Megyn Kelly and Peter Tragos dissect the Karen Read case, contrasting prosecution claims of a 24 mph Lexus impact with defense arguments regarding blunt trauma inside 34 Fairview. They scrutinize controversial evidence like biased investigator texts and a disputed Google search timestamp while noting Read's acquittal on murder charges following hung juries. The discussion highlights civil litigation between Read and investigators versus the O'Keefe family, emphasizing how physical inconsistencies and witness intimidation complicate the narrative of intent versus negligence in this high-profile trial. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly and welcome to Crime Week here on The Megyn Kelly Show, or as we like to call it, True Crime Christmas, because nothing says Christmas like true crime.
All week, we are bringing you deep dives on some big legal cases you likely know well, and others you might not know much about.
We're talking to a lawyer, a private eye, the woman at the center of a shocking fraud case, and our good pal Maureen Callahan on a serial killer case she covered extensively.
But we begin crime week with a crime and trial that has captivated the country for years now.
Karen Reed's courtroom drama has sparked intense debate, raised questions about police conduct, and fueled fierce divisions online.
And the legal saga is far from over.
In fact, there is a new development just this month.
Not just one, actually more.
Peter Tragos, attorney and host of the lawyer you know on YouTube, he's so good on this.
He's covered every twist and turn of this case.
You will love listening to this conversation.
And he joins me right now.
I've been talking a lot about Riverbend Ranch because I love their steaks.
Well, this holiday season, express your love with a very special gift of premium steaks from Riverbend Ranch.
They have spectacular beef bundles that are wonderful gifts to friends and family.
Their prime rib roast and holiday bundles are only available while supplies last and they're going fast.
For the last 35 years, Riverbend Ranch has been creating an elite Angus herd by using ultrasound technology to identify genetically superior cattle with a focus on flavor and tenderness.
All Riverbend Ranch cattle are born and raised in the USA.
They never use growth hormones or antibiotics, and the beef is processed right at the ranch in their award-winning USDA inspected processing facility.
Avoid the costly middlemen because the beef is sent directly from Riverbend Ranch to your home.
This is not your average black Angus beef.
Order from RiverbendRanch.com.
Riverbend Ranch Prime Rib00:15:15
Use the promo code Megan for 20 bucks off your first order and let me know what you think.
That's riverbendranch.com.
Promo code Megan.
So let's just start back at the beginning for people who may not be as up to speed on this case as you are.
Karen Reed was who?
She's living her private life in Massachusetts.
Who was she before all this happened to her?
She was a single woman dating a law enforcement officer, had a great job in finance, and her family was a close-knit family, loved each other for all intents and purposes.
When she reconnected with this boyfriend who was an officer and they go out for a night on the town, they had a bit of a tumultuous relationship.
And then that night, after some drinking at the bar, hanging out with a bunch of friends, everything changed forever.
So the prosecution, which would ultimately be charging her, alleges that they left this bar, they drove over to a friend's house, another cop, and that her boyfriend got out of the car.
That he then walked up to the front door of the friend's house and went.
Sorry, this is what she alleges.
She alleges he went to the front door of the house.
He went inside and something terrible happened to him.
The prosecution said, no, he got out of your car.
He never made it inside because you ran him over.
You backed up into him at something like 24 miles an hour, hurting him, casting him into the snowbank, where he then later died from blunt trauma and hypothermia.
Is that the basics?
Yeah, I mean, it turns on what happened after they got to 34 Fairview.
Everybody's basically on the same page.
They went to a couple bars.
They were hanging out together.
They were drinking together.
Karen Reed is driving her Lexus.
Nobody disputes that.
John O'Keefe, who's her boyfriend and the victim in this case, sitting in the front seat.
They drive to 34 Fairview to hang out with the McCabes and the Alberts, who are all connected to law enforcement and connected to people in Canton.
She drops him off.
He gets out of the car.
There also seems to be third-party witness testimony that he gets out of the car.
After that, that's where the stories kind of turn.
If you believe the prosecution and the witnesses inside 34 Fairview, he never makes it inside the house.
She backs up, hits him with her Lexus because she's angry at him about, you know, a multitude of things and they're fighting and she wanted to end his life, I guess, is their point of view.
If you believe Karen Reed, she said he walked in towards the house.
She didn't see John O'Keefe again.
He stayed inside.
He was supposed to come back out, kind of tell her what's going on.
She gets pissed off, drives back to his house, calls him, leaves him all these angry text messages, and he never comes home.
That's Karen Reed's story.
And it wasn't until the wee hours of the next morning, you know, like five, six in the morning, that she and another then start searching for him.
Like, what happened to him?
Where's John?
And oh, wow, he's dead in the snowbank, how that happened.
Now, there are two competing facts that I want to ask you about as I was just listening to this.
I didn't follow this case as closely as you did at all.
But as I was listening to it, the best fact, well, there's two that I think the prosecution has are as follows.
Number one, that she allegedly said, I hit him.
I hit him.
I hit him.
And that an emergency worker, like a paramedic, heard that.
And now she denies that, but you've got a third-party witness saying she said that.
So that's a very good fact for the prosecution.
And they also have tailgate plastic in his clothing, like from where her tailgate of her Lexus hit him.
So it doesn't look like he got beaten up inside.
It looks like he got hit by her car.
Not just any car, but her car.
So those are very good facts for the prosecution.
On the other side for Karen Reed, the best fact I saw for her defense, because again, her defense is, no, he walked into the house.
I didn't run him over.
He went into the house and then there was some cop on cop violence.
Some old score got settled and they beat him.
They beat him to death and then threw him in the snowbank and tried to say that I ran him over.
And the best evidence I saw for Karen Reed's theory was that someone inside that house allegedly googled something to the effect of how long can you be out in the snow before you die before they found the body, before they found the body, you know, before she even had allegedly hit him.
And that would certainly suggest the people inside the house were up to no good.
Now at trial, they disputed that piece of testimony.
So can you walk us through that evidence?
