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Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, is sharing new insights about her case going into her second trial.
Read, 45, is accused of drunkenly killing O’Keefe in January 2022. Prosecutors allege she hit him with her SUV and left him to die in the snow in Canton. Read previously told Vanity Fair she believed she was being framed in a cover up involving four law enforcement agencies, including Massachusetts State Police, who investigated O’Keefe’s murder. (Per Vanity Fair, homicides that occur outside of Boston are investigated by state troopers in Massachusetts.)
According to Read, her experience as a murder defendant against what she calls a biased investigator has her reconsidering the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson in the murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and friend Ron Goldman. (Simpson died on April 10, 2024, at the age of 76.)
“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 told Vanity Fair in an interview published on Thursday, April 10. “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 has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. Her first trial ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury in July 2024.
Read faces life in prison going into a second trial for the same charges, with opening statements expected to start next week. Her legal team has since grown from David Yannetti, Alan Jackson, and Elizabeth Little to now include Robert Alessi and Victoria George, as well as nine law students acting as clerks, who have joined her case pro bono.
In March, Michael Proctor, the lead State Police investigator on the case, was dishonorably discharged after Read’s first trial when he was forced to read aloud what he admitted to be inappropriate text messages he had sent about Read to friends and coworkers at the start of the investigation. The Massachusetts State Police said Proctor’s firing stemmed from his “derogatory, defamatory, disparaging, and/or otherwise inappropriate text messages about a suspect in that investigation to other individuals.”
Proctor’s family, including his wife Elizabeth and sister Courtney, released a statement in March, per Boston.com, saying he had been the subject of “egregiously false statements from Karen Read and her defense team,” adding that Proctor had been “falsely labeled corrupt by the alleged murderer, her family, her defense team, and a mob of her followers.”
Read told Vanity Fair of the statement from Proctor’s family, “All the statement did was put his vile behavior back in the news cycle. And he had to use two women to do it? Can’t he speak for himself?”
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