Viewers of Investigation Discovery’s A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read docuseries should expect a prosecutor and defense attorneys in full thrust and parry as Karen Read, a former college lecturer, is tried for allegedly hitting and killing her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, with her SUV on Jan. 29, 2022.
With the 2024 trial ending in a mistrial, and a 2025 retrial set to start April 1, ID’s latest true crime series, airing over three nights starting on Monday, attempts to answer, with careful diligence, who and what could have caused O’Keefe’s death, while also going beyond the courtroom to extensively interview Read and her legal team with surprising access.
That Read’s boyfriend was also a Boston police officer whose body was discovered on a fellow cop’s front lawn leaves viewers facing vastly contrasting narratives during the first trial. The prosecution cites a toxic relationship between O’Keefe and his girlfriend, leading to an alleged drunk and angry Read hitting her boyfriend with her car and leaving him to die in a snowstorm after a night of heavy drinking at two bars.
Read’s defense team, however, claims she is innocent and was framed to protect other Boston police officers involved in a confrontation with O’Keefe inside a home at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts, before he was dragged outside to die from hypothermia.
Here are five takeaways from the docuseries on a murder case and trial that has earned national attention, with quotes from director Terry Dunn Meurer in conversation with The Hollywood Reporter. A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read, produced by Unsolved Productions for Investigation Discovery, airs on ID and streams on Max over three nights starting Monday at 9 p.m., with a one-hour finale on Wednesday.
Karen Read’s legal team reveals mysterious tip that blew the murder case wide open
A tip from a “Mike” that was called into Read’s attorney David Yannetti ultimately steered the defense to claiming fellow Boston cops allegedly killed O’Keefe and framed her for the crime. “He wasn’t a witness. But that tip was invaluable. It sent us in a different direction very early on in this investigation,” Yannetti recalls in the ID docuseries.
The tipster wasn’t specific, fellow defense attorney Alan Jackson adds, but was helpful. “You need to look at the folks inside the Albert House. You need to look at the occupants of the house. Something is more than meets the eye,” Jackson said of the home on Fairview Road in Canton, then-owned by Brian Albert, where O’Keefe was discovered dead and buried under a snowdrift in the front yard on Jan. 29, 2022.
Without that tip, the focus on O’Keefe’s death may have remained on a car accident in a blinding snow blizzard, hampering claims during the first trial that Read’s boyfriend had been killed inside the Fairview Road property and that his body had been dumped out in the snow.
Is Trooper Michael Proctor the Mark Fuhrman of the Karen Read trial?
If the defense claims are true, Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor will be to the Karen Read retrial what LAPD Detective Mark Furhman was to the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial. Fuhrman was the detective investigating the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and who was accused by Simpson’s defense team of having planted the bloody glove he claimed to have found behind Simpson’s house in Brentwood.
Proctor, the lead detective in investigating the death of O’Keefe, admitted during Read’s first trial that he had sent vulgar texts about his main suspect to his friends and supervisors. And the ID docuseries director Terry Dunn Meurer sees parallels between Proctor and Furman. “It’s an echo of O.J. Very similar. You know, Michael Proctor in our film is Mark Herman in the O.J. case, with accusations of a cover up and conspiracy and planting evidence,” Meurer tells THR.
Prosecutors used the damaged taillight on Read’s SUV to claim she was guilty of hitting O’Keefe and causing her boyfriend’s death. But Read’s defense team are captured in the docuseries alleging Proctor, who confiscated her phone and SUV as part of the investigation, took shards from a broken taillight cover on her car and planted them at the scene as evidence O’Keefe had been murdered outside the home and not inside.
Attorney Jackson says in the docuseries: “We believe it’s not just a sloppy investigation. There’s active planting of evidence. Why? Because inside that house, there’s a Boston police officer, Brian Albert. And Proctor knows this family and has known them for decades. The entire policing culture there is deeply, deeply connected to each other. And we believe that leads to ‘let’s look the other way, let’s call it a favor, let’s do a solid for a buddy.’”