Those, do I have like the best facts on both sides or have I missed something critical?
Yeah, honestly, there's just so much.
So we'll go with what you're asking because it's really fascinating for somebody who's kind of followed it from a cursory point of view.
And maybe, you know, you've heard some of the highlights or seen some of the shows reporting on it because it was fascinating.
And it's really a case unlike any other I've tried personally myself or followed even, you know, since I've been following these cases in the media.
And you've brought up some big points of contention.
And the prosecution absolutely pushed the I hit him comments as a confession.
That's what they continued to call it, a confession.
She confessed to law enforcement, to EMS right there on the scene.
Karen Reed's team cross-examined those witnesses and said, if you had somebody that confessed, why didn't she get arrested?
Why wasn't that immediately the investigation and they knew exactly what happened?
Why was there any unknown?
Why wasn't the investigation and the crime scene taken as they knew exactly what happened that she hit him with her Lexus?
And Karen Reed's team responds with, it was, did I hit him?
Could I have hit him?
Which there are some other people that say.
Stand by, let me just play that because she spoke to Dateline.
She didn't testify at her trials, but she did speak to Dateline.
Here's Karen Reed trying to clarify that point in SAT 51.
I said, could I have hit him?
Did I hit him?
How could that have been?
I mean, you dropped him off.
I don't know what else could have been.
It was howling wind.
I had YouTube blasting on the stereo.
And I thought, did he somehow try to flag me down, which was the reaction I was hoping to garner as I slowly pulled away from the house?
Did he come out and maybe trip or bend over to pick up a cell phone?
And I ran over his foot and then he passed out drunk?
I mean, I didn't think I hit him, hit him, but could I have clipped him?
Could I tagged him in the knee and incapacitated him?
He didn't look mortally wounded as far as I could see, but could I have done something that knocked him out and drunkenness and in the cold didn't come to again?
And just to be clear, Peter, this was after, so that the night goes on.
You know, she allegedly hit him around right just after midnight.
But according to her testimony, she didn't hit him.
She waited for him to come back out of the party.
He didn't.
She got mad.
She went back over to his house.
And then by the next morning, by like 5 or 6 a.m., she and this other gal were like looking for him.
And lo and behold, there he was dead in the snowbank at the location of the party.
So go ahead.
Right.
And that is one of the big points of contention.
And as you know, one of the big things now that there's competing civil lawsuits that we may talk about later, when we're talking about the criminal case and you're saying, here's the best evidence for one side and here's the best evidence for the other, the prosecution in this case has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what happened that night.
And that was one of the big difficulties when you have maybe some EMS and some people said, she said, I hit him.
Some people said, did I hit him?
Based on her conversations and a lot of what else happened that night, maybe it wasn't as clear of a confession.
And nobody seemed to think that at the time, that it was a clear confession.
And then when you flip to his injuries, which you mentioned them as kind of good evidence for both sides that her taillight pieces were, you know, on him, in his sweater, kind of attached to him.
How would they get there unless she hit him with her Lexus?
And then she says his injuries match a fight, getting beat up by cops inside.
You know, he had raccoon eyes.
He died from hitting the back of his head.
And, you know, the evidence shows maybe it was on a ledge and not a flat ground.
You know, that was a little who was actually going to prove what injury was the cause of death and how he got it.
So that was a big point of contention throughout.
And if you looked at a lot of the medical evidence and the accident reconstructionists, to me, that's really where Karen Reed.
Yes, that was a good fact for her, the fact that the Lexus expert at trial said there was nothing recorded on this car of hitting somebody, of going 24 miles an hour or whatever it was, and running over another person.
Like that, that he would have expected something to register in the car's brain and nothing did.
Yeah, and that's one of the problems with so many facts in this case is there was kind of competing theories on that, where if you hit a man that's 200 pounds, maybe that's not going to be enough to register an event when you have, you know, a very heavy Lexus like that.
And then there were some people that said, well, maybe it should have and there's nothing on here that actually did register it.
But even more so, Karen Reed had accident reconstructionists that were actually hired by the FBI while they were investigating this investigation, which we'll get into the shady stuff happening there as to why the FBI would even get involved.
But Karen Reed ends up hiring those guys as her experts, and they do all sorts of different testing, and they can never create the same action where something hitting that taillight would explode out into the yard and on John O'Keefe the way that the prosecution said it happened in that case.
It just wouldn't happen, especially with some of the videos and pictures where the taillights are still working without busting those little actual light bulbs inside.
It was really fast.
Which was the case here?
Correct.
The lights were still working.
So in other words, this was faked.
In other words, the point is those guys killed him inside.
They brought him out.
And then they were the ones who hit her car to make it look like it had bumped into him.
So partially, they somewhat point the finger at the guys inside the house for beating John O'Keefe to death and leaving him on the lawn, but they allege that law enforcement actually cracked the taillight, placed the pieces there, mixed everything together so it would look like that taillight hit John O'Keefe.
And they went so far as to, Alan Jackson, one of the defense lawyers in this case, had a chart of all the glass that was found at the scene.
And there was a cocktail glass that was found on Karen Reed's car that was found nowhere else at the scene.
So how really would it have gotten there but for somebody placing it on the bumper of Karen Reed's car, which was driven away from the scene, driven around the next morning, put on a tow truck, driven back.
And we're supposed to believe that some of this cocktail glass stayed on there.
And there was one hair that stayed on there that they said was John O'Keefe's hair.
Things that just were really hard to believe that the Commonwealth was trying to explain to a jury in this case.
Okay, so what the theory of the prosecution is easy to understand, that she and John hadn't really been getting along.
He had talked about possibly breaking up with her.
She was very angry that night.
She was drunk.
And in her drunken anger, she ran him over.
And there was some debate about whether they overcharged the case.
Should they have just charged it as a manslaughter?
They went for murder too, which definitely raised the stakes for this jury.
Like it was intentional.
She wanted to kill him as opposed to just like heat of passion.
