In Massachusetts, defendants need court approval to subpoena documents or physical evidence. Norfolk County Superior Court judge Beverly Cannone agreed to a hearing in May 2023, before the trial began, to determine whether Karen Read could subpoena phone records from Albert and McCabe, but they opposed the motion. Cannone canceled the court date and denied Read’s request. Two months later, Read’s team asked Cannone to recuse herself, claiming the appearance of bias. Aidan Kearney, the blogger known as Turtleboy who has been covering Read’s case, said he received Facebook direct messages from a McCabe family member suggesting family ties to “Auntie Bev.” Cannone rejected that motion too—saying, “I’ve never socialized with [McCabe] or any family members or witnesses who have been […] here in court.” She added, “I reject the notion that untrue and unsubstantiated rumors spread on the internet can force a judge to recuse herself from a case.” Less than a month later, Kearney reported that Cannone's brother, attorney John Prescott Jr., represented Chris Albert in a motor vehicle homicide case after he killed a foreign-exchange student in 1994 and subsequently led police on a 30-hour manhunt. Chris was sentenced to six months in prison. VF has spoken to a source confirming Cannone’s brother represented Chris Albert. At the time this story went to print, Cannone was slated to preside over Read’s second trial. (Cannone declined to respond to all of VF’s questions.)

A year after O’Keefe’s death, Read got a partial extraction of McCabe’s phone. Contrary to the Massachusetts State Police report, which found no relevant search history, Read’s expert Richard Green discovered that McCabe Googled “hos [sic] long to die in cold” at 2:27 a.m. on January 29 and later deleted the search. He determined that McCabe also deleted 18 phone calls from that day—including calls to her sister Nicole (Brian Albert’s wife) at 6:07 a.m. and 6:08 a.m. that were answered, though the Alberts said they slept through the commotion of the discovery of O’Keefe’s body. (Their bedroom overlooks the front yard.) During trial, McCabe denied making that Google search before 6 a.m.—claiming that she only did so at Read’s request after O’Keefe’s body was discovered. She also denied deleting the search, denied that Nicole picked up her phone calls that morning, and denied deleting phone calls from her call log.

The prosecution’s expert said the 2:27 a.m. time stamp “is not indicative of the time of the search,” claiming that McCabe could have searched in a window opened at 2:27 a.m. Vanity Fair asked Umit Karabiyik, a PhD at Purdue’s Department of Computer and Information Technology who specializes in iPhone artifacts and the limitations of digital forensics, to evaluate the prosecution’s expert testimony as well as an affidavit from Read’s expert. “Based on my research and expertise, I concur with what I see in the Affidavit from Richard Green,” Karabiyik emailed VF, referring to Read’s expert. Though the browser tab was opened earlier than the searches, Karabiyik said, “The time stamp for the search items is recorded for searches [and] stored in the database, not the time of the tab opening.” He noted that Green additionally verified the search times with associated WAL files that are occasionally overlooked.

Jackson’s cross-examination of McCabe became so heated, with the prosecution witness repeatedly asking to see her prior grand jury statements, that, as one juror told VF, it felt like they should have been served drinks and appetizers. “Supposedly this is the most traumatic thing of your life and you don’t remember what you said?” That juror adds, “There were so many times I wanted to just yell out, can you shut up? Tell the truth. Just tell the truth.”

32,709 TEXTS

O’Keefe’s death wasn’t the first time Norfolk County law enforcement found themselves facing allegations of cover-up and corruption. In 2021 the death of Sandra Birchmore, a pregnant 23-year-old who had been found hanging in her apartment by the strap of her gym bag, was ruled a suicide. The following year, three Stoughton police officers, Robert Devine, Matthew Farwell, and William Farwell—the latter two are twin brothers—were found to have engaged in sexual relations with Birchmore after meeting her through their department’s youth program. In June a forensic pathologist hired by Birchmore’s family determined her death was homicide by strangulation.

