Matt Gutman
Appearances
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
So Dee Dee Moore takes Abraham Shakespeare's mother out for a meal, and it's super loud in this restaurant, and, oh, suddenly... The mom gets a call. Oh, look. Oh, Abe's on the phone. And he sounds a little different. He sounds a little weird. And then it's Greg Smith the whole time explaining to the mother, hey, I have a cold. I just wanted you to know I'm OK. Don't worry about me.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
It was just before Christmas. It's a short conversation. He hangs up. So that was supposed to be the proof of life showing that Abe Shakespeare is alive. At some point, Greg Smith and Dee Dee Moore meet at a mall parking lot and she hands him money. It just so happens that the cops are already watching Dee Dee Moore, watching her give money to this guy, Greg Smith.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
And then he leaves the parking lot of the mall. They follow him. They light him up. They take him down. They're like, you're in big trouble, mister.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
Yep. She has claimed that she had counseled it was not sufficient, that she was improperly represented, and the judge has thrown that out. The judge was not happy with this case that she presented before the courts, and he tossed it out pretty quickly.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
She is now still in prison, facing a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, which means that unless one of her additional appeals works, she will die in prison.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
Right here at this gas station in a town with a name you just can't make up. Frostproof, Florida. One stop. Two quick pick lottery tickets, one of which would change his life forever. A jackpot worth $30 million.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
Well, I mean, just going back to the house where he lived in, Debra gives you a sense of the distance he had traveled from the moment he purchased that ticket to when he cashed it or finally got to cash it after some lawsuits. You know, it's basically a shotgun shack, this crumbling house in Lakeland. And as was noted in that clip that you just put out,
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
There were literally people camped outside of his house for months waiting for handouts. He couldn't leave the house without people physically accosting him, asking him for money because he really was incredibly generous in the beginning. All he wanted to do was help out his people and there were
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
lists that he carried around of people names and the amounts of money and one of the major problems and one of the the you can't make this up things about this story is that abraham shakespeare was functionally illiterate right so he needed a lot of people to help him he couldn't write text messages really so there were people helping with his phone people helping him with his accounts people helping him keep tabs of all the money he was handing out
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
But it just became too much. And, you know, in 2006, you suddenly have $17 million and he took the lump sum. So the total was 30. He took the lump sum. That is life-changing, community-changing money. For anybody. And he was for anybody. But especially then, especially in Lakeland, Florida. And it was in the news. It was in the local news. Everybody knew this guy. Suddenly he was a celebrity.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
You know, he was the kind of guy who didn't, you know, we said he was a janitor, but he didn't actually really have a job. He would do odd jobs all the time. He would go to, you know, this barbershop owned by a guy named Greg Smith, who becomes very important in the story later on. And, you know, he would just sweep the hair off the floor, do whatever he could to get a meal and get some money.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
So it was an enormous distance that he covered by winning this lottery. And of course, it did not end well for him.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
I went back again to watch some of the old videos from 2013, and one of the clips is this old clip of Greg Smith, who was the barber, who essentially created this catch can in a Red Bull can, put a microphone inside, and recorded Dee Dee Moore, essentially getting her to more or less confess to murdering and sort of disappearing Abraham Shakespeare. But Greg Smith was pretty close to him, and
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
Greg recounts a story of one day deep into the mess that Abraham Shakespeare had sort of been immersed in because of the winnings. And Abraham Shakespeare, who's been like handing out money right and left, comes in and he's like, you know, Greg, I wish I could go back to my old life. I wish I could go back to the time before I had this money.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
I could just live free and be myself because I can't be myself. And that desire to sort of get out not only caused Abraham Shakespeare to go and move into a gated community where he thought he might be protected from all these people looking for the handout, the loan, the payout. There were women who were coming who were saying that their children were his illegitimate children.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
People were literally coming out of the woodwork, so he was trying to inoculate himself from them, trying to create some distance, which is why he moved to this house on the edge of town in a gated community. And it's why, when Dee Dee Moore actually murdered him,
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
She was able to cover her tracks by making this video in which you basically hear Abraham kind of saying he's ready to check out, move away, maybe California, maybe Cozumel, go on a cruise. And why people believed for a long time that he really did disappear.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
You know what's really funny is I had to go back to look at some of the old videos that we did back in like 2012, 2013 when I first started doing this story and when we interviewed Dee Dee and Greg Smith. You know, I was much younger. I was still in my mid-30s and I realized, Holy cow. I look so tired because I was crisscrossing the country so much back then.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
Debra, you've done this many times as well, right? The jail interviews are some of the most nerve-wracking things we do because you have a very limited amount of time with this person. The prison prescribes exactly how long you have. They have everything set up. There are all these parameters.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
There's a lot riding on a very short period of time where you have to get all your questions in and hope that this inmate whose life is either on the line or who faced life in prison without parole play ball with you. And in the case of Dee Dee Moore, she came to play. I mean, it was one of the most astonishing, confounding, frustrating experiences.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
So she sits down and right away she admits no guilt. And it pretty quickly goes off the rails when I'm trying to call her out on the fact that there is a mountain of evidence that Which the jury saw, which is why they just convicted her of murdering Abraham Shakespeare, including the fact that his body was found under a slab on her property.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
Yeah, in her backyard. I mean, that's not great that she concocted the video. She concocted the letters, the text messages from Abraham. And yet, Deborah. She continues to say that there's another guy. There's a drug dealer named Ronald out there. That there's a woman named Deanne who's a witness who has the key to everything. And look, Deanne sent a letter.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
And nobody's ever met these people and there's no evidence that they exist. No. And the letter, Debra, was in her handwriting.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
I'm like, dude, what is wrong with you? Get some rest. Get some sun, boy. It was actually very interesting. But yeah, I'm in L.A. in my little cave office here. So I'm happy to be sedentary right now.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
You say a lot of things, but then you only mention one thing. Maybe you didn't lie about that much.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
In the recordings from your conversations with the sheriff's office, you give so many different versions that it's absolutely bewildering. Why is that?
