Karen Read Tells Her Story (Part 1): A Murder Trial in Massachusetts

This is the first article in a two-part series about Karen Read’s trial. Part 2 will be released on October 30.

On an August morning, Karen Read is wheeling my suitcase into her four-bedroom Mansfield home. Her minimalist Colonial is embedded with clues to her current existence. A Ziploc go bag, in case of sudden arrest, sits hidden in the buffet of her blue dining room. In it: Advil, melatonin, toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, drugstore lipstick, strip of paper with her lawyer’s phone number on it, and a bottle of Laura Mercier foundation, left over from her previous life. A copy of David Rudolf’s American Injustice, a 2021 account of horrifying prosecutorial misconduct, rests atop a stack of finance books. A burner phone and SIM cards—purchased after Read learned authorities were tracking her this year—is stashed inside a safe box beneath a scenic painting. In her closet, a framed Rebel Without a Cause poster stands behind the poster-board exhibits from her last trial.

She’s been staying with family and friends but wanted to conduct our interviews in the house. Read told me she’d have a security person stay overnight. Said security turns out to be a volunteer, a friend of sorts, who declined to be named for this story but who looks like John Cena and has a license to carry. As Read said, “Strangest sleepover ever.”

And it is strange for a journalist to stay at a subject’s home, but Read’s offer was audacious: three days during which she would discuss any and every aspect of her life and complicated legal saga with the commonwealth of Massachusetts. There will be no lawyer present or conversation parameters, even though anything she tells me on the record could be used against her in her forthcoming trial. “There’s nothing we’re afraid of,” she told me. “Any question you have, I have answers for.”

My editor and I discussed boundaries; I arrived with groceries for myself, and I booked a backup hotel room in case I felt uncomfortable. My family was nervous—me, six months pregnant, bunking with an alleged criminal. Journalists rarely get such unfettered access to any subject. Especially not someone in the middle of such unusual, high-stakes circumstances: a defendant in a murder case that’s become a national obsession, whose freedom hangs in the balance, and whose fate hinges on reliving the worst day of her life over and over again.

Her story: Around 12:20 a.m. on January 29, 2022, after a night of drinking, Read dropped off her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, at the home of another officer, Brian Albert. She watched him walk toward the house where a smattering of Albert’s family and friends, including a federal agent, were drinking. Then she returned to O’Keefe’s house, where she lived part-time, and went to sleep.

When Read awoke about four hours later, she was panicked to see that her boyfriend hadn’t made it home. After calling O’Keefe’s friends and discovering no one knew where he was, Read returned to the house where she’d left him. She found O’Keefe covered in snow in the front yard, unconscious, with blood pooled around his nose and mouth. Straining to understand how he wound up gravely injured in a middle-class neighborhood at 6 a.m., she wondered whether she had accidentally backed her vehicle into O’Keefe the evening before. She uttered nine words that would immediately make her a suspect and radically change the direction of her life: “Did I hit him, could I have hit him?”

By five o’clock that night, Michael Proctor, a Massachusetts State Police trooper, had seized Read’s car and phone. Sixteen hours into his investigation, Proctor texted his friends, “There will be serious charges brought on the girl…. She’s a whack job cunt. Zero chance she skates. She’s fucked.” In a later group text, the investigator told his supervisors he was searching Read’s phone and apprised them of his progress: “No nudes so far.”

When someone surmised that the homeowner would surely “receive some shit” as well, Proctor responded, “Nope. Homeowner’s a Boston cop too.” (Proctor has called the texts “unprofessional and regrettable” but argued that his remarks “have zero impact” on “the integrity of this investigation.” He did not respond to Vanity Fair’s questions.)

Read wouldn’t find out about those texts until much later, along with the public. In the immediate term her charmed existence as an equity analyst and adjunct professor at Bentley University dissolved. Commonwealth prosecutors claimed that after a drunken argument, Read reversed her Lexus SUV into O’Keefe, ultimately killing him, and then drove off. On February 1, 2022, she was charged with manslaughter, motor vehicle homicide, and leaving the scene of a personal injury or death. She lost both jobs, her health insurance, her car, and her life savings.

