Karen Read murder trial: Owners of home where O’Keefe was found testify
She’s accused of killing boyfriend John O’Keefe with SUV during winter storm
Jurors heard Friday from homeowners who were inside their Canton house while Boston police officer John O’Keefe was left outside in the front yard during a snowstorm. His girlfriend, Karen Read, is accused of striking him with an SUV and leaving him to die.
Read, 43, of Mansfield, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and other charges. The prosecution says she hit her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, with her vehicle outside of a home in Canton during a snowstorm on Jan. 29, 2022, following a night of drinking. Her defense plans to argue that someone else is responsible for killing O’Keefe.
Nicole and Brian Albert owned the home at 34 Fairview Road and were part of the group that was out drinking with O’Keefe and Read. Several people were invited back to the Alberts’ home after leaving the bars, but they testified that neither O’Keefe nor Read ever showed up.
The defense also asked about the decision to re-house their dog, which Nicole Albert said was made after an incident in 2022.
Testimony on Friday was briefly interrupted when the prosecution asked Judge Beverly Cannone to remove controversial blogger Aidan Timothy Kearney, known as “Turtleboy,” from the courtroom. He faces witness intimidation charges in connection with the Read case.
While Read and her lawyers have previously denied being in contact with Kearney, court documents indicate that state police believe the two were in frequent contact for months while he was publishing prolifically about the case.
Kearney, who did not move to the defendant’s table during the debate, continued to post to social media from the courtroom.
After hearing arguments, Cannone agreed that Kearney’s has a press pass and has the right to attend the trial under the same rules as other journalists but she said Kearney has a “chilling effect” and will be “excused” during the testimony of certain witnesses.
Video below: Blogger’s presence debated in court
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What to know about the case:
- LINK: Recap of testimony, evidence from each day of the case
- Karen Read, 43, of Mansfield, is accused of second-degree murder and other charges. The prosecution says she hit her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, with her vehicle outside of a home in Canton during a snowstorm on Jan. 29, 2022, following a night of drinking. She returned hours later to find him in a snowbank.
- Read has pleaded not guilty.
- Read and her defense team claim she is the victim of a cover-up and plan to present a third-party culprit defense. They claim O’Keefe was beaten inside the home, bitten by a dog, and then left outside.
- In pretrial motions, prosecutors revealed the existence of text messages they said suggested a “romantic entanglement” with a friend who was present at locations Read and O’Keefe visited on the night of the incident. Other documents have also suggested trouble in the relationship between Read and O’Keefe.
- Read is also accused of having frequent contact with a controversial blogger known as “Turtleboy,” Aiden Kearney, who now faces charges in related cases.
- Opening statements were delivered on April 29.
- The trial is expected to last 6-8 weeks.
Jurors heard on Thursday from two of O’Keefe’s neighbors, who are also relatives of the family that owns the house where he was found in the snow.
Read’s defense appeared to be suggesting the couple, Chris and Julie Albert, and their son had tension with O’Keefe. They also confronted Julie Albert about her telephone conversations with the sister of Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor, who led the investigation.
Evidence introduced on Thursday included receipts showing John O’Keefe bought two beers and a Titos vodka at the Waterfall Bar & Grille, the second bar that he and Read patronized that night. Previous testimony indicated that Read was drinking vodka.
Also Thursday, the court distributed Judge Beverly Cannone’s order that the anticipated testimony of O’Keefe’s niece and nephew cannot be recorded, photographed or transmitted. The order also applies to any exhibits that may contain prior recorded statements from the children.
On Wednesday, jurors saw surveillance videos from inside two Canton bars and heard testimony from others who were there with Read and O’Keefe. Witness after witness testified that they saw no trouble between Read and O’Keefe — but prosecutors have said the couple fought that night.
Karen Read trial: Key updates, evidence from every day of testimony
One of the videos showed O’Keefe and friends at CF McCarthy’s pub. Read was also seen in the video when she arrived, greeting O’Keefe with a hug and a kiss.
Other footage from the Waterfall Bar & Grille shows O’Keefe, Read and other members of the group after they moved across the street. Footage showed that Read left with two other women before O’Keefe exited a short time later with something in his hand, meeting Read at the door and walking together toward her car.