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
I mean, when she started talking, so there's a duality that happens that I know you've experienced, Debra, which is you go into these prisons and you interview these people. And very often it's after conviction. Sometimes it's before. And so these people have been judged by a jury of their peers. They've been convicted.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
By 12 people who've been presented often a very significant amount of evidence against them. And she becomes very small. That's a very gentle tone. She's trying to be convincing.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
But this is a woman who was found guilty, and the evidence is enormous against her, of murder. firing bullets into Abraham Shakespeare, then carrying the body outside, somehow getting it. like 100 yards from her house to that field, then burying the body.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
This is a tough, physically strong woman who was capable enough to have this nursing staff agency and capable of making these businesses, but also capable of concocting this story of torturing Abraham Shakespeare's mom by making her think that he was alive, by covering up her tracks, and then by murdering this guy in... cold blood solely because she wanted his money.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
It was hard to square the two. And then when she started talking about, you know, trying to convince me of her innocence by saying that she loves Donald Duck and Daffy and Minnie Mouse and all that stuff because, you know, she knows that ABC News is owned by Disney. Wow. It was so preposterous and so ludicrous and frankly a little offensive.
20/20
The After Show: Unlucky Numbers
So he owned a barbershop, Greg Smith did, and Dee Dee Moore, she said, basically, I'll give you some money if you help me convince Abraham Shakespeare's mother that he's actually alive, or she didn't say he's dead, but, you know, just call the mother to assure her that Abe is okay.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
So it's a weekend in Boston, and we are talking about a group of Boston cops investigating And it's a snowstorm. And so typically the activity is going to the neighborhood bar. Right. Right. And so Karen Reed, who is an adjunct finance professor, works in the financial industry as well. That's what she and her Boston police officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
So here's where this story continues to get more interesting, right? You think this is a cut and dried case. There was an allegation by the prosecution that a woman was driving drunk. She got angry at her boyfriend. She rammed her car into him in the snow. They were both drunk. Okay, that's the end of the story. That's what happens here. But it's so layered that it keeps expanding outwards.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
So the trial takes place. not far from Canton, Massachusetts, where John O'Keefe was found in the snow in Denham, Massachusetts. And pretty quickly, this story becomes the all-consuming passion of the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Everybody is talking about this, including a guy named Turtle Boy, who runs, at this point, a very small news website based out of Worcester, Massachusetts, who begins to start to try to investigate the case set out by the defense.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
He believes that there is a mass conspiracy by Boston police, by state police to cover up something, and he starts following people on the witness list who are connected to the Alberts. He follows Jennifer McCabe. He follows the Alberts. He's going to their kids' sports games. He's heckling them, and he doesn't stop, and he starts to create this army of supporters.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
By the time this trial starts in April 2024, and I was right there in courthouse steps as the skies just grew dark and ominous and there was this huge rainstorm.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
But before that hit, Turtle Boy and the supporters of Karen Reid had turned up by the hundreds, swarming the courthouse outside, protesting in her favor, heckling family members of John O'Keefe as he came in, saying that Karen Reid was framed. It created an entirely different dynamic. And then inside the courtroom, Brad, there was not a seat in the house. There was standing room only.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
You couldn't get in. You had to get on a waiting list just to sit in the courtroom. That's how big this trial was in Boston. Boston was saturated with... details of the trial and everybody involved, and it was a nine-week trial.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Eventually, the jury got the case, and they deliberated for five days, like 25 total hours, and they couldn't reach a verdict, and Judge Canone eventually declared a mistrial.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
They weren't quite sure how to handle the three different charges. So jurors afterwards spoke to us. They also spoke to the defense. And They wanted apparently to deliver a partial verdict, couldn't figure out how to do it. And apparently there was some confusion about the jury instructions, which the judge hands down to the jury to explain how they're supposed to proceed.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