Now Read is living off what remains of her 401(k); not long after my visit, she sold her house to subsidize her legal expenses. She still owes more than $5 million in deferred fees for the highly skilled defense team she’s marshaled. Read’s first trial ended on July 1 with shock but no conclusion: Norfolk County Superior Court judge Beverly Cannone declared a hung jury and a mistrial—a conclusion that five jurors have since come forward to contest, according to the defense, saying that the jury had unanimously voted to acquit Read on the charges of murder and leaving the scene, and were only divided on the manslaughter charge. District Attorney Michael Morrissey’s office plans to prosecute Read again on all three charges, with a trial date set for January. Read’s team has taken the matter to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and will argue on November 6 for the charges to be dismissed on the grounds of double jeopardy. Also on her side is the ACLU of Massachusetts (ACLUM), which filed an amicus brief backing this argument and criticizing the court. (The DA’s office declined to answer VF’s questions, citing the case’s active nature.)

Read’s lawyers believe the first trial’s outcome is just another twist in a strange saga that involves no fewer than four law enforcement bureaus, including the Massachusetts State Police, the Canton police, the Boston police, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). They allege that Read not only didn’t kill O’Keefe, but that she is a victim too—of a crooked DA, jury tampering, and corrupt law enforcement.

“Other than feeling wrongfully persecuted and prosecuted, I feel incredibly violated,” Read tells me. Police have visited her home three times, seized her phones twice, subpoenaed her family’s financial records. Her private text messages—her most intimate thoughts—have been presented to the world, dissected and debated by the public. Her personal tragedy is many people’s true crime entertainment. And even though the second trial, scheduled to begin January 27, will offer more of the same humiliations and intrusions, and plunge her deeper into seven-digit debt, she’s pushing forward.

“I’m not backing down now,” she said. “As scary as a potential conviction is, I will go to jail for something I didn’t do before I plea out. I will never give them that win.”

Her pent-up feelings pour out of her with the urgency of a person facing a maximum sentence of life in prison, though she occasionally wisecracks in her tour through the wreckage. (“I never knew an unopened shredder could make me so sad,” she says, pointing out the factory-sealed machine, which she’d hoped to use to destroy her reams of legal documents after an acquittal.) “If I can get the entire truth of this case out in the public forum, that, to me, is priceless.”

IN THE BEGINNING“Hey, blast from the past. How’s things?” That was the Facebook message Read received from O’Keefe in the spring of 2020. The pandemic was first taking hold, schools were shutting down, and Read hadn’t seen O’Keefe in 16 years. They’d first met at a birthday party for O’Keefe’s sister, Kristen, in Boston in 2004. Read didn’t know Kristen; she was just tagging along with a friend from Braintree, where the O’Keefes grew up. She thought O’Keefe was cute; they exchanged numbers and dated for a few months—a fleeting 20-something romance. In the intervening decade and a half, Read and O’Keefe both experienced harrowing personal traumas. Read endured 10 surgeries in 18 months to treat and ultimately diagnose Crohn’s disease. Less than a year after her last major surgery, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. O’Keefe, meanwhile, lost Kristen to brain cancer in 2013, and shortly after, his brother-in-law, Kristen’s husband, from a heart attack. O’Keefe, known simply as JJ to his niece, Kayley, and nephew, Patrick, became their guardian.

Read thought that surviving these life-altering events helped her forge a deep bond with O’Keefe. She fell for him and the kids. “I felt like this is a perfect situation,” says Read. “It’s a Karen-sized hole in this house that I have the energy and resources to fill.” The relationship progressed quickly in the confines of the pandemic. Read, who could work remotely, rearranged her schedule to be at O’Keefe’s house most days, supervising the children’s Zoom schooling and making them lunch, while O’Keefe worked a desk job in the Sex Offender Registry Information unit at the A-1 station in downtown Boston.

The couple dated for two years before O’Keefe’s death.

Courtesy of Karen Read.

As in any relationship, issues bubbled up: O’Keefe resented that Read got to do the fun parts of parenting while he played disciplinarian, she says. When the kids returned from a trip with their grandparents, Read recalls that Kayley and Patrick walked past O’Keefe to hug her first. O’Keefe felt the kids preferred Read because she spoiled them with go-carts, fancy haircuts, and shopping trips. She thought they could feel her warmth and O’Keefe’s stress. He never adequately mourned his sister, according to Read, and struggled to manage his own grief plus the children’s increasingly complicated needs, emotional and otherwise. O’Keefe saw a therapist with them at one point, but when the shrink introduced board games, O’Keefe checked out. “I think that’s part of his stock,” Read contemplates now, “this Irish Catholic, south-of-Boston, rub-some-dirt-on-it, drink-through-your-problems mindset.”