She did something crazy.
But the defense had a totally different version of events.
And so for the clueless juror just walking into this case, why would John O'Keefe's fellow cops want him dead?
It's a great question.
And if you look at the two criminal trials, because this went to trial twice, the first one was a hung jury.
The second one was a not guilty verdict on all of the charges dealing with ending John O'Keefe's life.
She was convicted of OUI operating under the influence.
But the big difference in the theme and theory of the defense case from trial one to trial two was this was a big conspiracy in trial one.
Everybody was involved.
The people inside the house ended his life.
The cops covered it up and there was a hung jury.
In the second trial, it's you can't prove anything.
This investigation was so bad.
These cops didn't do the interviews properly.
They didn't record them.
They didn't secure the scene properly.
This evidence doesn't make sense.
It looks like it could have been planted.
These guys have been terminated.
These text messages are disgusting how they talk about Karen Reed and other people.
And that was a not guilty verdict that they couldn't prove the case.
So two very different theories.
But when they were trying to prove that somebody inside the house killed John O'Keefe, it was based on jealousy because somebody inside the house had been texting flirtatious texts with Karen Reed, had kissed Karen Reed, and the defense was trying to use some videos in one of the bars as if these two guys were grappling and, you know, play fighting, but they were kind of getting in the mood to fight, I guess.
Some of it was, you know, a little bit of a reach, but they were trying to say that they looked over across the bar and pointed at John O'Keefe and told John O'Keefe to come to 34 Fairview because basically they wanted to fight.
And that was kind of their theme and theory of why somebody, what the motivation for somebody being wanting to kill John O'Keefe inside that house.
When would the defense have posited, if they did, that law enforcement broke her taillight to make it look like it was Karen Reed?
Because under this scenario, he goes inside the house, he gets murdered.
But we've already talked about how she took off.
She was there for a short time.
Then she left with that SUV.
Did they posit that her taillight was broken later when she drove back in the morning and found the body?
So this taillight, there was so much litigation about this taillight.
First, the defense says there was a video that shows she backed up very slowly into John O'Keefe's car at John O'Keefe's house.
And that's how she cracked her taillight and there was just a little crack in it.
Not when she hit John O'Keefe.
The prosecution says, no, it was totally damaged, destroyed, and they had in 46 different pieces.
But what made the taillight so interesting is it was towed to the Sally port where law enforcement is.
And when they tried to show when the SUV was dropped off, they showed an inverted video, a flipped video.
And they were like, hey, nobody even went near this taillight.
But then when you realize it's a flipped video, which they did in the middle of trial, then you realize there are people that walk by that taillight.
And when you look closer at the entire time it was in the Sally port, there are blips and cuts in and out and huge chunks of time missing where you don't see what's going on with that Lexus.
And the defense said, well, where are those chunks?
And the Commonwealth says, well, you know, it's motion activated, so it might not be there.
And then when they secured the crime scene the first day, they found a couple pieces of taillight in the yard, right, where John O'Keeffe's body was found.
But days and weeks and months went by and they continued to find taillight piece after taillight piece after taillight piece in this front yard that they didn't find the first time they went, the second time they went, the third time they went.
They just happened to be driving by and they'd find another piece of taillight, very sketchy, unlike just about every investigation you've probably ever seen.
Reasonable Doubt in Case00:14:58
So what does that imply?
So they're implying that they would go back to the yard, put the pieces in the yard after they busted it at the Sally port, and they would find it every day, more and more pieces of taillight that they didn't find the first day, the first week.
And they just kept planning pieces of taillight and going and getting it to make sure there are text messages that said, we're going to pin it on the girl and we're going to make sure that nobody in the house catches any crap.
We're going to make sure he's a Boston cop.
So we're not even going to look into him.
So there were all kinds of text messages that the defense made look like they were trying to protect the people in the house and make sure Karen Reed caught charges for this.
Oh, well, that sounds really bad.
I actually hadn't realized that there were explicit text messages saying we're going to pin it on the girl.
That's from cops.
That's from the people inside the house, from people inside the house, inside 34 Fairview.
Some of them are cops or related to cops.
And they said they would make comments like, oh, she did such a good job explaining this or make sure they're getting all their testimony straight to say, make sure we all say the guy never came in the house.
You know, they were making sure they were all staying consistent there.
They weren't necessarily being forthcoming with who was actually in the house that night.
It was just what happened, I don't think we'll ever know because the investigation was so bad.
And the lead investigator ended up getting terminated because he was found to have shown bias in this case, sending some of the most disgusting text messages you would ever think about a defendant that you are doing an investigation on, supposed to be protecting and serving and being an unbiased party, just doing your investigation and going where the evidence leads you.
I mean, these text messages were so horrible.
He had supervisors thumbs up in those text messages.
It was just a good old boys club that looked really, really horrible.
How bad were they?
The ones I heard about were he was saying like, I'm looking for nudes now on her phone.
That was about as racy as I heard, but I was listening to Dateline.
They don't tend to go to the fully R-rated place.
Yeah, I mean, they were talking about there are certain things that, you know, we would probably both condemn, but that were not necessarily as bad as some of the biased ones where, is she hot?
Yeah, she's kind of hot, but no ass.
She has, you know, this Boston accent or whatever.
They were objectifying her, which is one thing.
Doesn't necessarily mean they're going to pin some crime on her.
But then they started to say that we're going to make sure the owner of the house doesn't catch any shit.
He's a Boston cop.
That's a quote from the text messages.
And they would talk about how she had a balloon knot because she had some surgery or issues, gastro internal issues.
They would talk about how she had leaky poo.
They would talk about how she, you know, some of the text messages with the person that she was having the affair with were back and forth and racy and talking about John and how we need to hide this from John.
And then that person went to the police station that night at 2 a.m. and said he was moving cars around, but was instead moving bags back and forth between different cars, going inside the police station with his hood up and just sketchy thing on top of sketchy thing from all these law enforcement officers involved.
Wow.