So eventually they declared a hung jury. They said they couldn't come to a conclusion. They took it back to the judge. And as happens in every case where a judge is presented with a hung jury, typically the The judge might send it back to the jury and say, hey, work on this a few more hours. Give it another day. See if you can come to something.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
He's been with the police department for well over a decade. And that's what they end up doing. They meet some friends in Canton, Massachusetts, for drinks at a bar called The Waterfall. And they drink there. And they drank some more.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
But I think the judge realized that they weren't going to budge, and she declared a mistrial, meaning that this is not her being exonerated of anything. This means the jury couldn't decide, and there has to be another trial. The prosecution could have decided at this point, you know what, this has cost so much money. We spent so much time on this that let's just drop this thing.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
We're going to let her go and chalk up this loss. But the prosecution didn't do that. They are adamant that she is guilty. And so they went back at it. They decided they wanted to try for a second trial. And that's basically where we are today during jury selection for the second trial of Karen Reed in Dedham, Massachusetts.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
You know, if you can imagine a trial with even more fireworks, this may be it. So the prosecution in the first trial had used a local deputy DA. This time they've chosen a special counsel and lead prosecutor, a pretty famous Boston lawyer who represented the Boston gangster, James Whitey Bulger, who was obviously notorious in the city. And
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Judge Kenoni, who was also the judge in the first trial, basically ruled that she's going to allow something called the third-party culprit defense, which involves Brian Albert and Brian Higgins, who were alleged to be in the house the night of the murder.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
So I think we're going to hear more about this alleged conspiracy to kill John O'Keefe and the Boston police cover-up, which the defense alleges.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
They're going to be allowed to introduce that, yeah. And I believe that they're going to push that all the way to the hilt. Interestingly, the defense has also added another member to this pretty high-flying defense team, and that is Victoria George, who was an alternate juror during the first tryout.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
That is correct. She will be advising the defense team on these matters, which is actually really smart. If you think about it, you want to know what the jury's thinking. Heck, bring in an ex-juror who sat there, who was there every single day of those 29 days of trial and might know and give you some insight into what the current jurors are thinking about.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
And after a few hours, a guy named Brian Albert, who is a police sergeant detective with a very elite unit who John O'Keefe had always looked up to, offers Karen and John the opportunity to go back to his house for an after party. You know, he said some of the guys and their family members are crazy.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
I just have to talk about the jury poll for a second. The amount of media saturation that this case has had in Boston has made it very difficult to find jurors who say that they are either unbiased about the case or have not heard an unbelievable amount.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Because when you go to Boston or anywhere around there, in fact, Brad, people talk about this case and they know it with such incredible granular detail that
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Well, I mean, I think you put it perfectly. It is high stakes and it does elicit such strong feelings because on the one hand, it's either the murder of a beloved police officer or if the converse is true and what the defense alleges is true, it's a giant, ugly conspiracy
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
We did the interview. We had a couple meals together. I spent time with her lawyer, Alan Jackson. According to him and what he told me, he took the case because he so deeply believes in her innocence and in the truth of the story that she's telling about what really happened that night. And not only is he convincing, but Karen Reid is convincing. Did you kill John O'Keefe?
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Would you say that you were angry with John that night?
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Is it possible that you might have hit him unwittingly in your admittedly very large SUV?
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Could you have been angry enough and slightly drunk because he had annoyed you and done some inconsiderate things of late that in the fit of rage you just backed up and tried to tap him?