Drinking increased for both of them on weekends, which she now regrets but rationalized at the time as them unwinding after a hard week. Once O’Keefe had a drink or two, “that was when he was the most relaxed,” says Read. “He would be easygoing, but then it was this vicious cycle that he’s hungover the next day.” During a New Year’s group vacation in Aruba, Read says, O’Keefe and his friends cracked beers at 10 a.m. and drank till sundown or man down, whichever came first. She says she caught O’Keefe kissing another woman. (The woman denied it at trial.) That same January, Read engaged in her own flirtation: She exchanged texts with one of O’Keefe’s contacts, Brian Higgins, an ATF agent. It was a brief thing and petered out as quickly as it started. “I knew Higgins found me attractive,” she says. “It helped me emotionally validate myself, which is embarrassing to admit.”

“NOWHERE TO BE FOUND”On Friday night, January 28, 2022, Read and O’Keefe had been drinking with O’Keefe’s buddies at the Waterfall in Canton—the kind of bar where flat-screen TVs are perma-tuned to sports and friends trade shots. Canton is a quaint cop town 15 miles southwest of Boston, just past the skirt of suburbs that are untouchable under seven figures, where the state’s major highways intersect, making it a prime blue-collar community where homes are passed down over generations.

It was around midnight and snow had just begun falling when Brian Albert invited everyone in the group to his house afterward for drinks. The former Marine and 30-year BPD veteran headed the Fugitive Apprehension Team and had appeared on the Donnie Wahlberg–produced reality show Boston’s Finest. As one of seven siblings raised in town, he seemed to know or be related to everyone. His younger brother Kevin is a Canton cop, and another younger brother, Chris, is a town Select Board member. That night, Read and O’Keefe were joined by a cluster of the veteran cop’s family members—his wife, Nicole; his brother Chris; Chris’s wife, Julie; Nicole’s sister Jennifer McCabe; and McCabe’s husband, Matt—plus Higgins and an unrelated couple, Karina and Nicholas Kolokithas.

When Read woke up the next morning, panicked that O’Keefe was not home, she met up with two of his friends—Jennifer McCabe, who was at the Albert home when Read dropped O’Keefe off, and Kerry Roberts—to look for him. At about 6 a.m. the women pulled up to the Alberts’ house at 34 Fairview, and Read spotted O’Keefe in the front yard. Hysterical, she jumped out, cleared snow from her boyfriend’s bruised and bloodied face, and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Roberts administered chest compressions and McCabe called 911. At times, Read lay on top of O’Keefe, desperately trying to heat his body, which had cooled to 80 degrees.

Emergency vehicles raced onto Fairview moments later, their red lights beaming into the dark sky and bouncing off the snow. It was such a spectacle that a neighbor snapped photos. Neither Albert nor any of his family members emerged from the house as first responders attempted to save O’Keefe’s life. Even in her confusion, Read clocked this. She wondered whether she had dropped her boyfriend off at the wrong house and, after a night of drinking, O’Keefe entered an aggressive stranger’s home. (The Alberts say they slept through the noise. The neighbor who snapped photos opines to VF that Albert’s explanation “absolutely doesn’t make sense.”) Read was so distraught that she was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital for evaluation.

EMTs delivered her around 8 a.m., about the same time O’Keefe was pronounced dead of hypothermia and blunt force trauma to the head. “The patient is hysterical, she is actively grieving, she states she does not belong [in] care, she just wants to know what happened to her [boyfriend],” observed attending physician Jonathan Rice, who noted that Read had blood on her face and hands. The doctor also noted “no psychiatric history,” and that Read denied any “SI, HI, AH, VH,” meaning no suicidal or homicidal ideation, and no auditory or visual hallucinations. He also noted that Read worried continually about her “husband” because they had two adopted kids, and she stated she “can not live without him.”

When Read’s father, Bill, arrived at the hospital, a nurse briefed him: “Your daughter wants to know whether or not John O’Keefe is dead. We can tell her. You can tell her. Or you can tell her with us present.”

