Latest news with #BostonIrish
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Yahoo
Opening Arguments for the Trial Everyone Is Talking About Begins Tuesday
Los Angeles defense attorney Alan Jackson is expected to give a fiery opening argument Tuesday morning in the case of Karen Read, the one-time Massachusetts finance analyst charged with backing her SUV while drunk into her Boston police officer boyfriend during a 2022 blizzard. Jackson, along with fellow L.A. defense attorney Elizabeth Little, have maintained that John O'Keefe, a well-respected Boston cop whose body was found in a snowbank after a night of partying with Read and other law enforcement officers in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2002, was brutalized inside the Canton, Mass. home of Brian Albert, a now retired Boston police officer, a charge he and others assembled at the home steadfastly deny. This is Read's second trial. The first ended with a hung jury - with one of those jurors, a Boston lawyer, now working for Read's defense. Victoria Brophey George, a Princeton-educated lawyer from Boston who was an alternate when fellow jurors led the judge to declare a mistrial, will now be sitting with Read's high-profile Angeleno attorneys and hard-hitting former Boston city prosecutor, David selection in the case ended on April 15, after three weeks of voir dire. Eighteen people were selected to serve in the case, and after closing arguments, 12 will be selected to deliberate while the others will remain on as alternates. Read, 45, has been working on her defense full-time since her arrest on second-degree murder and other charges within hours of her boyfriend's body being found. She is now millions of dollars in debt she says in an HBO documentary, and "fighting for her life." The prosecution also has a new lead attorney, one added to the team from the private sector: Hank Brennan, a criminal defense lawyer who famously defended notorious Boston Irish mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who was captured in Santa Monica in June 2011 after more than a decade on the lam, and murdered by a coterie of his enemies at a federal prison seven years later. From the time Read was taken into custody, the case exposed a myriad of problems in the investigation at the hands of Massachusetts State Police troopers who are assigned to the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office, currently run by Michael Morrissey. The troopers assigned to that unit investigate homicides alongside their local police counterparts Norfolk County, which is comprised of 27 insular cities and towns that make up what is known locally as the south shore of Boston. But retired Massachusetts State Police Lieutenant Bob Long, who now runs a vaunted private investigations agency, defended the work of his former colleagues in the state police, pointing to the blizzard conditions and the emotions at play when a fellow cop "is left to die." "She admitted at the crime scene that she thinks she hit him," Long told Los Angeles. "They were working from that premise in blizzard conditions." This story is developing. Stay up to date with developments at
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Yahoo
L.A. Lawyers Take Center Stage as Karen Read's Second Murder Trial Set to Rivet the Nation
A blockbuster second murder trial is slated to begin for Karen Read, the Massachusetts woman charged with killing her Boston cop boyfriend by backing into him during a blinding blizzard on Jan. 29, 2022, a case that ended in a hung jury last year after her L.A. based attorneys argued she was framed. The controversial case is the subject of a Max documentary A Body in the Snow which details Read's unfettered insistence that she did not kill Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe after a night of drinking and the real killers were fellow cops who hosted a party inside the Canton, MA home where he was found in a snowbank. Jury selection in the case will not get underway until Tuesday, but pre-trial motions have already made headlines - including an announcement this week that an alternate juror, an attorney who sat on Read's first trial, will join her defense team. Victoria Brophey George, a Princeton educated lawyer from Boston who was an alternate when fellow jurors led the judge to declare a mistrial, told Vanity Fair she "waited for nearly a year after the mistrial hoping the court system would work as intended to remedy some of the wrongs in this case." She also added, "If as a lawyer I was too afraid to stand up for what I believed in, who would?"She will join Read's team, which has been led by L.A. criminal defense attorneys Alan Jackson and Elizabeth Little, along with hard-hitting former Boston prosecutor, David Yanetti. The trio have steadfastly maintained that their client is the victim of a deliberate police coverup aimed at cops protecting their own, while prosecutors say Read hit her boyfriend after a night of drinking and left him to die in the cold. They maintain O'Keefe's cop colleagues - who were drinking all day after attending a funeral in New York City for a fallen NYPD brethren - killed him, dragged him outside and framed Read for his death by planting evidence, including broken bits of her SUV's taillight, at the scene. Jackson called it a case of "extraordinary government misconduct." The prosecution also has a new lead, one added to the team from the private sector: Hank Brennan, a criminal defense lawyer who famously defended notorious Boston Irish mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who was captured in Santa Monica in June 2011 after more than a decade on the lam, and murdered by a coterie of his enemies at a federal prison seven years later. From the time Read was taken into custody, the case exposed a myriad of problems in the investigation at the hands of Massachusetts State Police troopers who are assigned to the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office, currently run by Michael Morrissey. The troopers assigned to that unit investigate homicides alongside their local police counterparts Norfolk County, which is comprised of 27 insular cities and towns that make up what is known locally as the south shore of Boston. The lead investigator, MSP Trooper Michael Proctor, was suspended without pay after Read's first trial ended in a hung jury last July. Under cross examination by Jackson, after he was forced to read a slew of