Earlier in the case, evidence of a shattered drinking glass was shown to the jury. Prosecutors appear to be developing an argument that O’Keefe was holding the glass when he was hit by Read’s SUV.
Hearst OwnedShattered glass introduced as evidence in Karen Read trial.
Testimony on Monday described the unusual conditions faced by investigators and the unorthodox methods they employed, including the use of red plastic cups from a neighbor to collect samples of blood in the snow and bringing them back to the Canton police station in a Stop & Shop paper bag. Investigators said they didn’t have anything else to collect the evidence in and they had to improvise.
Jurors this week also heard two 911 calls, the first saying Karen Read was freaking out because her boyfriend, O’Keefe, had not come home that night. The second call was from when Reed and two other women had just found O’Keefe’s body lying in a snowbank.
Proceedings in the case last week spanned four days, featuring testimony from numerous first responders and a tour of the Canton neighborhood where the death occurred. Several of the first responders who testified this week in the courtroom said they heard Read make some kind of confession at the scene.
Jurors also had a chance last week to see Read’s Lexus 570 SUV, the one that allegedly hit O’Keefe. One tail light was missing and a small dent was visible on the rear hatch.
The trial’s first few days also detailed the futile efforts of first responders to save O’Keefe. They found him face up when they arrived just before dawn on Jan. 29. He was pronounced dead at the hospital and an autopsy later found he died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.
Hearst OwnedOfficer John O’Keefe
Part of what prosecutors are trying to do is show Read’s actions were intentional. To do that, Norfolk Assistant District Attorney Adam Lally started offering up evidence showing the couple had a stormy relationship that had begun to “sour” in the month before O’Keefe died. The prosecution’s first witness, O’Keefe’s brother Paul, testified they would regularly argue including over what Read fed his two adopted children and that he witnessed a 2021 fight the couple had in Cape Cod over how O’Keefe treated her.
Paul O’Keefe’s wife, Erin, testified that Read told her the couple fought in Aruba after she caught O’Keefe kissing another woman.
Prosecutors appeared early on to be relying on Read’s own words to get a conviction. Most of the first week has been dominated by first responders, who detailed a harrowing scene that morning in January 2022.
David McGlynnProsecutor Adam Lally questions a witness during Karen Read’s murder trial
In their opening statement, the defense team laid out plans to portray the investigation into O’Keefe’s death as shoddy and undermined by the close relationship investigators had with the police and other law enforcement agents at the house party.
They argued investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” and that prevented them from considering other suspects. They plan to argue someone other than Read was responsible for O’Keefe’s death but have only floated a theory that he was beaten inside the house and left for dead outside.
David McGlynnKaren Read with her defense team
They also got one witness, who testified to hearing Read say O’Keefe’s death was her fault, to acknowledge he never wrote that in a police report. They also questioned another witness’ memory and suggested another may have been too focused on saving O’Keefe’s life to be able to hear Read say she hit O’Keefe.
They also tried to plant doubts in the jury’s mind about the overall investigation, getting several witnesses to say they never heard Read say she hit O’Keefe nor did they see dozens of pieces of her broken taillight at the scene, evidence which prosecutors say shows she backed into him.
The Problem With The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox
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TV Critic
In a notorious video that circulated around the globe, 20-year-old exchange student Amanda Knox is kissing her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Out of context, it looks like banal, sun-dappled vacation footage—American girl goes to picturesque Perugia, falls for scarf-wearing Italian boy. In fact, the couple had just learned, after an eerie morning at the apartment Knox shared with three other young women, that police had found her roommate Meredith Kercher brutally murdered in Kercher’s bedroom. The kiss became a key piece of a prosecutorial propaganda campaign, giddily inflamed by the tabloid media, that framed Knox as a perverse, cold-blooded killer. You only have to keep watching for a few more seconds, as the lovers turn away from one another, to catch the look of pain and confusion on her face and realize she’s not celebrating.
