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

3 weeks ago 4

“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.

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.

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.