KAREN READ: MURDER OR COVER-UP IN CANTON, MASSACHUSETTS

KAREN READ: MURDER OR COVER-UP IN CANTON, MASSACHUSETTS

A Boston police officer is found face-down in the snow outside a fellow officer's home in Canton, Massachusetts. His name is John O'Keefe. He had been lying there for hours.

His girlfriend, Karen Read, was accused of backing into him with her Lexus SUV and leaving him to die in a blizzard. But after two trials, two juries, and years of courtroom battles, the question still hasn't gone away:

What really happened to John O'Keefe?

In this episode of Crimery, host Tim Novotney breaks down the full Karen Read case — the timeline, the party at 34 Fairview Road, the nor'easter, the injuries, the "hos long to die in cold" Google search at 2:27 AM, the broken taillight evidence, the dog bite theory, Michael Proctor's devastating text messages, and the courtroom collapse that changed everything.

This is a deep-dive into one of the most divisive true crime cases in recent American history.

If you've been following the Karen Read case — or you want a clear, detailed, no-BS breakdown from an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker — this episode is for you.

Host: Tim Novotney | 3x Emmy Award-Winning Filmmaker

Show: Crimery — True Crime 

PodcastWebsite: www.crimery.show

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A Boston police officer is laying face down in the snow. He has been there for hours. Nobody called for help. Nobody went outside to check on him. Nobody in the house where the party just ended. The house belonging to a fellow Boston police officer said his name once. His phone has not moved in five hours. His girlfriend finds him just before dawn. She drops to her knees in the blizzard and starts CPR right there in the snow, screaming for someone to call 911. It's too late. His name is John O'Keefe. He is 46 years old. He gave up everything he had built to become a father to two children who had no one left. And what happened to him in the hours between the party and that front lawn, two trials, two juries, and the full weight of the Massachusetts court system could not answer it. I've spent months trying. I'm Tim Novotny, this is Crimary, and this is the most honest account I can give you for what happened in Canton, Massachusetts on the night of January 28th, 2022. Before we go anywhere near what happened that night, I need you to understand where we are. Because Canton is not just a setting. It is the reason this story went the way it did. Take Route 138 south of Dedham, about 15 miles southwest of Boston, and you drive through the usual New England suburb strip. Drive-throughs, chain restaurants, storage units, and then something shifts. The road opens up, colonial homes with wide front porches, old stone walls cutting through the wooded lots built by hand 200 years ago and still standing. The Canton River running through the middle of town, threading a chain of quiet ponds together. And behind everything, Great Blue Hill rising up at the edge of the sky like the town put it there on purpose. About 24,000 people live here. That's a pretty small town. The median household income is over$125,000 a year, and that is above the national average. Nearly 63% of adults have a college degree, so there's low crime, strong schools, the kind of suburb people spend years saving towards and then they never leave. The town was incorporated in 1797. A man named Elijah Dunbar suggested calling it Canton because he believed, incorrectly as it turns out, that it sat on the exact opposite side of the globe from Canton, China. He wasn't very good at geography. But the name stuck. Paul Revere, the patriot famous for his midnight ride warning the colonies that the British troops were coming, built the first copper rolling mill in America right here in 1801. Apparently, he liked the place so much that he wrote a poem about it. And if Paul Revere writes you a poem, you frame it. And yes, Canton is where Duncan was born. World headquarters, right here. 60% of all Duncan orders are iced coffee year-round. Doesn't matter if there's a foot of snow on the ground, New England orders it cold. If you have ever pulled through a Duncan drive-thru at 6 in the morning and felt the entire spirit of Massachusetts running through your body, that's Canton's gift to you. People who live here and review it online say the same thing over and over again. Quiet, safe, great for families, good schools, the kind of place where you know your neighbors. One reviewer put it simply: nothing exciting ever happens here. And that's the point. The Blue Hill Reservation sits right at the edge of town. 7,000 acres of trails and open sky, one of the biggest open spaces within 25 miles of Boston. Families hike it on fall weekends. In December, hundreds of people pack into Canton Park for the annual tree lighting. Santa flips a switch, the whole town shows up. It's not a big production. It's just Canton, together in the