The moment is recreated in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a true crime drama that traces the since-exonerated Knox’s Kafkaesque ordeal in an Italian justice system that tarred her as a psycho sex fiend who masterminded Kercher’s rape and murder. What’s strange, considering that Knox, her husband Chris Robinson, and public-shaming expert Monica Lewinsky are among the series’ executive producers, is how much more ambiguous the kiss looks in this telling. When Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox, turns to face the camera, her expression is wide-eyed and inscrutable. Twisted is otherwise overwhelmingly sympathetic to its protagonist, and Van Patten (Nine Perfect Strangers, Tell Me Lies) does an admirable job with limited material. Yet the fumbling of this scene captures what is so frustrating about the show. For all its fidelity to the complicated facts of one of this century’s most infamous murder cases, Twisted fails to deliver the one element of Knox’s story that might be best expressed through scripted drama: insight into who its viciously caricatured, widely misunderstood subject really is.
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The eight-part series, helmed by showrunner K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us), often plays like an extended version of the broad reenactments you see in crime docs. In a way, this makes sense. There is much to reenact, to explain and unravel and contextualize, in a legal saga that began on Nov. 2, 2007, the morning Kercher’s body was discovered, and had yet to be fully resolved as late as this year. Italy’s justice system differs greatly from its American counterpart; prosecutors lead police investigations, criminal and civil trials can be consolidated into the same proceedings, juries in even the highest-profile cases are unsequestered. From paparazzi photos to footage recorded at the scene by the forensics team to TV news reports to interviews with Knox, plenty of imagery exists from throughout this story—much of which already appeared in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox before being restaged, shot-for-shot, in Twisted.
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Following a flash-forward to Amanda’s return to Italy in 2022, during which she spends a tense car ride hiding under a blanket from local media ravenous for a glimpse of its favorite villain, the tale unfolds in mostly chronological order. We watch an ingenuous Amanda skip around Perugia, in the fall of 2007, living out a study-abroad fairytale with her new boyfriend, Raffaele (Giuseppe De Domenico, heartbreaking), and three female roommates, including Meredith (Rhianne Barreto), a British student. About 10 minutes into the premiere, the dream sours. Amanda returns to her adorable apartment to shower after a night at Raffa’s but slowly realizes something isn’t right. There are blood stains in the bathroom, a revolting mess in the toilet. Meredith’s door is locked, and no one answers when Amanda calls out to her.
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Soon after the body is found, the young couple become crucial witnesses in the police investigation, detained at the station for days’ worth of questioning. Bilingual scripts effectively demonstrate how the language barrier exacerbated Knox’s predicament, as she was far from fluent in Italian at the time and often lacked an adequate translator. It is (almost cartoonishly) clear from the outset that Amanda has rubbed the investigators the wrong way. They don’t like the kiss, or her sexual candor, or the vibrator that was found among her toiletries; their prejudices are reinforced when Meredith’s British friends express their own dislike for Amanda. A pair of nightmarish, physically and psychologically violent marathon interrogations ends with Raffaele manipulated into destroying her alibi and a disoriented Amanda implicating Patrick Lumumba (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), the proprietor of the bar where she worked, in the murder. (Though she almost immediately recanted this accusation, Lumumba was arrested, then quickly cleared, and a slander charge was added to list of crimes for which she’d face trial.)
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The middle half of the series wades, somewhat laboriously, through years of legal wrangling and incarceration, as Amanda and Raffaele are found guilty and serve four years of their sentences before seeing their convictions overturned due to an astonishing absence of reliable physical evidence. The arrival in Italy of Amanda’s fiercely loyal mother, Edda Mellas (the usually great Sharon Horgan, struggling with an American accent), should raise the emotional stakes, but, as is the case with so much of the show’s dialogue, the women mostly speak in gloomy exposition. Richer and more thoughtfully depicted is the relationship that Amanda, an avowed atheist, develops with Don Saulo Scarabattoli (Alfredo Pea), the prison’s open-minded, in-house priest. The advice he gives her when she’s on the verge of yielding to despair over what could become a life sentence—”You can serve humanity even if it doesn’t serve you”—will shape her future.