So listening to you, Peter, I feel like you, you may believe that Karen Reed is actually innocent, factually innocent, not just found not guilty, which she was, but may in fact truly not have done this.
You know, it's really hard for me to say, like beyond a reasonable doubt, I don't think either side would ever be able to prove this.
And because of that, and because the investigation was so horrible, and I just don't feel like I can trust anything the cops say or did in this case, you'd never get a conviction.
This is a case I would never want to try.
I prosecuted cases.
I would never prosecute this case.
This is just not one you can, I would have felt ethically comfortable with putting in front of a jury.
On the civil side, will they be able to get enough to prove to a jury by the greater weight of the evidence, 51%?
I think it's possible, but it's just so hard to know what happened inside that house of 34 Fairview.
So while if I had to choose, is she factually innocent or is she factually guilty?
I would choose that she's factually innocent.
I'm just not overly confident of that.
I don't think I would be able to say that beyond a reasonable doubt because I really don't think anybody's ever going to be able to prove what happened that night.
Okay, let's talk about the civil suit.
So she was found not guilty.
First, there was a hung jury.
Then I guess we'll play it because there was an extraordinary moment on June 18th, 2025 when she was found not guilty.
And you could hear the crowd cheering outside.
She had quite a groundswell of support that had begun in the beginning of the first trial.
Here's that moment in SOP 53.
003.
What say is the defendant at the bar leaving the scene after accident resulting in deaths?
Defendant not guilty or guilty.
So say you, Mr. Foreman.
So say you all.
Juris, hearken your verdict as the court records.
And you upon your oath say the defendant on 001 is not guilty.
On 002 is guilty of operating under the influence of liquor.
And 003, not guilty.
Thank you.
All right.
Juris, everybody please be seated.
Jurors, we thank you for your service.
And the crowd's support for her, Peter, would be relevant because the prosecution witnesses and the family of the victim really objected and felt this colored their right to a fair trial.
Yeah, it's brutal to think about the victim's family in this.
The O'Keeffes and all of this, regardless of what happened and who did what inside 34 Fairview or law enforcement, they lost John O'Keefe.
And that family has gone through.
I don't know if you know any of the backstory of that family.
They have gone through more loss than most people would in their entire lives.
And, you know, to continue to feel that way and not get justice, they clearly believe Karen Reed is guilty.
They clearly believe the witnesses inside 34 Fairview.
They've all gotten a lot closer as this litigation has continued.
So I feel horribly for them.
But I think that the fault lies with law enforcement.
The fault lies with the prosecutors in how this case was prepared, how this case was investigated, how this case was litigated.
Some of the other text messages with the cops were basically guaranteeing that Karen Reid is guilty the next morning before an investigation had even taken place.
And then, you know, you have just that confirmation bias where you want to be correct and you're going to do everything you can to make sure you're correct.
That's what it felt like more to me than maybe a big conspiracy to cover it up and protect the people inside the house.
But I mean, we've seen cases where law enforcement gets locked in on somebody and they're going to make sure that's the right person.
And they start, you know, getting to know the victims.
And it's so sad.
And you want to bring justice and you think you're crossing a line for the right reason.
And it just blew up in their face in this case.
That item that I asked you about before.
So when she went back and she was looking for John's body or John and then stumbled upon his body, this is around 6 a.m.
And there was her friend, last name McCabe, and that person Googled hose, meaning how.
She used an S instead of a W in typing, how long to die in cold.
And that to me seems like it should have been known very clearly what time she Googled that.
Because if she Googled that before she knew, like her, like basically they were saying, well, I only did that, her defense to Karen saying that the people inside the house had killed him.
And look, here's evidence you knew he was dead.
You Googled that before I even came back.
But her defense was, I didn't Google that when I was alone inside the house before you came back.
I Googled that with you once we realized that you had hit him and he was in the snow and we were trying to figure out whether he was dead or alive, right?
Is that basically how this McCabe defended that?
But like, why isn't that just totally knowable?
What time she Googled that?
The whole case should rise or fall around that Google.
Yeah, the way you explained it is exactly how kind of the arguments went on both sides.
Was it at 2 o'clock in the morning or 6 o'clock in the morning?
Because that makes all the difference in the world because nobody knew he was dead at 2 o'clock in the morning.
So how are you possibly searching that unless you're the person that put him out in the cold and you're wondering how long it would take?
And yeah, it was, again, unlike any other case I've seen.
Celebrate said one time.
Actually, everybody agreed at one point that it showed that it was at 2.27 or something in the morning.
And then they got Celebrate involved.
Celebrate's like, well, that's not actually correct.
That's when the tab was open.
Celebrate.
Sorry?
What's Celebrate?
So Celebrite is like the program that they download the phone and it tells you, here's all the Google searches.
Here's the time each Google search was made.
And that report said 2.27 a.m.
And then there's another different program called Axiom that does basically the same thing.
That said 2.27 a.m. as well.
But then Celebrite had, well, maybe it was at 6.04.
Is 2.27 the time she opened the tab and she was searching some sports team, Hockamock Sports.
And when she was in bed at night going to bed at 2 o'clock in the morning and that tab was left open.
And then when she searched at 6 a.m., it was showing the time she originally opened the tab.
So there were competing experts saying the search was at 6 o'clock, the search was at 2 o'clock.
And once again, like so many other facts in this case, it felt impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which once again should be held against the prosecutor and not the defendant.
That's so frustrating.
As soon as I heard that piece of it, that somebody was Googling how long to die in cold and it happened at two in the morning before they found the body.
I was like, oh, the people inside the house definitely did it.
Karen Reed did not do this.
That's as good as evidence as you're ever going to get.
And then I read that thing you just said about how they were like, well, it might have been the time, 2 a.m. might have been the time she opened the internet for a search that came many hours later.
And as somebody who always has tons of tabs open on my phone, I can understand that happening very easily, that you just use a tab that's already open to search something many hours later.
