In her August 2023 Nightline interview, Karen Read told ABC News correspondent Matt Gutman that she did not kill her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O’Keefe, gave her own timeline of the night he died outside a retired officer’s home in Canton, Massachusetts, and pushed back on the words witnesses said they heard her say at the scene. The interview aired more than a year before her first trial ended in a mistrial and nearly two years before a jury acquitted her of murder in June 2025.
What Karen Read Told Nightline
Read sat down with Gutman while awaiting trial on charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of personal injury and death. She was direct about the central accusation. “I did not kill John O’Keefe,” she said, adding, “I have never harmed a hair on John O’Keefe’s head.”
She then walked through her version of the early hours of January 29, 2022. After drinking with O’Keefe and others at the Waterfall Bar and Grill, she drove him to 34 Fairview Road, the home of retired Boston police officer Brian Albert, where a group was gathering. Read told Gutman she pulled up to the foot of the driveway and watched O’Keefe head toward the side door. “As I see him approach the door, I look down at my phone,” she recalled. She said she waited about ten minutes, grew irritated when he didn’t come back or respond, and drove to his house. When she woke before 5 a.m. and realized he had never come home, she began searching for him with Kerry Roberts and Jennifer McCabe. The three women found O’Keefe unresponsive in the snow outside Albert’s home around 6 a.m.
Her Account of the “I Hit Him” Statement
Emergency responders and witnesses at the scene said Read repeatedly cried out, “I hit him.” Jennifer McCabe testified she heard the statement with “100 percent clarity.” On Nightline, Read gave a different reading of her own words. She told Gutman the phrase was preceded by “did” and followed by a question mark — that she was asking whether she might have “incapacitated him unwittingly” given how much he had been drinking, not confessing to hitting him with her SUV.
Gutman asked whether it was possible she had struck O’Keefe without realizing it. “No. Not possible,” Read answered.
The Broken Taillight
Read also addressed the damage to her Lexus SUV, which prosecutors would later present as central physical evidence. She said that on the morning O’Keefe was found she told Roberts and McCabe, “I just hit my car, on top of everything.” According to Read, they responded, “It’s cracked. Calm down, you cracked your tail light.”
The Case Read Was Answering
The interview only makes sense against the case Norfolk County prosecutors were building. Their theory was that Read struck O’Keefe with her SUV during a three-point turn around 12:45 a.m., knocking him backward in what one prosecutor called a “drunken rage,” and then drove off, leaving him to die of blunt impact injuries to the head and hypothermia.
Forensic witnesses would testify that Read’s SUV had a broken right taillight, a dented trunk door, and a scratched bumper, and that red and clear plastic fragments at the scene matched the taillight housing. Microscopic plastic pieces were recovered from O’Keefe’s pants, shirt, and sweatshirt. Data pulled from the vehicle indicated it had reversed and accelerated to roughly 24 miles per hour. Read’s Nightline answers — her denial, her account of watching O’Keefe walk to the door, her explanation of the taillight, her reinterpretation of “I hit him” — were her response to each of those elements.
Her defense team, led by Alan Jackson and David Yannetti, went further at trial, arguing O’Keefe was beaten inside Albert’s home, attacked by Albert’s dog, and left on the lawn, and that investigators framed Read to protect their own. Jackson said an FBI expert had concluded the damage on Read’s car was “inconsistent with having made contact with John O’Keefe’s body.”
Nightline’s Return for the Retrial
Gutman and ABC News came back to the story as the second trial approached. Impact x Nightline: Secrets in the Snow: The Murder Retrial of Karen Read, a 30-minute documentary led by Gutman, began streaming on Hulu on April 24, 2025. The special included interviews with Read, friends of O’Keefe, law enforcement officials, and a juror from the first trial.
It was one of two major documentary treatments of the case. Investigation Discovery released A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read, directed by Unsolved Mysteries co-creator Terry Dunn Meurer, filmed behind the scenes of the first trial with Read’s authorization and streaming on Max.
What Happened After the Interview
Read’s first trial opened in Norfolk County Superior Court before Judge Beverly Cannone. On July 1, 2024, after jurors reported being “deeply divided by fundamental differences,” Cannone declared a mistrial. An anonymous juror later came forward to say the panel had actually been unanimous in acquitting Read of second-degree murder and of leaving the scene, and had deadlocked only on manslaughter, with a 9-3 vote favoring conviction on that count. The juror said the panel had not understood how to communicate their unanimous decisions to the court.
Read’s attorneys argued that a retrial on the murder and leaving-the-scene counts would violate double jeopardy. Massachusetts law, however, requires a verdict to be unanimously agreed upon, signed, and delivered in open court to be valid, and no such formal verdict had been returned. A federal judge denied the motion to block the retrial in March 2025, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on April 28, 2025.
The lead state police investigator, Trooper Michael Proctor, was fired in March 2025 after personal text messages he had sent about Read — including one reading, “Hopefully she kills herself” — became public. Colonel Geoffrey Noble said the termination was for Proctor’s “racist, sexist and abhorrent” text messages.
The retrial went forward before Judge Cannone. On June 18, 2025, the jury acquitted Read of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating under the influence, and leaving the scene of a collision resulting in death. She was convicted of a single count of operating a vehicle under the influence and sentenced to one year of probation.
On the courthouse steps, Read thanked the supporters who had rallied around her for nearly four years, many wearing pink and using the American Sign Language sign for “I love you.” “No one has fought harder for justice for John O’Keefe than I have,” she said. “Than I have, and my team.”
Read has since filed a civil lawsuit against the Massachusetts State Police and the Canton Police Department alleging wrongful prosecution. O’Keefe’s family, including his brother Paul and sister-in-law Erin, filed a wrongful death suit in Plymouth Superior Court against Read and two Canton bars, alleging the bars overserved Read the night O’Keefe died. In October 2025, Judge Daniel O’Shea allowed the case to proceed on claims of reckless or intentional infliction of emotional distress.