The high-profile murder trial of Karen Reed captivated millions and divided a tight-knit Massachusetts community. Now, a year after her first trial ended in a hung jury, Karen Read is back in court being tried for murder again. Follow The Crime Scene Weekly to get new episodes early! You can find the podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and what is The Crime Scene Weekly?
This is Deborah Roberts. We've got a new show for you that I think you're really going to want to check out. It's called The Crime Scene Weekly from ABC News. Each week, host Brad Milkey, who you know from Start Here, sits down with the journalists covering the latest true crime stories.
From the discovery of grisly new crimes to breakthroughs in cases that are far from closed, you can stay up to speed on the latest true crime headlines. It's true crime in real time. And for the next few weeks, we're going to bring the Crime Scene Weekly to you here in the 2020 feed. If you like it, make sure to follow the show and keep listening. Again, it's the Crime Scene Weekly.
Now, here's Brad.
Last year, the high-profile murder trial of Karen Reid captivated millions and divided a tight-knit Massachusetts community. After 600 pieces of evidence and 70 witnesses, the case ended with a hung jury. Well, now Karen Reid is back in court being tried for murder again. Welcome to the crime scene. I'm Brad Milkey. I host ABC's daily news podcast, Start Here.
And every week we're bringing you the latest on what's big and what's new in the true crime space. This week, I'm talking to ABC's chief national correspondent, Matt Gutman, who did the first full exclusive interview with Karen Reid before her first trial and has now been prepping for this retrial.
Matt, I did not think we would see each other so soon after you joined us last week, but I'm so happy you're here. Thanks for being with us. I'm happy to be here, Brad. Thank you. So this story starts in 2022. It's January 28th. It's a winter night. In fact, it's the night of a historic snowstorm. Can you walk us through what happened?
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Chapter 2: What happened on the night of John O'Keefe's death?
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.
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.
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.
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
Okay, so Karen allegedly drops John O'Keefe off at his colleague Brian's house for this after party. She goes home. What happens next?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What is the prosecution's theory against Karen Reid?
so what is the theory from the prosecution here is that Karen Reed is drunk and then hits this guy with her car and leaves him to die because Karen by the way denies being drunk or incapacitated so what is the actual argument being made by the prosecution that's pretty
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So to the prosecution, open and shut case, like you said, Occam's razor, simplest explanations, the most probable explanation. But the defense here, Matt, has told a completely different story, right? They've alleged a framing and a cover up by fellow police officers. Everyone in that house has said not a chance. We had nothing to do with it. There's no framing.
John O'Keefe never even entered the house, they say. So what is the defense alleging here?
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 –
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Chapter 4: What alternative theory does the defense present?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, that's the term of the Google search? How long to die in the cold? But like a typo version of how long to die in the cold?
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Chapter 5: How credible is the investigation and what conflicts of interest exist?
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...
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
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Chapter 6: What impact did the investigation have on the community and what's next for Karen Reid?
To which we should say, Matt, his turtle boy, his name is Aiden Kearney. He's facing witness intimidation charges related to this case now, to which he's pleaded not guilty. Right. But go on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is that? Did you get a sense of what the jury found lacking on either side?
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.
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.
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.
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