So unfortunately, that's not as clear as we would like.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's like, I've handled trials that have Celebrate reports.
I'm sure you've seen other trials with Celebrate reports.
I've never seen them attacked like this as just a report that they put out as a time that seems very simple, is just absolutely, completely wrong.
And this is something I'm going to keep an eye out now: is this, are more defense attorneys going to attack this?
And how often does Axiom and Celebrite give completely different reports like they did in this case?
Because Axiom, if you run a report right now on her phone, still says the search was at 2.27 a.m.
Wow.
The other question about we spent some time in the taillight.
There was a question about whether this Lexus, it was an SUV, right?
Yes.
It was like whether this Lexus SUV, even at whatever it was, 24 miles an hour, let's say, whether it would, whether the taillight would break upon hitting a man and that this was, they couldn't replicate this, the defense, as they tried over and over and over to recreate the scene of this alleged incident that the prosecution said happened here to take his life.
That makes some sense to me too.
I don't know, like that a man made of flesh and bone might not be enough force to take out the taillight on an SUV backing up into him.
What was the back and forth around that?
Yeah.
And, you know, Megan, it's impossible to really fully dig into each one of these individual aspects in just an hour or six hours.
But if I showed you his body, so I'm a personal injury lawyer now.
I handle a lot of truck accidents, car accident case, pedestrian accident case.
So a person that gets hit by a car.
And we all kind of know what that looks like, especially if somebody gets hit at 24 miles an hour.
I have had clients die at 24 miles an hour getting hit by a car.
But do you know what they look like?
They have broken bones.
They've got internal bleeding.
They've got serious head injuries.
They've got injuries below the waist.
John O'Keefe had none of that.
No broken bones, no bruising anywhere on his body.
The back of his head hitting the ground basically or hitting a ledge was the cause of his death.
And one of the fatal flaws of the prosecutor's case the second time around is their expert showed an example of another pedestrian getting hit by a car and they passed away.
And they're saying, see, look, this can happen.
The problem is the report on that person had broken bones, internal damage, exactly what you would expect for somebody that got hit by a car.
And the ME, who was not hired by either side, could not determine that he died as a result of a car accident or that it was a homicide.
It was undetermined.
And she did not see evidence that this was a result of a car accident.
No experts did, really.
Gosh, that's so tricky.
We did pull some sound from a couple of the jurors after the not guilty verdict.
It's always fascinating to listen to them if they'll talk.
And this one you're going to hear first, it's the jury foreman, Charlie DeLoach.
Take a listen to SOT 55.
It was intense because before I got to the last not guilty, the crowd erupted.
It was already cheering like there was a basketball stadium outside.
I didn't take one note.
I didn't have to after the first witness.
It was just like, oh, okay.
I see where this is going.
During the trial, I just was waiting and just looking for that aha moment and there was none to make her guilty at all.
It was just always like, oh, that witness helped.
I was open-minded.
I was willing to listen to both sides if she hit him or if there is corruption.
And then the corruption outweighed her getting hit, her hitting him with the car.
The case was, it was leaning one way and it kept on leaning one way up until the very end.
One more to play for you.
This is juror number four speaking out.
Jason, the jury found Karen Reed not guilty on murder and manslaughter.
Was it because they had reasonable doubt or because they thought she was innocent?
So I think for the jurors, there's a mix of some people thinks that she was definitely innocent.
And the other people, there was a lot of reasonable doubt, at least to where you can't, we didn't want to convict her.
I mean, I can only speak for myself.
I think that she was innocent.
It's hard to tell exactly what people think deep down.
There was a lot of things thrown at us.
Do I think it was a corrupt police investigation?
I don't know.
There's no way for me to know.
I can't, I wasn't there.
Burden Shift Confuses Jury00:11:31
There was just, there was holes in the case that left for reasonable doubt.
I think they could have checked some boxes or, you know, done some things differently.
But do I know that they were corrupt?
Absolutely not.
I don't know that there was any corruption going on, but do I know that there wasn't enough proof or evidence secured by the police to convict Karen Reed?
Absolutely.
There's no, there was not.
Very interesting, Peter, that he's saying that we were between actual innocence and just not guilty, but did not speak of any holdouts saying, no, I think she did it.
Yeah, and I think that really goes to the investigation and the way that this case was presented.
There was holes everywhere.
No matter where you want to look, if you want to compare the experts, if you want to compare the medicine, if you want to compare the car data, if you want to compare the credibility of witnesses, because that was a really big thing.
If you noticed, juror number one, the four person said, after the first witness, I was like, oh, wow.
And he still kept an open mind.
But so much of these trials is the jury looking at each individual witness and judging their credibility.
Are they telling the truth?
Are they being honest?
Do they have something to gain or lose by this testimony?
Does it make sense in the context of the rest of the testimony?
And I just think that their credibility was hurt throughout the trial by the cross-examination and the other evidence presented by the defense.
Do we know who the first witness was?
It would have been for the prosecution since they go first.
And my understanding is when they went back for the second trial after the first jury was hung, they eliminated some of their more problematic cops, like the guy who was like, let's see the nudes and referring to Karen Reed in those disgusting terms you mentioned.
He did not get called by the prosecution a second time.
So they learned.
So I would imagine they would have, you know, you always want to start with your best foot forward, your best witness.
Yeah, I think they started with an EMS person who I actually like.
I thought he was a good witness.
I thought he was trying his best.
He made a mistake.
I believe it's him that said John O'Keefe had like a really big jacket on and he didn't.
He just had like a short sleeve or a long sleeve thin shirt that you probably wouldn't be wearing out in the snow.
But I don't know.
Boston guys are probably tougher than me in the snow.
But I think that's what the defense was trying to.
I was in Colorado, almost died from the snow there.
But so, you know, so they were trying to say, you know, you didn't even remember those details.
So, and they were trying to say that that shirt would be more likely something that he had on inside versus outside.
And they dragged him outside and threw it.
So there were all these little details, but I didn't think the first witness was that bad, honestly.
