Karen Read Greenlights Documentary on Her Murder Case, Leading to Mistrial | Vanity Fair

Karen Read will soon be tried for the second time on charges that she intentionally backed her vehicle into her boyfriend at the time, Boston cop John O’Keefe, and left him to die in a blizzard. In some ways, her story can be boiled down to just 15 words.

Read said the first nine in the early morning of January 29, 2022, after she discovered O’Keefe’s listless body in a snowbank: “Did I hit him, could I have hit him?” The next six were typed into a search bar by Jennifer McCabe, a friend of the couple—either hours before the body was found, or immediately afterward, depending on whom you ask: “hos [sic] long to die in cold.” (McCabe says she made that Google search at Read’s request only after O’Keefe’s body had been located. Read’s defense team argues that McCabe did it earlier.)

Four months later, Read pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder. Her lawyers allege that she was framed by Boston police officers, who they say confronted O’Keefe inside a home at 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts before he was hauled outside to die from hypothermia and blunt force trauma to the head.

For the definitive, far more detailed account of how Read came to face two murder trials over O’Keefe’s death, revisit Julie Miller’s extensive reporting on the tale, which became one of Vanity Fair’s most-read stories of 2024. The defendant invited Miller to stay for three days at the home she later sold to subsidize her legal expenses. “Strangest sleepover ever,” Read admitted, though she also claimed to be an open book: “There’s nothing we’re afraid of. Any question you have, I have answers for.”

Read was so confident in her innocence that she also agreed to let Terry Dunn Meurer—who cocreated Unsolved Mysteries—film her behind the scenes of her first trial. The resulting Investigation Discovery documentary series, A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read, is now streaming on Max.

On the day I spoke to Meurer, Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor—lead investigator into the Karen Read case, notorious for calling Read “a whack job c-nt” in a text sent just 16 hours into his probe—had been newly fired. Proctor had already been suspended without pay for sending several unprofessional texts, including this one to his supervisors while searching Read’s phone: “No nudes so far.” Proctor called the texts “unprofessional and regrettable” and admitted “my emotions got the best of me,” but said that his remarks “have zero impact on the facts and the evidence and the integrity of this investigation.”

Meurer previously compared Proctor to former LAPD Detective Mark Furhman, the lead detective investigating the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, whose racist remarks eventually tainted his testimony. Suffice it to say, she is not surprised that Proctor was fired. “It’ll be interesting to see how Michael Proctor’s status affects the new trial,” the director says. “Are they going to call him [as a witness] now that he’s no longer a Massachusetts state trooper? Does he come in as a civilian?”

The second trial will introduce a new prosecutor, who reportedly hopes to admit into the trial footage of Read from Meurer’s doc. “I know Hank Brennan, the prosecutor, mentioned it in a hearing, but I don’t know that he’s planning to bring it into the trial,” says Meurer. “I was surprised when I heard that. We’ve been trying to be very neutral, very unbiased. Knowing that this series was going to launch before the new trial, it was even more important to me because we wouldn’t want our documentary series to affect the outcome.”

But Meurer knows that is asking a lot of a community already fiercely divided by this case. “I think it’s going to be hard for them to find a jury that hasn’t heard about this, hasn’t seen news, hasn’t seen the documentary, even—maybe they have,” she says. “But their job is to swear that they can be impartial no matter what they’ve heard.”

Meurer said her team also strived for objectivity after receiving Read’s “incredibly unusual” invitation to cover the case. The project was also supported by her legal team, which includes Massachusetts defense attorney David Yannetti, as well as Alan Jackson and Elizabeth Little, two LA-based lawyers who used cell phone data to get a civil 2019 groping case against Kevin Spacey dropped.

Before granting Vanity Fair’s Miller total access, she told her side of the story on camera. According to Meurer, Read likened her predicament to The Staircase, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s true-crime docuseries detailing the defense strategy of Michael Peterson—a novelist who was accused of murdering his wife, Kathleen, in 2001. (Michael was found guilty of the crime in 2003, but has since been released from prison after being granted a new trial and submitting an Alford plea, which is a guilty plea that allows defendants to maintain their innocence and avoid a harsher sentence.) “Karen said, ‘I don’t want to be, but I am a Staircase case,’” says Meurer. “That was the motivation [her team] spoke about.”

The immediacy of Read’s case was irresistible. “So many times we’re telling stories in past tense and doing reenactments, and in this case, we didn’t know what was going to happen from day to day,” says Meurer. “It was a challenge, but also very exhilarating.” Plus, the story felt right in her wheelhouse. “I still don’t know if we’re ever going to really know what happened at 34 Fairview that night. It was a mystery—and my career shows I love mysteries.”