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
The whole team tells a convincing story. And I think that's why so many people in the Boston area and around the country, and this has really become a national story, believe in her innocence. She is compelling. She's so articulate.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Her story has remained almost exactly the same from the moment that she started talking about it, which I think is one of the reasons that people could find her so compelling.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
are going to drink there and hang out some more and do they want to come and john said yes karen tells me that she said that she wasn't so interested in staying for more of that kind of stuff and she wanted to go home so she was going to drop him off she lives with john and he basically adopted his sister's children after his sister and her husband passed away tragically which kind of gives you a sense of who john o'keefe was
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
The way Karen Reid describes it is she wakes up. It's 4 a.m. She searches the room. She's on the couch. She doesn't see him in the living room downstairs. She goes upstairs to the bedroom. He's not there. Where is he? Checks her phone. No messages from him. She starts to get frantic.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
She calls John's friend, Carrie Roberts, and Jennifer McCabe, then goes to pick them up, and they create this search party to go look, and she and Carrie Roberts and Jennifer McCabe are in the car, The snow is still ferociously coming down and they're searching for John. They go back to the Albert's house, the place where the after party was supposed to be.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
And after a short search, they realize that John's out there in the snow. He's unresponsive in the snow bank and it's not looking good. Yeah, what is his condition right there? So he's alive, but barely. Karen says she touches him. She realizes he's freezing. He's obviously hypothermic, but he's got gashes on his head. And then the ambulance arrives. Police arrive.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
And initially, no one's quite sure what happened. John is taken to the hospital. He's pronounced dead there. He's got head trauma, hypothermia. He's got injury to his arm. Karen Reed's also brought to the hospital. She sees his family there, and that's when things begin to grow cold because people start to wonder what exactly happened. And that's when suspicions begin to mount against Karen.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Yeah. Three days later, she is arrested and she pleads not guilty to charges of second degree murder, manslaughter, leaving the scene of a crime. She has always, from the very start, pleaded not guilty and has been adamant that she did not hit John with the car, that she wished John were still alive and that she loved him.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Despite, and this would come back to haunt her, a couple of things, including some really nasty messages that she left on his phone as they parted that night. Clearly, they were in an argument. Clearly, things were not going well. And she was very, very angry. And it wasn't the first time that she had been angry at him. She had also been angry at him at a trip in Aruba.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
And there were some other incidents as well. But overall, she says she loved the guy.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
much it i mean it's occam's razor right there they're drunk people in boston in a snowstorm visibility is near zero she drops the guy off the prosecution claims they were in the midst of a fight and you could see how the voice messages and what she calls him terrible names is screaming at him can back that up She backs the car up at a very fast pace as she's leaving the scene.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
And the prosecution put out vehicle data that indicated that Karen Reid had backed up about 60 feet, hitting 24 miles an hour. That's when they alleged that she slammed into John O'Keefe. The force of her 6,000-pound SUV hitting him knocked him so far back. He falls backward. His head snaps against the ground. The snow had started falling heavily, but it wasn't.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
as much snow as it was hours and days later when the snowstorm ended. So he hit the frozen ground, bang, lights out, starts some significant bleeding in his body. He's holding a glass from the bar. That shatters, it cuts him up. The prosecution alleges there are pieces of broken taillight everywhere and that, you know, this is Occam's razor. She's drunk. She's angry.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
She backs up into him, hits her live-in boyfriend, the guy she loves, because she's upset at him, and then leaves him to die in the snow and leaves the scene and goes home, wakes up the next day, buyer's remorse, and then comes back and produces this act according to the prosecution. They say it's an act. Oh, you know, I had no idea. I had no idea what's going on.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
But one of the things that they keep coming back to is that she asks, did I hit him? I hit him. I hit him. You know, there's this phrase that emergency workers testify to hearing Karen Reid repeatedly saying, and the prosecution found that very damning.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
This gets really interesting, Brad, in my 15 years doing 2020s. I have never met a lawyer who so believed in his client as Alan Jackson. Alan Jackson, former top-notch prosecutor here from Southern California, still lives in Pasadena, guy now works for –
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
clients he is a defense attorney looks good he dresses really nice really nice suits which he walks into like working-class Boston courtroom and and not everybody heads definitely turn not everybody liked what they saw but he got a call from Karen Reid very early on in the case and he is not normally inclined to take cases like this but she was so convincing on the phone he told me
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
She was so good and so truthful sounding, he believes she is telling the truth, that he essentially let her talk pre-trial outside on the courtroom steps. He let her have hours-long interview with me. I was going to say, that's rare, pre-trial. Any of that can theoretically be held against you. Most defense attorneys would say that's absolutely suicidal.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
That's why it never happens because it's a terrible idea. But Alan Jackson so believed in his client and in her innocence that he was willing to put her out to the whole world before trial. And one of the things that ended up coming out from conversations with Alan Jackson and with Karen Reid is this alternate theory. And the alternate theory is that John O'Keefe was sort of like –
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Considered a bit of a softer cop. Like, he was the nice cop you want to run into. He's not the knuckle-dragging SWAT guy who's going to beat you up, according to the defense. And he wanted to hang out with these guys, the Alberts, who were really like one of the great famous families in Boston police officer lore. This guy is such a big-name cop in Boston.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
He was actually featured in a TV series along with Donnie Wahlberg called Boston's Finest, which shows... like these top-notch, hard-charging cops. So the defense claims that, hey, John O'Keefe was just desperate to hang out with the cool kids, right? And they were the cool kids. It's like a family of cops. They know everybody. They're super connected.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
But there was some beef that I'm not going to get into with another member of the family that put John O'Keefe in the sights of these other cops. And the allegation from the defense is that John went over there Karen Reed left in that SUV on that snowy night, not hitting him. She watched him go in or thought she watched him get close to going in.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
And so what the defense says happened is that John O'Keefe was essentially led into an ambush. He was brought downstairs into the basement of this house in Canton, Massachusetts. And a fight broke out. Other people piled on. John O'Keefe tried to defend himself, but there were too many other guys. They beat him badly and then dragged him outside to die in the snow.
