You're listening to Amma Mia podcast. Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters. This podcast was recorded on It's a blustery winter's night in Canton, Massachusetts in January twenty twenty two and Karen Reid and John O'Keeffe are out with friends. They're drinking, bar hopping and enjoying a night on the town. John is a local cop and the plan is to move the party to one of his colleagues homes nearby. After midnight, Karen drops John
at the address and heads back to his house. She starts panicking when he still isn't home in the early hours of the morning. Well that's her side of the story anyway. John's body is found outside the location of the house party at six am the next morning. Pieces from a broken tail light are found nearby. As Karen whales at the site of her dead boyfriend, she says something that remains a point of contention. Either I hit him, I hit him? Or did I hit him? Did I
hit him? The slight change of inference means everything. It could mean the difference between freedom and a jail cell for Karen. But this story gets even murkier because as her defense picks up the case, they start to unravel another potential series of events, one that involves a cover up, contamination by law enforcement, and the framing of Karen for murder.
I'm Jemma Bass and this is True Crime Conversations a Muma me a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. Before her arrest, Karen Read was a financial analyst and professor. She'd been dating John O'Keeffe, a Boston police officer, for two years. Photos of the pair show an attractive, smiling couple in their mid forties, but despite the pretty pictures,
their relationship wasn't all rosy. They'd been having some disagreements in the lead up to that January twenty twenty two evening. Ever since John's death, the town where he died has been divided, but it since snowbled into an international debate fueled by the free Karen movement that's grown legs online.
There's two very distinct camps. Was John killed by those inside the house, a house full of police and law enforcement, who then proceeded to cover up his murder, or did his girlfriend Karen kill him before he even made it through the front door. To help us unpack those theories and everything that came before it, where joined by Jessica Lalfer, producer of Karen, an in depth podcast series by the Law and Crime Network. Jessica joins us now just tell us about Karen and Jones love story.
So, Karen and John actually first met when they were in their twenties, shortly after college. They dated for a little while, but their careers took them on different paths. Karen became an adjunct professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts,
and John O'Keefe became a cop. He was a Boston Police officer, and in twenty twenty or you know, during the COVID era, they came across each other again on Facebook and he messaged her and was like, you know, longtime no see, And she was looking at his profile and was like, oh, I noticed you have these kids
with you now, like, what's going on with that? And it turns out that he has taken custody of his niece and his nephew after the really really sad story that not only did his brother in law die, but also his sister died, and so that left the kids without any parents, and so John swooped in and took them under his wing. And so he ended up taking a desk job at the Boston Police Department to have a safer job so he could take care of these kids. And from what I had seen on their TikTok, they
just had like a ton of fun together. You can tell he was the fun uncle and really loved them, and it really just seemed like a really fun house to live in. But Karen and John they rekindled and they dated for two years up until the night that this tragic incident happened.
That's a lot of different dynamics to navigate as someone coming into a new relationship. You've got this once single guy, no kids, who suddenly has two children to look after. He's also grieving. How did they navigate all of that her basically adopting two step kids in this relationship.
Yeah, from all accounts we've heard, Karen really really cared about the children, and she was often spending the night at John's house and helping to raise them, to take care of them. She was very invested in their futures. But Karen and John were only dating, and so there were times where she felt like she was being taken advantage of when he would go out drinking and she couldn't get a hold of him and she would be at the house with the kids. You know, She's like,
I have to go back to my house. I have a job to do, and you're nowhere to be found. And so there was a lot of back and forth, it seems, between the two of them over the kids, and especially from some testimony we heard during the trial about what she was feeding the kids, it's actually kind of ironic that it's all over like Dunkin Donuts, which is very Massachusetts, very Boston of this case.
So take me through that he was upset that she was fading them donuts.
Yeah, so there was just one morning where instead of making them a breakfast, she brought them Dunkin Donuts and John was unhappy about the kids eating donuts and wanting them to eat something healthier, and they had a big argument about it. But I'll say this, just judging from everything we've learned about Karen and John over the course of the past couple of years since instance and it happened, it seems like it's pretty easy to get them to
fly off the handle. You know, she seems like she has quite a temper on her And I'm not sure about John. I haven't heard that about him. But it takes two to start a foot, yeah.
Quick to fire, by the sounds. So what was the state of their relationship looking like in twenty twenty two. Early twenty twenty.
