It’s been a month since testimony began in Karen Read’s second trial for the murder of John O’Keefe, and the new trial has brought a notable change in presentation.

“I mean, I didn’t think I hit him, but could I have clipped him? Could I have tapped him in the knee and incapacitated him?” Read told NBC’s “Dateline” in an interview that aired last October.

It was the first clip that prosecutor Hank Brennan played for jurors of Read’s own public statements that have aired since her last turn in court ended in a mistrial last summer.

That footage played at the conclusion of his opening statement on April 22, but he has played many more clips in the five calendar weeks and 20 trial days since, fulfilling his promise to use Read’s own words against her.

The case boils down to 3 words

Read, 45, of Mansfield, faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision causing death.

She’s accused of ramming her Lexus LX570 SUV into John O’Keefe, a Boston Police officer she had dated for about two years, and leaving him to freeze and die on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton on Jan. 29, 2022.

Both the prosecution and defense said in opening statements that the case boils down to three words.

For the prosecution, those are “I hit him, I hit him, I hit him.”

Brennan told jurors that the defendant said those words herself — admitting to the crime — to first responders to the chaotic scene surrounding O’Keefe’s body on that front lawn.

To back this up, Brennan called over the first two weeks of trial several Canton Fire paramedics to testify to hearing this, which the defense hotly contested in cross-examination.

Because the defense had its own three-word mantra for jurors to consider: “There was no collision … there was no collision, there was no collision.”

Defense attorney Alan Jackson told jurors that his client didn’t strike O’Keefe with her vehicle at all and is the victim of a cover-up orchestrated by the Massachusetts State Police case officer. The investigation, he said, was beset by “a cancer that can’t be cured. … And that cancer has a name: Michael Proctor.”

Jackson cast suspicion on the owner of 34 Fairview Road at the time, Boston Police Sgt. Brian Albert, and how well-connected the Albert family is around town. He told them Proctor’s “priority was to protect that blue wall. … To protect his friends who were at the Albert house last night.”

The ghost witness

Proctor, the villain of the defense opening statement, has not taken the stand in the new trial, though he appears on both the prosecution and the defense’s witness lists.

There’s still plenty of time for him to show. There were 71 witnesses across 29 days of testimony in the last trial and he didn’t show up until day 22, June 10, 2024. Over the course of that testimony, Proctor threw out his reputation and even his career.

He was out of work hours after the mistrial and officially fired before the new trial began, with the MSP citing sustained concerns over his behavior in the O’Keefe investigation. Those concerns aren’t locked away in a personnel file, but immortalized in his trial testimony.

“She’s a whack job (expletive),” Proctor read from text messages about Read he sent to friends and even colleagues during his investigation. “Yes she’s a babe. Weird Fall River accent, though. No (butt).”

The next day he would testify that he texted his sister about Read: “Hopefully she kills herself.”

It is unclear if the now-fired Proctor will take the stand this time around. He was the case officer, which means the primary manager of the MSP investigation — and which the defense has repeatedly tried to suggest also means “lead investigator” — so it could be hard to illustrate elements of the investigation without him. On the other hand, he may be too much of a liability now to take the stand.

But the damage has already been done without him. He has been a specter over the defense’s questioning of nearly every witness. When forensic scientists take the stand, the defense asks who delivered the materials to them. When police take the stand, the defense asks how long Proctor could have been out of their sight and possibly meddling with the evidence.

But there was no clearer avatar for Proctor’s own presence on the stand than MSP Sgt. Yuriy Bukhenik, Proctor’s supervisor and investigative partner. He was grilled over three days regarding Proctor’s behavior and his own supervisory failure to control that behavior, for which the MSP slapped him with a penalty of five vacation days.

The text messages

Bukhenik’s testimony boiled down to his assertion that “The investigation was done with honor, integrity, and all the evidence pointed in one direction and one direction only,” and that direction was Read.

But the most intriguing testimony might have come from his second of three days on the stand, when he read the complete text messages between Read and ATF Agent Brian Higgins, a friend of both Brian Albert and O’Keefe.

Those text messages revealed a budding relationship between Read and Higgins over the weeks before O’Keefe’s death, which at least included one real-world kiss and one real-world date to a bar in West Roxbury.

The texts were presented by the defense, but there were no objections from the prosecution throughout the reading. The texts help both sides, depending on how the jury interprets them.

For the defense, it casts Higgins — one of the men along with Albert they have cited as a possible alternative killer — as a rival paramour for Read’s affections who may have resorted to fists against O’Keefe after both men drank heavily that night.

And for the prosecution, Read could be seen as manipulative and angry at O’Keefe. In the texts, she expresses jealousy and also contempt over having to help raise his niece and nephew when she had never wanted to have children.

Bukhenik himself testified to this view: “My opinion is that it’s an angry girlfriend trying to set up a hookup to hurt John (O’Keefe).” He would later slightly rephrase this to “an angry girlfriend trying to get revenge.”

