A judge declared a mistrial Monday after jurors said they were deadlocked in the murder trial of Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her police officer boyfriend in 2022.
The decision came on the fifth day of deliberations and after a nine-week trial in a courthouse outside Boston, where Read’s lawyers portrayed the killing of John O’Keefe, 46, as a cover-up by law enforcement.
Prosecutors had argued that Read, 44, and O’Keefe had a tumultuous relationship that culminated in the financial analyst ramming her boyfriend with his Lexus SUV and leaving him for dead on Jan. 29, 2022.
Read was charged with second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.
In a memo sent Monday afternoon to Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone, the jury foreman said that despite rigorous efforts, the panel of six men and six women had still not found an answer. Some felt the evidence exceeded the standard of proof needed to convict Read, the memo said, while others felt prosecutors had failed to make their case.
In an earlier note, the jurors told the judge: “Despite our commitment to the duty entrusted to us, we find ourselves deeply divided by fundamental differences in our opinions and our state of mind.”
After the mistrial was declared, Cannone set a status hearing in the case for later this month.
In a statement, the district attorney’s office thanked O’Keefe’s family and said prosecutors intend to retry the case.
Outside the courthouse, Read’s attorney, Alan Jackson, told reporters that prosecutors had relied on compromised investigators and a compromised investigation.
“We will not stop fighting,” he said.
O’Keefe’s body was found unresponsive that morning and was later pronounced dead. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as blunt force head trauma and hypothermia.
Her lawyers said she was set up by police officers seeking to cover up a beating they said she suffered during a gathering at the house where her body was found.
The defense alleged that the lead investigator in the case, Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, tampered with evidence, failed to properly investigate O’Keefe’s death and sent a series of insults and vulgar messages about Read to friends, family and supervisors.
In his closing arguments Tuesday, Norfolk County Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally acknowledged that Proctor’s texts were “indefensible” but said they had no bearing on the integrity of the agency’s investigation.
Lally dismissed the defense’s allegations of a cover-up as “rampant speculation.”
Read repeatedly told first responders she had hit O’Keefe, Lally said, and vehicle data showed she backed her SUV 62 feet at 24 mph near the home of another officer, Brian Albert, after midnight on Jan. 29.
Lally said physical evidence supported the allegation that she hit him, including a taillight that authorities said was broken after the collision, as well as hair and DNA from O’Keefe that were found in the back of the vehicle.
Lally said no one who attended the meeting recalled seeing O’Keefe inside Albert’s house.
Defence lawyer Alan Jackson said the tail light was actually broken after Read dropped O’Keefe off at Albert’s, drove home and left in a panic hours later, realising her boyfriend had never returned.
The defense presented security video from O’Keefe’s home showing Read backing her SUV into her boyfriend’s vehicle as she drove off to pick him up. Data from O’Keefe’s iPhone showed his device took dozens of steps around the time prosecutors said he was struck, Jackson said, suggesting those steps could have led to the basement of Albert’s home.
Read’s attorneys were allowed to present a third-party culprit defense — a theory of O’Keefe’s death that differed from the prosecution’s — and they named a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who had exchanged flirtatious text messages with Read as a possible suspect in O’Keefe’s death.
Jackson suggested that the agent, Brian Higgins, became angry after Read ignored him at a bar before the meeting at Albert’s home. At Albert’s home, Jackson said, there could have been a skirmish between Higgins and O’Keefe over Read that could have ended with O’Keefe falling and hitting his head.
Higgins testified that he never saw O’Keefe inside Albert’s house and said he was not upset about being ignored by Read.
According to the Associated Press, a forensic engineer who reviewed law enforcement’s handling of the case for the Justice Department testified that O’Keefe’s injuries would have been more severe if he had been hit by a vehicle traveling faster than 20 mph.
“We don’t really have enough evidence in this case to determine what specific event actually caused this injury,” the expert, Andrew Rentschler, said, according to the AP.