cold. That's what this town does. It shows up for its own. And here is the thing about Canton that you must absolutely need to know before we go any further into this story. Canton has a deep generational relationship with law enforcement. Boston police officers, Massachusetts state troopers, federal agents, they've all been settling in this town for decades, growing up here, buying houses here. Their kids go to the same school, play on the same travel teams, show up at the same birthday parties. Their families are woven together the way communities get when people from the same world land in the same zip code over generations. Old friends ending up on the same force, sisters marrying into the same circles, and cookouts where half the people at the table are carrying a badge. The Canton Police Department has fewer than 40 sworn officers, so it's small, it's tight, and it's the kind of department where loyalty isn't just a word. It's in the air of every breath. In most places, that kind of loyalty is just a nice thing to say about the local cops. In Canton, it goes bone deep. But here's what I've learned covering cases like this one. Loyalty that runs that deep doesn't just protect people. Sometimes it decides things before the facts do. Sometimes it builds a wall so fast and so solid that the truth never gets inside. In January of 2022, that wall went up in Canton, and the man it buried was named John O'Keefe. This case got covered everywhere. Cable news, national podcasts, Netflix, Amazon, social media movements, protests outside courthouses, more takes than you could read in a month. And somewhere in all of that noise, the man who actually died got completely lost. So before we go anywhere near the investigation or in the courtroom or the verdict, I need you to know who John was because you're about to spend the next 40 minutes trying to figure out what happened to him. You should know who you're fighting for. John was born on December 8, 1975. He grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, South Shore, about 12 miles southeast of Boston. An Irish-Italian family. His mother's maiden name was Rizzitano. His parents were John and Margaret. St. Francis of Assisi's Church every Sunday, same neighborhood, same parish, same streets. He was a serious athlete growing up. Not a recreational one. Serious. The people who watched him play said if Braintree Youth Sports had a Hall of Fame, John O'Keefe would go in on the first ballot. That is a specific thing to say. That's not someone just being nice at a funeral. That's the kind of thing you say about someone who showed up every single week and actually competed. And from the time he was a kid, he knew exactly what he wanted to be. A cop. Not the way kids say things, the way someone means it. He interned at the Braintree Police Department before he even had his badge. He worked as an auxiliary officer in Duxbury and Falmouth, two separate towns before the real job came through. He was doing the work before he was even being paid to do it. Then Northeastern University in Boston. Then he kept going. He got a master's degree in criminal justice from UMass Lowell. He joined the Boston Police Department in 2005, assignments in Hyde Park and downtown Boston, Dorchester, and then he got into the sex offenders unit. He had been building towards that badge his entire life. His colleagues called him solid, the kind of officer you wanted beside you when things got complicated. To everyone who loved him, he was Johnny. Or JJ if you were close enough. There's a story people tell about John that I keep coming back to. He was at a Super Bowl party, he stepped out of the room for a few minutes, someone, just to mess with him, quietly changed the time on the microwave clock. And when John came back, he didn't say a word. He didn't make a thing of anything. He walked straight over to the microwave, fixed the time, and kept moving. It was wrong, so he fixed it. That was John O'Keefe. His college friend, a man he continued to commute with from the South Shore to Northeastern for four years, said something about John after he died that I haven't been able to shake. He said multiple women John had dated over the years, not one, multiple, showed up for John's family during the worst stretch of their lives. Not because anyone asked them to, because they wanted to. Because John O'Keefe never burned a bridge in his life. Not one. You don't hear that about many people. Now I need to tell you about 2013. John had a sister, Kristen, one year older. Same house, same street, same church. She had built a real life, married a man named Stephen Furbush, settled in Canton, had a daughter named Kaylee and a son named Patrick. They had a great life. The kind you work for. In the spring of 2013, Kristen was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her husband Stephen kept a website during her treatment, updated for family and friends, and one of the last entries he wrote that Kristen