“I’ll tell her,” Bill said. He was led to Read’s room, where he told his daughter simply, “He’s gone.”

Dash cam video shows Read, right, after finding John O’Keefe in the snow.

Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger/AP.

Read insisted that her father take her to O’Keefe’s house to see Kayley and Patrick. The rest of the O’Keefe family was already there, including his mother, Margaret (who goes by Peg), his father, John Sr., and his brother, Paul. They had also come from the hospital, where they identified the officer’s body and saw his gruesome condition laid bare under the bright lights. The adults gathered around the kitchen island, and Read asked the family what O’Keefe looked like.

“He looked like he went five rounds with Mike Tyson,” was Paul’s response, according to the Reads. They say Peg made her own assessment: “I think he looks like he got hit by a car.”

Read was thunderstruck by the unexpected hostility. Her family realized it was time to leave. Read and her father went upstairs to quickly pack her medication and several belongings, then she hugged and kissed Patrick and Kayley for what would be the last time. A few days later, Read was court-ordered to refrain from contacting the O’Keefe family. “I felt like all of a sudden this went from being my house to I am persona non grata,” she told me. As they left, she told her father, “Dad, I don’t know what happened, but I feel like Peg thinks I did something.”

When they got home, Bill Read searched “criminal defense attorneys in Boston.” David Yannetti’s name and picture popped up. Yannetti had spent the first decade of his career as a prosecutor. As the Middlesex assistant DA, he put two men behind bars for one of the county’s most heinous crimes, the 1997 rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, whose attackers lured him with the promise of a new bicycle. Bill’s vetting was more on instinct. A devout Catholic who prays every day and paid his way through college by working as a night guard in Fall River, Bill decided on Yannetti because “he looked like an honest man.”

Massachusetts State Police were moving quickly—they seized Read’s car and phone less than 12 hours after O’Keefe was declared dead. She knew she was a suspect, but her devastation trumped fear. She was still confused why O’Keefe’s body was on Albert’s lawn and was shocked he was dead. “I’d been with him all week,” she told me. “We had been intimate the night before and now he’s gone.”

Yannetti told Read to prepare for an arrest. So, wracked by grief and disbelief, she zombie-walked through her morning ritual. She showered, did her makeup, blew out her hair, picked out a sweater that would be comfortable in jail—and waited for hours on the overstuffed white couch in her living room, where I sat while she recounted this story. Three days after O’Keefe’s death, she was taken into police custody.

An attractive, highly educated finance professional accused of killing her cop boyfriend and leaving his body on another cop’s lawn was catnip to Boston media. The morning after her arrest, cameras rolled as she was escorted, in handcuffs, to her arraignment. She pleaded not guilty to all charges and was released on $50,000 bail. A cousin with a criminal record called her with advice: “I’ve pled to charges where I wasn’t even in the state [where the crime happened]. I wanted to get out of jail, I couldn’t post bail, and I didn’t have David Yannetti.” The cousin warned her that prosecutors don’t always care if they have the right guy as long as they have someone behind bars. That’s a closed file for them,” he said, then added, “Question everything.”

Officer John O’Keefe in his department headshot.

Boston Police Department/AP.

Yannetti received a different kind of call on February 2, within hours of Read’s arraignment. A man with a gravelly voice claiming to have a background in Boston law enforcement made an explosive claim: He told Yannetti that Brian Albert and his nephew had beaten up O’Keefe on January 29. When O’Keefe didn’t come to, said this mysterious man, Albert and an unnamed “federal agent” put O’Keefe’s body on the front lawn. When Yannetti called him back for a more thorough interview, he backtracked, saying he was only speculating based on photos of O’Keefe in the news, and he ultimately recanted the tip altogether. But Yannetti points out that photos of O’Keefe hadn’t been released at the time of the first call. And other details from the tip lined up: Higgins, the ATF agent, had been drinking at the Albert home that morning. As had Albert’s nephew Colin. Until the tipster’s call, Read and Yannetti hadn’t known that Colin was at the house, as he later testified he was, because his name was not in police reports.

