A Canton Cop Conspiracy
Meet the characters of the Karen Read trial
Jury selection begins in Dedham, Massachusetts tomorrow morning for the second trial of Karen Read, a Boston equity analyst and adjunct professor accused of killing her boyfriend, Boston cop John O’Keeefe, in Canton, Massachusetts in January 2022. As the prosecution’s theory goes, Read ran over O’Keefe with her Lexus SUV in a drunken fit of rage.
The alternate version of this story: A ring of corrupt keystone cops initiated a drunken brawl against O’Keefe that night to settle a score. Brian Higgins, a fellow Boston cop jealous of Read’s relationship with O’Keefe, lured O’Keefe to the Canton home of Brian Albert (yep, you guessed it—another Boston cop) under the pretense of continuing the party after closing time at their local watering hole, The Waterfall Bar & Grille.
The real plan was for Higgins to deliver a beating upon O’Keefe. Chloe, Albert’s vicious German Shepherd with priors, got involved. So did Albert’s equally savage then-eighteen-year-old nephew, Colin Albert, spotted after the night in question with black and blue knuckles to match the shiners around O’Keefe’s eyes.
They took the roughhousing too far, and Read discovered O’Keefe dead in the snow at 6:10 a.m. on January 29, 2022 in Albert’s front yard. The cops needed to blame O’Keefe’s death on someone. As a Canton outsider absent from the scene but present earlier that night, Read became their scapegoat.
The second account is the one I’d stake my life on.
Watching high-profile, livestreamed trials is my idea of a good time. So in June 2024, when I heard about a criminal defense trial featuring a cop frame-up and a beautiful bonanza of Boston dialects, I immediately checked out YouTube’s Law and Crime channel, where I remained glued throughout Read’s first trial.
I’ve since talked incessantly about this case, and I have wanted to write about it. But I wrote very little, due to overwhelm from the sheer volume of content I could share about this dramedy’s cast of characters:
Judge Beverly Cannone, or “Aunt Bev” as many livestream commenters call her—the judge who declined to recuse herself from presiding over this trial, despite her clear bias, as revealed in the pre-trial unearthing of this comment from Sean McCabe, Jennifer McCabe’s brother-in-law (see below on Jen), to a blogger who’d asked whether Sean McCabe was connected to the judge: "Auntie Bev??? Whose seaside cottage do you think we're gonna bury your corpse under?" Aunt Bev is also the one who sustained almost every objection the prosecution made over the thirty-one-day trial, and who didn’t bother to mention to anyone when she dismissed the case over the hung jury, declaring a mistrial, that the jurors had dropped two of the four charges against Read.
Trooper Proctor (you bet your bottom dollar I meant for you to read that in a Boston accent), the brazenly partial officer assigned to investigate O’Keefe’s death, who texted his high school buddies just sixteen hours into his investigation that Albert would not be in trouble for the dead body in front of his house because “he’s a Boston cop, too” and that “we’re gonna’ pin it on the girl.” I felt immense joy watching Proctor turn purple during his cross-examination when, at the command of brilliant defense attorney Alan Jackson, Proctor had to read these texts in front of Read and the jury, along with one in which he’d referred to Read as a “whack job c-word” (except he typed out the word), and yet another he’d sent to his higher-ups on the force, stating that he’d been searching Read’s phone, as one might assume his investigation would require him to do. “No nudes yet,” he’d added.
Jennifer McCabe—the sister of Nicole Albert, as in Brian Albert’s wife—who Googled “hos long to die in cold” (her typo, not mine) in the middle of the night in question, just a few hours before Read found O’Keefe’s body dead in the cold. Her testimony sounded every bit the way her face looks in this photo. Jackson was only a few questions in with McCabe before I’d armchair-diagnosed her with Borderline Personality Disorder.
I could go on. This case is replete with crazies and the people who cover up their misdeeds.
With the imminency of Read’s second trial, I’m excited to dive in, covering the madness in real time. Stay tuned.