The sound of screaming coming through the phone at 4:53 a.m. was so loud that the woman’s husband shot up in bed and one of her children rushed into the room.
On the other end of the line was Karen Read, the former financial analyst accused of murdering boyfriend John O’Keefe. Read, 45, is on trial in Massachusetts for the second time for the death of the Boston police officer after a trial in 2024 ended in a hung jury.
Jennifer McCabe, a key witness in Read’s defense and a friend of the couple, delivered long, emotional testimony on Tuesday about the early morning phone call as well as discovering O’Keefe’s body in the snow later that day in January 2022.
McCabe’s tearful testimony is the latest in the case as it stretches into a second week. Jurors also heard from a digital intelligence expert on Tuesday who testified about what cell phone data shows about where O’Keefe, 46, spent his final hours and when he was first found.
The case, which began when O’Keefe’s body was discovered January 29, 2022, has turned into a years long whodunnit legal saga that has garnered massive intrigue from true-crime fans across the country, spurring an array of podcasts, movies and television shows.
Prosecutors allege that Read, a 45-year-old financial analyst, purposefully ran over O’Keefe, a 46-year-old cop, with her SUV while the two were drunk and fighting. They say she then left his unconscious body lying in the snow and cold in front of a Boston police officer’s house.
But Read’s defense has long argued that she was framed for the murder by law enforcement officers, paramedics and others. They floated a theory during Read’s first trial that O’Keefe entered the other Boston cop’s house, where he was beaten by his colleagues, attacked by a dog, and then dumped in the snow.
McCabe is the sister-in-law of one of the officers, Brian Albert. She also was out drinking with Read and O’Keefe that evening.
Experts have told USA TODAY that witness testimony appears to be setting the stage for elaborate arguments down the road.
More: Karen Read murder trial: Will the Supreme Court weigh in?
Evidence presented to jurors thus far includes detailed phone location data of O’Keefe’s whereabouts the night he died, which prosecutors say shows he never enter the cop’s home; texts between O’Keefe and Read that revealed a fraying relationship; and blood tests revealing that Read was intoxicated when O’Keefe died.
The trial is expected to last up to eight weeks. Here are the latest updates from Day 6 of the trial.
‘I couldn’t believe that was him lying there’
Read had raised concern several times the day O’Keefe’s body was found that she hit him the night before, McCabe said. Read, she said, asked to go to the home where his body would be discovered.
About 20 or 30 yards before they drove up to the house, McCabe said Read asked her and Kerry Roberts, another friend, whether O’Keefe was being unfaithful in their relationship. As they approached the house, Read began screaming “something to the effect of there he is” McCabe said, but she told prosecutors that she and Roberts could only see snow coming down out of their windows.
Read yelled “stop,” McCabe said.
But it wasn’t until McCabe got out of the car and walked over to a patch of the lawn where Read and Roberts had congregated that she saw O’Keefe. Roberts, she said, was removing snow from his face.
“I couldn’t believe that was him lying there,” she said, crying. “It looked like him but just frozen.”
“I think I knew in that moment that John, you know, was dead,” she told Prosecutor Hank Brennan. McCabe then said she called 911 as she walked to the back of her car to look for blankets and towels. She tried to give O’Keefe compressions until police came, she said.
Her testimony is expected to resume April 30.
Crucial witness Jennifer McCabe takes the stand, describes hearing Read scream
Brennan began questioning McCabe a little after 2 p.m. Much of her early testimony revolved around her relationship to O’Keefe and Read, as well as the events that took place the evening before O’Keefe was found dead.
McCabe said she was happy to see both Read and O’Keefe when they joined her and other friends, including Brian Albert, at the Waterfall Bar and Grille in Canton, Massachusetts, early in the evening. She said she knew Read through O’Keefe and enjoyed spending time with her.
The group decided to go to Albert’s house around midnight to continue the evening, McCabe said. She told Brennan that O’Keefe had texted her sometime between 12:15 a.m. and 12:30 a.m., and she called him back on her drive to Albert’s to relay the plan.
She described the mood at Albert’s house as “celebratory.” McCabe said she looked out the glass front door several times during the evening and saw a dark SUV with break lights on in different locations each time: at one point straight in front of the house, then near a flagpole in the lawn, then further up the road. He didn’t answer.