In February, a funeral was held for O’Keefe in Braintree. Dozens of Boston police officers saluted O’Keefe’s casket as it was carried into St. Francis of Assisi Church. Bagpipes skirled a solemn hymn as a giant American flag waved in the wind. Read was not there, in part because of the stay-away order, but views the pomp as performative. “This whole Irish cop Departed bagpipe thing,” says Read, trailing off. “There’s nothing holy about this,” she says. “I think it is the biggest farce, maybe only second to my trial, that the people who were there in the cold outside the church were nowhere to be found in terms of actually delivering justice to John O’Keefe.”

A breakup when kids are involved is a high-stakes decision. In January 2022, despite their troubles, neither O’Keefe nor Read were willing to give up on the family dynamic they had forged with Kayley and Patrick. That fateful night, they still loved each other. They cuddled at the Waterfall (as security footage shows), and witnesses described them as affectionate. Albert invited the group back to his house to celebrate his son’s 23rd birthday.

Beyond a bar run-in the week before O’Keefe died, he’d never really socialized with Albert—even though both were BPD living in Canton and had McCabe in common. Albert had an alluring reputation: He helped unmask the Boston Strangler in 2013 and capture the Craigslist killer before that. The night he died, O’Keefe was eager to join up for a nightcap. When he and Read arrived at 34 Fairview, though, she wondered whether they were at the right address. There weren’t many cars in the driveway, and Read felt uneasy—McCabe had conveyed the invitation, so Read wasn’t sure how welcome the couple actually were. O’Keefe said he’d check out the scene and report back. But minutes passed without word. “I got pissed,” Read tells me now. She knew that a woman O’Keefe used to hook up with lived a few houses down the street.

“He’s got to be screwing around,” she thought. “I didn’t think he was physically incapacitated.” After about 10 minutes of waiting, Read drove to O’Keefe’s house to be with Kayley, who was home alone.

To Read, it felt like Aruba all over again, so recent. She sent O’Keefe a barrage of angry voicemails and texts:

John, I’m going home…. You are fucking using me right now.

You’re fucking another girl. Kayley is sleeping next to me.

John, I fucking hate you!

“THIS IS FUCKING DIRTY”Four months after Read was first charged, Massachusetts State Police were back at Read’s house to arrest her again, this time for second-degree murder. She and Yannetti were stunned; she didn’t know a rearrest was possible, and her lawyer hadn’t been given a heads-up. Defendants can be upcharged when significant new evidence is discovered, but Read and Yannetti considered the additional evidence cited to be a stretch: In an interview, Patrick had claimed O’Keefe and Read argued “a decent amount of time” and Kayley recalled O’Keefe telling Read their relationship was over, with Read refusing to leave the house. The commonwealth also cited Read’s estimated blood-alcohol level, based on a sample taken at the hospital.

That second arrest was Yannetti and Read’s first clue that something was, as they say, amiss. “It was so dirty and underhanded that they would go behind my back,” Yannetti tells me by phone. The DA requested Read’s bail be set at $500,000. “I believe it was to scare me and get some kind of plea deal going,” Read says of the second arrest. “Do two years on a lesser manslaughter [charge] and you’ll be free. Which we were never going to consider.” At Read’s second arraignment, Yannetti argued that his client had reason not to flee—her Crohn’s and multiple sclerosis treatments were in Boston. Cannone set Read’s bail at a comparatively low $100,000.

Read at her former home in Mansfield, MA.Photograph by Diana Markosian.

“The day after I’m upcharged, David’s like, ‘Listen, I know this is the worst time to have this conversation, but my fees double for murder,’ ” says Read. The fees weren’t as frightening as the legal shock, though. At that point, says Read, “David and I realized this is fucking dirty. This is not you said something that was taken the wrong way at the scene and they got the wrong guy…. This is intentional. They’re framing me.”

By September 2022, Read and Yannetti were running into repeated roadblocks trying to get basic evidence from the commonwealth. They hoped to get Google geofence data, which would identify every cell phone on the Alberts’ property on January 29.

Desperate for guidance, Read emailed Alan Jackson, an LA-based lawyer who used cell phone data to get a 2019 groping case against Kevin Spacey dropped. Jackson had worked the other side too: As an LA County prosecutor, he put Phil Spector behind bars for the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson. Since then, he’s built a reputation as one of California’s top (and most expensive) trial lawyers, representing a Venice Beach hotel owner charged with murder, an NBA player facing domestic assault charges, and a 22-year-old Bakersfield man who stabbed his brother in self-defense. (He managed to avoid jail time for all of them.)