Two, people in the group were saying that the relationship had run its course. The niece actually had overheard John say to Karen that this isn't healthy. And this was one week before his death, and so there's a lot of like moving parts around this time. They're dating, she's practically living with him, she's taking care of his children. But you know, they still love each other and so it seems like it's very hard for them to figure
out like how to make this work. And then leading up to the night of the twenty eighth, you can see on surveillance footage John and Karen and their group of friends. They're at this bar called the Waterfall Bard Girl, and they look like they're having a great time. Everybody looks like they're getting along. Everybody's laughing, She's like holding on to him. They're very affectionate, and it's very hard to believe everything that happens after this.
They go to an after potty, which is what happens after the night out drinking. Before we get to what happened, can you give us some context about who was at that after potty, because it was a house that was owned by a man called Brian Albert, and he's quite significant in this story.
He is, so Brian Albert is also a Boston police officer, so he knew John O'Keeffe. He said he was a friend of his, but they were probably just buddies. They're also cops. They live near each other, and also John O'Keeffe lives next door to Colin Albert, which is the nephew of Brian Albert. So thirty four Fairview Road is
where all of this ends up taking place. In Campton, Massachusetts, a noeters coming in, which is a huge snowstorm, the likes of which the area had not seen in years, and they were projected to get like feet and feet of snow, and so they were all just trying to get one last hurrahan before they were going to be
holed in by this snow. And at the house, they're celebrating Brian Junior's birthday, party, So Brian Junior is there at the house with a bunch of his friends, while the parents in John O'Keeffe and Karen Reider at the bar. And so around twelve fifteen, everyone starts trickling from the bar to the Albert home and this is the home of Brian. And at the home with them at this
point is Jennifer McCabe. So one other person that's at this party is the person that Karen Reid has been exchanging flirtatious text with and he was also at the bar. His name is Brian Higgins. There are two Brian's in this story. So Brian Higgins is not a police officer, but he's in law enforcement and he happens to have an office in the Canton Police Department, where Kevin Albert is a detective. Kevin is Brian's brother, and they have
another brother named Chris, who is the Canton Selectman. So this is clearly a very well connected family in this little town. So it's easy to see where this conspiracy theory took fire because there are so many tentacles to this family and so many people involved. But at the core of it, that night, there were about ten adults and maybe a few of the kids left from the birthday celebration around twelve thirty at night.
Okay, so what does Karen say happened that evening?
So Karen Reid has really not said much about this case publicly, except she did an interview for Nightline back in twenty twenty three before the trial took place, and I'm actually surprised her lawyers let her do this. But she says that she and John were leaving the bar and he says, we're going to go to the Alberts for the after party. She says, are we invited? I want to make sure we're invited, And so she tells him when they get there to go inside to make
sure that it's okay, that they're welcome there. And this is where the details get like a little fuzzy, because she says she never saw him go in the house, but she saw him approach the door. She says she looked down at her phone and then drove off, which is kind of weird because I thought she was going
to stay at the party. But there's also some times where she said that she waited for a really long time for John to come out and give her the confirmation and he wasn't answering his phone and he wasn't responding to any texts. So perhaps she was there for about ten minutes and waited for him, and then she took off and went back to his house for the night because that's where the kids were and somebody needed
to be with them overnight. And over the course of this whole evening, she's blowing up his phone, she's texting him, she calls him fifty times, and she's leaving like these profanity laden voicemails. They're kind of funny if it wasn't in the middle of this extremely serious situation. So that's Karen's story, is that she wakes up around five am and she realized John never came into the house. She was sleeping on the couch and I believe the niece
was with her in the living room. So she calls Jennifer McCabe, who again is the sister in law of Brian Albert, the homeowner, and she says, you know, John never came home last night. Where's John? Do you think he got hit by a plow? And it's really interesting that she's just throwing out all of these weird like what if he got hit by a plow, Like, we need to go look for him. So she, an Jennifer and this woman Carrie Roberts decide to go on this
journey together to look for John. And while she's on the phone with Jennifer McCabe, Jennifer's husband, here's the conversation and Karen is saying, I left him at the waterfall. I must have left him at the waterfall, and he's like, what are you talking about? We saw you outside the house. So there are multiple people who say they saw her dark suv outside of the house. So we know that it's at least true that she pulled up to the house and dropped off John. That's true. Nobody's debating that.