was coming home from the hospital, that all she wanted to do was hold her kids. Kristen died at home on November 11, 2013. Kaylee was six years old, Patrick was three years old. Eight weeks later, January 12th, 2014, Steven had a heart attack. He was 39, same age as Kristen. Both parents, eight weeks apart, two little kids. Then, eight days after Kristen died, before the family had caught a single breath, John's closest friend on the Boston Police Force, an officer named Pat Rogers, died by suicide. His girlfriend was pregnant at the time. John O'Keefe lost his sister, his brother-in-law, and his best friend inside of one year. His sister-in-law Aaron figured she and John's brother Paul would take Kaylee and Patrick. And that made sense. John was working on the street in Dorchester. He had an apartment, a demanding job, a life that wasn't built for two small kids who had just lost everything. John called his family and said he was going to do it. He packed up and moved to Canton, gave up the street work job and took a desk job. Not because he wanted to, but because a desk job meant being home when school let out. He figured homework out, the parent-teacher nights, which lunches Patrick would eat and which ones would come back untouched. He was at the games every morning, every Christmas, and the kids called him JJ. And then, because John O'Keefe apparently wasn't finished, he went to the hospital the day Pat Rogers' son was born, walked into that delivery room, held the boy who came into the world without his father, and stayed in his life from day one. The last text John's brother Paul ever sent him was in a family group chat. John was excited Cayley had just gotten into a private high school. That was the last thing on his mind. His girlfriend, who had watched all of this up close, who had seen what he had built out of the worst year imaginable, called him the patron saint of Canton. Her name was Karen Reed. And before you hear what she was accused of, you need to know who she was. I want to tell you about Karen Reed before the lawyers get involved. Because once the case starts, she stops being a person and she becomes a defendant. And she was a person first. Karen grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts, south of Boston. Not wealthy, not connected, Catholic family, Sunday Mass, a quiet cul-de-sac neighborhood called Nicholas Mills, where everybody knew everyone, sorta like Canton, I guess. Her father William taught accounting and eventually ran the finance department at Bentley University. Her mother, her brother Nathan, a normal life on a normal street. Except Karen wasn't a normal kid. Not in the way that it matters. There was this teacher at her high school, Coyle and Cassidy Catholic School in Taunton, since closed, who ran the community service program for 40 years. Thousands of students came through that program. Thousands. And when people asked him about Karen Reed years later, he remembered her specifically. He remembered her choosing to spend her time volunteering her hours at a nursing home. Not in the activity room handing out cards, sitting with one particular resident, an elderly person who was there alone, who was struggling, who was nearing the end of her life. Karen came back. She formed a real bond with that person. She gave them the time when nobody else was giving them the time. 40 years, thousands of kids. She was the one he remembered. In her senior yearbook, she picked a quote from the British writer V. S. Pritchett. She went to Bentley University, her father's school, and finished her finance degree in three years. Stayed for her master's, built a career as an equity analysis at Fidelity. Eventually came back to Bentley as an adjunct professor, teaching in the same building where her father spent his career. And then her body turned on her. Crohn's disease at 25. 10 surgeries in two years. She traveled to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. That's what you do when local surgeons have run out of answers. Then, at 32, multiple sclerosis. There was a period when she went temporarily blind. She kept working, she kept teaching, she kept building. Her father said Karen would never break down. She will never lose her resolve. I want you to hold on to that. Hold the Crohn's, hold the MS, hold the blindness. Because later in the story, the man the state of Massachusetts assigned to find out what happened to John O'Keefe, the investigator who was supposed to be fighting for him, is going to text his friends jokes about those conditions while he was actively running the murder investigation. I need you to already know what she went through. So when we get there, you understand exactly what kind of man he was. Now before the night everything fell apart, you need to know how Karen and John found each other. Because the story of how they got together is part of why what happened is so hard to make sense of. Karen and John first met in 2004 at a birthday party