A jury in Massachusetts acquitted Karen Read of murder and manslaughter charges on Wednesday, ending a legal saga that has gripped the Boston area since the death of Ms. Read’s boyfriend, John O’Keefe, a Boston police officer, in January 2022.
Prosecutors had accused Ms. Read, 45, of intentionally hitting Officer O’Keefe with her S.U.V. after an argument, and then leaving him to die in a blizzard.
Ms. Read tearfully embraced her attorneys after the verdict was read in a courtroom in Dedham, Mass., as the cheers of hundreds of her supporters erupted outside the courthouse.
The jury of seven women and five men, who began deliberating last Friday, convicted Ms. Read on one relatively minor charge, operating a vehicle under the influence.
They delivered their verdict almost a year after an earlier trial in the case ended in a mistrial. That jury was unable to reach a consensus after five days of deliberation.
The case attracted a fervent following far beyond Boston, made up of true-crime fanatics and others who were fascinated by the elaborate theory advanced by Ms. Read’s lawyers. They argued that Officer O’Keefe, 46, had been killed at a late-night house party in Canton, Mass., that was hosted by another Boston police officer, and that corrupt investigators covered up the truth and framed Ms. Read for the murder.
Ms. Read, who had worked at an investment firm and taught college finance classes, had pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death. If convicted, she would have faced sentences of life in prison for the murder charge, five to 20 years in prison for manslaughter and 10 years for leaving the scene.
The penalty for a first conviction of operating under the influence could include up to 2½ years in state prison, but is typically limited to probation. The jury was given the option of convicting her on that charge as an “included offense” if they did not convict her of manslaughter.
Standing on the steps outside the courthouse after the verdict, Ms. Read thanked her supporters for providing years of financial and emotional assistance.
“I could not be standing here without these amazing supporters,” she said, her words at times drowned out by the cheers and chanting of the crowd. “No one has fought harder for justice for John O’Keefe than I have,” she added.
Judge Beverly J. Cannone had briefly called court back into session around 2:30 p.m. to report that during the lunch break, the jury had notified the court that it had reached a verdict, but then said moments later that it had not. After about 15 more minutes, the jury said again that it had a verdict.
Several people who attended the house party that night in January 2022 — and later fell under suspicion themselves when Ms. Read’s defense lawyers claimed there had been a cover-up — said in a statement that the verdict was “a devastating miscarriage of justice.”
“Today we mourn with John’s family and lament the cruel reality that this prosecution was infected by lies and conspiracy theories spread by Karen Read, her defense team and some in the media,” the group said in the statement.
The group included Brian Albert, the former Boston police officer who hosted the party at his home. And it included Jennifer McCabe, a guest at the party whose Google search that morning, asking how long it takes to die in the cold, was used by defense lawyers to suggest that party guests had plotted to cover up the murder.
Talk of the trial became unavoidable in Massachusetts, exhausting some people while enthralling others, who picked apart the evidence endlessly at social gatherings and in Facebook groups. A constellation of factors fueled their fascination: the relative rarity of a woman accused of murder; the murky circumstances of the death; the small-town power dynamics at play; and the allure of conspiracy theories for those who are inclined to mistrust law enforcement.
Testimony in the retrial, which began in April, closely resembled that of the first, with a few new elements. Prosecutors again called witnesses who described a cracked taillight on Ms. Read’s S.U.V., and a “debris field” of broken taillight fragments found in the yard where Officer O’Keefe’s body was discovered outside the house in Canton. They again played angry voice mail messages that Ms. Read left for her boyfriend that night, and video clips of her drinking cocktails at a bar before she drove Officer O’Keefe to the party.
The state also called several technical experts who testified about movement and temperature data that was obtained from Officer O’Keefe’s cellphone, as well as data obtained from Ms. Read’s vehicle. Lawyers for the prosecution said those two data trails proved that after Mr. O’Keefe got out of her car at the party, Ms. Read accelerated in reverse and struck him, causing him to fall and suffer a skull fracture.
“She could have driven home — they could have talked about it the next day,” Hank Brennan, a lawyer for the prosecution, said in his closing argument, referring to the fight the couple had en route to the party in Canton.
Instead, he continued, “she takes a 6,000-pound Lexus and she makes a decision — she steps on the gas after banging it into reverse.”
Prosecution experts testified that Officer O’Keefe’s phone did not record any movement after 12:32 a.m. that night, and that the phone’s temperature steadily dropped over the next several hours. Prosecutors used that evidence to rebut defense claims that he was attacked by people at the party.
“He’s not at a party; he’s not in a fight,” Mr. Brennan said. “If he was in a fight, his cellphone would be moving.”
Defense lawyers kept returning to the fact that the original lead investigator in the case was fired by the Massachusetts State Police for sending unethical and offensive text messages about Ms. Read. The defense claimed that the police went easy on the people who attended the party in Canton that night, and that the hosts’ and guests’ personal ties to local law enforcement had protected them from searches and questions that might have turned up incriminating evidence.
“What if it wasn’t the home of a Boston cop?” Alan Jackson, a lawyer for Ms. Read, said in his closing argument. “We can be certain that investigators would have torn that house apart to get answers.”
Mr. Jackson suggested that the shards of broken taillight had been planted on the lawn by corrupt investigators, and that the presence of the shards in the snowy yard was not enough to prove that they had been broken by the S.U.V. striking Mr. O’Keefe.
The defense also maintained that injuries to Mr. O’Keefe’s arm had come from a dog attack inside the house during the party.
“There was no blood, no skin, no tissue, no DNA on the taillight that the Commonwealth says sliced into John O’Keefe’s arm,” he said. “Where is it? Where is the DNA? The only way this is possible is if it never touched his arm — and it didn’t. A dog did it.”
Ms. Read found Officer O’Keefe unresponsive in front of the house in Canton around dawn on the morning after the party. She has said that she frantically searched for him after waking up on his couch around 4 a.m. and realizing that he was not there. The officer, who had severe head injuries and hypothermia, was pronounced dead shortly before 8 o’clock that morning.
Ms. Read was arrested three days later.
Supporters who were convinced she was innocent gathered outside the courthouse daily throughout both trials, many of them wearing pink — which they said was Ms. Read’s favorite color — and carrying signs demanding, “Free Karen Read.”
Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University who closely followed the case, said before the verdict that acquittal struck him as a sound result, given the many problems with the investigation and the evidence presented at the retrial.
“The defense did a very good job of poking holes in the prosecution’s case and generating reasonable doubt about her guilt,” he said. “At bottom, trials are about putting the government’s evidence to the test. Norfolk prosecutors simply failed the test.”
Maya Shwayder contributed reporting from Dedham, Mass.
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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