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The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
They also alleged that he was bitten by the family German shepherd, and there were a number of other allegations as well. Basically, the defense charges that John O'Keefe was beaten very badly, dragged out in the snow, and that he died there. And, you know, normally that would be a pretty outrageous accusation to make by the defense against Boston's finest, right?
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
You're talking about a very, very large police department that has some credibility, but it also has... lost some credibility in recent years. And that was also on display in the way that the investigation was handled and the connections between the cops who were allegedly at that after party in Brian Albert's house and the cops who investigated in the coming hours this alleged murder.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
You know, one of the things that the defense kept talking about is that John O'Keefe's injuries were not consistent with a car accident. They didn't like the fact that everybody seemed to know each other. The investigators knew the people who owned the house where John O'Keefe died. That's the Albert House.
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The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
At one point, they used a leaf blower to try to get the snow away so they could pick up pieces of potential evidence underneath. And they also... pointed to a Google search made by Jennifer McCabe. She was the woman who was driving with Kerry Roberts and Karen Reid to try to look for John O'Keefe.
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The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Now, the defense alleged, and they told me this very, very early on in the case when they first got the discovery, that Jennifer McCabe made a Google search in her phone, how long to die in the cold, H-O-S, how long to die. But basically, she was asking how long to die in the cold.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
How long to die in the cold, yeah. Allegedly around 2.30 a.m. And that was hours and hours before John O'Keefe's body was found by Jennifer Cabe, Karen Reed, and Kerry Roberts. There are other weird things as well. The defense claims that the family dog was then given away. The Alberts sold the house.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
Putting all of these incidents and allegations together, the defense suddenly start to feel that, well, maybe there is a cover-up here. But the prosecution very quickly, especially this happened at trial, shot a lot of this down, right? They said that that Google search actually happened at 6 a.m. with Karen Reid at the Alberts house when she came back and found John O'Keefe dying in the snow.
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The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
But it was a tab that had been opened. or had been open since 2.30 a.m. So basically it misread the timestamp.
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The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
So, OK, remember, the house where this happened. belonged to that very well-known Boston cop named Brian Albert. Brian Albert's brother worked at the Canton Police Department, and there was already a bit of conflict of interest when this was happening. So they did the reasonable thing, and it was the state troopers who took control of the investigation.
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
However, the state trooper and lead investigator in the case admitted to actually knowing
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
the albert family actually being friends with them and very quickly through discovery the defense began to pick these pieces together and to allege that this lead investigator named michael proctor not only did a bad job but he was biased and prejudiced against karen reid from the very get-go uh... there were texts that they
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
showed the jury in which he calls her names, really bad names, crude names against women, calls her a whack job. He texted his sister that he wished Karen Reid would just kill herself. He allegedly treated her very badly when he initially arrested her. And of course, again, he was friends with members of the Albert family who lived in that home where John O'Keefe was found dead. So the defense...
20/20
The Crime Scene: Karen Read Murder Retrial Begins
pounced on this and they hammered michael proctor on the stand it was merciless and at the end it was so bad for proctor he was put on leave and then after the totality of these text messages and his conduct was exposed he was fired from the police force we are actually going to take a quick break right here when we come back we will hear how this case divided this quiet community of canton mass and what is next for karen reed
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He reconsiders, and then he comes out with his ruling on whether he would support resentencing of the brothers in this upcoming hearing. And remember, the ship has already sailed. Trains left the station. The judge has already approved the previous DA's motion to start the resentencing process, right?
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And there are a couple of California laws that essentially give a tremendous amount of discretion to a judge to allow this to happen, including one called AB600. And There's some precedent indicating that the new DA can't roll back this ruling that a resentencing hearing is going to happen.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
We're talking about Kitty and Jose Menendez. And Jose Menendez was really a star in the entertainment world, right? He's involved in music producing. He has become a millionaire. He has single-handedly raised his family and all of his extended family up. This is an American success story, right? Basically came from Cuba. They were virtually penniless.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Right. And what a lot of people thought was going to happen, Brad, and there's a whole group of people in Los Angeles who are Menendez brothers watchers and experts, right? Like, massive legal teams and who are very close observers of the case. They felt that, okay... What Ackman's doing is probably smart.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He's going to try to turn down the brothers' effort to try to get a new trial based on this new evidence. And then he's going to actually relent on the resentencing. Right. Because there's like different paths. There's the habeas thing and then there's the other thing. Right. There are two paths.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And so the first path, which was the habeas petition, which is, hey, let's have a new trial for these brothers, given the new evidence that is out there. He shut the door on that in February. And so a lot of people who watch the proceedings about the Menendez brothers thought that, OK, well, Hockman will relent on the second path, which is the resentencing, because
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
We've all seen the data and the documents that have come out of the California prison system which show that these guys are exemplary prisoners. They have created hospice programs and substance abuse programs. They have created a mindfulness and yoga program. They have beautified the campus of the Donovan Correctional Facility where they live in a green space project.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They have the lowest security profile. So yes, maybe... Hockman will see that it might be better to give them a second chance and have them their sentence reduced or give them even the option of being resent and so that one day they could walk free, maybe one day soon. And so he stands up in front of the podium on March 10th. And what does he pronounce?