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Knox and Lewinsky have talked about how they insisted on ending Twisted not with Amanda and Raffaele’s first acquittal, on appeal in 2011, but with a pair of episodes that trace the case’s aftermath: the bumpy reacclimation to freedom, the permanent reputational damage, the search for purpose in a life derailed, the ongoing legal woes and media circus. The instinct to move beyond the true crime template, avoiding a false happily-ever-after ending, is a good one. But as executed, the penultimate episode just feels like more trudging from point to point on a timeline of well-documented events. Amanda endures an aggressive interview with Chris Cuomo (Josh Burdett): Check. Amanda finds community with other exonerees: Check.
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The finale—which is, unfortunately, the only episode co-written by Knox—goes deeper. We see Amanda, now an author, wife, and mother, compare battle scars with Raffaele and confront the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who, despite the early emergence of airtight forensic evidence implicating the third person convicted of Kercher’s murder, perpetrated the character assassination that led to her imprisonment. It’s in this coda that the series finally feels like it’s about something other than the obvious fact that Knox suffered a grave injustice. We discover that, just as Amanda is not the sex-crazed monster Mignini created, Mignini is not the bloodthirsty misogynist her allies imagined; he’s a man tortured by personal demons. Everyone is more complicated than tabloid headlines make them out to be. (Knox took this argument to an extreme in a recent Atlantic essay that called the common description of University of Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger as, simply, evil “an excuse to stop thinking, to ignore the evidence, to hate and punish someone law enforcement didn’t, or wouldn’t, understand.”)
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This perspective tempers the hysteria of an earlier episode, which opens with a mini-biography narrated by Mignini that races from a childhood steeped in the Madonna-whore complex to his father’s untimely death (“You’re the man of the house now,” the boy is told, graveside, in an egregiously canned bit of dialogue) to the debacle that was his involvement in the Monster of Florence serial killer case. The Italian-stereotype quotient is high in this rendering, as it also is in another episode’s more empathetic portrait of Raffaele. Perhaps out of respect for the privacy of the real people or their families, we barely spend any time with Meredith or Patrick—another innocent victim, whose experience as a Black, Congolese immigrant feels under-acknowledged in a story so concerned with Amanda’s gendered shaming. But Raffa, a sweet, inexperienced romantic hoping for another shot at love with a woman he adores, comes through clearly.
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I left the series feeling as if I knew him much better than I knew Amanda, even though she gets far more screen time than any other character and Van Patten narrates most of the episodes. (These voiceovers can get pretty purple: “Telling my tale is a sticky, tricky thing—especially when I was a stranger to my story’s true beginning.”) This is not for lack of discussion about her personality. She is described, variously, as quirky, impassive, naive, vulgar, blithely optimistic. “Everyone says I’m like Amélie”—the eponymous gamine from the movie she and Raffaele watched the night of Meredith’s murder—“because I’m a weirdo,” Amanda says at one point. Edda calls her “sunny despite everything.” One of Meredith’s friends testifies that the defendant struck her as “cold,” “unfeeling,” and “quite open about her sex life.” It’s fine that none of these contradictory characterizations bear much resemblance to the Amanda we observe. This is, after all, the story of a woman who was misread by a significant chunk of Earth’s population.
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But The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox should have a compelling counternarrative to offer about Amanda Knox. To the extent that she’s defined, it’s in terms of what she self-evidently is not—not a killer, not a sex freak, not a callous American femme fatale. With ample evidence of Knox’s innocence available for over a decade, Steinberg and her writers had the chance to do something more than mount yet another defense. They could’ve made us understand Amanda’s thinking in the most awkward and insensitive-seeming moments of her trial by media. Instead, the show tends to replay these gaffes without adding much new perspective. Amanda’s alleged weirdness is mentioned more than it’s explored; how much could we have learned about her if Steinberg hadn’t rushed through a scene set at her time-traveler-themed wedding? A flashback episode that gave us more time with Amanda before Meredith’s death might also have helped.
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Some of the best crime docudramas, like Hulu’s own The Dropout and The Girl From Plainville, thrive on nuanced portraiture of real women whose mass-media villain edits contain far more truth than “Foxy Knoxy.” Without powerful insight into a person who is also Twisted’s executive producer—and who has drawn more perceptive conclusions from her ordeal in two memoirs, multiple podcasts, and the Netflix doc—it’s hard to justify the reopening of 18-year-old wounds.