Jackson gets more than a hundred representation requests monthly, but the subject line of Read’s email stood out: “murder of a Boston cop.” He clicked on it and read her plea: “I am fighting for my life against a blue wall…and therefore marshaling whatever resources/advice I can find.” On a call with Read, Jackson agreed to share his cell-phone-data-related motions and asked to hear more about her case. After learning that she was being accused of fatally hitting O’Keefe with her SUV, the lawyer asked to see photos of O’Keefe’s injuries. Read immediately sent over a few, revealing O’Keefe’s bruised and swollen eyes and the cuts above his right eye and nose. But it was O’Keefe’s right arm, which looked like it had been clawed, that caused Jackson to exclaim, “That’s an animal attack.” Jackson later said by phone, “If there’s any medical examiner or DA or lead investigator out there claiming that’s from a car, that’s bullshit. And if that’s not true, what else isn’t true?”

“GOOD, BAD, UGLY”The police theory of what happened that night is evident in the charges. But what Read and her defense team believe happened involves a fatal fusion of alcohol, testosterone, and bad luck. They allege that O’Keefe encountered some combination of Brian Albert, Brian Higgins, and Colin Albert in the basement, and a fight turned dangerously violent. According to O’Keefe’s Apple health data, after 12:20 a.m., about the time when Read dropped the police officer off, he took 80 steps—the equivalent of half of a football field—and went up or down three floors. Witnesses inside the Albert home that night deny O’Keefe ever went inside. The defense’s theory holds that O’Keefe’s body was moved to the yard.

Read’s defense offers several possible catalysts for a disagreement, such as Higgins’s flirtation with Read. (Higgins, who testified he did not encounter O’Keefe after the bar, did not respond to VF’s questions.) Another is O’Keefe’s allegedly antagonistic relationship with Colin Albert, who lived two doors down from him. According to Read, the teenager regularly dumped beer bottles and cans on the lawn. (Colin testified that there was no animosity with O’Keefe and that he left the Albert home around midnight, before O’Keefe was dropped off. He did not respond to VF’s questions.) Or there’s the idea that Brian Albert might have simply been irritated by the likes of O’Keefe, who was given special accommodations by the BPD after his sister’s death—like a desk job with flexible hours. “I could see how someone could look at John and say, ‘I’m a real cop. I’m the head of the fugitive unit, I’ve been on the drug unit, the gang unit,’ ” Read imagines to me. (Albert’s spokesperson, Greg Henning, denies the idea that there was ever “beef,” or any physical altercation. He adds that Albert attended a fundraiser in support of Kristen. He also noted that Albert attended O’Keefe’s wake to grieve with the family.)

In any of these scenarios, the defense believes, the Alberts’ German shepherd, Chloe, was a factor. She was being kept in the basement part of that night because she was “not great with strangers,” Albert admitted to the court. She was not great with other dogs, either. A Canton resident told VF that in 2018 she was walking her goldendoodle past the Albert yard when Chloe attacked her dog so aggressively that she was not able to stop the German shepherd until someone emerged from the Albert home and called Chloe’s name.

The owner took her dog, covered in blood, to the veterinarian, who told her that Chloe needed to be reported to Animal Control; based on the severity and location of the bite, the vet said, it looked as though Chloe wanted to kill the dog. But when the woman called Canton Police, she was told that Animal Control was out and that police could not tell her when the Animal Control officer would be back. After she left her information with Canton Police, she says that Kevin Albert—Brian’s brother and a Canton cop—contacted the woman’s husband with a message from the then police chief: “How can we make this thing…go away?” (Neither Kevin nor Canton Police responded to VF’s questions.) The woman became so nervous walking past the Albert house afterward that she started to carry pepper spray. About three months after O’Keefe’s death, Chloe attacked another dog and bit a woman who tried to intervene, that woman confirmed to VF. Another woman was injured while trying to help. The Alberts subsequently rehomed their dog of seven years.

