Karen Read’s Second Murder Trial Is Already a Spectacle

Last week Karen Read returned to a wood-paneled courtroom about 25 minutes southwest of Boston for her second murder trial.

Twelve jurors had already determined that there was not enough evidence from Norfolk County district attorney Michael Morrissey to convict Read of second-degree murder and a lesser charge of leaving the scene of a deadly accident, according to two jurors who spoke to VF. After a mistrial was declared, five jurors came forward to say that the voting body had only been split on the manslaughter charge, but had not understood that coming to a partial verdict was an option, according to Read’s lawyers. And now, against a backdrop of escalating appeals arguing that a second murder trial would violate Read’s double jeopardy rights, the former equity analyst was back in the defendant’s seat.

The initial trial had riveted Massachusetts; Read was accused of drunkenly killing her police officer boyfriend, John O’Keefe, by hitting him with her car and leaving him to die on the lawn of a home belonging to another Boston cop, Brian Albert. As Read previously told Vanity Fair, she believes that she is being framed in a corrupt saga involving four law enforcement agencies—including the Massachusetts State Police, whose troopers work out of Morrissey’s office and investigated O’Keefe’s death. (In Massachusetts, homicides outside of Boston and a few other cities are investigated by state troopers. Morrissey’s office declined to comment.) That trial ended with a hung jury and worldwide attention. In her second trial on the same charges, Read again faces life in prison if convicted of murder.

The latest on Karen Read’s trial

Read has now expanded her legal team of David Yannetti, Alan Jackson, and Elizabeth Little—adding Robert Alessi of New York; Victoria George of Massachusetts, a juror from the first trial; and nine law students who will act as clerks, including Sophia Hunt, who recently served as Harvard Law Review president, and Abigail Rosovsky, a former Fulbright scholar. Read has already sunk seven figures into her defense—liquidating her retirement funds, selling her house, and relying on donations. All 11 of her additions are working pro bono. Morrissey, meanwhile, has enlisted Hank Brennan, one of Whitey Bulger’s defense lawyers, to act as special prosecutor for the government.

Brennan has taken a more proactive approach than his predecessor in the first trial, Norfolk ADA Adam Lally. Last month Brennan tried to obtain text messages between Read and Yannetti, arguing that Read had sacrificed the right to attorney-client privilege by discussing her conversations with the lawyer in interviews. (Judge Beverly Cannone denied the motion.) He also sought private conversations between Read and Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as Turtleboy, contending that they would prove “consciousness of guilt.” Brennan argued that motion before a different judge. After Read and her numerous lawyers single-filed in during that proceeding, an entrance so dramatic it made local news, Brennan told the judge, “I’m not sure why we’re being joined by Ms. Read’s team, unless they have a standing in this.” Read squinted at Brennan in disgust. He was later granted access to the messages.

Brennan found himself on the defense too. In the last six months, Read’s team received two new batches of security footage from the Canton Police Department, where she claims law enforcement tampered with her car—the alleged murder weapon—and began to frame her. Read alleges that her taillight was broken at Canton PD, with fragments later planted at the crime scene. (Canton PD did not respond to VF’s request for comment. A recent police audit outlined mistakes made at the O’Keefe scene but found no evidence of tampering, corruption, or conspiracy based on the materials the hired intelligence company reviewed.)

The “new” videos were turned over in October 2024 and January 2025, more than two and a half years after they’d been recorded and months after Read’s first murder trial had ended. (Some videos obtained by Read’s team in October were “clarified” versions of what had been provided to the defense in April, as the original videos were extremely dark.) There was no apparent chain of custody for new videos provided in October, but there was a note from Canton PD chief Helena Rafferty that read, “That is how it records LOL. No tampering.” Rafferty is on the witness list for the second trial.

While Brennan conceded that the video situation “should have been managed better,” he said the defense had not specifically requested this footage and that there was nothing to indicate it was exculpatory. Cannone sided with Brennan and denied Read’s request for an evidentiary hearing.

On any day when Read is inside the courthouse, her supporters can be found outside accusing Cannone of being biased toward the prosecution. Signs have included slogans such as “Bev’s Court Is a Clownshow” and “Judge Bev Is Conflicted.” After Cannone reinstated and extended the buffer zone for this trial to keep peaceful protesters at bay, four Massachusetts residents sued the judge, claiming that the action was “an unprecedented move to muzzle dissent and protect her own reputation.”

Inside the cramped Dedham courtroom, Read is likely to again confront the people she is accusing of framing her, including former Massachusetts State Police trooper Michael Proctor, who led the Read investigation and was dishonorably discharged from the law enforcement agency last month. (Proctor plans to appeal the decision, according to his lawyer.)

The Massachusetts State Police found him guilty of unsatisfactory performance, with violations stemming from his “derogatory, defamatory, disparaging, and/or otherwise inappropriate text messages about a suspect in that investigation to other individuals.” He was also found guilty of consuming alcohol on duty.

Last month Proctor’s family, including his wife, Elizabeth, and his sister, Courtney, released a statement casting Proctor as the victim of “egregiously false statements from Karen Read and her defense team.” They added that he “has been defamed, maligned, and falsely labeled corrupt by the alleged murderer, her family, her defense team, and a mob of her followers.”