And the way that the prosecution pared down the case from trial one to trial two was amazing.
They got a special prosecutor who's a big criminal defense lawyer there that they brought in specifically just to hire this case.
Nobody from within their office.
I'm much better at his presentation.
But I think he missed the boat a lot with the way he presented the case.
And one thing he did was he did not call Proctor, who was who you were referencing before, who was the lead investigator in the case.
They tried to pretend like he didn't exist.
And you can imagine the defense did not like that.
And they did not let that go quietly.
And they highlighted his name and said his name and besmirched his name as much as they possibly could.
And they didn't call him either.
So he was kind of like the boogeyman.
Why wouldn't they call the lead investigator?
You really want to side with them?
You can really trust this investigation.
They don't even trust their own guy.
It was not a good one.
That's the only way to do it.
No, one would think you'd call him.
You'd just front it all.
You'd have him do a full Maya culpa.
I was a douchebag.
I've been fired.
So humiliated.
My wife, you know, she's forgiven me, but I just was acting like an ass.
But it doesn't mean I was corrupt.
I certainly wouldn't corrupt a murder investigation.
But like to not call him, I mean, hindsight's 2020.
Obviously, I'm sitting here in this comfort of my studio, not like the prosecutor who actually had to get this done.
Okay, so now let's talk about the civil suits because this is pretty extraordinary.
It's not extraordinary to me that John O'Keefe's family is now filing a wrongful death lawsuit against Karen Reed.
That happens, you know, not infrequently.
It's like what Ron Goldman did to OJ after he was acquitted.
You do have to testify as the defendant in this posture once you've already been acquitted and you get sued civilly.
So like he is going to have to, she is going to have to testify in this case.
But what's extraordinary is there's there's lawsuits going the other way against her by whom exactly.
So there are lawsuits against her and the bars by the O'Keeffe family for wrongful death.
Like you said, that's normal, different burden, civil court versus criminal.
I'm sorry, I meant to say the opposite.
Lawsuit by her against others.
Yes.
Which is weird.
So she has also filed a lawsuit against the aforementioned Michael Proctor, who is the lead investigator on the case.
Yuri Buchanick, who is another trooper who was Proctor's supervisor, and then everybody's supervisor, Brian Tolle, another law enforcement officer.
And then the five people in the house that she basically thinks are responsible for John O'Keefe's death.
Brian Albert, Nicole Albert, Jennifer McCabe, Matthew McCabe, and Brian Higgins.
Higgins is who she had the affair with.
The Alberts are who owned the house.
McCabe is who searched House Long to Die in the Cold.
So those are the people that she's suing for basically conspiring to pin this on her, violating her rights, civil conspiracy, trying to pin it on her and literally ruining her life.
That's crazy.
You never see that.
Never.
Because let's face it, nine times out of 10, more than that, the defendant actually is guilty, maybe got off on a technicality like OJ or jury nullification in OJ's case.
And the last thing they want to do is go back into court with anybody.
You know, it's like, they know they kind of got away with it.
It's like, okay, I'm out of here.
But she is not in that posture.
She's like, let's go.
Now, she also appears to need money because I'll tell you, we invited her to come in this show and she wanted tens of thousands of dollars.
And we told her, goodbye, madam.
We're news people.
We don't pay for news, which does make me question how she wound up talking to Dateline and others because NBC is also not supposed to pay for news.
In any event, she clearly is hard up for cash.
So maybe it's just a money grab.
I don't know.
What do you make of it?
There was a lot there.
There was a lot there.
First, I disagree with some of your percentages, but we don't need to get into that.
How many of them are actually not guilty?
But I do agree with you that most of the time, once it's over, they want it to be done and they don't want to keep rehashing this.
Also, millions, millions of dollars in attorneys' fees and costs.
She sold her house.
She's lost everything.
She was unhireable for all of these years.
So I'm sure she is in need of money.
And I think she's entitled to get whatever money she deserves in the civil process.
It doesn't bother me one bit.
I don't know her personally.
I've never spoken to her.
So, you know, this is nothing like I know what kind of person she is or anything like that.
But if this is true, what she's alleging, then she does deserve to be compensated for it, in my opinion.
And I agree with you that she is standing on business basically at this point saying, I have the truth because she's been threatened and is going to be sued if it hasn't happened already for defamation, saying that she's defaming all these people, lying about them, creating this false narrative, which was one of the allegations in the O'Keefe complaint in the wrongful death complaint.
They also sued her for intentional infliction of emotional distress, saying she created this false narrative and pushed it out there in the media and that they were injured because of that and she caused them damages.
So truth is an ultimate defense to defamation.
And that's what she's standing on, that she has the truth.
She can prove it.
You know, she's got some gumption.
She's not afraid.
Her lawyers are not afraid.
They're sticking with her and pushing forward on this case.
And sometimes it's a money grab either way, right?
Like when you have a criminal case that you lost as a victim, I know you're not technically a party, but and you still go forward on a civil litigation, you could still get a settlement.
Often that's what would happen.
You wouldn't even go to trial.
And from her perspective, too, if she just needed money and she's going to file this lawsuit and just get some money out of it, fine.
It doesn't seem like that's what it is.
And if this ends in a settlement, I'm going to assume it was a huge amount of money.
So have those parties that she's now suing cross-filed against her for defamation yet?
Because right now, I thought the only lawsuit she was actively facing was John O'Keefe's family suing her for wrongful death.
But have those other parties that she's now messing with cross-filed against her for defamation yet?
They have come out and said publicly that they are going to file defamation cases.
But the way it works in these civil courts is she files a complaint.
They file their motions to dismiss first.
And then if they can't dismiss her lawsuit, then they would file their answer and their counterclaims.
So that's coming in due time.
I would expect that it is going to come, though.
It's so interesting because the burden of proof is so much lower in civil court, as you point out, 51% more likely than not.
And now it's really on.
You know, in a way, we heard from the jurors, it was kind of easy for them because they were like, my God, no, they haven't come anywhere near this very high standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.
