The Megyn Kelly Show
Breaking Down Every Angle of the Karen Read Case and Trials: Crime Week Begins, with Peter Tragos | Ep. 1218
29 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the background of the Karen Read case?
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly and welcome to Crime Week here on the Megyn Kelly Show, or as we like to call it, True Crime Christmas, because nothing says Christmas like true crime.
All week we are bringing you deep dives on some big legal cases you likely know well and others you might not know much about. We're talking to a lawyer, a private eye, the woman at the center of a shocking fraud case, and our good pal Maureen Callahan on a serial killer case she covered extensively. But we begin Crime Week with a crime and trial that has captivated the country for years now.
Karen Reid's courtroom drama has sparked intense debate, raised questions about police conduct, and fueled fierce divisions online. And the legal saga is far from over. In fact, there is a new development just this month. Not just one, actually more. Peter Tragos, attorney and host of The Lawyer You Know on YouTube. He's so good on this. He's covered every twist and turn of this case.
You will love listening to this conversation. And he joins me right now. I've been talking a lot about Riverbend Ranch because I love their steaks. For the last 35 years, Riverbend Ranch has been creating an elite Angus herd by using ultrasound technology to identify genetically superior cattle with a focus on flavor and tenderness. All Riverbend Ranch cattle are born and raised in the USA.
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Order from RiverbendRanch.com, use the promo code Megan for 20 bucks off your first order, and let me know what you think. That's RiverbendRanch.com, promo code Megan. So let's just start back at the beginning for people who may not be as up to speed on this case as you are. Karen Reid was who? She's living her private life in Massachusetts. Who was she before all this happened to her?
She was a single woman dating a law enforcement officer, had a great job in finance, and her family was a close-knit family, loved each other for all intents and purposes. When she reconnected with this boyfriend who was an officer and they go out for a night on the town, they had a bit of a tumultuous relationship.
And then that night after some drinking at the bar, hanging out with a bunch of friends, everything changed forever.
So the prosecution, which would ultimately be charging her, alleges that they left this bar, they drove over to a friend's house, another cop, and that her boyfriend got out of the car, that he then walked up to the front door of the friend's house and went Sorry, this is what she alleges. She alleges he went to the front door of the house, he went inside, and something terrible happened to him.
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Chapter 2: How did the prosecution's allegations shape the case?
He had raccoon eyes. He died from hitting the back of his head. And the evidence shows maybe it was on a ledge and not a flat ground. You know, that was a little, who was actually going to prove what injury was the cause of death and how he got it. So that was a big point of contention throughout.
And if you looked at a lot of the medical evidence and the accident reconstructionists, to me, that's really where Karen Reed's...
Yes, that was a good fact for her. The fact that the Lexus expert at trial said there was nothing recorded on this car of hitting somebody, of going 24 miles an hour or whatever it was, and running over another person. That he would have expected something to register in the car's brain and nothing did.
And that's one of the problems with so many facts in this case is there was kind of competing theories on that where if you hit a man that's 200 pounds, maybe that's not going to be enough to register an event when you have a very heavy Lexus like that. And then there were some people that said, well, maybe it should have, and there's nothing on here that actually did register it.
But even more so, Karen Reed had accident reconstructionists that were actually hired by the FBI while they were investigating this investigation. which we'll get into the shady stuff happening there as to why the FBI would even get involved.
But Karen Reed ends up hiring those guys as her experts and they do all sorts of different testing and they can never create the same action where something hitting that taillight would explode out into the yard and on John O'Keefe the way that the prosecution said it happened in that case.
It just wouldn't happen, especially with some of the videos and pictures where the taillights are still working without busting those little actual light bulbs inside. It was really fascinating. Which was the case here? Correct. The lights were still working.
So in other words, this was faked. In other words, the point is those guys killed him inside, they brought him out, and then they were the ones who hit her car to make it look like it had bumped into him.
So partially, they somewhat point the finger at the guys inside the house for beating John O'Keefe to death and leaving him on the lawn. But they allege that law enforcement actually cracked the taillight, placed the pieces there, mixed everything together so it would look like that taillight hit John O'Keefe.
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Chapter 3: What evidence did the defense present in Karen Read's trials?
might've been the time She opened the internet for a search that came many hours later. And as somebody who always has tons of tabs open on my phone, I can understand that happening very easily, that you just use a tab that's already open to search something many hours later. So unfortunately, that's not as clear as we would like.
Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, I've handled trials that have Celebrite reports. I'm sure you've seen other trials with Celebrite reports. I've never seen them attacked like this as just a report that they put out as a time that seems very simple. It's just absolutely completely wrong.
And this is something I'm going to keep an eye out now is this, are more defense attorneys going to attack this? And how often does Axiom and Celebrite give completely different reports like they did in this case? Because Axiom, if you run a report right now on her phone, still says the search was at 2.27 a.m.
Wow. The other question about, we spent some time in the taillight. There was a question about whether this Lexus, it was an SUV, right? Yes. It was like- Okay, whether this, well, anyway, whether this Lexus SUV, even at whatever it was, 24 miles an hour, let's say, whether it would, whether the taillight would break upon hitting a man.
And that this was, they couldn't replicate this, the defense, as they tried over and over and over to recreate the scene of this alleged- Incident that the prosecution said happened here to take his life. That makes some sense to me, too. I don't know, like that a man made of flesh and bone might not be enough force to to take out the taillight on an SUV backing up into him.
