The lawyer who defended the notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger will next week deliver the prosecution’s opening statements in the retrial of Karen Read.
Read is a financial analyst from Mansfield, Massachusetts, who is accused of striking her police officer boyfriend John O’Keefe with her car and leaving him to die in the snow.
Her case, recently explored in a Max docuseries, A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read, is seemingly made for TV: it will be broadcast, gavel-to-gavel, from Norfolk superior court in Dedham, Massachusetts.
Read’s first trial ended with deadlocked jury in July last year. Now Hank Brennan, special prosecutor for the commonwealth, will make the state’s case against Read.
The 45-year-old has pleaded not guilty to charges, including second-degree murder, vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a collision.
Prosecutors have claimed that, after a night out drinking, Read dropped O’Keefe off at a house party just after midnight on 29 January 2022 and intentionally struck him as she made a three-point turn in her Lexus SUV outside a fellow police officer’s home.
Read’s lawyers claim she was framed, that she saw O’Keefe enter the home where he was allegedly fatally beaten and possibly attacked by a German shepherd before his body was placed on the front lawn.
Brennan has said the defense’s suggestions that someone other than Read is responsible for O’Keefe’s death is a tactic meant to confuse the jury.
“We should not engage in a process where we allow witnesses to be asked questions with no ability of the defense to follow up on those questions with actual proof,” he recently said.
Brennan has also challenged Read’s attorney-client privilege, arguing that she sacrificed her right by discussing her conversations with her lawyers in interviews. He has since sought access to private conversations between Read and Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as Turtleboy – who was instrumental in bringing the case into the wider public realm. Just this week, Kearney said he would invoke his fifth amendment rights against self-incrimination if he were called to testify.
For her part, Read has accused Brennan of being disingenuous about his desire for her to receive a fair trial.
“It has evolved from wanting ME to get a fair trial to ‘the COMMONWEALTH deserves a fair trial,’ which is not a right I’ve ever heard of. But it doesn’t matter – I shouldn’t even be on trial,” Read told Vanity Fair.
Since the mistrial, Read’s celebrity has only grown. A defense fund for her has soared beyond $845,000, and her supporters will surely pack into the courtroom – again – when the case gets underway before Judge Beverly J Cannone, who also oversaw the first trial.
Joining Cannone will be Michael Proctor, lead state police investigator, who was dismissed last month after a months-long suspension following his disastrous testimony in the first trial. In that trial, he read texts about Read he’d sent to friends and co-workers describing her as “babe” and “a whack job cunt”.
“We’re gonna lock this whack job up,” Proctor said in another text.
The defense will probably, as it did in the first trial, try to use the texts to show that the investigation was biased from the outset and focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider”.
They are expected to call witnesses who will describe how Read and O’Keefe’s relationship had turned bitter before O’Keefe’s death.
“It’s still going to be an uphill battle for the commonwealth because there is some level of incoherence in the forensic evidence – the body just doesn’t look like a body that was only struck by a car,” Rosanna Cavallaro, a professor of law at Suffolk University in Boston who has commented widely on the case, told the Guardian.
“Whatever the alternative narrative is may not be coherent either, but it doesn’t need to be. There just needs to be reasonable doubt. The defense doesn’t need to present an airtight story, it just needs to punch holes in the state’s story.”
Cavallaro notes that the state is obliged to call Proctor because he directed the investigation at the outset: “They have a dilemma. Either call him and stick their head right in it, or they are evasive and the evasiveness comes back to bite them.”
This time around, Read has ramped up and expanded her legal team, adding nine law students who will act as clerks. To fund her defense, she has invested a whopping seven figures – relying in part on donations but also liquidating her retirement funds and selling her house.
For the prosecution’s part, its selection of Brennan as a special prosecutor could turn the trial into more of a performance than a rerun.
Brennan was responsible for “one of the most riveting days” of the 2013 Bulger trial, according to the New York Times, when he cross-examined Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, the mobster’s former crime partner, who had been involved in the killing of his stepdaughter Deborah Hussey. Brennan caught Flemmi off guard with his first question: “Did she call you Daddy?”
Given that Read is seeking an all-out acquittal, the state may be making an error in pursuing the top charge when jurors rejected it at the first trial.
Offering Read a deal on manslaughter and dropping the murder charge might have resolved the matter, Cavallaro said. “It may be that Read is thinking that it will now be impossible for prosecutors to convince a jury on any of the level of charges in the indictment.”