in Boston. A party for John's sister Kristen, the same Kristen whose kids he would later raise. They connected, they dated briefly, then Karen's career took her to Dublin, Ireland, and they went their separate ways, the way people do when they're young and life is moving fast. 16 years went by. Not five, not ten, sixteen years. Then in 2020, the world locked down, everyone suddenly still, everyone reaching back through their lives for something real. John sent Karen a message on Facebook. They started over, and this time they were both ready. By January 2022, they had been going together for almost two years. Karen had become part of John's world in Canton. She admired what he had done, stepping up for Kaylee and Patrick, building a real home out of grief. She stayed over regularly, she helped with the kids, she was present in a way that wasn't casual. But going into January 2022, the relationship did have some friction. A New Year's trip to Aruba had gone badly. Arguments and accusation of cheating that hadn't been resolved, two strong people who weren't sure they were still heading in the same direction. What nobody disputes, on the night of January 28th, 2022, Karen Reed and John O'Keefe were out together in Canton, and only one of them came home. So let me take you through that night, minute by minute, because the timeline is everything. The night of January 28th, 2022. Let me walk you through what we actually know about Saturday night, not what anyone claimed later, just what the data shows. Because in this case, the data is the most honest thing we have. Karen and John start off at C.F. McCarthy's bar around 10:30 p.m., a few drinks, and then the group moves to the waterfall bar and grill, where they met up with a larger crowd. The crowd includes Brian Albert, Boston police sergeant, Canton resident, house at 34 Fairview Road, two minutes away, his wife Nicole, Nicole's sister Jennifer McCabe, and her husband Matthew. And last but not least, Brian Higgins, federal ATF agent, who had been texting Karen things he probably shouldn't have been texting her in the weeks before all of this happened. The bar closes around midnight. The Alberts invited everyone back to their place on Fairview Road. Here is where the two accounts split and never come back together. Karen says she dropped John off at the front door on 34 Fairview Road and then drove home. She never went inside the house on 34 Fairview Road. But every single person inside 34 Fairview Road says they never saw John O'Keefe. Both of those things cannot be true at the same time. So let's go to the phones. 1214 a.m. Jennifer McCabe calls John, giving him directions to 34 Fairview Road, a house he's apparently never been to. 1215. Multiple witnesses see Karen's black Lexus outside the house. 1220. John's phone runs a wave search for 34 Fairview Road. He is looking up the address while he is essentially already there. 1224. John's phone puts him at 34 Fairview Road. He has arrived. And then his phone goes silent. Jennifer starts texting him. 1227. Here? Question mark? 1231. Pull behind me. 1240. Hello? 1242. Where are you? 1245. Hello? Nothing back. Not one response. Meanwhile, Karen has driven back to John's house, where Kaylee and Patrick are asleep. She starts calling him. Seven times between 1233 and 1236 a.m. No answer. So she starts leaving him voicemails. And I want you to really hear these words. Not as evidence for a minute, just as a human being listening to another human being. At 12 37 a.m. She leaves this message. John, I fucking hate you. At 12 59, I'm here with the fucking kids and nobody knows where the fuck you are. 11 10 a.m. It's 1 in the morning. I'm with your fucking niece and nephew. 1 17. You are fucking using me right now. 1 18 a.m. Last call and then silence. She falls asleep in Kaylee's room. Now the prosecution heard those voicemails and heard rage. Jealousy. A woman who knew exactly what she had done and was performing innocent for the record. I hear something different. I hear someone who had absolutely no idea where he is. And let's think about this honestly. Would you call someone seven times if you knew what happened to them? Would you call them and leave them messages that are that raw, that specific, and that angry at him if you did anything to him? Would you fall asleep in his niece's bedroom and then wait for the morning? Or does that sound like a woman who is drunk and furious and completely in the dark about what has happened to the man she had dropped off about an hour ago? I'm not telling you what to think. I'm telling you what I think. And here is what nobody on either side of the case can dispute. From 12.25 a.m. until 6.15 in the morning, John O'Keefe's phone shows zero GPS movement. Zero. Five hours and fifty minutes in a northeaster, in the dark, on a front lawn in Canton, Massachusetts. No calls made, no texts sent, no movement. And not one person inside that house will say they saw him. Five hours and fifty