Read’s lawyers want to share a theory
Ask judge to allow jurors to hear their version of events
DEDHAM — When the murder trial against Karen Read begins next week, her attorneys aim to convince a jury that her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, was killed by an unnamed third party inside a Canton home where police say she dropped him off hours before he was found dead outside in a snowbank.
On Friday, Read’s lawyers argued in Norfolk Superior Court that the jury should hear this theory, what’s known as a third-party culprit argument.
Trial Judge Beverly J. Cannone said she would issue a ruling on their request next week.
“I don’t know who the third-party culprit is, even after reading 4,500 pages of discovery,” Cannone said.
The final day of court preparations before the trial saw many of the same startling claims and intense jockeying between prosecution and defense that have turned this case into a spectacle, dividing friends and neighbors in Canton and triggering a federal probe into potential police misconduct.
Read, 44, is facing charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. Prosecutors allege she killed O’Keefe by hitting him with her SUV during a blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022, following a night of drinking. Read allegedly returned hours later with two other women and discovered O’Keefe’s snow-covered body, later telling a first responder, “I hit him,” prosecutors have said.
But lawyers for Read say she is being framed by law enforcement to protect the real killer. They maintain O’Keefe entered the Canton home, where a gathering was being held, and was beaten to death in the basement, his body then left outside.
Acting US Attorney Joshua S. Levy’s office has convened a federal grand jury to investigate law enforcement’s handling of the case, and federal authorities have provided thousands of pages of sealed materials to prosecutors and Read’s defense team.
On Friday, David Yannetti, an at
torney for Read, named three potential third-party culprits who were in the Canton home on the night in question: a nowretired Boston police sergeant who owned the home, his nephew, and a federal law enforcement agent who her attorneys say had a romantic interest in Read.
Yannetti said the federal agent, Brian Higgins, was friends at the time with the owner of the Canton home, Brian Albert. He said Higgins had a “prior romantic interest” in Read and did not expect to see her with O’Keefe at a bar earlier that night. He cited text messages and a phone calls among some of the parties, and other testimony, including from Higgins that he had destroyed his phone, to support the theory.
Lawyers for the men have said that they are not targets of the federal investigation, and none have been charged in connection with the case.
Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Adam Lally said Friday that Read’s lawyers are mischaracterizing the content of sealed grand jury materials to advance their theory.
”In regard to Mr. Higgins, that was a fanciful story,” Lally told the court. “But again, there’s actually no actual evidence of most of those things, or at least the imputations, or the connotations, that counsel wants to put behind that.”
Prosecutors have said Read’s right rear taillight was damaged when she struck O’Keefe and that his DNA was “present on the broken taillight and microscopic pieces of red and clear apparent plastic located in” his clothing.
Yannetti suggested Friday that the SUV was tampered with, and that a law enforcement witness is prepared to testify to seeing now-retired Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz and Higgins alone with Read’s vehicle parked outside the Canton Police station on the afternoon of Jan. 29 for “a wildly long time.”
Video for that area cut out for 42 minutes while they were inside, Yannetti said.
Lally countered the camera was motion-activated and the damage to Read’s taillight was apparent long before the car arrived there. For example, hours before Read’s vehicle arrived at the police station, officers went to O’Keefe’s home to perform a well-being check on his niece and nephew, whom he took care of after their parents died, Lally said; a camera in the police cruiser captured the damage to Read’s taillight as it pulled into the driveway.
The prosecution’s bid to bar Read’s lawyers from raising a third-party culprit defense is one of dozens of motions Cannone considered Friday ahead of jury selection, which is slated to begin Tuesday.