DEDHAM, Mass. — In the heat of early summer, a Massachusetts jury is deciding whether a woman murdered her boyfriend on a snowy winter night, or was framed in a conspiracy concocted by corrupt police involved in the killing of one of their own.
Karen Read is charged with second-degree murder in the January 2022 death of Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe. She's accused of dropping him off at another officer's house party after a night of drinking, and then ramming him with her SUV and leaving him to die in a snowstorm. But her defense team argues she was framed, and that the evidence shows O'Keefe was beaten up by someone else inside the house, bitten by a dog and left outside.
It wouldn't be the first time a turbulent romantic relationship ended in death, and the partner is always a top suspect when an investigation begins. But it also has become easier to question police tactics and integrity after many high-profile cases of misconduct nationwide.
The jury went home Wednesday after a second day of deliberations. They've been asked to consider whether the sometimes tiny bits of evidence — pieces of a broken tail light, a single human hair — point to the girlfriend's guilt, or a sprawling cover-up by law enforcement officers to plant evidence and protect their own, leaving a killer unpunished.
What first might have seemed to be an open-and-shut case has drawn outsized attention, fueled by true crime fanatics, conspiracy theorists and Read's pink-shirted supporters. In closing arguments Tuesday, defense attorney Alan Jackson rattled off the names of more than a half-dozen prosecution witnesses he said lied on the stand.
''You don't have to wonder if they would lie to support their narrative, you only need to wonder how many times they did lie, over and over,'' he said. ''And even when they're caught in their own lies, they won't blink, they don't sweat. They'll just look you in the eye and demand, 'Pay no attention, you folks. Look the other way.'''
While Jackson argued the state's entire case boiled down to those four words — Look the other way — Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally narrowed it down to three as he began his final statement: ''I hit him.''
Lally reminded jurors that four witnesses reported hearing Read say those words when she returned to the house hours later and found O'Keefe unresponsive on the lawn, covered by snow. Lally also replayed a voicemail he said Read sent O'Keefe hours earlier. Read was ''seething in rage,'' he said.