But the prosecution may have come near 51% more likely, 49% less likely that she did it or the other way.
Could go the other way.
I don't know.
Like, how do you see this going?
What's really interesting is, you know, you mentioned what you would do if you were Proctor.
You put them on the stand, you just eat it, right?
They did that the first trial.
They also had a much more boring prosecutor, but just kind of a normal prosecutor who put everybody up there and was like, tell us what happened.
They repeated the same facts a million times.
And while reports from that jury room where they were all not guilty on second degree murder, there was a split and the majority thought that she was guilty of manslaughter or at least taking his life in some sort of way with the car in that first round of trial.
But it ended up being a split verdict and a hung jury.
And everybody changed their way.
And I think the defense was much more successful round two.
I think they would have won regardless round two because they didn't try to prove the conspiracy within that criminal trial, which can be very difficult.
It can kind of burden shift and confuse the jury.
But just like you're saying, there were some jurors that thought that she did hit him with her car throughout the first trial.
So there's obviously the possibility that that could be true proven in a civil court, but you would be amazed and appalled at the discovery that was not turned over in the first trial that was turned over before the second trial, at the discovery they're going to be able to get in this civil litigation that they did not get their hands on in the criminal case.
I think there are going to be so many added factors and facts during this civil process that I'm not sure we know exactly what it's going to look like yet.
You know how much my family and I love our dogs.
Yes, even sweet Strudwick.
I cannot imagine life without them.
They have a great life, but some dogs are not this lucky.
And that's why I'm so glad to tell you about Delta Rescue, the largest no-kill, care-for-life animal sanctuary in the world.
They have rescued thousands of dogs, plus cats and horses, too.
They provide all the animals with shelter, safety, and most of all, love.
And they've been doing it for more than 45 years now.
Delta Rescue relies solely on contributions to stay open, and giving can bring tax benefits to you too.
Speak with your estate planner about how you can grow your estate while helping animals in need.
And check out the estate planning tab on their website to learn more.
We love our thunder and Strudwick, but would like other dogs who need love to find it too.
Visit deltarescue.org today to learn more.
Delta Rescue Animal Sanctuary00:10:04
That's deltarescue.org.
Ta steget inn i en annen verden med Storytel.
Kriblende romantikk, neilebitende trillere eller spennende barnebøker.
Fyll vinteren med lydbøker som gjør mørket litt lysere.
Prøv Storytel til 50% i tre måneder.
Livet er bedre med en god fortelling.
Her er et tips fra investeringsrådgiverne i Nordea.
De kundene som gjør ønsker til en strategi for mer ut av sparepengene sine.
Kom i gang med din strategi for 2026 på Nordea.no Sparavtale.
They spoke out after the not guilty verdict in June.
Let's take a listen to what they sounded like then, SAP 56.
People turned this thing into a tailgate party, it looked like some days.
Board games, cornhole, cookouts.
This is a guy that was murdered.
And it's atrocious for that family.
What they've done is they've dehumanized us to the sense where we're not real people.
We're almost like caricatures.
We're just we're pawns.
Have each of you been called murderers?
Like actual murderers?
Oh, yeah, on a daily basis.
Anybody who's touched this case has been called a murderer at some point.
And anyone who's friends with us support cop killers.
The name Turtle Boy comes up a lot when you talk about what was happening outside the courthouse and the generation of a groundswell of opposition to the people you just saw on camera there, the people who were inside the house, including cops and their wives and so on.
Who's Turtle Boy?
So first, just to comment on what they're saying, I think it's horrible that people's lives get ruined and people get accused of things like this with very little evidence and You know, go after their kids and their livelihoods and things like that.
I also think that there are some fair criticisms like the Alberts who lived in the house never came outside the entire morning when there were all these EMS people and witnesses and everything outside, and their friend is dead on their front lawn.
They never come outside to try to help.
They both have emergency, or I know he has emergency training, was former law enforcement.
That stuff is really strange to me and hard for me to get over.
And the way they spoke about John O'Keefe, somebody that was supposed to be their friend, it is, there's just so much strange stuff going on.
Turtleboy is a journalist who looked into this case, found witnesses nobody knew about, like a tow truck or a plow driver that potentially had evidence that could help Karen Reed, that held everybody's feet to the fire, that was very loud with a megaphone about it, that had his specific crass way of doing things.
And, you know, he's almost like a caricature where he says the most hyperbolic thing he possibly can.
He calls everybody every name in the book.
He uses language that, you know, would make sailors probably turn red.
And he does it a certain way.
And a lot of people don't like it.
And he has caught some witness intimidation charges because the statute is really kind of weird there in Massachusetts with that.
But he has uncovered so much evidence that people did not know about.
And people know about Karen Reed's case and exponentially more because of Turtle Boy.
So it's kind of like a love him or hate him.
He is who he is type of scenario for him.
What you're saying is, God forbid I ever get accused of a crime.
I want Turtle Boy on my side.
I would say he's a pretty good ally to have until he's not.
Okay, okay.
And he was at both trials.
Yeah, I think he's been at everything, you know, and his whole case people are now following as well, his criminal charges that are going on.
I've actually gotten to know his lawyer, one of his lawyers a little bit, Mark Betterow, who's an amazing lawyer, awesome guy.
I've talked about this Karen Reed case a lot with him.
So I know he's got great representation and they've already won a couple of the criminal cases that have been dropped because the DA and the law enforcement there just can't get out of their own way.
They have all these prosecutors that are conflicted off cases.
Nobody could end up prosecuting one of Turtle Boy's cases, so they just had to drop it.
So it's a whole other separate saga himself.
So if you're teaching this class in a law school, Peter, what would you say this case is about?
How not to investigate and prosecute a case.
I think I could do a lot of sessions on the appropriate way, what ethics look like, even if you think somebody is guilty.