That was not the only major change for the Albert family: In 2023, Brian Albert retired from law enforcement due to a shoulder injury incurred on the job, says Henning, and his maximum pension had been reached. The same year, the Alberts also sold the home on Fairview that had been in their family for decades. Henning denies that either decision was related to the case—he says that the family considered selling in 2021, before O’Keefe’s death, but eventually did so because the Albert children had grown up and moved out. When the new owners moved in, flooring had been removed from the basement—where Read’s defense team claims the fatal altercation with O’Keefe took place. But Henning said that was a modification that a real estate agent suggested following 2021 water damage, among other updates.

“I believe whatever happened to John was a setup to teach him a lesson or tune him up, and it got out of control. No one would choose to kill someone in their own home and then set it up so sloppily,” Read tells me. But that is where her willingness to make sense of everything ends. “I hold the district attorney, who passed the bar and went to law school, to a higher standard. The power that a district attorney has in any given county is staggering. It’s scary,” she said. “He can bring all the resources of the state to try to get a pound of flesh, which I believe is what he’s doing.”

Read spent her first months after O’Keefe’s death mourning him, reminiscing, and trying to distract herself from her predicament. She wallpapered the house, cooked with her mother, and read. (Alexandre Dumas’s classic The Count of Monte Cristo—in which the protagonist is framed and arrested but ultimately escapes and avenges himself—has been an inspiration.) Read was still so confounded by O’Keefe’s death that she was open to the idea that she could have accidentally hit him. “I told my parents, if I did anything in any way, I’ll pay my dues,” she says now. “That’s how this should work. I want to know the truth—good, bad, ugly.”

She hired a private investigator and even sought out materials that could prove she was guilty, like security footage from the Albert home. But Albert said he never installed a camera his wife gave him. Nor was there security footage from homes on the street. (The homeowner across from the Alberts, who works for Canton Police, told Read’s private investigator that his camera did not pick up anything from 34 Fairview.) Security footage from the library that Read drove by between 12:37 a.m. and 12:39 a.m. should’ve shown whether her taillight was smashed, but that precise two-minute time frame of the video was missing when the commonwealth turned it over to Read’s team. (The commonwealth says they turned over the entirety of the video that the Canton PD gave them.) Read told me about a rumor that there are texts between her and her lawyer in which she implicates herself—texts that police supposedly read when they confiscated her phone but that will never be released because they’re privileged. Proctor, the state trooper, himself referenced an exchange on the stand, saying that he stopped looking through her phone when he saw messages between Read and “an attorney.” But Read and Yannetti each point out that they didn’t communicate until after Massachusetts State Police had seized her phone and car. “I didn’t even have a cell number for David until several hours after Proctor left with my phone,” Read says.“I never texted him on January 29. Proctor testifying on the witness stand that he saw texts between David and me is a provable lie.”

Read has pored over tens of thousands of pages of legal filings and police reports. She has played the Waterfall security footage on repeat. She has scanned every text, screenshot, and Google search on O’Keefe’s phone for buried clues. Initially, it was difficult to look at O’Keefe’s autopsy photos and torture to imagine, “What did he feel? Did he know he was freezing? Was he waiting for me to come back?” She has scoured social media, going down rabbit holes of Facebook posts featuring Proctor with various Albert family members, even a post where Proctor’s mom called Chris and Colin Albert her “second family.”

A COURTESY TO THE FAMILYWhen the trial began in April, meanwhile, Adam Lally, a prosecutor who has worked for the Norfolk County DA’s office since 2010, assured the court that Proctor had no conflicts: “These are not people that know each other,” Lally said. The prosecution produced 68 witnesses, at least nine of whom were related to Albert by blood or marriage. Read had six, including a snowplow driver employed by Canton. (Lally did not respond to VF’s questions.)

Leading up to the trial, Read’s team struggled to get basic discovery items—like crime scene photos. “Even that was a fight,” says Elizabeth Little, another California lawyer on Read’s team. “We did numerous discovery requests…filed a motion to compel. We were given JPEG copies of photographs of zero metadata that were blurry and useless. After seven months of litigation, it comes out that they don’t have the original photos…. They came from a phone. The phone doesn’t exist anymore. Initially you think, It’s just incompetence. The more we dug, the more we realized that the stuff we were looking for was never gathered in the first place or was being intentionally withheld…. It became hard to believe it was all an accident or mistake.”