But what happens next is still a mystery because they're driving around the two square miles from the bar to the two houses, and as soon as they pull up in front of the house, the homeowner is Brian Albert, Boston police officer. She immediately homes in on this gigantic snow mound in between the flagpole and the fire hydrant, and she runs and she beelines to it. She's like, it's John, It's John, It's John. Nobody else sees what
she's seeing. Like again, it's snowing very, very hard. There's at least two feet of snow on the ground, I believe at this point, and she runs over to him. She's pushing the snow off of him. At one point she takes her shirt off, she takes his shirt off, and she's trying to warm him up. And I believe he's still alive at this point, or you know, maybe he's just pronounced dead later. But it's really strange what
you end up seeing. Of course, I've never seen his body on the scene, but he has two black eyes, a big straight abrasion on the back of his head, and he has a lot of what looked like claw marks scratches on one of his arms, and he's bleeding from the mouth and the nose and the eyes, and so they call nine one one. Multiple people have called
nine one one at this point. And this is where again it gets even more complicated because a lot of people end up on this scene, the paramedics, the investigating officers from the Canton Police Department, who do not investigate homicides, let alone deaths, and so they're a little bit out of their element. It's snowing. It's a crazy scene. It's
six in the morning, and Karen is screaming hysterically. Everyone keeps talking about how crazy she's going at this scene, while everyone else is very calm and they're just, you know, kind of in shock that this is even happening to their good friend John O'Keefe. And there are multiple accounts that Karen said I hit him, I hit him, I hit him, but nobody wrote it down in a single report at the time.
There was also contention over the wording of that wasn't.
There right, And so she maintains that she did not say I hit him. She maintains she asked did I hit him? Could I have hit him? Because she's thinking back to the night before when she dropped him off. And so this is where it gets a little fuzzy, because you you either have to believe that she doesn't remember anything about that night, or she's only remembering details, or they're coming to her over time, which could happen.
But really everything about this case is really complicated by the fact that nobody secures the scene, none of the officers separate the witnesses, They never go into the home. Brian albert A police officer and a first responder never comes out of his home to see what's going on outside, and they start collecting evidence with red solo cups borrowed from a cop neighbor who lives down the street.
That is a wild detile, isn't it.
I know it came out in the trial. It was just like, how far away is the police department? You guys don't have sterile plastic containers, like what would take you five minutes to get there? So they're clearly out of their element by the time the afternoon rolls around. Obviously this case has been taken out of their hands
and it's given to the Massachusetts State Police. And this complicates the case even more because the person assigned to investigate this is Trooper Michael Proctor, and he is also a friend of the homeowner, Brian Albert.
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me Jimmy Bath. I'm speaking with Jessica Laufa about the trial of Karen Reid. What is John's actual cause of death put down in his autopsy report?
This is what's crazy, is that his cause of death is blunt force trauma mixed with hypothermia. So if it happened. How the prosecution says it happened is that Karen Reid backed up into John O'Keefe hit him with her car, and he laid there for six hours until someone found him. And it was freezing cold, wind whipping, snow piling up. But what's so strange about that is that there were a lot of people coming and going from this party
all night. And even the plow driver who came through at two thirty in the morning has his light shining and says he never sees anything in that front lawn, and he would have noticed it because he drives this route all the time. And they never determined his manner of death, which is curious that you would try to put someone on trial for murder without a determined manner of death.
And there were, as you were saying before, quite bizarre injuries on him if you consider that the prosecution thinks that he was backed into, but he had bruises on his eyes and he had weird mocks on his arms.
And that's the thing is that the prosecution has an expert that testifies that these injuries are consistent with being hit by a car, But the defense has an expert that goes on and says or not this is consistent with either a fight or an attack by an animal.
And there was an animal there wasn't there?
There was an animal there? And is if this story is not crazy enough. Now a dog named Chloe becomes a suspect. There's a German shepherd that's been living with the Alberts for seven years, their beloved pet dog. And curiously, they rehome this dog within months of John o'keeith's death. And not only do they rehome the dog, they rehome themselves. They buy a new home, even after they had just renovated their entire basement. So a lot of curious things
going on, a lot of strange coincidences, I suppose. But on the final day of the trial, before closing arguments, they have an expert go up there and say, these marks on John O'Keefe's arms are consistent with that of dog claw marks and bites, and if you look at the photos or look at other photos of dog attacks, they look exactly the same. Nobody ever examined the dog.