In August federal prosecutors charged Matthew Farwell with murdering Birchmore to cover up a sexual relationship that began when she was underage and resulted in her pregnancy. “When it became clear to Mr. Farwell that he could no longer control Sandra Birchmore, he allegedly silenced her, permanently,” said Joshua Levy, acting US attorney for Massachusetts, shortly after Farwell’s arrest. Farwell stands accused of staging her death to look like a suicide just hours before the officer’s wife gave birth to their third child. (Farwell has pleaded not guilty.) A 45-page affidavit outlines damning evidence that Massachusetts State Police apparently overlooked—like a new stroller in Birchmore’s apartment and an appointment for a newborn photo shoot, both indicating her excitement about her baby. And while MSP said they had not found texts between Birchmore and Farwell, the FBI found 32,709 between the two, as well as messages from Birchmore to her friends. About a week before her death, she texted one that Farwell had dropped by in an upbeat mood. “He asked me if I’d give him a key and said that if I keep it a secret, he’ll be around…then he looked in my closet…idk why haven’t figured that out.” Days later, she was found hanging from the closet door handle.

TURTLEBOY

Before Read’s case reached national attention levels, it was a local curiosity, most obsessively covered by Kearney, aka Turtleboy. (The moniker refers to a statue of a boy riding a turtle, which has become a lewd inside joke in his hometown of Worcester.) As interest snowballed, Turtleboy cranked out more than 400 installments of his “Canton Cover-Up” serial and hundreds of live YouTube shows, earning him as much as $50,000 a month.

“As off-the-wall as Turtleboy is with some of his reporting techniques, I said, ‘If there’s anybody that’s going to get this out there, it would be him.’ He answers to nobody,” Jon Silveira, Read’s friend of 30 years, told me. Some of his reporting techniques were indeed off-the-wall or flat-out aggressive. He confronted McCabe at her daughter’s lacrosse game to ask her about the “hos long to die in cold” search. (He was asked to leave.) He appeared at a Canton government meeting, where Chris Albert is on the board, holding a sign that read “Chris Albert killed a man,” in reference to the 1994 crash. “When I believe in something, I don’t just say, ‘Oh, here’s the facts.’ I go out and I hold protests,” Kearney told me. So that’s what he began doing.

If you believe Read is innocent, Turtleboy’s in-your-face approach is catharsis in the face of brazen corruption. If you believe Read is guilty, Turtleboy is an abhorrent opportunist. Outside the Dedham courthouse in August before a Read hearing, a woman in a blue “Justice for JJ” shirt tells me, “Turtleboy is a despicable human being because of what he has done.” Pointing to pink-clad “Free Karen Read” supporters, she says, “And these are all his followers.” When the blue shirts start chanting “Justice for JJ,” the pink side joins in. A woman in pink peace-sign earrings tells me, “They don’t understand that we want justice for JJ too.”

Six months into his coverage, Kearney was arrested and charged with witness intimidation—before the commonwealth served him a second helping of charges, Kearney served 60 days in jail after his bail was revoked because of an assault charge that, according to The Boston Herald, has since been dropped. (Kearney maintains his innocence.) As part of its case against Turtleboy, the commonwealth revealed that Kearney and Read logged 189 phone calls. “Karen’s the subject of my reporting and I spoke to her,” confirms Kearney. “That’s traditionally known as journalism.”

In connection with Kearney’s case, Morrissey convened a grand jury in March, a month before Read’s trial began, to try to have Read indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit witness intimidation. The jury did not vote to charge. Had the DA been successful, Read’s bail would have been revoked and she would have gone to jail. (Morrissey declined to respond to all of VF’s questions.)

“Turtle Riders”—what Kearney calls his readers—send him tips. One noticed McCabe’s car, easily identifiable with a vanity license plate, parked outside Proctor’s house and snapped a photo. (McCabe testified that Proctor was not home and she was there to talk to Proctor’s wife about the “vicious harassment” they received related to the case.) Supporters raised $5,000 to put up a “Free Karen Read” billboard across from Gillette Stadium; the billboard owner believes so much in Read’s innocence that he’s left it up for over a year without additional payment.

In August 2023, Morrissey, whose office is in Canton, issued a video statement. The DA condemned the harassment of the families involved in the case and declared that “Proctor has no close personal relationship with any of the parties involved in the investigation.” He dismissed the defense’s claims as “a false narrative” and “conspiracy theories” that are “completely contrary to the evidence and a desperate attempt to re-assign guilt.”

“Never have I seen such unethical conduct from a prosecutor,” Yannetti said in court, arguing for Cannone to disqualify Morrissey’s office from the case. She rejected the motion.