Proctor seemed problematically conflicted from the outset. The investigator appeared in social media photos with various Alberts and McCabes dating back to 2012. Though Proctor seized Read’s car and phone the day of O’Keefe’s death, he did not interview Colin for another year and six months. Then the interview went unrecorded. Proctor’s sister Courtney is such good friends with Albert’s sister-in-law Julie that they shared 67 phone calls in the seven months after Read’s first arrest. (At trial Julie said she couldn’t remember how many calls.) On the day of Read’s first arrest, Courtney texted Proctor that an Albert family member “said when this is all over, she wants to get you a thank-you gift.” (Proctor asked that she get his wife a thank-you gift instead.)

“Forget about the allegations of the victim being killed inside the house,” says Doug Louison, a Boston defense attorney who has represented law enforcement for four decades but who is not working on the Read case. (He, like many legal analysts, believes Read should never have been tried for second-degree murder.) “As soon as these people who Proctor was acquainted with were identified as witnesses, he should have dropped out of the case. It was a system failure by the state police.” Instead, Proctor declared Read guilty via text the day he started his investigation. About six months later, while the probe was underway, Proctor and Albert’s brother Kevin, the Canton cop, went out drinking. The next day, Proctor texted Kevin that he left his badge in Proctor’s cruiser. Kevin responded, “Did I take my gun?”

On the morning of January 29, when McCabe’s 911 call about O’Keefe being found on Albert’s lawn came in, it was Kevin’s Canton Police Department coworkers who responded. One called two off-duty officers to report to the scene, including Sergeant Michael Lank, who has known the Albert brothers since childhood. In 2002, while Lank was off duty and drinking, he ran into Chris Albert, who told him that he had been harassed by a pair of brothers. Lank got into a fistfight, summoned police backup, punched one alleged assailant in the face, and was accused of spitting in the face of another while he was handcuffed. (Lank settled a federal case but testified that he would have come to similar defense for a civilian.) Before police stepped into the Albert home the morning of O’Keefe’s death, they sent McCabe inside to wake up its residents. Then they interviewed McCabe and the Alberts together for about 10 minutes, without recording the conversation or searching the house. (Canton Police lieutenant Paul Gallagher testified that they only interviewed McCabe and did not separate her from the Alberts when doing so.) The officers said they had no reason to believe O’Keefe had ever been inside. (McCabe did not respond to VF’s questions.)

The commonwealth’s key physical evidence against Read has been her right taillight. No piece of Read’s car was found during a daylight search on January 29—after snow had been cleared from the yard with a leaf blower. Read, her family, and a Dighton police officer who witnessed Proctor seizing the car hours later say that Read’s taillight was only cracked at that point—damage Read says was inflicted when she backed out of O’Keefe’s garage to search for him and bumped into his SUV, which was caught on O’Keefe’s security camera. Despite Proctor’s affidavit declaring he picked up Read’s car at 5:30 p.m., Dighton police and the Reads’ security camera showed that he took the car at 4:12 p.m., a time to which the commonwealth conceded a year and a half later. (Read thinks this discrepancy was to make it seem as though her car was not in police custody when pieces of her taillight were found.) After her Lexus was in law enforcement custody, Read believes her taillight was completely smashed. It wasn’t until Proctor greenlit a State Emergency Response Team search after 5:30 p.m., in the dark, when pieces of the taillight were found in the Albert yard. One week later, after multiple searches by law enforcement, former Canton Police chief Ken Berkowitz reported spotting more taillight pieces in the yard from his moving vehicle during a random drive-by. Read says that she has always considered the taillight to be “the cornerstone of the whole case: It’s the only concrete evidence that connects me to that crime scene,” she says. “No evidence was found until they had the evidence.”

The taillight was not the only discrepancy that came up at trial. The snowplow driver, a witness for Read’s defense, was adamant that he saw no body when he drove by at 2:45 a.m. His truck has a high vantage point and bright lights, he noted, and he constantly scanned his periphery for obstacles. When he passed the house a second time, about 3:15 a.m., he saw a Ford Edge, the same model car Albert drives, parked in front. This was unusual, he said, because the Albert family normally does not park on the street, and it is standard protocol for him to call in a vehicle on the side of the road. (During cross-examination, the prosecution presented a different timeline, calling into question the driver’s account.) As a courtesy to the Alberts, whom he has known for decades, he didn’t call it in.

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