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He pronounces that these men remain the same men that they were in the 90s. They are congenital liars. They are murderers who purposely and with intent and premeditatedly poised those shotguns, pointed them right at the faces and heads of their parents, and pulled the trigger. And when they ran out of those shotgun shells because they've plugged so many holes in the bodies of their parents...
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They reloaded and shot again. He said those are the same men. They are not rehabilitated right now. They continue to issue at least 20 lies that Hockman said that they continue to say, and I will not support their resentencing in this upcoming hearing.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Exactly. So it's still up to the judge. The judge has a lot of discretion, but it makes it a bit of a thornier decision for the judge because now he's going to be going directly against the authority of, you know, the highest elected legal official in the largest county in the United States. And that does complicate things. And so after that decision, I actually interviewed D.A.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Hockman one-on-one, and he said, well, you know, there is actually a pathway through which the brothers can get my support for resentencing, and he laid it out for me.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Like, do you want them to enumerate each individual lie? Do you have a checklist? I actually do. And so basically what he's saying is that the brothers admitted to the murders and they have apologized to the family members, by the way, and made peace with the family members about the murders.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
But what they haven't done, according to Hockman, is admit to a long list of lies, which he says that they made in the years after the murder. And so if they admit to those lies publicly, then he would change his stance on resentencing. And, you know, you can hear I asked him, do you have a list? He's like, in fact, I do have a list.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
By the way, the brothers lawyers tell me that is very unlikely to happen for a series of reasons, including that it might expose the brothers to other charges.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And now he is living in a multimillion dollar Beverly Hills mansion. He's got these two kids, Eric and Lyle, chiseled faces, forearms, muscled and veined from tennis and sports. And they're just like poster children of Beverly Hills kids, you know, with these mops of thick, dark hair. You know, they look the part. But obviously something went very, very wrong.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
100%. I mean, it would just take a scribble of the pen and their sentences would be completely commuted. Governor Newsom has said that he's not quite interested in doing that, but he has taken a very big step in starting the process towards seeing them granted some sort of clemency. And that happened right after that press conference with D.A. Hockman.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He basically initiated a risk analysis process by which parole board members were would assess whether the brothers would pose a risk to society if they were released from prison and that assessment is going on as we speak the brothers have the first meeting from the parole board in june and it is very possible that it's that parole board
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
in a process initiated by the governor, who has the most power in the state of California, that is going to see the brothers' pathway towards resentencing and eventual release opened. But Brad, it could be sometime, and it's very possible that Eric and Lyle are not released at the same time because Lyle has a couple of very minor, but infractions nonetheless, on his record in prison.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So we have this hearing coming up in a little over a week in which the judge will meet with the defense attorneys and the DA's prosecutors. And he'll basically make an assessment of whether that resentencing hearing can continue, can go on as planned on April 17th and 18th. And it seems likely, given previous indications, that he will at least allow that hearing to go on. And that's a big deal.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So we don't know what will happen from that hearing. We do know that the brothers have been, by and large, exemplary prisoners. And just an example comes up. They've been in the system in California for 35 years. Neither of them have ever been in a physical altercation, not a single one. So, you know, it's those kinds of things.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
It's the fact that their families now unanimously, because the one holdout who was against the brothers, Uncle Milton, passed away recently. So now every single surviving family member of Kitty and Jose Menendez unanimously and strongly supports the brothers' release and their resentencing. And that actually makes a big difference because we're talking about the victims, right?
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
The victims matter in the U.S. justice system. And in this case, the victims are advocating strongly for the resentencing and release of the perpetrators.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
It's a really good question, Brad, and I think about it all the time. Why are people... including my 16-year-old daughter, so obsessed with this case, right? Like, I have never seen her be more interested in anything involved in the news in her entire life. And her dad is in the news. She has never taken interest. But this is such a big thing.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
You know, part of it is because of the massive social media traction, because of the Netflix drama series, which she watched, Monsters. And part of it is because I think for people like us as well, it hearkens back to our past, but also has us reassessing our present. What is a crime? What is unforgivable? What makes a crime forgivable, right?