vulgar and dehumanizing remarks he made about Read in a text chain with other cops, including his supervisors, on the stand. In that text chain, which began on day one of the O'Keefe murder investigation, he called Read a "wack job cunt," and reported that he had not located any nude photos on her phone, while remarking that she was "hot" but had "no ass." This month, a State Police Trial Board fired Proctor after finding him guilty of sending "derogatory, defamatory and disparaging and/or inappropriate text messages" about Read while leading the investigation into her. He was also found guilty of providing sensitive and confidential information about the case to people outside of law enforcement - including to his sister, to whom he wrote that he hopes Read kills herself. Proctor was also found guilty of drinking alcohol on duty, in a state police vehicle, with Canton Police officer Kevin Albert, who is the brother of Brian Albert, the Boston police officer who owned the home where O'Keefe's body was found. The incident exposed a close relationship between Proctor and the Albert family, which raised questions about why the homeowner at 34 Fairview Avenue was not interviewed about the dead body on his lawn. Albert and Proctor were working on a cold case when they began drinking, which led Proctor to text Kevin Albert about finding his Canton PD badge in the cruiser. Albert told him to leave it in his mailbox, and then wrote, "Did I take my gun?" along with a wincing face emoji. Evidence showed that Kevin's brother Brian Albert sold his house and got rid of his dog Chloe - who Jackson claims may have mauled O'Keefe - after the sensational case began to be debated across the country. There were also questions raised about a Google search made by his sister-in-law Jennifer McCabe, "hos [sic] long to die in cold," at 2:27 a.m., hours before O'Keefe's body was found. McCabe, who was called by Read to look for O'Keefe when he didn't come home, said she conducted the search after Read asked if she "hit him," when the body was found. Proctor's sister, Courtney Proctor, is also connected to the Albert family. She is the the best friend of Julie Albert, whose husband Chris, brother to Kevin and Brian, is a Canton town official. Albert is still a Canton police officer. Brian retired from the Boston Police Department in 2023. All of it, Read's lawyers say, exposes layered corruption within the Massachusetts law enforcement community. "I am fighting for my life," Read said in the Max documentary. The Read case has also raised questions about two other high-profile homicides handled by the Norfolk County DA's office. During another blizzard in February a year before O'Keefe died, another body was found in Canton. The victim was 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore, a pregnant teacher's aide with a dark secret: the father of her child was a married Stoughton Police Detective. Stoughton is the neighboring town to Canton in Norfolk County. Birchmore was found in her bedroom with a duffle bag strap tied around her neck. The Norfolk County DA's office troopers, and Canton police, among them Kevin Albert, who responded to the scene immediately declared her death a suicide despite multiple signs that she was not suicidal at the crime scene. Among them, she was doing a load of laundry, had cleaned snow off her car for a morning drive to work, was making plans for an ultrasound, and setting up care for her cats when she was scheduled to give birth, on the night of Feb. 1., 2021 when Matthew Farwell showed up at her home and became the last person to see Birchmore alive. Her phone registered its last activity in the minutes before her apartment building's surveillance cameras spotted his rapid exit. Hours after that visit, his wife gave birth to the couple's third child. The lead investigator for the State Police Lieutenant John Fanning, who was among the supervisors in Proctor's troubling text chain, also had a conflict of interest that should have led him to recuse himself from the Birchmore investigation. Before joining the MSP, Fanning had been a Stoughton Police Officer, like Farwell, and enjoyed a personal and professional relationship with him. Farwell's twin brother, William, and their longtime friend Robert Devine - both now disgraced Stoughton cops - also had inappropriate sexual relationships with Birchmore while on duty, according to an internal affairs report that led to their firing in 2022 due to their "deeply disturbing pattern of behavior," in the years before the young woman died. All had been her mentors in the Stoughton Police Explorers Academy, a national mentoring program which advised children seeking careers in law enforcement. It was only when the FBI took over the Birchmore investigation did the sexual misconduct of the Farwell brothers and Devine come to light. The FBI arrested Matthew Farwell last August on charges that he strangled her and staged the body to look as if she took he own life. He remains held without bail with his next court appearance scheduled for May. A third case in the same DA's office, the disappearance of a mother-of-three in the ultra exclusive town of Cohasset, also in Norfolk County, has ties to both Boston and Los Angeles. Ana Walshe disappeared on New Year's Day 2023, but her body has never been recovered. What investigators did find in the mansion she shared with her husband, a convicted art fraudster named Brian Walshe, who was accused not only of bilking an L.A. art gallery owner with fake Warhol paintings but who also scammed his own father's estate, was blood. Lots of blood. They now believe Walshe dismembered his wife and disposed of her remains at several incinerators across MA. Walshe was indicted in March 2023 on charges of misleading a police investigation and obstruction of justice and improper conveyance, or transport, of a human with Proctor's firing, that case has also been called into question. Superior Court Judge Beverly Cannone, the judge on the Karen Read case, was also slated to sit on Walshe's murder trial later this year but has been reassigned by the court. Walshe's lawyer, Larry Tipton, is demanding that court hand over information related to Proctor and the Norfolk County District Attorney's questionable handling of the investigation into the death of Sandra Birchmore. Get the latest news delivered to your inbox daily! Sign up for Los Angeles Magazine's The Daily Brief below or click here.