minutes. What was happening to John O'Keefe out there? Hold that question. Because the next person who sees John is Karen. And what she does next is something nobody on either side of this case has ever fully explained away. Sometime before 6 a.m., Karen woke up. John wasn't home, still not answering, and something had shifted in her overnight. Something that felt wrong. She got in her car in the blizzard and drove back to Fairview Road. She pulled up to number 34, got out in the wind. She saw him face down in the front yard, dark against the white. She ran to him, dropped to her knees in the snow, and started performing CPR, pressing and screaming for someone to call 911 and pressing again. It didn't matter. John O'Keefe was taken to Good Sumerian Hospital in Brockton. At 8 50 a.m. on January 29th, 2022, he was pronounced dead. The medical examiner's finding hypothermia, blunt head trauma, a skull fracture, a brain bleed, and lacerations to both arms. He had been in the snow for hours. The first thing that should have happened right after that, an honest, thorough, independent investigation into how a Boston police officer ended up dead in a fellow officer's front yard. What actually happened was a man named Michael Proctor. Now let's talk about Michael Proctor and who he is. The Massachusetts State Police assigned a trooper named Michael Proctor to the lead investigation. I need you to understand something about that. Assignment. Proctor wasn't pulled from a rotation. Proctor was personally connected to the Albert family. He knew the people inside 34 Fairview Road. He was embedded in the same exact same tight web of Canton law enforcement relationships that I described at the top of this episode. The same world of people who grew up together, worked together, bought houses near each other, and showed up at the same cookouts. He was the last person who should have been anywhere near this case. He was the person they put in charge. Now the prosecution did have real physical evidence. They had pieces of Karen's broken taillight found near John's body. DNA consistent with John on her rear bumper, small plastic fragments in the lacerations on his arms that matched a taillight material. Their theory was straightforward. Karen, drunk and jealous, backed her Lexus into John when she dropped him off. Taillight shattered, he went down, she left. That evidence is not nothing. I want to be clear about that. DNA on a bumper is a real thing. But here is the problem. Michael Proctor collected that evidence. He is the chain of custody. Every piece of physical evidence the prosecution built its case on passed through his hands. And 16 hours into the investigation, before John O'Keefe's autopsy was even completed, Proctor was in a group text with his friends. He called Karen a whack job. He used other words about her that I'm not going to say on the show. He made jokes about her Crohn's disease. He mocked her MS. He wrote in writing to multiple people that he hoped she would hurt herself. 16 hours in, before he even knew how John died, he had already decided who was guilty. When those text messages were read out loud in court, the room went quiet. Because here was the man, the state of Massachusetts trusted to find out what happened to John O'Keefe, a fellow officer, a member of the Brotherhood he had sworn into, and this is what he was doing within the first 16 hours, not investigating, but deciding and then texting about it. That's not an investigation, Crimers. That is the verdict dressed up as one. But here's another thing about this case. Even with Procter out of the picture, even if you set aside every text message, every personal connection, every conflict of interest, there is still one piece of evidence sitting in the middle of his story that neither side has ever been able to fully explain. There is one detail in this case that I need to give its own space because once you hear it, you can't unhear it. In the early mornings of January 29th, 2022, a search was made from Jennifer McCabe's phone. The search was Haas long to die in cold, misspelled, typed fast, the kind of thing you type when your hands are shaking. Now, here is where it gets complicated. And I want to be straight with you on both sides. Karen's defense argued that search was made at 2.27 a.m. That's more than three hours before Karen found John's body. More than three hours before anyone was supposed to know he was outside. If the 227 timestamp is right, then someone connected to 34 Fairview Road while John O'Keefe was freezing to death on the front lawn, searched for how long a human being can survive in the cold, and did nothing. Now the prosecution argued the timestamp was actually 6.23 a.m. after the body was found, after the morning chaos had started, when anyone may have instinctively grabbed their phone and typed that question in a panic. Two separate teams of digital forensic experts, two completely different timestamps. Both sets testified in