“All the statement did was put his vile behavior back in the news cycle. And he had to use two women to do it?” Read said to VF. “Can’t he speak for himself?” The statement also defended Proctor’s texts: “How would you feel if the contents of your personal phone were questionably released to the public without full context?” Read, whose text messages were read aloud during the first trial, said she found that sentence “rich.”

These days, when Read watches movies about Boston corruption, some characters strike her as eerily familiar—like Matt Damon’s self-righteous yet corrupt statie in Martin Scorsese’s film The Departed: “He typifies Proctor’s arrogance and excitement to play God in people’s lives.”

Given her experience as a murder defendant squaring off against a biased detective, Read now looks back at O.J. Simpson’s 1995 acquittal differently.

“I felt so strongly about the prosecution and his guilt and the fact that he spent all this money on this dream team of lawyers. They all looked like snake oil salesmen to me,” Read said. Her thinking now, however, has changed a bit: “I’m not saying I believe O.J. was innocent, but I believe that it was not a completely above-board investigation. Now that I am smarter, I would’ve cheered at that acquittal. You have to hold cops accountable.”

Read is also expected to face other people she has accused of framing her, including Jennifer McCabe, Brian Albert, Brian Higgins, and Colin Albert. (All four have denied involvement in O’Keefe’s death or any cover-up.) Cannone has furthermore put parameters around Read’s third-party-culprit defense, banning its mention in Read’s team’s opening statement and prohibiting Read’s lawyers from pointing to Colin as a suspect.

In early March, Brennan announced that he had permission to reveal that “there is no longer any federal investigation into the investigation of John O’Keefe’s death or any related matters. It is closed. It is over.” (The US Attorney’s Office would not confirm or deny the existence of the investigation.) Shortly after Brennan’s declaration, Canton police chief Rafferty issued a statement declaring “that ALL ASPECTS of the federal investigation…have been completed.”

But some question whether that is true given the resources and time the DOJ devoted to a logistically complicated probe into an active investigation. Brian, Colin, and Higgins—plus McCabe—were subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury.

Yannetti revealed in court that his entire case file had been subpoenaed by the US Attorney’s Office, later sharing that the request was part of an ongoing investigation—disclosures that took the prosecution by surprise. The US Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts has turned over with the new presidential administration, with Leah B. Foley having replaced Joshua Levy.

When I asked Read about Brennan’s assertion that the federal investigation had ended, she messaged me that, in her mind, there are only two possibilities. The first: “Someone is not being truthful.” The second: “The new administration is choosing not to pursue this investigation. That hardly means anyone involved in murdering John or framing me was cleared of wrongdoing. But everyone should note which side of my case is celebrating the federal investigation supposedly being closed and which side isn’t. That will tell you which side of this case is culpable and therefore worried about a possible federal indictment.”

When Brennan first signed on to the case, he vowed to give Read “a fair trial.” But Read said she never expected that courtesy. She pointed to some of Brennan’s recent arguments, such as one asking Cannone, on behalf of the Commonwealth, to impose a gag order on Read’s attorneys so that “we can have a fair trial.” (Cannone granted the request.)

“If you notice Brennan’s language, it has evolved from wanting ME to get a fair trial to ‘the COMMONWEALTH deserves a fair trial,’ which is not a right I’ve ever heard of. But it doesn’t matter—I shouldn’t even be on trial,” Read messaged me in the hectic days before jury selection began. The first-trial jurors who came forward said the jury had been unanimous in deciding to acquit Read of the murder and leaving-the-scene charges, but had been split on manslaughter and failed to understand that coming to a partial verdict was possible.

There is an entire Reddit thread speculating why Brennan took this case. J.W. Carney, Brennan’s partner in defending Bulger, did not elucidate on a phone call with VF: “The opportunity was offered to him and he took it.”

Carney called Brennan “the finest cross-examiner that I have ever seen.” In this sense, Brennan is a match for Jackson, who prosecuted Phil Spector and was described by VF’s Dominick Dunne as having “an uncanny ability to enrage those he quizzes.”

Brennan was responsible for “one of the most riveting days” of the 2013 Bulger trial, according to The New York Times, when he cross-examined Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, the government’s star witness and Bulger’s former crime partner. Carney said Brennan had caught the convicted murderer off guard with his first question: “He asked him if his daughter ever sat on his lap as a child and called him daddy.”

Flemmi had been involved in the killing of his stepdaughter, and Brennan’s opening salvo was a surprise. Later, Brennan tripped him up on key details that shot his credibility—eliciting acknowledgment that Flemmi had played a role in his stepdaughter’s death. “I agreed because I was coerced into it,” Flemmi said before pausing. “And Mr. Brennan, I didn’t kill her.”

After just over a week of jury selection, the prosecution and defense have seated 15 out of the desired 16 jurors. Read told reporters outside the courthouse that opening arguments could begin as early as Tuesday. With a combined list of 150 potential witnesses, the second trial could last as long as the first—nine weeks—if the Supreme Court does not intervene. Read appealed to the nation’s highest court last week, arguing that her constitutional double jeopardy protections would be violated if she were to be tried again on the charges of murder and leaving the scene.

Until the Supreme Court decides whether to take up her appeal, Read says she is trying to look on the bright side. “I am still free.”