If you can't put the lead investigator on and you can't put half your evidence on because you don't trust it yourself, maybe you shouldn't be prosecuting this case and not staking your career and risking it all on one case and realizing mistakes will be made in life and we just have to let the chips fall where they may.
As a criminal defense attorney, you learn to fight, to dig, even if the judge sometimes can be very difficult, even when it seems like everything is stacked against you.
It's also a lesson in PR, like the way the defense attorneys have done their interviews and set up Karen Reed to do interviews in ways that I disagree with.
I would never have had Karen Reed do any interviews.
They have.
They said they welcomed them being played at trial.
So it could be some lessons on that.
Some great lessons on cross-examination, some great lessons on civil litigation, how to try to get federal documents where you request them from the federal government and then try to show them as unbiased third party, bringing experts into the case, investigating an investigation.
So many interesting nuances to this case that law students could learn from.
But you don't always want to learn from the exception, right?
Well, you know, what you said about the star witness reminded me of something.
When I was a young lawyer, I tried a civil case in upstate New York, and we were so clearly in the right on this civil case.
It was just so obvious that our guy was telling the truth and the other party wasn't because we knew we knew our star witness very, very well and we knew his entire employment history and all this stuff.
But the judge, the judges always try to push a settlement in a civil case.
And in a criminal case, too, they try to push you to take a plea if you're at all open-minded so they don't have to try it to verdict.
It's much better resolution where it's agreed to.
And he was looking at the other side, pointing out like all the evidence that they were in the wrong.
And then I said, What's he going to say when he looks at us?
Because we're in the catbird seat here.
And he said, How do you like your lead witness?
And the judge was exactly right because even though the facts were totally on our side, our star witness was not likable.
And the judge knew it.
And we stuck by him.
Of course, we were like, oh, he's good.
He's fine.
He wasn't.
The jury didn't like him.
And they found against us.
We got it reversed on appeal.
But he wasn't wrong.
Like having a bad chief witness can make or break your case.
And in this case, the prosecution had, it sounds like a terrible chief witness, whether it was just juvenile talk on those texts or not.
The reason he got fired is because he cost them this investigation.
Yeah.
And it wasn't just the text message.
There's just so much more than that.
But, you know, the number one thing is probably the roles of each job of a lawyer because you just described the civil situation.
And as a criminal defense lawyer, the way you want to look at it and what your duty is and how you try a case, how you handle a case, all of those roles are incredibly different than a prosecutor who is only there to find truth and justice.
And sometimes that's making hard decisions and letting people you think might be guilty go and not prosecuting those cases because you have all the leverage, all the power to ruin people's lives.
There's very little repercussion when you lose.
And that's a very big responsibility and power that you have as a prosecutor that makes that job very different than a criminal defense lawyer or any type of civil lawyer.
And that to me was where this case could have been handled more appropriately.
It's crazy to me that there was no ring camera on anybody's door.
You know, like everything's on cam these days.
Yeah.
I mean, there was some talk that there was a ring camera and then there wasn't.
And maybe somebody accessed the ring camera and maybe they didn't.
And somebody across the street.
Or even on your car.
Doesn't your car have one of those things?
Like there's a camera on my car now that shows me what's happening behind me.
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's cameras all over the place.
But somehow during that period of time, there was no camera on any house in that neighborhood that could have caught it or even back at John O'Keefe's house.
There was some ring camera, but not that could show anything that we needed to show to prove the accident.
This case is a mystery.
I'd love to know the truth.
You know, it's like usually I hear these stories and I'm like, I have a pretty good idea what happened.
This one, I remain uncertain, really don't know.
And I mean, I don't think I haven't been persuaded by anything I've heard that she intentionally killed him.
I am open-minded to the theory that in her anger, she backed up too quickly and ran him over and either didn't realize it or did and didn't care.
But I haven't heard anything that would lead me to believe she's an intentional murderer who would just take out her anger by killing somebody.
That was just a mistake.
For them to even go for that was such a mistake.
They were never going to be able to prove anything like that.
And I'll tell you the number one thing.
And again, it's probably based on my experience, what I do so much of seeing injuries in these pedestrian accidents.
It is just so far from anything I think is remotely scientifically or physically possible for that Lexus to just break on the taillight, not have any other dents and damages on it.
And then the injuries that corresponded to John O'Keefe.
And we didn't even get into the bite marks versus scratch marks or any of that.
But the injuries have attacked him.
Yeah.
They just, they just don't line up to me, the injuries, for it to be a car accident the way that the prosecution described.
And that's so hard for me to get over.
Wow.
All right.
Thank you so much, Peter Drago.
So good to see you again.
This has been the most clear, easy to understand explanation of a very complex case I think I've ever heard.
It makes me miss you all the more.
Thanks for being back with us.
Thanks for having me.
Every once in a while, something comes along that reminds us of the power of storytelling: something bold, meaningful, and grounded in faith.
Pendragon Cycle Premiere Date00:02:31
The Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin, is a new seven-part series from the Daily Wire based on the novels by Stephen R. Lawhead.
In the series, as pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's faith lights the spark of a civilization reborn.
It's a story about courage, order, and moral clarity.
It's the kind of story Hollywood does not make anymore.
Through blood, faith, and sacrifice, Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings.
The Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin, premieres exclusively on Daily Wire Plus on January 22nd, 2026.
Watch the new trailer now at pen dragonseries.com.
Hey, everyone, it's me, Megan Kelly.
I've got some exciting news.
I now have my very own channel on SiriusXM.
It's called the Megan Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth unfiltered with no agenda and no apologies.
Along with the Megan Kelly show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Wake Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Jushinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.
It's bold, no BS news only on the Megan Kelly channel, SiriusXM 111, and on the Sirius XM app.
Thanks for joining me today.
Coming up tomorrow, Maureen Callahan, host of The Nerve, right here on the MK Media Network, is here on a horrifying serial killer.
I did not know anything about this guy, but Maureen has encyclopedic knowledge and she will walk us through the case of Israel Keys.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
Fiken presenter at Super Inkle Transcast Programme.