fair’s request, Purdue University associate professor Umit Karabiyik, who specializes in iPhone artifacts and digital forensics, evaluated both Green’s affidavit and testimony from the prosecution’s experts. Karabiyik told the magazine he concurred with Green.
According to Vanity Fair, Read has also undertaken steps to investigate whether O’Keefe ever entered Albert’s home that fateful day. She’s been paying for a temperature-controlled storage unit to house carpeting torn out from Albert’s home after he sold it last year, Miller reported, and hopes to one day swab it for blood and DNA.
Read dodged another attempted indictment in March
According to Miller, Read’s team also questioned the court’s handling of three jurors they claim displayed “visible disgust” at certain parts of the prosecution’s case, including Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor’s vulgar texts about Read.
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Turtleboy blogger Aidan Kearney, who has proclaimed Read’s innocence and attended much of her trial in-person, reported that one of the three jurors was dismissed the day of closing arguments over allegations they spoke about the trial at a bar, as Vanity Fair noted. The other two potentially sympathetic jurors were sidelined from deliberations after the clerk magistrate selected alternate jurors by pulling numbered tiles from a Bingo-style box, Miller reported.
“The chances of that happening are next to nil,” defense attorney Alan Jackson told Miller.
An investigation into Kearney’s alleged intimidation of witnesses in Read’s case also revealed the blogger’s frequent contact with Read, who allegedly leaked him non-public information. According to Vanity Fair, Norfolk District Attorney Michael Morrissey’s office convened a grand jury in March to try to have Read indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit witness intimidation, but the grand jury declined to do so.
If they had indicted her, Read could have had her bail revoked and been sent to jail just a month before her murder trial began.
Karen Read’s ‘trial on a budget’
As the Vanity Fair profile revealed, Read has paid handsomely for her defense and still owes her lawyers more than $5 million in deferred fees. She reportedly paid $1.2 million leading up to and during her trial to cover bails; hire private investigators and experts; and accommodate, feed, and transport three of her lawyers.
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“For that, she used her savings, about $500,000 from her since-depleted legal fund, and $400,000 donated by friends and family,” Miller wrote.
According to the article, Read called her first go-round in Norfolk Superior Court a “trial on a budget,” filling in as support staff for her attorneys and negotiating rates with two Uber drivers for trips to and from the courthouse. Responding to criticism that she and her lawyers were spotted dining at upscale restaurants throughout the trial, Read allegedly replied: “You try feeding Alan Jackson McDonald’s.”
Read also shot back at critics who said she didn’t come across as a grieving girlfriend in the courtroom, with one headline even calling her “America’s Happiest Murder Defendant.”
“If I look happy, did it cross your mind that I have a free conscience? Because I didn’t do it?” Read told Vanity Fair. “If being innocent and enjoying the support and refusing to be down day after day, month after month, year after year makes me America’s happiest murder defendant, then I’m America’s happiest murder defendant.”
Read addresses O’Keefe’s family
Read invoked O’Keefe directly in the article, saying she doesn’t feel her former boyfriend’s family “can be saved.”
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“They want to see me incarcerated for the rest of my life despite never seeing evidence while you were alive that I mistreated you,” Read allegedly said, addressing O’Keefe. “We were dating for two years, and I’ve since eclipsed those two years. I’m going on three, and I’ve got to save myself now.”
Read told Vanity Fair she has one recurring nightmare where O’Keefe survived on Jan. 29, 2022, but can’t recall what happened to him. In this nightmare, Read tries to get O’Keefe to remember while his mother and brother — Peg and Paul O’Keefe — pin the blame on Read, Miller reported.
“So Paul and Peg, if you think I killed John, that means you misjudged me for two years and entrusted two young family members in my care,” Read told Vanity Fair, referring to O’Keefe’s niece and nephew, who lived with him. “Then in the blink of an eye, you now think I’m a cold-blooded killer who took away your son?”
According to Miller, the coldness from O’Keefe’s father hurts Read the most — the pair used to attend Sunday Mass together and take O’Keefe’s nephew out for breakfast. One month before O’Keefe died, his father reportedly gave Read a Christmas card calling her an “angel” and expressing his love and gratitude for all she’d done.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Read also reflected on her complicated feelings about her time with O’Keefe.
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“I feel that everything in the two years I dated John was a precursor to this horrible decision of us to go out drinking, and for John to think he was welcome with these people who never really acted welcoming to him before,” she told Miller.
Each witness who testified during the trial, she said, came into her life because of O’Keefe.
“Everyone was a drinking buddy, and everyone testified as much,” Read told Miller. “Alcohol’s at the epicenter of this, and it was in my relationship with him. In hindsight, everything was just a precursor to this fateful, tragic night in his life and to a much lesser degree mine.”
What’s next?
Read is now preparing for her Jan. 27 retrial as her lawyers appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court in a bid to get two of her charges dropped, including the second-degree murder count. The Norfolk DA’s office has tapped an outsider — defense attorney Hank Brennan — to lead prosecutors during round two, and Vanity Fair claims this unusual move came after Morrissey’s top prosecutors refused to retry the case.
Looking ahead, Read told Miller she feels momentum pushing her closer to justice.
“I just don’t know how long the trail of dominoes is. Are there 10? Are there 100 more?” she told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know how long it takes to get there. But I know there’s a big explosion at the end.”
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