Production was fast and furious. “We had one Zoom call, and then a month later, we were boots on the ground in Boston,” says Meurer, whose team attended nearly every day of the nine-week trial, alongside “the Pinks”—a group of Read diehards dressed in her favorite color, some of whom Meurer says had traveled from around the globe for the trial.

Did Read, when granting this level of access, come with any stipulations? “I explained to them: We have to tell both sides of the story, because you can’t talk about the defense without knowing what they’re defending against,” says the documentarian. “Very early on, one of the first conversations I had with Karen, I said, ‘All right, tell me all the players that are involved in this case. But I want both sides—all the people that are your supporters who you feel we should interview, and then all the people who are not your supporters who will tell the other side of the case.’ She gave us a list for both sides, and so we pursued both.”

But Read’s legal team probably assumed that Meurer would be capturing Read’s journey toward freedom—not a temporary reprieve on the way to a second trial. “I 100% believe that they thought there was going to be an acquittal in this case,” Meurer says. “So when they took this on, that’s what they were thinking. And it would be a different film if that had happened. Everyone was surprised that it was a hung jury.”

When a mistrial was declared on July 1, 2024, Meurer said, “We needed to make sure we were 100% as balanced as we could be, because we knew there was going to be another trial.”

In an effort to balance the scales, Meurer contacted the O’Keefe family, whom she says were unable to participate because of an exclusive agreement with another production company. (VF previously confirmed that an unscripted project on the case is in the works at Netflix.)

The O’Keefes previously declined to answer questions from VF, but sent a statement declaring that the family believes Read “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.” (Last November, a judge ruled that Read will not be deposed in a civil wrongful death lawsuit filed by O’Keefe’s family until after her second criminal trial concludes.)

In response to claims that she’s relishing her notoriety, Read told VF, “Anyone in my position who’s being falsely accused would be shouting from the rooftops. 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.”

Post-verdict, Meurer’s focus shifted from Read to O’Keefe. “My personal opinion is he’s gotten lost in all the noise around this case. So we reached out to his friends,” she tells VF. “During the first trial, they told me that they just wanted to maintain a low profile. They didn’t do a lot of interviews, weren’t super vocal. But when the mistrial was declared, they realized that they probably should start to speak up, and they have.”

Among those shown speaking on behalf of the prosecution is Joseph Krowski, who is identified only as a criminal defense attorney. His ties to the case run a little deeper than that, though: Krowski previously represented Colin Albert, nephew of Brian Albert, the retired police officer who owned the property where O’Keefe’s body was found. “He was no longer representing Colin at the time—he had represented Colin,” Meurer said when asked why Krowski isn’t identified on camera as his former lawyer. “We made a very conscious choice to not bring Colin into the docuseries, and so it’s all wrapped up in that, but I think Joe is his own independent mind. We call him the voice of reason. He does a great job kind of doing point-counterpoint for the series."

While parsing roughly 270 hours of her footage, plus 170 hours of archival material in postproduction, Meurer said she found herself returning to O’Keefe. “That was what I just kept coming back to with the editors,” she says. “And I would go back to the interviews that his friends did and figure out what we haven’t included so that we can pull him in. That was very important to me."

This meant losing footage of Read and her legal team, who Meurer has said didn’t get to approve the series before it aired, and are only now able to see it. But Meurer, whom Read entrusted to bring her plight to the screen, doesn’t appear to be in contact with the accused anymore. As for Read’s potential reaction to the doc? “I saw a written version of something that Karen said to one of the bloggers, and that’s all I’ve seen,” says Meurer. “She hadn’t seen it yet. This was before it had launched. But one of her comments was, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of footage I hear that’s not in there about me waking up in the morning and going to bed, us going to dinner.’ I mean, there was footage of Alan Jackson getting his hair cut, and Liza Little riding her skateboard to go pick up food down the streets of Boston. David Yannetti working out. There’s lots of behind-the-scenes that we wish we could include, and she’s right—a lot of that is not in there."

In an exclusive statement to Vanity Fair, Read said that she had no plans to watch the docuseries: “I lived it. I don’t need to see it editorialized for marketability.” The one clip she caught, however, failed to impress her. She mentioned the fact that Meurer did not identify Krowski—who appears on camera refuting Read’s version of events in the minutes leading up to O’Keefe’s death—as Colin Albert’s lawyer. “Colin Albert was inside 34 Fairview in the early morning hours of January 29,” noted Read. “A good, objective journalist and documentarian would make note of that for her audience."

Meurer is hopeful that those who view the series will “keep an open mind and look at both sides,” continuing, “It’s a very divisive case and we need to respect everyone’s opinion. If you’re ‘Free Karen Read,’ great. If you’re more on the prosecution side, fine. But it’s been upsetting to watch how vile this has been—the name-calling and the vitriol, the personal attacks. The case has been tried on social media, and I think that’s a shame. It’s a disservice to the justice system and to Karen."

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