front of two separate juries. I can't tell you which timestamp is right. Nobody can. That's why it went to two juries. But here is what I cannot get past. Weeks after John died, Jennifer McCabe told police for the first time that it was actually Karen Reed who asked her to do that search. That Karen said it out loud in a car full of people on the way to find John's body and asked Jennifer to look it up. Sit with that for a second. If Karen had just hit someone with her car and left them in the snow, why would she ask someone else to Google how long they had been dying out loud in front of witnesses on the way to find him? Either Karen Reed said the most self-incriminating thing a guilty person has ever said, or that explanation came later, constructed to account for a search that otherwise had no innocent explanation. Both juries heard it. Neither juries convicted Karen Reed of killing John O'Keefe. Make of that what you will. All of it, the taillights, the DNA, the Google search, the text, the timeline eventually ended up in front of a jury. Twice. And here is what happened. The first trial opened in April of 2024. The prosecution laid out their physical case. The taillight pieces, the DNA, the plastic fragments in John's arm. Their crash reconstructed expert testified Karen backed into John at 23 miles per hour in reverse. Then the defense went to work. And this is where it gets important. The FBI, during a separate federal investigation into this case, had their own expert evaluate the damage to Karen's car. That expert concluded the damage was inconsistent with striking a human body. The defense's forensic pathologist looked at the lacerations on John's arms and said they were not consistent with taillight fragments. They were consistent with a dog bite. Brian Albert owned a large dog. Brian Albert got rid of that dog after John died. Brian Albert sold his house. A former Rhode Island chief medical examiner testified she saw no evidence of a vehicle impact on John's body. She also disputed hypothermia as a cause of death, saying John showed none of the internal physical markers that typically appear when someone else dies from cold exposure. A neurosurgeon testified that John's skull fracture and brain lacerations were consistent with a drunk man falling backwards and hitting the back of his head on the ground. He said he had seen it regularly during his time at the trauma center in Minneapolis. Drunk people fall on ice and develop exactly these injuries. And then Michael Proctor took the witness stand. His texts were read out loud, one by one. His personal connections to the Albert family were laid out to the public for the first time. The investigation he had run, every piece of evidence he had touched, every decision he had made collapsed under cross-examination. The jury deadlocked July 1st, 2024 mistrial. The second trial started April 1, 2025, roughly a year later. The DA brought in a new prosecutor, Hank Brennan, the attorney who once defended Whitney Burgler. By that point, Proctor had already been fired from the state police. His law enforcement certification in Massachusetts was suspended permanently in December of 2025. The federal obstruction investigation had closed with no charges filed. The jury deliberated for four days. June 18, 2025, not guilty, second-degree murder. Not guilty, open manslaughter. Guilty, operating under the influence. One-year probation, standard first offense, no prison. Karen Reed walked out of that courthouse having spent three years and millions of dollars defending herself against charges that two separate juries ultimately would not sustain. Hank Brennan told reporters, the evidence led to one person and only one person. He was disappointed. Karen's defense team called her factually innocent. John O'Keefe's family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit against Karen, and that is currently still pending. Karen filed her own lawsuit against the investigators and the witnesses she believes conspired to frame her, and that is also still pending. Nobody has been held criminally accountable for what happened to John O'Keefe. That's where the courtroom left things. And here's where everything actually stands right now. In early 2026, Karen Reed sold her home to pay for legal fees that reportedly ran into the millions. She's living with her friends and family, still on probation, still fighting the civil cases on multiple fronts, still saying publicly what she had said from day one, that she did not kill John O'Keefe. Michael Proctor has no badge, no certification, no career. He dropped his appeal to get his job back after his iCloud account was examined and reportedly contained images that made continuing that appeal something he couldn't do. Brian Albert sold 34 Fairview Road and moved. He got rid of his dog. The civil case grinded on with no resolution in sight. And in the Blue Hill Cemetery in Braintree, Massachusetts, John O'Keefe is buried next to