What was what was the back and forth around that?
Yeah, and Megan, it's impossible to really fully dig into each one of these individual aspects in just an hour or six hours. But if I showed you his body, so I'm a personal injury lawyer now. I handle a lot of truck accidents, car accident case, pedestrian accident case, so a person that gets hit by a car.
And we all kind of know what that looks like, especially if somebody gets hit at 24 miles an hour. I have had clients die at 24 miles an hour getting hit by a car. But do you know what they look like? They have broken bones. They've got internal bleeding. They've got serious head injuries. They've got injuries below the waist. John O'Keefe had none of that.
No broken bones, no bruising anywhere on his body. The back of his head hitting the ground basically or hitting a ledge was the cause of his death. And one of the fatal flaws of the prosecutor's case the second time around is their expert showed an example of another pedestrian getting hit by a car and they passed away. And they're saying, see, look, this can happen.
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Chapter 4: What role did internet searches play in the prosecution's case?
But I think he missed the boat a lot with the way he presented the case. And one thing he did was he did not call Proctor, who was who you were referencing before, who was the lead investigator in the case. They tried to pretend like he didn't exist. And you can imagine the defense did not like that and they did not let that go quietly.
And they highlighted his name and said his name and besmirched his name as much as they possibly could. And they didn't call him either. So he was kind of like the boogeyman. Why wouldn't they call the lead investigator? You really want to side with them? You can really trust this investigation. They don't even trust their own guy. It was not a good look.
That's not the way to do it. No, one would think you'd call him. You'd just front it all. You'd have him do a full mea culpa. I was a douchebag. I've been fired. So humiliated. My wife, you know, she's forgiven me, but I just was acting like an ass. But it doesn't mean I was corrupt. I certainly wouldn't corrupt a murder investigation. Like to not call him. I mean, hindsight's 20-20.
Obviously, I'm sitting here in the comfort of my studio, not like the prosecutor who actually had to get this done. OK, so now let's talk about the civil suits, because this is pretty extraordinary. It's not extraordinary to me that John O'Keefe's family is now filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Karen Reid. That happens, you know, not infrequently. It's like what Ron Goldman did to O.J.
after he was acquitted. You do have to testify as the defendant. In this posture, once you've already been acquitted and you get sued civilly, so she is going to have to testify in this case. But what's extraordinary is there's lawsuits going the other way against her. By whom exactly?
So there are lawsuits against her and the bars by the O'Keeffe family for wrongful death. Like you said, that's normal. Different burden. Civil court versus criminal. I'm sorry.
I meant to say the opposite. Lawsuit by her against others.
Yes. Which is weird. So she has also filed a lawsuit. against the aforementioned Michael Proctor, who was the lead investigator on the case, Yuri Bukenik, who was another trooper who was Proctor's supervisor, and then everybody's supervisor, Brian Tully, another law enforcement officer.
And then the five people in the house that she basically thinks are responsible for John O'Keefe's death, Brian Albert, Nicole Albert, Jennifer McCabe, Matthew McCabe, and Brian Higgins. Higgins is who she had the affair with. The Alberts are who owned the house. McCabe is who searched house long to die in the cold.
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Chapter 5: How did the 'Turtle Boy' influence the public perception of the case?
As a criminal defense attorney, you learn to fight, to dig, even if the judge sometimes can be very difficult, even when it seems like everything is stacked against you. It's also a lesson in PR, like the way the defense attorneys have done their interviews and set up Karen Reed to do interviews in ways that I disagree with. I would never have had Karen Reed do any interviews. They have.
They said they welcomed them being played at trial. So it could be some lessons on that, some great lessons on cross-examination, some great lessons on civil litigation, how to try to get federal documents where you request them from the federal government and then try to show them as unbiased third party, bringing experts into the case, investigating an investigation.
So many interesting nuances to this case that law students could learn from. But You don't always want to learn from the exception, right?
Well, you know, what you said about the star witness reminded me of something. When I was a young lawyer, I tried a civil case in upstate New York, and we were so clearly in the right on this civil case. It was just so obvious that our guy was telling the truth and the other party wasn't.
because we knew our star witness very, very well, and we knew his entire employment history and all this stuff. But the judge has always tried to push a settlement in a civil case, and in a criminal case, too. They try to push you to take a plea if you're at all open-minded so they don't have to try to verdict. It's a much better resolution where it's agreed to.
And he was looking at the other side, pointing out all the evidence that they were in the wrong. And then I said, what's he going to say when he looks at us? Because we're in the catbird seat here. And he said, how do you like your lead witness? And the judge was exactly right because even though the facts were totally on our side, our star witness was not likable. And the judge knew it.
And we stuck by him. Of course, we were like, oh, he's good. He's fine. He wasn't. The jury didn't like him and they found against us. We got it reversed on appeal, but he wasn't wrong. Like having a bad chief witness can make or break your case. And in this case, the prosecution had, it sounds like a terrible chief witness, whether it was just juvenile talk on those texts or not.
The reason he got fired is because he cost them this investigation.
Yeah. And it wasn't just the text message. There's just so much more than that. But, you know, the number one thing is probably the roles of each job of a lawyer, because you just described the civil situation.
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