The prosecution’s evidence

The prosecution’s case largely rests on physical and digital evidence involving Read’s SUV, which jurors got to see in person, parked outside of 34 Fairview Road in the first week of trial.

It is undisputed that Read’s vehicle had a cracked passenger-side taillight on Jan. 29, 2022. But the extent of the damage and where the damage occurred are hotly disputed.

The prosecution says that Read’s taillight was cracked when Read threw her vehicle into reverse and struck O’Keefe at about 24 mph and left him there to freeze and die.

They have yet to question MSP collision specialist Trooper Joe Paul about the speed of the backup — which they did last year — but they did have digital forensics examiner Shanon Burgess testify last week that the vehicle registered a “back-up event” at 12:32 a.m. on Jan. 29.

As for physical evidence, Canton Police witnesses testified to uncovering a broken cocktail glass and “pink spots” of blood under where they were told O’Keefe was found.

The MSP search crew, the MSP Special Emergency Response Team (SERT), would further search the scene that afternoon, commander Lt. Kevin O’Hara testified. He said his team searched the area for an hour and uncovered O’Keefe’s missing sneaker as well as six or seven pieces of taillight — both clear and red.

Days later, more pieces of taillight would be discovered, ending with some 46 pieces.

Forensic scientists testified to fitting the taillight pieces to Read’s taillight housing and that microanalysis determined the plastic to be the same as well. A scraping of O’Keefe’s hooded T-shirt uncovered microscopic plastic pieces that were also a match. Other scientists testified that O’Keefe’s DNA contributed — to a very high degree of scientific certainty — to a hair found on the SUV’s bumper and to DNA found on the taillight housing.

Medical examiner Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello testified that O’Keefe died from blunt-force trauma to the head and hypothermia.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Aizik Wolf testified that his examination of autopsy photos and Scordi-Bello’s report paints a clear picture that this was a “classic blunt trauma injury,” and that O’Keefe fell and hit his head on “solid ground.”

The defense’s evidence

The defense has not yet begun calling its own witnesses. Its strategy so far has been largely traditional: discrediting prosecution witnesses, finding alternative interpretations of the evidence presented, and challenging the way the investigation was handled.

The Proctor problem, and Bukhenik’s supervision of Proctor, has been a high-profile example, but other investigators have also been examined.

The defense criticized Canton PD Lt. Paul Gallagher for using a leaf blower to process the scene on Jan. 29, for collecting the pink spot samples in red SOLO plastic cups, bagging evidence in Stop & Shop grocery bags, and for placing the evidence in unsecured areas and near Read’s SUV taillight where cross-contamination could occur.

They also used him to confirm that none of the taillight pieces were found in that first hour at the scene — which helps suggest the items were planted by Proctor or others.

As for those pieces of evidence, the defense had scientists admit that some pieces — like a glass found by Proctor in the roadway — was not a physical match to anything else at the scene. And the hair sample was analyzed for mitochondrial DNA, which is only from the mother, so anyone within O’Keefe’s matrilineal line could have contributed.

As for the doctors, the defense emphasized that the medical examiner listed “undetermined” for manner of death, as she could not conclude it was a homicide. The neurosurgeon testified that lacerations above O’Keefe’s eye were not part of his conclusion of a fall to the ground.

But perhaps the most intense cross-examination was reserved for the digital forensic examiner Burgess.

Defense attorney Robert Alessi seized on “academic dishonesty” by Burgess, who does not hold a bachelor’s degree, for listing a bachelor’s degree on his CV, his LinkedIn profile, and on his biography on his employer’s website. Burgess countered that he has never claimed to to hold a bachelor’s degree and the degree was being “currently pursued.”

Then comes Jennifer McCabe, a figure as central to the defense’s theory of a cover-up as Albert and Higgins. She made a search for “hos long to die in cold” — the first word being a typo for “how” — on her phone, but what time she made the search is hotly contested.

She — and two prosecution experts, Ian Whiffin and Jessica Hyde — says she made the search at around 6:20 a.m. at Read’s request as the women surrounded O’Keefe.

But the defense counters that their expert has her making the search at 2:27 a.m. That means she was searching for hypothermia hours before she allegedly found O’Keefe and thus knew about his fate beforehand. This, the defense says, is evidence of a conspiracy.

Ahead

The case took an extended break, with not only Memorial Day Monday off but also the previous Thursday and Friday. Court resumes on Tuesday.

Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuriy Bukhenik holds up clear fragments from the yard where John O’Keefe’s body was found. (Pool Photo/Charles Krupa)

Jennifer McCabe answer questions from defense attorney Alan Jackson last month. (Greg Derr/Pool photo)

Now-fired MSP Trooper Michael Proctor shows the jury the broken taillight from Karen Read’s Lexus during Karen Read’s first trial last year. It’s not clear if Proctor will be returning to the stand this year. (Kayla Bartkowski/Pool photo)
John O’Keefe’s in an undated family image. (Herald file photo)

The trial of Karen Read in Norfolk Superior Court at Dedham on Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Pool Photo by Greg Derr