his sister Kristen. No one has ever been convicted of killing him. His brother Paul says he still picks up his phone sometimes to text John, and then he remembers. That's where this case lives. Not in a courtroom, not in a civil filing, in a man reaching for his phone to text his brother and coming up empty. So here is my read on all of this. This is where I fall in all this, given everything that I researched. You've been with me through all of it. You know John, you know Karen, you know the town, you know the night, the evidence, the trials. You've heard everything, two separate juries heard, and then some. So here's where I land. And I want to be clear before I say this. What follows is my honest interpretation of the evidence. This is what I believe the facts point towards when you look at them without any agenda. It is not a statement of fact by any living person. Nobody has ever been convicted of anything except Karen Reed's OUI. I'm not a prosecutor and this is not a verdict. But you came here for my honest read, so here it is. I do not believe Karen Reed's car killed John O'Keefe. And here's why. The FBI's own expert said the damage to her Lexus was inconsistent with striking a human body. A nationally respected crash reconstruction firm said the same thing. The forensic pathologist said the wounds on John's arms looked like dog bites, not taillight fragments. A former state chief medical examiner said he saw no evidence of a vehicle impact on his body at all. A neurosurgeon said his skull fracture was consistent with a drunk man falling backwards on ice, something he had seen regularly in cold weather cities his entire career. The jury convicted Karen of drunk driving because she was drunk. The jury did not convict her of killing John. That split verdict is not nothing. That is 12 people saying we believe she was impaired, but we do not believe the evidence proves she killed him. So if her car didn't kill John O'Keefe, then what happened? Here is what I think based on everything I've been able to put together. John arrived at 34 Fairview Road at 12.24 a.m. His phone went dark immediately. For nearly six hours in a northeaster, in the dark, there is no record of where he was or what was happening to him. The people inside that house have consistently said they had never saw him, but someone connected to that house searched Huslong to die in cold in the middle of the night. Brian Albert sold his house and got rid of his dog. I am not accusing Brian Albert or anyone else in that house of murder. I want to be clear about that. I cannot prove it. Neither could the federal government after a full investigation. What I am saying is this the evidence does not support Karen's car as the cause of John's death, and the evidence does point consistently across multiple independent experts, across two juries, reasonable doubt towards something that happened at or near 34 Fairview Road between midnight and 6 a.m. We may never know exactly what, because the man assigned to find out had already made up his mind before the autopsy was finished, because Michael Proctor was personally connected to the people in that house, because he spent his first 16 hours texting jokes about the woman he had already decided was guilty. That is not a tragedy. That is a choice. A deliberate choice by a man who was supposed to fight for John O'Keefe and chose instead to protect the world he was comfortable in. John grew up going to St. Francis of Assissi's Church in Braintree. He interned at the local police department as a teenager because he wanted that badge more than he wanted anything. He had gave up his career he had built to go home to two kids who had nobody. He walked into a delivery room for a baby who was coming into this world without a father. He was the kind of man who noticed when the microwave clock was wrong and quietly fixed it. The system he gave his life to looked the other way. John O'Keefe deserves better than that. And so do Kaylee and Patrick. Thank you for staying with me on this one, guys. I know it was heavy, it was supposed to be. I want to know where you land. Do you think Karen did it? Do you think some do you think something happened inside that house? Do you think that the truth is somewhere nobody has pointed yet? Come find us at crimary.show and tell me. This is exactly the conversation I build this show to have. Before you go, Crimary.show. That's www.crimary.show. Day one support merchandise is now live. There's only 100 pieces for each item, and once it's gone, it's gone forever. Patreon is coming very soon. Follow our socials so you don't miss it. And if you have not left us a five-star rating, please do that right now. 30 seconds. It is the single most important thing you can do to help other Crimers find this show. Thank you for caring about John O'Keefe. I'm Tim Novotney. This is Crimery. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and never stop asking questions. We'll see you next week.