The dog was living in Vermont, and they say that they offered up the address of the dog if they wanted to go interview her, But yeah, no one ever really followed up with this lead, and because really the crux of the story is is that they honed in on Karen Reid from day one and they wanted someone to blame this on, and they blamed it on her.
Well, she was arrested in early feb initially not charged with murder, but quite quickly upgraded to murder two, which frozsies is kind of like manslaughter. On what evidence was that charge made? You've said that the prosecution claims that the car backed into John, but what was the evidence that that happened.
The evidence that they claim that proves Karen Reid hit John O'Keeffe with her SUV is that there were microscopic tail light pieces found on him, and there were tail light pieces that were found around the scene underneath the snow. So after they use the leaf blower to push all the snow away, the state police finally come in with shovels and find tail light pieces underneath the snow. And so that's one of the contentious points of this case is that nobody saw any tail light pieces until the
state police came in. And when you have an investigator assigned to this case, who has as much history as Trooper Proctor does. This is when the conspiracy starts to really really boil to the surface.
Was there anything that directly challenged that version of events. I've seen a lot of debate about that tail light evidence.
Yeah, the tail light evidence is really kind of crazy because even at the trial, the plastic bag that the tail light pieces are in multiply over time, like the pieces multiply, and so at one point there's only three, then there's five, And even over the course of the investigation of this case, they found tailight pieces near his body, then they found the microscopic pieces on him. But when you see pictures of Karen's suv, the taillight did not look as broken when they brought the car in as
it did when it left there. And so there's this surveillance footage of the quote Sally Port that the Massachusetts State Police brought her suv to search it to give
it a very thorough look through. And one thing that the defense notices right away is that this video appears to be inverted, and so what looks to be the passenger side is actually the driver side, and what looks to be the driver side is actually the passenger side, and supposedly it's the right rear tail light, so on the passenger side that's broken, and on the video you see two people walk by and appear to be fiddling
with something. But because this looks like it might be the driver's side, nobody's really thinking anything of it until it's pointed out in the trial that no, this video is inverted. They see the number on the wall, the four is backwards on the police cruiser is backwards, and
so it's very, very, very complicated. What they're implying through all of this is that Trooper Procter planted evidence and purposely broke the tail light and brought the tail light pieces back to the scene to plant in the snow to frame Karen Read for this murder.
Which is a huge thing to accuse local law enforcement of doing right.
It's not unheard of. There's a history in this area of not trusting lawn. A lot of people don't trust authority, a lot of people don't trust the police, and so you have like two sides forming do you trust the police investigating this case, or do you believe that this woman is being railroaded in the death of her cop boyfriend but it's not unheard of for this area to be suspicious of these investigators, and turns out a lot of them were right based on what happens after the trial.
But what reason would these cops have to frame her? What do they say happened? The defense to John.
The defens's theory of what happened that night is that Karen drops John O'Keeffe off at the Alberts. He goes into the house and is immediately confronted by people in the basement of the Albut at home, there's a weight room down there, and they think that a fight broke out pretty quickly. Someone may have hit John O'Keeffe with a dumbbell on the back of the head, maybe punched him in the face, and then maybe perhaps he fought back and the dog intervened and the dog attacked him.
And I don't think anyone intended for John o'keef to die. Now, this is all alleged. This is a house full of law enforcement, so they have to spend the next few hours trying to figure out what to do, and their theory is that they bring the body out through this back set of stairs from the basement to the backyard and bring the body around to the front yard and lay him there with his phone underneath him.
Up next, we delve deeper into the trial well that captivated the world and the text messages that put a lead investigator on notice.
