Editor’s note, June 18, 2025, 4:40 pm ET: On June 18, 2025, Karen Read was found not guilty of the second-degree murder of her boyfriend John O’Keefe. She was found guilty of drunk driving. This was her second trial; to read our rundown of what was different at the retrial, click here. The story below was originally published July 3, 2024.

Every so often, a true crime case comes along that seems to be a Rorschach test — where there’s so much complicated, compelling, and contradictory evidence on all sides that it becomes easy to believe what you want to believe.

That’s arguably the best way to describe why the case of Karen Read, which deadlocked a “starkly divided” jury after an intense nine-week trial, has hypnotized and polarized the city of Boston, and increasingly the rest of the nation. Following Judge Beverly Cannone’s declaration of a mistrial, the prosecution immediately vowed to pursue a retrial; the second trial is currently scheduled to begin in late January 2025. That likely means heightened public interest and further entrenchment of the bitter camps in this case.

The prosecution alleges that Read, a successful finance analyst and adjunct professor who’s far from the “typical” murder suspect, killed her boyfriend, 46-year-old Boston police officer John O’Keefe, in the early, snowy morning hours of January 29, 2022. According to prosecutors, Read, who stood trial for second-degree murder and manslaughter, deliberately backed into O’Keefe with her SUV while she was intoxicated, then drove home, leaving him lying in the cold. O’Keefe died from blunt force trauma and hypothermia. But at trial, things were anything but clear; reports indicate the jury would have unanimously acquitted Read on charges of murder and leaving the scene, but were torn on the lesser charges, with a “soft” 9-3 split in favor of conviction for manslaughter.

Among the main pieces of evidence in the state’s favor: Read herself asking various witnesses, “Could I have hit him?” the next morning, after awakening and returning to the house to look for him.

Read, on the other hand, alleges that she’s been framed, in a spiraling conspiracy that began with a party full of witnesses lying about what happened and soon encompassed the entire Boston Police Department (BPD) and the prosecutor’s office. While from one standpoint, Read’s defense may be grasping at straws in its attempt to paint the case as a frame-up, from another, it’s the kind of police work Bostonians — and those in other cities across the country — have come to expect.

The trial has developed from what initially seemed to investigators like an open-and-shut case into a reckoning with a criminal justice system the public no longer trusts.

The murky facts of the case

Read claims that after she and O’Keefe spent until around midnight drinking at a local bar, she dropped O’Keefe off to hang out at the home of retired BPD officer Brian Albert. Several people who were either members of the BPD or affiliated with the local justice system were also at the house, but no one who was there corroborates her story. Not one of them says they saw O’Keefe enter the building; instead, they all claim they had no idea O’Keefe had even arrived at the house until his body was located outside of it in the snow the next morning.

Read, however, maintains that she watched O’Keefe go into the house before she left the scene. She alleges that O’Keefe must have been injured inside the house, that the partygoers staged the crime scene to look like a hit-and-run, and that they have lied about it ever since. Her defense argues that the injuries O’Keefe sustained resulted from a physical fight and a dog attack from a German shepherd mix Albert owned.

The defense alleges the investigation was hindered from the start by a failure to treat the Albert house as a possible crime scene and a failure to treat the witnesses as possible persons of interest; two of the primary investigative team members also have personal links to the witnesses. Further undermining the police were the bizarre methods they used, including using leaf blowers to clear away snow (and potentially evidence) at the crime scene, and using solo cups and grocery bags to collect evidence. Add to that a parade of unprofessional conduct and comments from officers, particularly from a lead investigator who was fired immediately after the mistrial, and........

© Vox