Blogger Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney: Journalist or social media provocateur?
Among the most passionate supporters of Read outside the courthouse during her first trial was Aidan Kearney, also known as Turtleboy, who argued an innocent woman had been framed for murder. The rub is the controversial blogger has been charged with witness intimidation and possibly faces new charges as Read’s retrial is set to get underway.
Kearney has pleaded not guilty to the charges and claims he’s a journalist. Prosecutors claim Kearney and his megaphone rants from the courthouse steps helped the defense present a false narrative about a police cover up, and are making jury selection in the coming retrial an uphill battle.
“It’s the collateral damage — this is a very personal opinion — but the collateral damage that he’s done in terms of the lives of these witnesses, who are just witnesses, as Jennifer McCabe says on the stand, ‘I’m just a witness,’ it’s really concerning and disturbing,” Meurer tells THR.
She’s referencing key prosecution witness Jennifer McCabe, whose Google search on how long it takes to die in the cold (which she says was done at the request of Read after O’Keefe’s body had been discovered and not earlier, as the defense team claimed) made for a dramatic moment during the first trial.
Brendan Kane, a longtime friend of O’Keefe who appears in the docuseries, recalled an immediate change in sentiment among pink-clad supporters of Read outside the courthouse owing to the intervention of Turtleboy and other online bloggers. “They were booing Johnny’s family as they walked into the courthouse. At first, I had trouble processing that. Why are they doing it?” he recalled asking himself during an interview in the docuseries. He concluded the Free Karen PR campaign, encouraged by Turtleboy, was at work.
“You’re hot:” Key prosecution witness reads out Karen Read’s steamy text messages in open court
ATF agent Brian Higgins, a key prosecution witness during the first murder trial, brought his dirty laundry to the stand when flirty text messages exchanged with Read were read out in the open court. Higgins put into evidence texts like Read telling him, “You’re hot.” He then responded: “Are you serious or messing with me?” To which Read responded: “No I’m serious,” which was followed by Higgins texting: “Feeling is mutual.”
For the prosecution, the exchange of texts only weeks before O’Keefe was allegedly murdered, with Read flirting with Higgins, offered a possible motive for why she may allegedly have wanted to end a failing relationship. But the steamy texts also gave the defense team evidence to claim, on the night of the alleged crime, that Higgins and O’Keefe had an argument inside 34 Fairview Road. Or, as attorney Jackson put it in the docuseries, “created a very, very clear motive for Brian Higgins to visit harm on John O’Keefe.”
Behind the scenes, Read says in the docuseries: “It felt like the walls were closing in during the Higgins text messages. I could feel my parents shrinking. That was painful,” she recalls.
Here’s a safe bet: the prosecution won’t bring Trooper Joseph Paul back to the stand in Read’s upcoming retrial
Trooper Joseph Paul’s cross-examination during the first trial by Read’s defense team about his reconstruction of the alleged SUV crash was devastating for the prosecution. On the stand, Paul conceded he knew little about kinematics, or the geometry of mechanical motion, held no degrees in mathematics or physics, and had only an degree in the administration of justice.
“I’ve been dying to know for two and a half years, what was the point of impact on John’s body?” Read questions in the doc series. It didn’t come definitively from Trooper Paul, who appeared flustered on the witness stand, and had to be told by the presiding court judge to speak more slowly and clearly.
And the defense brought two of its own accident reconstruction experts to the stand to testify after being hired by the FBI to look at the Read case. Their conclusion was that data did not point to a vehicle striking and killing O’Keefe, not least as he had a blunt force wound to the back of his neck.
Traffic accident reconstruction expert Daniel Wolfe, when asked if it was possible the damaged taillight on Read’s SUV struck O’Keefe’s head, answered: “From a damage standpoint, it was inconsistent.”
A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read releases in three parts starting Monday at 9 p.m., concluding with a one-hour finale on ID and streaming on Max Wednesday.