And he lies there until Karen finds him at six in the morning. And so how does this turn into a big cover up? Is that Trooper Proctor again is friends with Brian Albert. There is a thin blue line cops protect other cops, and cops don't get in trouble for these types of things, and we don't investigate other cops, and especially not our friends. And so Trooper Proctor obviously knew when he was pulling up to this house that
this was the house of his friend, Brian Albert. He chose not to go in and interview, he chose not to lock down the crime scene, he chose not to separate the witnesses, and there were a lot of missteps, and all of this is captured in his own text messages that he embarrassingly has to read on the stand in front of the world, where he admits that he's gonna make this case cut and dried and pin it on the girl, and the girl is Karen read, and then there's a lot of horrible text messages where he's
talking about her body and how hot she is and how he hates her accent, and he calls her the C word, and you know, there's just a lot of really disgusting things said by this man to his superiors. So you can tell this is kind of a culture, right, a culture in this department, in this law enforcement community, that they can do anything and get away with it, and even so far as to say no nudes yet
because he was going through Karen's phone, Oh my gosh. Yeah, So all of this combined it makes it look like a cover up. It makes it look from the beginning that, you know what, this was Brian's house. We can't have this on Brian. Let's just pin it on the girl, like, let's just put it on her. And this didn't even have to be a murder case. This didn't even have to go to trial when you really think about it, this could have just been an accident. I don't know
if the defensis theory is correct. I don't know if this was planned from the beginning to pin it on Karen or whether it just happened naturally after she supposedly said I hit him at the scene. It all starts to build and build and build to make for a very very interesting case with a trial that riveted thousands and took over TikTok for like an entire week. While Trooper Proctor is reading these text messages on the stand, apparently to the horrified jurors. We spoke to a reporter.
He said that the jurors were just disgusted visibly by these text messages and by Trooper Proctor. And one interesting thing to note is that the jurors, who are a very important element of this case, they were not allowed to be aware that Trooper Proctor was under investigation at this time for his behavior on this case. They're not allowed to know that, and they're not supposed to be
looking up information about the case after they leave. They're not sequestered, so it's not like they're staying in a hotel with no TV, no phone, no news. They're just not supposed to be talking about it, and they're not supposed to be looking up in information about it. So not having that information is pretty interesting. But I think he kind of you said it all himself on the stand.
Before we get more into the trial. I think it's worth backtracking a bit to TikTok because, as you mentioned, this case exploded. People might have heard of book talk. There's also crime talk out there, and this was one of those cases that just captivated the internet. And I need to bring in Total Books because he's one of the nine reasons for that. Who on earth is Total Boy and why is he kind of the one that helped fuel all of this?
Yeah, So Aidan Kearney is his real name, and he goes by Turtle Boy. He's a local Massachusetts blogger. He's had this blog for over ten years and he's really known for his bravado and his kind of like take
no shit attitude. He's credited with bringing the Reed trial to the public's attention and mobilizing the quote free Karen Reid movement that ended up resulting in crowds and crowds of people forming outside of the courthouse wearing these pink shirts and solidarity with Kiaren with their signs, and it really kind of took on the air of like a celebrity trial for this tiny little town in Massachusetts. And that's all because of Aiden Kearney, and he through our podcast,
which is just you know, affectually called Karen. We found that Aidan Kearney was actually pretty heavily involved with the defense before this case went to trial. He fed them a lot of information about the Alberts and the mccabs, and he found a lot of this through his own investigative work. Now he has been charged with witness intimidation and so you know, he's not a perfect person to
be aligned with as a defense attorney. But at the same time, he really exposed the police cover up and the corruption in this town and the conspiracy surrounding this case. In particular.
He was also quite involved with Karen Rott mm hm.
So it turns out that Turtle Boy and Karen were talking a lot. They talked a lot on the phone. There was dozens and dozens of phone calls between the two of them. She would feed him information, he would feed her information, And yeah, they were pretty chummy there at the beginning. And I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing as long as you know he has
sources to back up like what he's saying. But the defense was basically given a gift in Aiden Kearney to really bolster this this conspiracy theory.
Let's get to the trial, because it was a very long trial went for nine ten weeks, which is huge for something like this. Was there anything that stood out to you? Obviously we knew all of this web that had been built beforehand, all of these players. How did you find the trial?
The trial was super entertaining and long and maybe a bit in the weeds more than people really want to experience. You know, in your regular courtroom drama that you're watching, you only get the fiery good stuff, which there was a ton of that in this trial. There was a lot of funny moments on the stand, a lot of people who maybe could have view some better prep before they went on the stand to testify. But in the end, this was a very emotional, very heated, very caustic trial
with really great defenders of Karen Reid. Her defense attorneys were top notch. They gave great performances in front of this jury, and the prosecution in turn ended up looking a little silly because they brought all of these witnesses who basically have nothing to say. They all agree that John O'Keefe never entered the house. They quote the guy
never went in the house. And the thing about that is is that they're all on text messages together like a text chain, kind of looking like they're trying to get their story straight. And so all these people are on the stand being grilled about these text messages. And
that's the other thing. When you're a witness in a case like this, you have to turn over your phone, and everyone did except for Brian Albert and Brian Higgins, because their phones were destroyed right before the police were able to collect them.