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Like how much do we take into account the fact that the Menendez brothers were so apparently abused, so heinously and mercilessly abused by a man who was allegedly a monster that none of us knew about, right? I think it makes all of us reassess the intricacies of the criminal justice system and what we view is justice.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And on this hot August 20th night, 1989, Kitty and Jose are gunned down. And not just gunned down. This is like brutal, nasty, visceral, up-close murder. Shotgun blasts to the kneecaps, to the back of the head on Jose. The mother is crawling at some point. She's shotgunned. They actually had to reload the shotguns, whoever the assailants were.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
These are questions I think a lot of us think about when it comes to the criminal justice system.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And it was so gruesome that police didn't quite know what to make of it initially, especially because Eric and Lyle Menendez, as you mentioned, 18 and 21 at the time, were like, hey, it's not us. They were intruders. And then the different stories started to come out and they never quite made sense. And then in March of 1990, police pretty much started to piece together what was going on.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They arrested Eric and Lyle, and they understood that these two young men had premeditated this murder. They had planned to murder their parents. They had purchased shotguns. They had driven down to near San Diego to buy them. They had shotgunned their parents. They had reloaded at some point. It was face-to-face and intimate. This was a killing that involved a tremendous amount of personal hatred.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Right. They are now saying that they murdered their parents because they had to, because of self-defense, because they were afraid of their father. And this unspools something else that was also completely novel and really sort of earth shattering. There was now open talk in court and in the public about about these two now young men being sexually abused by their father, Brad.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Well, the reaction in court was multifaceted. I mean, at one point, the prosecutor said that men can't be raped or can't be sexually abused, something to that effect, by other men. In the public, it was shock and disgust and sadness. And I think a lot of people believe that. But...
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
the jurors weren't quite convinced brad it was a hung jury for both brothers and that set up the second trial this time the brothers are actually tried together and it's a trial presided over by a judge named stanley weisberg and again we're talking about the mid 90s right more is and cultural attitudes towards male sexual abuse were different.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And this time, Judge Weisberg limited the inclusion of sexual assault and the testimony allegedly corroborating the sexual assault, calling that testimony, quote, the abuse excuse. Today, obviously, that would never happen. So a large amount of testimony and evidence that was included in the first trial was excluded from the second trial.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And so it was a very different type of imperfect self-defense that was set up for the brothers in their second trial in 1996.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They're saying. that, OK, maybe they didn't believe that on that specific night at that specific time, their father, Jose Menendez, had a gun by his side and was going to murder them and their lives were immediately in danger. But they felt that at some point in the near or.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
uncertain future that they would be significantly harmed to the point of being killed by their father and that their mother would be a bystander and that they felt that they had to defend themselves and this was the way to do it it's sort of preemptively acting in self-defense now
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Because of how this was presented in court and because of what the prosecution alleged and because of the facts of the case, the jury didn't buy it. The jury convicted them of first-degree murder. And not just of first-degree murder, but first-degree murder with special circumstances that the brothers were trying to enrich themselves as a result of the murder.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And that's why eventually they were sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms without the possibility of parole. That means that no matter what they do, they will have to spend the entirety of their natural lives in prison until they die.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So this is called a habeas corpus petition. This habeas corpus petition was filed with the court. And basically it says that years after the brothers were convicted, a cousin of theirs, Andy Cano, found a letter or somebody found it in his box of letters. It's from Eric to his cousin, Andy Cano, about the alleged abuse before the murders happened. Let me read some of it.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
It says, I've been trying to avoid dad. It's still happening. Andy, but it's even worse for me now. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. I'm afraid. He's crazy. And it took a while to have this materialized, partly because Andy Cano died in the early 2000s. And nobody brought this forward. The second piece was produced during a documentary.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So Roy Rosello was a former member of this boy band named Menudo. It was big in the 80s and 90s. And he appears in this docuseries called Menendez and Menudo, Boys Betrayed. And he says on camera that he was also raped by the brother's father, Jose Menendez, indicating that this was not just happening to the boys, but that other people were allegedly sexually abused by Jose Menendez.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Right. Some of the family members denied that this was happening, but other family members said, no, in fact, we knew about it. And one of the most prominent is Joan, the 93-year-old aunt of Eric and Lyle Menendez and Kitty Menendez's sister. And she very publicly said that the brothers never knew on any given night whether they would be raped. And so there was an evolution in the family.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Very quickly, they supported the brothers, but also quite quickly, they began not only to support them, but to try to demand or ask that they be released. And so there's this confluence of events. There is this documentary that comes out that shows the letter from Andy Cano and Roy Rosellas. on camera talking about being raped by Jose Menendez.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
