Karen Read’s high-powered, multimillion-dollar defense team helped her overpower prosecutors — twice — to beat back murder charges.
And they had help from a botched investigation and shady behavior from key witnesses and detectives.
Read, 45, of Mansfield, Mass., was cleared Wednesday in the 2022 murder of her then-boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, receiving one year probation after being found guilty on the least serious charge of drunk driving.
Read insisted on her innocence from the beginning and spared no expense in hiring an eclectic group of attorneys — including two high-powered Los Angeles defense lawyers, and an alternate juror who served at her first trial.
During both trials, the defense team left no stone unturned as they put forward the theory she was a mere patsy in a sweeping law-enforcement cover-up.
Read owed the defense team $5 million in deferred fees before the second trial even kicked off, Vanity Fair reported in October.
The financial analyst and adjunct professor sold her house to help fund the case and was living off her 401(k) as she had lost her jobs at Fidelity Investments and at Bentley University in the wake of the murder case, the outlet reported.
And Read — who garnered a cult-like following of supporters — also received over $1 million in fundraising from some 13,000 donors as of last week on a page set up by her defense team. The fundraising site that crashed for a time on Wednesday after the verdict was handed down.
Read’s legal team was helmed by hot-shot L.A. lawyer Alan Jackson — a former prosecutor who went on to defend the Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey sex-assault cases.
Jackson — who was caught canoodling with Read last year as jurors were deliberating, The Post exclusively revealed — fought tooth and nail in his attempt to sow reasonable doubt into every aspect of the prosecution’s case.
Jackson has been working alongside seasoned local trial lawyer David Yannetti since the first case, and the team later added lawyer Victoria George, who served as an alternate juror during that case.
“It is unbelievable, the insight you get from the jurors after they have sat on [a jury],” high-profile defense attorney Mark Geragos said in an April interview with News Nation.
The defense team successfully zeroed in on a major weakness in the prosecution’s case — the alleged rotten investigation helmed by since-fired Massachusetts Trooper Michael Proctor.
At the first trial, Proctor’s profane and inappropriate text messages were aired in front of the jury, showing he had apparently made up his mind about Read’s guilt before he even started probing the case.
During Proctor’s embarrassing stint on the witness stand last year, he admitted to the “unprofessional” messages in which he called her a “wack job c–t,” made fun of her Crohn’s disease saying, “She’s got a leaky balloon knot,” and had already decided she was to blame for O’Keefe’s death before fully investigating.
“Zero chance she skates. She’s f–ked,” Proctor wrote in another message.
Proctor — who was suspended without pay after the mistrial and fired in March — was not called to testify at the second trial.
The defense also homed in on a slew of other suspicious actions by others who were around when Read allegedly mowed down O’Keefe in her Lexus SUV and left him to die in a snow storm outside his retired cop pal Brian Albert’s Canton, Mass. home on Jan. 29, 2022.
For instance, Albert — who the defense team posed as an alternate suspect in O’Keefe’s death — didn’t emerge to see the commotion outside his own home when first responders showed up after O’Keefe’s body was found in a snow bank by Read, Albert’s sister-in-law Jennifer McCabe and another women.
Albert and his wife Nicole gave their dog Chloe away soon after the death, a fact which the defense seized upon as they contended O’Keefe’s arm injuries were from a dog bite rather than getting hit with the car, as prosecutors claimed.
Also contrary to the prosecution’s narrative, Read’s lawyers have suggested O’Keefe did actually enter Albert’s home that night where he got into a fight — which they claimed was the real cause of his death.
Defense suggested ATF officer Brian Higgins — with whom Read exchanged flirty texts and a kiss once — could also be an alternate suspect as he was also at Albert’s party and had an alleged jealous motive.
Other alleged suspicious actions included the fact that McCabe did a Google search for “hos [sic] long to die in cold” — which she claims Read asked her to search.
But defense focused on a timestamp discrepancy for when McCabe made the search, claiming it was made hours earlier than prosecutors said, at a time when Read wasn’t with her.
The defense also highlighted the inconsistent testimony about Read’s words in the aftermath of discovering O’Keefe’s body with some evidence suggesting she declared “I hit him!” and others suggesting she asked in shock, “Did I hit him?”