What which ends.
Up becoming a pretty huge part of Brian Higgins's testimony so far, This is the standout moment to me, besides the Trooper Proctor stuff, which was absolutely insane and at least mildly entertaining Brian Higgins. It meant to destroying his phone, not backing it up, and taking the SIM card out of his phone and driving to a military base to dispose of it in a bag along with his phone. And the only thing that he saved were his texts between Karen and John.
And to be clear, this is the Brian that was sharing flirtatious text messages with correct Okay, I want to bring in a search term used by Karen either before or after she found Jill because it's also a really important thing to bring in the text or the search is how long to die in cold? Why was that so heavily scrutinized.
Jennifer McCabe is the prosecution's star witness, or so they think, and they put her on the stand. She's very confident on her first day on the stand against some pretty
tough cross examination. But there's this Google search that happened at around six point thirty in the morning, six twenty two and six twenty three am, where she says that Karen told her to google how long does it take for a person to die in the cold, And because it's such a chaotic scene it's so cold, she mistypes it and ends up being like, has slung to die in cold? And cold's misspelled? And how's misspelled? And the
search is done twice. But when this data is analyzed by this company called Celebrate, it turns out that the first time this was searched was at two twenty seven am. So if Jennifer McCabe, the sister in law of the homeowner, was searching how long to die in the cold at two twenty seven am, this exonerates Karen one hundred percent because clearly someone in that house knew that someone was
outside dying and they did nothing about it. However, the Celebrate expert that the prosecution uses says this search did
not take place at twenty seven in the morning. She had a browser opened at two twenty seven in the morning, and when she went to go Google it at six point twenty two in the morning, it made it look like because she had just used the same browser that she was using at two thirty am looking up basketball stuff for her daughter, it made it look like the search was actually performed then, but that's just when the
browser was last used. However, the defense argues the opposite, that they have a newer version of the Celebrate data and that proves that the search was conducted at two twenty seven am and also again when instructed by Karen Reid to perform the search. So, I mean, ultimately, if the search did not happen at two twenty seven am, this evidence is completely like moot. It doesn't matter. But this is like three days of the trial is going over this search term.
Well, this just gives you a taste of just how confusing this tist becomes and how complicated all of these moving pots are, I don't envy the jury? How did that go with it?
So the jury deliberated for over twenty hours over the course of five days and lawng Crime. We live streamed the entire trial. We had forty thousand people watching. I think like at the most there was like fifty thousand people in the live stream at the highest peak. And it was a Friday afternoon. Everyone thought, we're going to get a verdict. The jurors surely want to be done with this, right. Well, no, they decide they want to take the weekend to think about it, and they come
back on Monday and they say they're deadlocked. They say they cannot come to a unanimous decision and that if they were to continue deliberating, it would only result in one of them having to compromise on their beliefs, and they didn't feel like they were going to be able to do that, and so they deliver this super eloquent
message to the judge. The judge accepts it and declares a mistrial, which did not surprise a lot of the legal analysts and reporters watching this case, because, as you can tell, everything we've talked about, this was pretty complicated. You know, in essence, it's a he said, she said with a lot of the evidence, like they say this tail light evidence was there, and the other side says
it wasn't. And so that's basically like the Google search, the tail light, the body itself, everything has two sides to it, and so it's no surprise that these jurors weren't unable to come to a unanimous decision. In my opinion, Well.
At the end of the day, all you have to do is prove that there is reasonable doubt.
Well exactly, and so a lot of people that we talked to for the podcast actually said that that was an interesting position for Alan Jackson and David Ynetti to take, was to come up with this third culprit theory. And you know, they fought in pre trial hearings to even be able to bring this into the trial, because the
American legal is absolutely insane. You have to like have a bajillion pre trial hearings in order to present anything that you basically want to say, and so they had to get permission to be able to say if she didn't do it, someone else did, and we want to say there's a third party culprit, and we want to explain how we think it happened, And so a lot of people said there was enough reasonable doubt without even this theory that he was beat up in the home,
dragged out of the back the basement, left there to die by this group of people, and that fifty people in the end end up agreeing to this one story to protect themselves and blame it all on this one woman. Was that even necessary, because if you strip all that away, there is so much reasonable doubt even with the story
the prosecution wanted the jury to believe. So if this case does end up going to a new trial, with which the prosecution has said that they intend to retry the case, Karen's team says that they are ready for the fight. But there was a motion to dismiss in early August, and the judge is still considering that motion as we speak now, and the new trials already set for late January.