Read housed Yannetti, Jackson, Little, and herself in the same hotel throughout the trial so they could maximize preparation time. She paid $1.2 million leading up to and during the nine-week court proceedings between bails; accommodating, feeding, and transporting three lawyers; and hiring private investigators and experts. For that, she used her savings, about $500,000 from her since-depleted legal fund, and $400,000 donated by friends and family. She now has more than $5 million in deferred legal bills and a second trial looming.

The first one was “trial on a budget,” according to Read. Since she couldn’t afford to fly out support staff from Jackson and Little’s firm, Read became the support staff herself. She negotiated rates with two Uber drivers to shuttle the team to and from court. Read is aware her team has been photographed exiting (discounted) SUVs and surrounded by (volunteer) security, and dining out (the bill often picked up by friends or family members). As for criticism that her team occasionally enjoys upscale restaurants, she says, “You try feeding Alan Jackson McDonald’s.”

“We don’t typically work that closely with clients,” says Little, who became partner during trial due to her long hours. “But in this case, we needed every hand on deck.”

“LOCK THIS WHACK JOB UP”

About 10 months after O’Keefe’s death, the Office of the US Attorney for Massachusetts empaneled a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into an unspecified federal crime related to Norfolk County’s handling of Read’s case. The impetus is unknown; Levy will not comment on active investigations and, nearly two years into the probe, his team has not yet reached a conclusion. “When the FBI steps in, that usually is an indication that they are in possession of some information that is extremely damaging to the law enforcement agencies involved,” says Tom Nolan, a 27-year Boston police officer turned criminal justice professor at Emmanuel College who is not involved in Read’s case. Last year, the Alberts, McCabes, and other witnesses were subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury, according to state court proceedings.

It is incredibly logistically complicated to pursue a federal investigation into an active state murder investigation—in part because two agencies are interviewing the same witnesses simultaneously. Zachary Hafer, a former federal prosecutor and Cooley LLP partner, tells me, “I can’t think of a time in my 14 years in the US Attorney’s Office where that happened. Presumably, it’s some type of federal obstruction or witness-tampering investigation—a cover-up of some sort.”

“In these types of cases, it is common for prosecutors to grant certain witnesses immunity to help them determine what happened and whether there is a provable federal crime. The US Attorney’s Office has always prioritized the prosecution of law enforcement misconduct,” says Hafer, pointing out that making false statements to a federal agent is a felony carrying a five-year sentence. “So even if an individual wasn’t guilty of the underlying offense—here, murder—lying about it after the fact to federal investigators is another potential charge.”

Shortly before the trial began, the feds provided more than 3,000 pages of findings to the defense and prosecution, including Proctor’s texts about Read.
A sampling:

she’s a babe, weird fall river accent though, no ass

She’s got a leaky balloon knot, leaks poo

Waiting to lock this whack job up

Hopefully she kills herself.

The federal investigation found that Brian Albert destroyed his cell phone the day before receiving a protection order to preserve it and its contents. (Albert said the timing was a coincidence, and he was due for an upgrade.) Also: that on January 30, Higgins, the ATF agent who’d been at the Alberts’, asked another federal agent for advice on extracting phone data. Months later, he drove to a military base to dispose of his destroyed phone and SIM card. (Higgins testified that the target of a different investigation had found his contact information.) The feds also determined that Higgins went to the Canton Police Station—where he worked from—after leaving the Albert home, though he was off duty and had been drinking. (He says he was reshuffling cars.) He spent much of the following day, a Saturday when he was still off duty, there—passing through the garage where Read’s car was eventually kept—until about 6 p.m. The federal investigation found a 22-second call between Albert and Higgins at 2:22 a.m.—five minutes before McCabe’s alleged “hos long to die in cold” search. The men said that both the dialing and pickup of those calls were “butt dials.”

Though the federal findings were disclosed, Morrissey appealed to Cannone days before the trial began to prohibit mention of the federal investigation in court, arguing that it would be prejudicial. Cannone approved the request, meaning Read’s lawyers could not so much as utter the letters “FBI” before the jury. When questioning forensic reconstructionists hired by the Department of Justice, for example, the most Jackson could say was that they were hired by an independent agency. Several jurors reportedly took that to mean they worked for an insurance company.

Morrissey attempted to have the federal investigation transferred out of Massachusetts, arguing that the US attorney in office when the probe began had been biased against him. He was unsuccessful. In a letter dated August 2023, the US Attorney’s Office told Morrissey that Levy “has a very different opinion of the circumstances in this case than as presented in Mr. Morrissey’s letter,” and that the US government “believe[s] it is essential to continue their investigation given the information of which they are aware.” (Levy’s office would not confirm or deny the investigation to VF.)

A BARGAIN WITH GOD

The Dedham courthouse is a 19th-century Greek Revival building that was the setting for what The New York Times described as “one of the blackest pages in the American national story.” In 1921, Italian Americans Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were wrongly convicted of robbery and murder before being executed in 1927, in spite of international protests and overwhelming evidence of their innocence. Fifty years after their deaths, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis absolved them, declaring “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names.” Read faces her fate in the same building.

The wildest moment during an already wild trial involved security video from inside the Canton PD garage during the crucial time between Read’s SUV arriving and the taillight being found at Fairview. With Massachusetts State Police sergeant Yuriy Bukhenik—Proctor’s supervisor—on the stand, the commonwealth played video appearing to show that no one in the station went near the taillight in contention—the right one. The video showed the person Bukhenik ID’d as Proctor behind the left taillight, though Read and her lawyers say they hadn’t seen the video beforehand and it hadn’t been entered during discovery. But they realized during testimony that the spelling of “police” on a cruiser also parked in the garage was in reverse—meaning that what looked like the right taillight was actually the left. (The time stamp was not inverted, which Jackson said “means somebody had to put that on the inverted, the manipulated, the altered video, on purpose.”) During Bukhenik’s cross-examination, he admitted that the video was inverted—meaning that the person Bukhenik previously testified was Proctor had actually been behind the right taillight. “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me right now?’ ” one of the jurors tells VF. “That was like, ‘Holy shit, they did this on purpose. This wasn’t just an accident where they didn’t know it was inverted.’ I couldn’t believe that a Massachusetts State Police sergeant was defending this in open court.” (Bukhenik testified that he did not know how the video came to be inverted.)

At certain points in the trial, Read’s team believed three specific jurors displayed visible disgust at certain prosecution-side actions, such as Proctor’s offensive texts about Read. The day of closing arguments, according to Kearney, one of those jurors was dismissed after a Massachusetts State Police officer—who had been on one of the text chains with Proctor and who was in charge of the jury—accused a juror of speaking about the trial at a bar weeks earlier. (That officer did not respond to VF’s questions.) In Massachusetts, alternate jurors are selected at the end of a trial, not the beginning—so of 14 potential jurors, two were removed after closing arguments. On the same day, the clerk magistrate pulled two tiles from a rotating box, Bingo-style. The magistrate did not show the numbers but said they belonged to the other two potentially sympathetic jurors. “The chances of that happening are next to nil,” says Jackson, referring to all three seemingly sympathetic jurors being removed from the deliberating pool.

Also the day of closing arguments, Albert and McCabe appeared in the courtroom’s small gallery—directly facing the jurors. One juror says he or she felt intimidated by their presence, calling it “completely and utterly inappropriate. They were substantial focal points of the trial. I can’t believe they were allowed in [to] stare the jury down.” (A spokesperson for Brian Albert says that the O’Keefe family asked his client to attend.)

Read, her lawyers, and her family spent five days on “verdict watch” in a church rectory near the courthouse. Read was called back into court on day two for what turned out to be a question but, thinking it might be the verdict, she realized how unprepared she was. “Could I be in a jail cell in 20 minutes? My first thought is I need to use the bathroom because I don’t know when I am going to have a private bathroom again. I couldn’t find my brother. I’m like, what if I can’t hug Nathan?” she says. At the end of the day, when the judge dismissed everyone, Read broke down. Her head hurt so badly that she wondered if she had even been breathing. Then she began bargaining with God. ‘I’ll take a mistrial. You can keep me in limbo for 10 more years. Just please let me go home tonight.’ ”

On July 1, Cannone read the jury’s note aloud, which stated that they were at an impasse. In the very next breath, Cannone declared a mistrial. “It was over, like a guillotine dropped,” says Jackson, adding that Read’s legal team was given no information before that. Some wondered why her defense team didn’t object. “The judge has one primary responsibility in the trial, and that is to charge the jury correctly,” says Jackson. “When the jury comes back and says, ‘We’re at an impasse,’ you have an additional responsibility to say, ‘An impasse on what? There’s three counts here.’ ”

Within days, Read’s lawyers heard about five jurors who were disturbed by the outcome, four of whom contacted the defense directly. The jurors stated that the jury had agreed unanimously to acquit Read on the murder and leaving-the-scene charges. It was the manslaughter charge that the group was split on. In an interview with Turtleboy, a sixth juror alleged that two jurors wanted to contact Cannone during deliberations, alerting her that they were unanimous on counts one and three. That juror claimed the foreman—the only person who can contact the judge, and who is selected by the judge—said they needed to be unanimous on all counts. “We believed that he knew what he was talking about,” the juror told Kearney in an interview. “I don’t know if it would’ve changed things if we had asked the question about consensus on two of the counts.”

In an August hearing, Read’s appellate attorney Martin Weinberg implored Cannone to bring the jurors back and poll them on their votes on the two disputed charges, arguing that trying Read again for second-degree murder would constitute double jeopardy. After Cannone denied the motion, Read and her lawyers took the appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court—a hearing is scheduled for November 6. “The trial court had a clear path to avoid an erroneous mistrial,” read ACLUM’s amicus brief. “Simply ask the jurors to confirm whether a verdict had been reached on any count.” Daniel McFadden, ACLUM’s managing attorney, said the organization “filed this brief to highlight serious constitutional concerns about the trial court’s process.”

“A POSITION OF POWER”

One of Read’s few breaking points occurred when Jackson was arguing with the judge over the verdict slip, which offered jurors three guilty options versus one not guilty option. Cannone said that is how all verdict slips look in Massachusetts, noting that Yannetti had certainly seen them. Yannetti said he actually hadn’t. “I disagree with you,” Cannone replied. When Read smirked at what she viewed as another slight, Cannone scolded her: “This is funny, Ms. Read?” (The scolding made headlines, with photos of Read’s smile underneath, but without full context.)

She also has a recurring nightmare: that O’Keefe survived whatever happened to him on January 29 but can’t recall what that was. Read is trying to get him to remember what unfolded after he got out of her car, but there are two other people in the dream: Peg and Paul O’Keefe, and they are telling O’Keefe that Read tried to kill him. The dream haunts her as much as the reality that O’Keefe’s family—who did not really know the McCabes and Alberts before O’Keefe’s death—has sided with the Canton families.

Read brings up the quote, “It’s easier to fool someone than convince them they’ve been fooled.” Read believes this captures the O’Keefes. She says Peg never fully embraced her when O’Keefe was alive, perhaps because of the difficulty of seeing another woman help raise her daughter’s children. Read thinks back to the morning of January 29, when Peg seemed to blame her immediately. But the O’Keefes did not seem to hold it against Albert that he never emerged from the house as emergency workers tried to save their son. “That doesn’t bother you in any way? But in an instant, you believe that I somehow flipped out and committed my first crime?” Read says to me. And here she begins a blow-by-blow rebuttal to the O’Keefe family’s criticisms. “So Paul and Peg, if you think I killed John, that means you misjudged me for two years and entrusted two young family members in my care. Then in the blink of an eye, you now think I’m a cold-blooded killer who took away your son?”

After the trial, Paul gave an interview to WBZ-TV. “We know that Johnny and Karen were arguing, it was kind of towards the end of their relationship. They were drinking and arguing and fighting, and in an intoxicated state of rage and jealousy, she just decided that she was going to do something about it.” Paul said he was convinced of Read’s guilt the morning of his brother’s death, when Read told his wife, Erin, that she needed to “remember the bad times.”

Read confirms she said that. “That was my processing—my trying to think of reasons not to mourn or miss John.”

“I am capable of meeting other people. What do you think? I don’t want anybody else to have him? He’s got to be dead? I can’t handle this fight we just had?” she says, firing off her rebuttals as though her antagonists are in the home with us. “And then I’m going to murder him on the front lawn of the most powerful guy in town—who’s an acting police officer?”

“We argued,” Read admits, “but was I abusive? Was I neglectful? Did I mistreat him emotionally or in any way? Or did we have ups and downs? And I helped him tend to the kids and we went on vacations and to sporting events and school and breakfast and haircuts?”

In the same interview, Paul said he’s bothered that O’Keefe’s death is being overshadowed by what he called “The Karen Read Show.” The O’Keefes declined to answer questions from VF but sent a statement declaring that the family “believes she is liable for John O’Keefe’s death. Unlike most people accused of murder and sued for wrongful death, Karen Read has embraced her celebrity in outsized ways.” After noting her media appearances and the fact that she did not testify at her first trial, the statement concluded thus: “This intensive media campaign to influence potential jurors compounds the O’Keefe family’s terrible loss while delaying and denying her accountability.”

Karen Read Tells Her Story (Part 1): A Murder Trial in Massachusetts

Read has a response to claims she’s embracing the spotlight: “Anyone in my position who’s being falsely accused would be shouting from the rooftops…. First of all, I don’t want to be here. It can be ‘The John O’Keefe Show.’ It can be ‘The O’Keefe Family Reunion,’ ” she says. “But if you think for a second that anyone has fought harder to find the truth about what happened to John and to enlighten everyone about what happened to John harder than me, you’re wrong.”

Paul stationed himself feet away from Read in court, glaring at her through the trial. Did that bother her? “You can’t have no respect for someone and care what they think. I didn’t do anything. So you can stare at me and get an ulcer over your hatred toward me,” she says. “The O’Keefes never carried a pitchfork for me until I started getting support. You didn’t speak to any media. Now you’re giving interviews. You really just can’t stand my rising from the ashes. The only thing that changed is I started to come from a position of power.”

“JOHN, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME”

In August, O’Keefe’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Read, the Waterfall, and C.F. McCarthy’s—the latter two being bars the family allege overserved Read in the hours before O’Keefe’s death—seeking at least $50,000 in damages for “conscious pain and suffering” and “profound emotional distress.” The Waterfall and C.F. McCarthy’s have denied the allegations. Read denies that she was overserved—every witness at the trial testified to Read not appearing drunk—and has sought to delay the civil suit until after her criminal trial. “They would’ve done this three years ago if this was about John,” she says. “Only when I walked out of that courthouse a free woman did they seemingly put the wheels in motion to sue me.”

O’Keefe’s father is the family member whose coldness hurts most. Read and John Sr. used to go to Sunday Mass together, then take Patrick to breakfast. She shows me a Christmas card he gave her a month before O’Keefe’s death: “Dear Karen, my mother always told me if you want to tell somebody how you feel do it in a letter. So here goes. I finally figured out who you are. You are an (angel) sent from (heaven) and Thank You so much for all you do. You are the best of the best. Love, forever Papa.” (Angel and heaven appear in parentheses in the card.)

“I don’t think he wants any of this fighting and this war,” says Read. Nevertheless, “We’re at war.”

She wakes up some mornings to iPhone memories showing her past life with the kids. The images used to hurt. Now they just make her mad.

“They’ve been exploited and brought into a trial they had no business being in,” Read says. “The hope for me is that one of them will really dig in [to the case] one day and be ambitious enough to say, ‘I need to see everything,’ ” says Read. “Or there’ll be a federal indictment and my allegations will become even more validated.”

Read has been criticized for not looking like a grieving girlfriend in the courtroom. “I have mourned and cried over John O’Keefe, but that is not productive now,” she says. “I don’t feel the acute sadness I did when I first lost him.” She realizes people may not understand this. “If that sounds callous, I’m not going to apologize. We weren’t married. The public is now hearing a lot for the first time, but they have to realize I’ve gone through these stages of grief. I’ve reached the point that—John, if you can hear me—I’ve done everything I can. I don’t think your family can be saved. They want to see me incarcerated for the rest of my life despite never seeing evidence while you were alive that I mistreated you. We were dating for two years, and I’ve since eclipsed those two years. I’m going on three, and I’ve got to save myself now.”

On another of my evenings with Read, she and I join her parents, Bill and Janet, her brother, Nathan, and his friend Adam for dinner at one of the family’s favorite Providence restaurants, Al Forno. Bill is earnest, analytical, and plainly anguished. He grew up in government housing and worked hard to give his family a good life. “I’ve never had to worry about police. Now I look with a very skeptical eye on everything,” he tells me. “There were layers of accountability” that should have remedied anything corrupt, he tells me. His daughter “is just collateral damage. It sounds heartless but it’s true.”

Janet, a stylish woman whose father was a cop and who met Bill when they both worked at Bristol Community College, can better compartmentalize. She is warm, bubbly, and half Italian—the meal’s mood booster. She makes sure I’ve tried the squash blossoms and wants to know whether I’ve seen Masterpiece’s Endeavour. Though it’s a show involving murder investigations, it’s been a welcome escape to a different time (the ’60s), place (the UK), and moral compass setting. Janet points out that the patrons around us have no idea what her family is going through. “People cannot hear what we’re saying. They see us and probably think, They have a lovely life. They’re just floating along.”

Read couldn’t share confidential information about the case with family, so her parents and brother had no preparation for some of the things that came up in trial, like Proctor’s horrific texts.

“It’s not easy,” says Janet. “I knew Karen was going to give me a look if I made even a breather of a sound. But I was frustrated.” Bill says he appreciated that Cannone made Proctor read the entirety of his profane texts about Read rather than let him censor himself to jurors. “When she forced him on that ‘see you next Tuesday’ word, I wanted to go up and shake her hand.”

“It needs to end,” Bill tells me as dessert arrives. “And it needs to end in a manner that puts some of these people behind bars.”

“But Dad, if someone came up to you right now and said they’re dropping the charges, there’ll be no further indictments, you will never set foot in another courtroom again, you’d go to sleep with a smile on your face,” says Read. “We don’t need anybody to be indicted.”

“We’d love it, but we don’t need it,” he agrees. “Just be free of my family.”

Read has been criticized for smiling and waving to her supporters—a jarringly dissonant display. But she has no apologies: “I implore any critic to get out of a car in the middle of a waking nightmare, see 200 people wearing your favorite color—telling you to keep your head up, to keep your spine strong—and you don’t crack a smile. It has been a lot worse. I’ve been frog-marched into court with shackles on my feet, in clothes that I slept in in a jail cell the night before, in front of cameras, to all negative headlines. And the only people in court were my parents and my brother. I can’t not smile. I just feel God’s presence.”

Read saw a Daily Mail headline calling her “America’s Happiest Murder Defendant.” “If I look happy, did it cross your mind that I have a free conscience? Because I didn’t do it? If being innocent and enjoying the support and refusing to be down day after day, month after month, year after year makes me America’s happiest murder defendant, then I’m America’s happiest murder defendant.”

On my final night with her, Read plays DJ on Spotify and tells us about the temperature-controlled storage unit she’s been paying for to house the carpeting torn out from the Alberts’ home after they sold it last year. She hopes that one day she’ll have the money to swab it for blood and DNA. The Olympics are on TV, but nobody’s paying attention.

“Did you buy that TV in 1992?” jokes the security guard.

“Actually, John hung this, so I got it in early 2020. He was very good about doing projects and he was handy,” says Read.

I ask if she gets sentimental about stuff that he bought or did in the house.

“I was at the beginning,” Read says. But when a significant other dies, “he’s gone and there’s no choice. You’ve got to pick up and move on.” A friend recently asked Read if she’s dated since O’Keefe died. “I’ve had a couple connections, but I haven’t been in a relationship,” she told the friend, who expressed surprise—which annoyed her. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Read’s feelings for O’Keefe have become more complicated the longer her legal saga stretches on. She was heartbroken but now feels trapped in a wretched afterlife of their relationship. “I feel that everything in the two years I dated John was a precursor to this horrible decision of us to go out drinking, and for John to think he was welcome with these people who never really acted welcoming to him before,” she tells me by phone. “Each witness I see come into court—each cop, each Albert, the girls from Aruba—it’s like, this all came into my life by way of John. Everyone was a drinking buddy, and everyone testified as much. Alcohol’s at the epicenter of this, and it was in my relationship with him. In hindsight, everything was just a precursor to this fateful, tragic night in his life and to a much lesser degree mine.”

Read does not drink as much as she did with O’Keefe and was initially reluctant to order the occasional alcoholic beverage at a restaurant, worried that people would judge her. She has since stopped caring what strangers think: “You’re allowed a cocktail if you’re being framed for murder.”

Each morning, she Googles herself. She clicks on the news tab, sorts the articles by date, and reads the most recent headlines to see if there have been breaking reports overnight. Then she heads to mass.gov to see if new filings have been added to the docket. But she is prisoner to her iPhone. Humor has bent to circumstance. When I drive Read to lunch, she brings up a toast her brother made to her at his wedding—saying he didn’t know how he’d ever repay her for the support she gave him during a previous breakup. “Little did he know he’d get to drive me to my criminal trial,” she cracks.

At one point in our visit, the security guard asks Read whether she’s ever worked with a therapist.

“No. Never. That’s what you guys are here for,” she laughs. “Can they make me not look out the window constantly to make sure the police aren’t there?”

After Read’s mistrial, Canton Police and Massachusetts State Police disciplined some officers. Proctor was suspended without pay; Proctor’s supervisor Bukhenik lost five vacation days; and Kevin Albert was suspended for three days. Others have remained untouched: Canton lieutenant Paul Gallagher, a 30-year veteran who collected O’Keefe’s blood evidence in Solo cups and stored them in a Stop & Shop bag, made $322,389 last year and recently announced his retirement. Michael Lank, one of the officers who neglected to interview the Alberts on the record or search their home, was promoted to lieutenant in August 2022, made $247,060 last year, and is still on active duty. When I visit the Canton Police Station on a Wednesday in July at 4:15 p.m., it is completely empty on the first and second floors. The dispatch center is dark. The lounge is outfitted with armchairs and silver scales of justice resting on a table between. One side is tipped fully to the table. In September, Canton residents protest outside the station, demanding an independent audit and declaring that they feel unsafe in their community.

Nolan, the BPD officer turned professor, predicts that Proctor’s punishment is temporary: “You can’t get fired for incompetence as a police officer.” He is backed by the Massachusetts State Police union, which issued a statement saying it is “disappointed” by Proctor’s suspension. Nolan points out the MSP union’s own corruption history: In 2022 its former president was accused of running the organization as “a criminal enterprise” and sentenced to 30 months for racketeering, obstruction of justice, and tax crimes. In September, Governor Maura Healey announced new leadership for the MSP in Geoffrey Noble, who was a lieutenant colonel in the New Jersey State Police—the first time someone outside Massachusetts would run the organization in its nearly 160-year history. (Noble, who took office in October, declined to answer questions sent by VF.) Nolan says that’s a baby step in correcting a 2,300-person organization so infamous for scandal that Martin Scorsese made a movie about it. (Read still thinks The Departed is a great film.) Louison, the criminal defense attorney, thinks otherwise: “The [Read] case has caused such turmoil within the rank and file, I think it’s likely that Proctor could end up being terminated.”

“One hundred percent I believe that she was framed,” says the juror who spoke to VF, citing the medical examiner’s testimony, and that the commonwealth’s accident reconstructionist failed to convince this person that a fatal vehicular collision occurred. “I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that this is possible within the Massachusetts State Police and the Norfolk County district attorney’s office,” the juror added. “There’s so many people involved in this—the people you’re supposed to be able to trust.”

Bill keeps a running count of the days the DOJ has been investigating his daughter’s case—his only hope. Read has a hard time believing the US Attorney’s Office would have committed so much time and resources if they were not building a case. Meanwhile, according to sources, Morrissey’s top prosecutors have refused to retry Read’s case, so he has taken the unusual step of retaining outside counsel to spearhead the next trial: Hank Brennan—who defended Whitey Bulger.

Though this chapter of her life has been dark and arduous, Read tells me she’s witnessed the best and worst of humanity because of it. “The evil people in my life, you know who you are,” she says, once again directing her answers toward people who don’t hear her. “You know what you did. I am at peace with my maker, and you, I promise, are not.”

Read feels a momentum toward justice. “It’s starting—one domino after the other,” she tells me. “I just don’t know how long the trail of dominoes is. Are there 10? Are there 100 more? I don’t know how long it takes to get there. But I know there’s a big explosion at the end.”