McCabe told Brennan that she texted O’Keefe as she was looking at the car, first “here?” and then when she saw it near the flagpole, she told him he could pull behind her car. The snow by that point had picked up, she said.
By about 1:30 a.m. she and others in the house began to leave. The conditions outside were windy and wet and McCabe said she ran to her car with her husband and two other women. As they pulled out, they were talking, joking and laughing, she said.
Then, at 4:53 a.m., she said she got a call from O’Keefe’s niece. McCabe said she could hear Read screaming in the background. Read told her that O’Keefe hadn’t returned home, they had gotten into a fight and she thought she had left him at the Waterfall.
By 5:30 a.m. McCabe said Read was in front of her house screaming and they planned to go search for O’Keefe together. She said Read’s taillight was broken. At that point, one of O’Keefe’s other friends, Kerry Roberts, was also at McCabe’s house. She told jurors she hadn’t spent much time with Roberts up to that point. The road conditions were awful, she said.
Defense questions phone expert on O’Keefe call history, pivotal Google search
Defense attorney Robert Alessi questioned witness Ian Whiffin, a digital intelligence expert with the company Cellebrite, about a call O’Keefe received from his friend Jeffinger McCabe at 12:29 a.m. Whiffin said O’Keefe answered the call, and then confirmed that two calls from Read at 12:33 a.m. and 12:34 a.m. went unanswered.
Alessi asked Whiffin to confirm that one version of software showed a timestamp around 2 a.m. for McCabe’s Google search “hos (sic) long to die in cold.” Wiffin told jurors April 28 that forensic data showed the Google search occurred at about 6:23 a.m.
But when questioned by prosecutors, Whiffin gave a live demonstration of why, according to his analysis, the 2 a.m. timestamp is inaccurate. Whiffin opened a new tab in Google and made a search, while the phone was connected to forensic data software. He then refreshed the tab several times and minimized it. He said that, despite those actions, the data software only showed “the timestamp that the tab was created.
He said the process showed that the “last viewed time” the defense team was looking at to determine the time of McCabe’s Google search was “unreliable.”
O’Keefe’s location under scrutiny
Prosecutors and defense attorneys have spent hours questioning Whiffin in what appears to be an attempt to show whether O’Keefe entered the home of a Boston police officer after he exited Read’s car the night before he died.
Whiffin previously walked jurors through his analysis of O’Keefe’s location by comparing data sources from his Iphone, including from the Waze navigation app, the health app and the battery temperature.
Together, Whiffin said the information indicated to a reasonable degree of certainty that O’Keefe never entered 34 Fairview after he left Read’s car. He said the home phone remained in the area near the flagpole on the front lawn, from around 12:24 a.m. to when O’Keefe was found around 6 a.m.
Upon cross-examination on April 29, Whiffin said it was “possible” that O’Keefe’s phone moved toward the home at 12:31 a.m. Defense attorney Robert Alessi asked whether the low accuracy of the location data could be a result of the phone entering a building, such as a house. Whiffin responded: “correct.”
Alessi later questioned Whiffin’s testimony about O’Keefe’s phone battery. Whiffin previously testified that the battery temperature dropped from around 80 degrees when it reached the home at 34 Fairview to an eventual low of 37 degrees hours later.
When he conducted an experiment putting a phone’s battery in the freezer, the temperature dropped by around 50 degrees in 15 minutes. He also placed a phone outside in temperatures of about 33 degrees. The battery dropped from 66 degrees to about 35 degrees in the same amount of time.
Alessia said there was a “much more dramatic drop in temperature” during the experiments than what occurred on O’Keefe’s phone.
Prosecutor Hank Brennan upon redirect asked Whiffin to explain why he completed the experiments on the phone battery. Whiffin said the tests were designed to confirm that the phone’s battery reacted to the temperature change, but that the exact temperature didn’t matter as much.
How to watch Karen Read trial
CourtTV has been covering the case against Read and the criminal investigation since early 2022, when O’Keefe’s body was found outside a Canton home.
You can watch CourtTV’s live feed of the Read trial proceedings from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts. Proceedings begin at 9 a.m. ET
