After three weeks of jury selection, a panel of nine men and nine women has been seated in the murder retrial of Karen Read.
Read, whose trial in the death of her police officer boyfriend exposed allegations of law enforcement misconduct, returned to court in suburban Boston this month to be retried on charges of second-degree murder and other crimes.
Read’s widely publicized first trial ended with a hung jury last summer.
The heart of the trial is set to begin Tuesday with opening statements.
Here are key dates in the case.
Jan. 29, 2022: John O’Keefe is found dead
John O’Keefe, a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department, was found unresponsive in the yard of a now-retired Boston police sergeant, Brian Albert. O’Keefe, 46, was pronounced dead shortly afterward, and a medical examiner attributed his death to hypothermia and blunt-force trauma to the head.
Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe.Boston Police Dept. via AP
The night before, the couple had been drinking with other law enforcement officers in Canton, just south of Boston, before they drove to an afterparty at Albert’s home.
What followed was not captured on video, and no witnesses have claimed to have seen what led to O’Keefe’s death. But lawyers for Read, an equity analyst who’d been together with O’Keefe for two years, later said she dropped him off at Albert’s home and watched him go inside.
Read’s defense team said that hours later, after she discovered that her boyfriend never came home, she went out looking for him and, eventually, discovered his body in the snow outside Albert’s home.
In court, Albert denied that O’Keefe ever entered his home. And after Read was arrested on charges of second-degree murder, motor vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence and leaving the scene of a collision causing death, prosecutors painted a different picture of what investigators believe happened.
April 2024: A widely watched first trial
When Read’s trial got underway last April, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office described a relationship in shambles and a drunken defendant so furious with her partner that she backed into him with her Lexus SUV and left him for dead.
Adam Lally, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, pointed to vehicle data that captured Read reversing her Lexus for 60 feet at 24 mph outside Albert’s home and forensic testing that showed O’Keefe’s hair found on the vehicle’s bumper.
Also found on the vehicle’s bumper were the remnants of a drink — O’Keefe was seen leaving a bar that night with a cocktail in hand — and bits of a drinking glass, Lally said.
Read’s defense team was allowed to make a third-party culprit defense, permitting it to call witnesses and present evidence supporting an alternative theory of O’Keefe’s death.
According to that theory, O’Keefe was fatally beaten and bitten by a dog in Albert’s home. Her legal team alleged that Read was framed by Albert and another person who’d been at the party — an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who’d traded flirtatious texts with Read before, the defense said, she ghosted him. (Albert testified that O’Keefe never entered his home but that he would have been welcomed with “open arms” if he had.)
The defense also accused the lead investigator in the case, former Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Proctor, of manipulating evidence, failing to properly examine the case and leading a biased investigation. Among the evidence introduced were text messages that showed Proctor using derogatory language to describe Read to friends, family members and supervisors.
At one point, Proctor said he hoped Read would take her own life.
Proctor acknowledged making unprofessional comments about Read and sharing details of the investigation with his sister, who was close friends with Albert’s sister-in-law, but he said he provided only “newsworthy stuff,” and he denied that his conduct compromised the integrity of the investigation.
July 1: A mistrial is declared
After a nine-week trial and five days of deliberations, Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial when jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
The Norfolk County district attorney vowed to retry the case and appointed Hank Brennan, a former prosecutor and longtime criminal defense lawyer who previously represented Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, to be lead prosecutor.
The defense sought to have the crimes dismissed, alleging “extraordinary governmental misconduct” and saying that retrying her for two of the charges, including murder, amounted to double jeopardy. The lawyers made the second claim after, they said, two jurors came forward after the trial and said the panel would have acquitted Read of those crimes.
Judges in superior and federal court denied both claims.
March 19: Lead investigator Michael Proctor is fired
A trial board with the Massachusetts State Police fired Proctor after it determined he violated agency rules by sending derogatory texts about Read and shared confidential investigative details with non-law enforcement personnel.
The panel also found that he drank alcohol on duty and drove his cruiser afterward.
Proctor has not publicly commented on his termination. His family said they were “truly disappointed” with the board’s decision, which they said “unfairly exploits and scapegoats one of their own, a trooper with a 12-year unblemished record.”
“Despite the Massachusetts State Police’s dubious and relentless efforts to find more inculpatory evidence against Michael Proctor on his phones, computers and cruiser data, the messages on his personal phone — referring to the person who killed a fellow beloved Boston Police Officer — are all that they found,” the family said in a statement.
“The messages prove one thing, and that Michael is human — not corrupt, not incompetent in his role as a homicide detective, and certainly not unfit to continue to be a Massachusetts State Trooper,” the statement added.
It isn’t clear what role Proctor will play in the retrial, and legal experts told NBC News that his presence is likely to loom over the proceedings.
April 1: The second trial gets underway
Jury selection began in Read’s retrial in a Norfolk County courtroom, with prosecutors and defense lawyers questioning hundreds of potential jurors.
After three weeks of screening jurors, the panel was seated.
The 18 jurors include six alternates.
Opening statements are expected to start in the Massachusetts courtroom Tuesday.