There's the dramatized version from Ryan Murphy called Monsters, which is a scripted series about the brothers, but also talks about their alleged abuse by their father. It creates this groundswell of interest that propels this story back into the limelight. It's thrust in front of LASDA George Cascone in the form of this habeas corpus petition.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Well, the question is which DA, right? So the first DA, George Casco was after a while swayed by this. And there may be a couple of reasons. First, We're so quick to forget the zeitgeist and the cultural moment, but really at the end of 2023 and 2024, lots of people started talking about the case, and it started picking up momentum on TikTok.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And then one of the country's very biggest influencers got on this bandwagon, and that's Kim Kardashian. And she really created this social media phenomenon of trying to get the brothers released. And There was a groundswell of this, and in late 2024, this had been reviewed by L.A. 's D.A. George Gascon at the time and his deputy district attorneys.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And they came to the conclusion, which they announced in October, just before the elections, by the way. I don't know if that was incidental or not. that they would punt on whether or not to recommend a new trial based on the habeas case.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
But right now they would recommend resentencing for the brothers based on their rehabilitation in prison, their good deeds, and the fact that it seems that they would not be a threat to society if they were out in public again.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
So there was literally a new sheriff in town, Brad, with a completely different set of ideas. And initially... DA Nathan Hockman, who took office on December 2nd, kept his cards close-ish to his vest. He very appropriately said, I know this is a big case. I know that there is tremendous public interest in this case. So what I want to do is spend some time with my team to review all the documents.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And remember... Two big, very long trials, a tremendous amount of paperwork having to do with their 35 years in prison. All the ancillary stuff, the letters and the habeas petitions and the various motions that have been filed over the years. So we're talking about Hockman and his team going through something like 50,000 pages of documents.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
There was visual and audio tapes that they were going through. That takes time. And then all of a sudden, January 7th, the massive fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. And that basically pressed pause on everything that happened in this city for at least a month. And so Hockman and his team asked to continue the hearing, which was supposed to happen in January. It got delayed.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
Then it got delayed again. It was supposed to be in March. And now it's going to be in April where they were going to decide on the resentencing for the brothers. But before that happened, Brad, Hockman decided that he would have a press conference.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
And his first press conference about the Menendez brothers was in February, in which he announced that, no, he's not going to go with that habeas corpus petition, that he does not believe that the new evidence that was purportedly brought to the attention of the previous DA and him, the letter to Andy Cano and the testimony by Ro Rossello, He said it's been too much time.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
This stuff should have come out before. It doesn't hold water. The evidence seems to indicate, according to Hockman, that the brothers were not sexually abused and that their serial lies leading up to their first trial. indicate that they should not be given a new trial based on this evidence. And he shot it down. But he did something that really upset the family and victims of sexual abuse.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
The way he put down the brothers' allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of their father seemed to many people to be And the family very quickly, like within an hour of that press conference, put out this livid statement. And I just want to read to you part of the statement the family put out, like, quote, District Attorney Nathan Hockman took us right back to 1996. That's the second trial.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
He opened the wounds we have spent decades trying to heal. He didn't listen to us. To suggest that the years of abuse couldn't have led to the tragedy in 1989 is not only outrageous but also dangerous. Abuse does not exist in a vacuum. They also called his press conference hostile and basically said that they'll continue to fight for the Brothers' release.
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The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
They say, quote, and all we are asking for is to right this decade's long injustice, they wrote, Brad.
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
We're talking about Kitty and Jose Menendez. And Jose Menendez was really a star in the entertainment world, right? He's involved in music producing. He has become a millionaire. He has single-handedly raised his family and all of his extended family up. This is an American success story, right? Basically came from Cuba. They were virtually penniless.
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
And now he is living in a multimillion dollar Beverly Hills mansion. He's got these two kids, Eric and Lyle, chiseled faces, forearms, muscled and veined from tennis and sports. And they're just like poster children of Beverly Hills kids, you know, with these mops of thick, dark hair. You know, they look the part. But obviously something went very, very wrong.
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
And on this hot August 20th night, 1989, Kitty and Jose are gunned down. And not just gunned down. This is like brutal, nasty, visceral, up-close murder.
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
shotgun blasts to the kneecaps to the back of the head on jose the mother is crawling at some point she's shotgunned they actually had to reload the shotguns whoever the assailants were and it was so gruesome that police didn't quite know what to make of it initially especially because eric and lyle menendez as you mentioned 18 and 21 at the time were like hey it's not us there were intruders
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
And then the different stories started to come out. And they never quite made sense. And then in March of 1990... police pretty much started to piece together what was going on. They arrested Eric and Lyle, and they understood that these two young men had premeditated this murder. They had planned to murder their parents. They had purchased shotguns.
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
They had driven down to near San Diego to buy them. They had shotgunned their parents. They had reloaded at some point. It was face-to-face and intimate. This was a killing that involved a tremendous amount of personal hatred.
The Prosecutors
The Menendez Brothers' Fight for Freedom, from Crime Scene Weekly
Right. They are now saying that they murdered their parents because they had to, because of self-defense, because they were afraid of their father. And this unspools something else that was also completely novel and really sort of earth shattering. There was now open talk in court and in the public about about these two now young men being sexually abused by their father, Brad.