Karen Read is accused of murdering her boyfriend. The internet think she's the victim of a cover-up.

If you're into true crime, TikTok, or the endless rabbit hole that is an amalgamation of both - CrimeTok - chances are you've heard the name Karen Read.

It's the name of a woman central to a murder trial that played out in real time over ten-weeks, before ending in a mis-trial in July, 2024.

It has all the ingredients of a binge-worthy TV serial, and as we wait for a re-trial early next year, the case continues to get murkier and murkier.

Allow us to take you back to the start.

What happened to Karen Read's boyfriend, John O'Keefe?

On January 29, 2022, 44-year-old Karen Read went out drinking with her boyfriend John O'Keefe, a Boston police officer. After a rowdy night spent with John's friends, whom the couple met at the bar, it was decided that the group would keep the party going at the home of fellow BPD officer, Brian Albert.

Karen, deciding to head home, dropped her boyfriend at the afterparty first. By her own account, she was drunk.

Listen: To True Crime Conversations unpack the case in detail. Post continues after podcast.

At 4:23 am on the morning of January 30, John's niece, who lived with him and of whom he had guardianship, called another friend who had been at the bar — Jennifer McCabe — the sister-in-law of Brian Albert.

She said Karen was worried that he hadn't yet come home, and couldn't remember details about having dropped him off due to being so inebriated.

Jennifer said she had no idea where John was either and about an hour after the phone call, Karen met up with Jennifer and another friend in order to hit the streets to look for him.

Outside, it had been snowing. The temperature read -7 degrees Celsius, and the group knew it was dangerous for anyone to be outside in that kind of weather.

As they drove back to the home of Brian Albert, where Karen had last seen John, she spotted his lifeless body outside the house in the snow. Running to sweep the snow off his face and body, Karen tried to warm her boyfriend's icy body by lifting his shirt and laying on top of him. She began CPR while another friend called emergency services, but to no avail — John was dead.

He had blood around his mouth and nose, and his right eye was bruised and swollen. He was missing one of his Nike trainers and the baseball hat he had been wearing. John's official cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma coupled with hypothermia, and in the chaos that ensued, Karen Read became the number one suspect.

Karen Read's boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. Image: AAP.

Why is Karen Read on trial?

The trial, which began in April 2024, quickly became divisive — both in the small town of Canton, Massachusetts where the alleged crime occurred, and online, where debate raged about whether or not Karen, an equity analyst and adjunct professor at Bentley University, is responsible for John's death.

Central to the prosecution's case is the theory that Karen, after dropping John at Brian's home, hit her boyfriend with her car.

The evidence put forward by the prosecution included testimony from first responders that in the immediate aftermath of discovering John's body, Karen repeatedly cried, "I hit him, I hit him", while speaking to EMTs.

They also cite a smashed tail light on the car, John's DNA found on the car, as well as text messages that point to their relationship going through a rocky patch in the days preceding John's death.

Is Karen Read guilty of her boyfriend's murder?

Karen's defence counters that while John O'Keefe's DNA is on the vehicle as it would be expected to be, an independent federal review found the damage to the tail light to be "inconsistent" with having hit John.

The defence alleges that not only did Karen have nothing to do with John's death, but that he was actually beaten inside Brian Albert's home, then left in the snow to die, with the people involved — including Brian, another police officer — framing Read for the murder.

This theory began to emerge when Karen's lawyer, David Yanetti, claimed he received a tipoff shortly after his client's arraignment on manslaughter charges (these charges were later upgraded to second-degree murder).

According to Boston Magazine, a tipster who initially used a fake name, told Yanetti in a phone call: "Your client is innocent. John was beaten up by Brian Albert and his nephew. They broke his nose, and when O'Keefe didn't come to, Brian and a federal agent dumped his body on the front lawn." (A lawyer for the man Yannetti identified as the tipster denies Yannetti's version.)

Karen Read claims she was aware there had been bad blood between Colin Albert (Brian's nephew) and her boyfriend, and investigations by her defence team found a witness who told them Colin had indeed been present the night John died.

The defence claims injuries on John's arms are consistent with being bitten by a dog, beaten up and thrown outside.