Twenty five five. A few things did happen not long after that mistrial, which is not that long ago from when we're having this conversation Michael Procter. He was relieved of his duty then suspended without pay. Was that surprising, not at all?
I think a lot of people were suspecting that they wanted to relieve him of his duties during the trial, but they didn't want to complicate matters or mess up the case for the prosecution. So yeah, he was relieved of his duties. And then it's revealed that there are two more people from the state police that are being investigated for their actions in this case. So that's three
investigators compromised. And that's a problem for the prosecution because if you really are going to want to bring this case a trial, you have three poison apples who are supposed to be your line of protection, Like these are the people that were supposed to trust their the authority. We're supposed to be able to believe everything that they say on the stand because they're the ones investigating. And what do you do after that?
Do you honestly think, after digging so deep into this case that we could see a different result if this goes to trial again.
It's hard to say. I mean, I do wonder how the defense would maybe change course, if they're going to still stick with this third party culprit defense, or if they are just going to allow the prosecution to dig their own graves, so to speak, and just allow the reasonable doubt to shine, because there really is no solid proof that Karen Reid killed John O'Keefe, and murder too is manslaughter, but there's also no intent there. And does this woman deserve to spend upwards of twenty plus years
in prison for an accident? You know, obviously this family deserves justice, and they are very upset with how famous this case has become and how Karen Reid's popularity has grown over this, and they deserve some kind of closure. But I just don't know if any closure will come from another trial unless new evidence is uncovered.
The other thing to come out after the mistrial was the jurors actually coming forward and speaking, which I'm not sure is completely legal, but what did they actually say?
So after the mistrial was declared and Trooper Proctor was fired from the Massachusetts State Police, a lot of jurors, forgers to be exact, came forward pretty quickly, and they went to Alan Jackson and David Yanetti first, and they said, we reached two unanimous decisions. Out of the three charges,
we reached unanimous decisions on two of the charges. There was only one we couldn't agree on, which this was actually a big part of the arguments on the defensive side during the trial is that the jury instructions were very confusing, and they felt that they were purposely confusing, and that the judge didn't write them out correctly or didn't explain them correctly, and so it could lead to
something like this happening. And a bunch of jurors then went to the district attorney's office and said the same thing. And the reason why this is important is because in the United States of America, there's this rule called double jeopardy, and you cannot be prosecuted again for the same charges if a jury found you innocent of them. And so the only one they couldn't come to a conclusion on was the one that had to do with the vehicle.
So they agreed on the murder charge. Well, the manslaughter of charge.
Yes, the jury was unanimous in finding Read not guilty of second degree murder and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. They found her unanimously innocent not guilty of these charges on manslaughter and the lesser included charges. The juror said. The jury's final vote was a quote
soft nine to three, with nine voting guilty. So This is something that the judge is really going to have to consider very seriously, and that's why I'm not surprised that it's taking her quite a long time to come to this decision.
With all of that in mind, I'm going to ask one final question. Do you think the Internet and the Free Karen movement, given all of this stuff that's come out since the mistrial, do you think this is just going to keep exploding?
I do, and I think that Turtle Boy's going to have a lot to do with that. You know, he got a lot of fame from this. He says that he's received a podcast and movie deal, and the TikTok In Couch detectives are still at it with exposing what they think are important details that, of course, you can't prove in any courtroom. And I think that the Internet is a perfect place for a conspiracy theory to grow and grow and grow and grow. And if the judge comes back and says we're not going to try this
case again, I think it would die out eventually. But if she says no, we're going back to trial, this is never going to die. It's going to get even more attention because there's a Netflix documentary coming out. You know, our podcast is out. Your podcast is going to be coming out. Every true crime podcast is talking about this, and so there's going to be probably like ten times the amount of ears and eyeballs on this than there
was in the first place. And so, unfortunately, conspiracy theories and really interesting cases like this are just bound to grow and grow and grow until someone says, Okay, here's your closure.
Thanks to Jessica for assisting us to tell this story. True Crime Conversations is a Muma mea podcast hosted and produced by me Jemma Buff with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our senior producer is Crystal corn Nielssen. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation