Karen Read Trial resumes Monday morning. Will Chloe the German Shepherd take center stage?

Yahoo

05-05-2025

The hotly contested Massachusetts trial of Karen Read, who is charged with killing her Boston cop boyfriend John O'Keefe during a drunken night in 2022, will resume Monday morning with decidedly less emotion than the first two weeks of the trial. After a battering three days on the stand during which Jen McCabe, who under cross-examination by Los Angeles defense attorney Alan Jackson, admitted that she misled FBI agents who showed up at her Canton home on Boston's South Shore, by lying about who she was and withholding details about who she called after they had identified themselves. the trial is slated to resume with expert witnesses connected to the evidence. McCabe's testimony led Read, 45, a former adjunct professor at Bentley College, to leave the courtroom on Friday and tell reporters that her former friend, who she had called on the morning of O'Keefe's death when he didn't come home, was the "quarterback" in the cover-up that she maintains led to her arrest. McCabe's sister Nicole and brother-in-law, O'Keefe's fellow Boston cop Brian Albert, owned the house where O'Keefe's body was found, and McCabe said she didn't wake the couple for help.She also initially failed to tell the FBI that she called Albert, Peggy O'Keefe, the slain officer's mother, her friend Kerry Roberts, who was also with McCabe and Read when O'Keefe was found, a witness advocate in the Norfolk County District Attorney's office - who is trying the case - and her husband in the span of ten minutes after the agents showed up at her home. Lying to the FBI carries a five-year prison sentence. McCabe's insistence that Read had repeatedly said "I hit him, I hit him, I hit him," after the body of O'Keefe was found covered in snow during on Jan. 29, 2022, was inconsistent with previous statements the self-described "normal mom" had made in the aftermath of the Boston Police Officer's death. Read herself remarked in an interview with Dateline NBC "Could I have hit him?," a clip of which was played for the jurors by special prosecutor Hank Brennan, a Boston defense attorney hired by the Norfolk County D.A. specifically to try the Read case. Brennan's client list included notorious Boston mobster and longtime FBI informant James "Whitey" Bulger, who was captured at a Santa Monica hideout after more than a decade on the lam.
Read, O'Keefe and others had gone to the Albert's home after a night of drinking at two bars in Canton. Read said she dropped him off, and her lawyers insist that O'Keefe died somewhere "warm" and was brought outside to die in the cold. Among the controversial evidence is a Google search made by McCabe "hos long to die in the cold," which a defense expert said was made at 2:27 am and prosecutors maintain was made at Read's insistence in the chaotic aftermath of O'Keefe's body being found. McCabe also testified about the Albert family's German Shepherd, Chloe, who was rehomed after O'Keefe was found dead. Read's lawyers plan to present evidence that O'Keefe suffered injuries consistent with a dog attack, which prosecutors have countered in what became a duel between experts in Read's first trial, which ended in a hung jury last year. When O'Keefe's body was found, McCabe told jurors, she didn't wake her first responder brother-in-law. Instead, she later went into the unlocked home and into her sister's bedroom, without seeing their dog, who, according to testimony in the first trial, was not good with strangers. Chloe's former owner, Nicole Albert, testified at Karen Read's trial in 2024 that the German Shepherd now lives on a farm in Vermont.