In the early hours of January 29, 2022, during a blizzard, 46-year-old Boston police officer John O'Keefe was found unresponsive outside a fellow officer's home in Canton, Massachusetts.
He was discovered by his girlfriend Karen Reed, who said she woke up on the couch around 4 a.m. and frantically looked for him after realizing he hadn't returned from a night out. Officer O'Keefe suffered severe head injuries, suffered from hypothermia, and was pronounced dead that morning. Ms. Reed was arrested three days later, and the case has riveted Boston ever since.
Ms. Reed, 44, is currently on trial in a Massachusetts courtroom, where she is accused of backing Officer O'Keefe in her sport-utility vehicle and leaving the scene after an argument. Her lawyer and a vocal and dedicated defense team maintain that she is innocent, alleging widespread conspiracy and cover-up by law enforcement officials to cover up the truth of the murder.
Public interest in the case has been fueled by a combination of factors. that women accused of murder are relatively rare; The mysterious circumstances of death. A small town setting and the web of relationships that connect the major players. And conspiracy theories have a strong appeal to people who tend to distrust police and government.
“Any one of these things is going to get attention, but when you add them all together, it's the appeal,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University. “We're all like rubberneckers waiting for the next bombshell.”
“People want to know – is she a calculating murderer or a damsel in distress?” he added.
The passion swirling around this incident led to one surprising development after another. The blogger was charged with harassing a prosecution witness. A district attorney scolds conspiracy theorists. The judge ordered pro-Reid demonstrators to stay 200 feet from the courtroom and prohibited them from wearing clothing with slogans related to the case inside the courtroom.
Some facts are indisputable. Ms. Reed and Officer O'Keefe, who dated years ago and reunited during the pandemic, met with friends in Canton, a town of 24,000 people about 20 miles south of Boston, on the night Officer O'Keefe died. and went out for a drink. At a downtown bar, they met Boston Police Sergeant Brian Albert, who also lived there, and received an invitation to join a group of friends for drinks late into the night at his house.
Shortly after midnight, they drove to a mansion in a hilly area of well-maintained homes. Officer O'Keefe got out of Ms. Reed's black Lexus SUV. Prosecutors allege that the two were fighting and that Ms. Reed then reversed speed, intentionally hitting her boyfriend and driving away.
In court filings, prosecutors allege the damage to the rear of Ms. Reed's SUV, the angry voicemail she left on Officer O'Keefe's phone that night, and the fact that Mr. Reed told her he wanted to end the relationship. It includes statements from witnesses who said that.
Most damningly, some paramedics who responded to the scene that morning said they heard Reed repeatedly say, “I hit him.”
Ms. Reed denies harming Officer O'Keefe. She has pleaded not guilty to charges of manslaughter and second-degree murder. She suggests that in her shock and sadness that morning, she uttered her question in a panic: “Did I hit him?” — This is not a confession.
Her attorneys have developed alternative explanations for Officer O'Keefe's death. Officer O'Keefe entered Officer Albert's home, where he was allegedly beaten and his body dumped in the snow.
Those who believe Reed is innocent say the evidence is contradictory and points to a cover-up to protect those who were at the Albert home that night, most of them related to the Albert family. There is.
They argue that the lacerations on Officer O'Keefe's arm are unlikely to have been caused by a car, but are similar to bite wounds that may have been inflicted by the homeowner's German shepherd. Prosecutors say no dog DNA was found on the body.
Reed's defense also argued that an initial search of the area around Officer O'Keefe's body did not turn up several pieces of red plastic, said to be pieces of her SUV's broken taillight, but hours later They question why it was discovered. Heavy snowfall made exploring the garden even more difficult.
They said the most suspicious feature was a Google search containing a misspelled word that was recovered from the cellphone of a woman who was at Albert's home that night. “It's cold and I want to die.'' The defense said the interrogation took place around 2:30 a.m., before the body was discovered. Prosecutors said it happened hours later, at Ms. Reed's frantic request, shortly after she found her boyfriend unresponsive, but the search tab remained open from 2:30 p.m. , resulting in misleading timestamps.
Some members of the “Free Karen Reid” movement, not satisfied with keeping their anger to themselves, took to the streets to protest and chant “Don't bite the car” (a woman found in the victim's arm). They held up signs with slogans such as “Referring to Wounds”. — and “Justice for John O’Keefe” on malls and intersections from Boston to Cape Cod. And they have continued to donate $5, $10, $25 to her online fundraiser for her legal defense.
“If you know in your heart that you're right, nothing else matters,” said Reed's supporter, who protested outside the Norfolk County Courthouse in Dedham throughout the trial, which began two weeks ago. said Tom Desrosiers, an organizer of the campaign. .
Many of her supporters wear pink. Some even bought matching hot pink sneakers to spend hours standing on the sidewalk. On a recent morning, a group sat on beach chairs near the courthouse, listening to live audio of testimony next to a Dunkin Donuts and coffee buffet.
“He's lying,” one woman muttered to no one in particular as she listened to a prosecution witness while chewing on a munchkin.
Jessica Finchreid, a mother of three from Taunton, said she was bringing her home-schooled 16-year-old daughter to the protest to learn real-life lessons about the criminal justice system. Told.
“Karen Reed could be any of us,” she said.
Reed, who worked at an investment firm before her arrest, told ABC News last summer that she respected Officer O'Keefe, who took in her young niece and nephew after the deaths of her sister and her husband. As their relationship progressed, she said in an interview, she began spending more time at his home, helping her care for her children.
However, she accused Officer O'Keefe of cheating on her shortly before her death, and witnesses told investigators that Officer O'Keefe had told her their relationship had “naturally died out.” According to prosecutors' court filings, Reed told her friend that she had been drinking heavily the night Officer Keefe died and that she didn't remember driving to Albert's house.
The public's unusual level of suspicion towards the prosecutors appears to have infuriated them, in part because of the controversy surrounding a popular Boston blogger known as Turtleboy, who persistently maintained his innocence. Last summer, District Attorney Michael W. Morrissey, who led the case, issued a video rebuttal, accusing conspiracy theorists of harassing witnesses.
Mr Morrissey said: “This should be an outrage to any decent human being and it should stop.” “Innuendo is not evidence.”
Blogger Aidan Carney was charged in October with harassment and intimidation of a witness. He pleaded not guilty. His website sells trial-themed apparel, including his $27 tank top emblazoned with the Google logo and the words “I can't wait to die in the cold.”
Federal authorities also intervened, conducting a highly unusual pretrial review of the on-site investigation, calling witnesses to a federal grand jury, and consulting their own experts. Their findings have not been made public.
Some say the loss of Officer O'Keefe and the grief of his family has been overlooked in all the fuss. The larger and more vocal the protests, “the more John's legacy seemed to be obscured,” his longtime friend recently wrote in Boston magazine.
In a Facebook group where thousands of Reed's lawyers analyze evidence and dissect court testimony every day, some dare to share their growing suspicions that she was framed. There are several people.
“I was initially going to buy into the conspiracy theory, but when no one cracked I started thinking Karen probably hit him,” one poster posted on Thursday. . “The simplest story is usually the most likely one.”
Another commenter expressed blatant skepticism, echoing Google Search's misspellings but not knowing which side they were on, writing, “I hope people stop making these ridiculous interpretations.'' “Is it still a long way off?”