According to CBS News, a search made at 2:27 am on Jennifer McCabe's phone (remember — she's Brian Alberts' sister-in-law), hours before Karen raised the alarm about John being missing, read: "hoe [sic] long to die in cold".

Jennifer claims she made the search hours later after John's body was found at 6:23 am, because Karen had asked her to. She claims the reason for the earlier timestamp is that she used a tab that was already open on her phone.

Watch: Karen Read speaks up about her murder trial for her boyfriend's death. Post continues after video.

A town divided.

While speculation about the trial might have all the irresistible elements of a true crime podcast in the making (and you'd best believe, there are several podcasts and YouTube channels that have covered the case daily, including our very own True Crime Conversations episode), for the residents of Canton, Massachusetts, it's far more sinister than online gossip.

On Reddit forums and Facebook groups, the fallout in local circles is evident. The middle-class town, with a population of just over 24,000 people, is fractured along the lines of whether they believe Karen Read is guilty, or whether they believe the assertions of her defence team that a very sinister coverup has occurred, hinting at corruption running through Canton's power brokers.

One woman, born and raised in Canton, told Boston Magazine, "It's like bringing up Donald Trump at a dinner party. It could just explode.

"People don't want people to know which side they're on. Because, like politics, they don't want to deal with the fallout."

Karen Read's mistrial.

In July, after thrice failing to come to a unanimous decision, the jury in the case was forced to relay to the judge that they could not reach a verdict. As a result, Norfolk County Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial.

After the mistrial, it became known that the jurors actually unanimously concluded she was not guilty of murder or of leaving the scene of a deadly accident. They were deadlocked only on the remaining manslaughter charge.

Regardless, in late August, the Massachusetts judge presiding over the trial rejected a defence motion to dismiss two charges, including murder, setting the stage for the case to be retried in January, 2025.

As Karen Read's fate still hangs in the balance, the lead police officer involved in the investigation has been relieved of his duties as an internal investigation into his alleged misconduct (which the defence says included manipulating evidence and sending a series of vulgar messages about Karen Read to his friends and colleagues) continues.

The second trial.

In the lead up to Karen Read's retrial, which is set to begin on January 27, 2025, she has done a bombshell interview with Vanity Fair.

In the interview, the college professor shared her 'theory' on what killed her boyfriend John O'Keefe on that fateful night.

"I believe whatever happened to John was a setup to teach him a lesson or tune him up, and it got out of control," she alleged.

"No one would choose to kill someone in their own home and then set it up so sloppily."

She also briefly touched on her allegation that she's being framed, and the power that authority bodies hold in the United States.

"The power that a district attorney has in any given county is staggering. It's scary," she said. "He can bring all the resources of the state to try to get a pound of flesh, which I believe is what he's doing."

Read added that she has hired a private investigator and looked into finding materials that could even prove her guilty, as long as she could find out what actually happened.

"I told my parents, if I did anything in any way, I'll pay my dues … that's how this should work," she claimed to Vanity Fair.

"I want to know the truth — good, bad, ugly."

However, unfortunately the search for security footage was unsuccessful.

A lawyer on Read's team, Elizabeth Little, also spoke to the publication about the issues they've faced in trying to clear her name.

"We did numerous discovery requests…filed a motion to compel. We were given JPEG copies of photographs of zero metadata that were blurry and useless. After seven months of litigation, it comes out that they don't have the original photos…." she said.

"They came from a phone. The phone doesn't exist anymore. Initially you think, It's just incompetence. The more we dug, the more we realized that the stuff we were looking for was never gathered in the first place or was being intentionally withheld…. It became hard to believe it was all an accident or mistake."

In the wake of her mistrial, Read has garnered both a devoted band of supporters and a mob of detractors.

She hit back at the O'Keefe family who have sided against her, and said that while she stopped drinking at first due to fear of being judged, she has tried to put aside what others think of her and live each day as it comes.

"You're allowed a cocktail if you're being framed for murder," Read said.We'll keep you updated here as the next trial progresses, but in the meantime: get thee to TikTok - because there is so much more to this still-unfolding saga.

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Feature image: AAP.

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