Karen Read Retrial, Week 6.5: The Defense Gets its Turn and Produces the Wildest Testimony of the Entire Trial

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It's an undeniable truth scripted television is more entertaining than watching events playing out in real time. A writer can keep the drama going, put interesting words in the character's mouths, dial up the conflict. Whereas real people can uninteresting and real life can be boring. That's why humans invented stories in the first place. To break the monotony of sitting in cave hearing the elders talk about the Woolly Mammoth they killed for the thousandth time. Stop me if you've heard this before, but even Reality TV isn't Reality. If it were, there'd be a lot of Real Housewives obsessing over their makeup and hair extensions and a lot less throwing Chardonnay in each other's faces. 

Then, there's the Karen Read trials. Both The Original Series and The Next Generation, which this week has entered the defense's presentation. If you didn't know better, you'd think these were scripted. There are times when it's like something out of Aaron Sorkin's MacBook Pro. I mean, court proceedings just don't play out like this. Ordinary people are, as the term implies, ordinary. Lawyers can be tedious. Civilian witnesses tend to be introverted. Law enforcement are trained to be fact-based and dull on the stand. But this retrial can't go three consecutive witnesses without at least two of them being weird, eccentric, argumentative, or outright hostile to whoever is cross-examining them. Again, just like it's all scripted. 

So as the defense took the ball for the second half of this particular game, they called in their expert in retrieving data from a motor vehicle to refute what the Cmmonwealth's expert in retrieving data from a motor vehicle had previously said. Which, as exciting and compelling as that might sound, wasn't exactly the edge-of-your-seat, high-octane adrenaline rush you might think. 

They then called one of Michael Proctor's friends. Why him, and not the disgraced former State Trooper and lead investigator himself? Honestly, I haven't the first clue. Some of the attorneys doing LawTube videos every day seem split on whether it's a good strategy. Some think it would humanize Proctor to the jury to have this out-of-work jerk explain how texting his buddies he was looking for noodz on Read's phone, calling her a "cunt" and telling them about her "leaky balloon knot" that "leaks poo" cost him his career. Maybe they're right and it's more effective to leave him as this unseen, shadowy menace jurors can only imagine. The Sauron of the Mass. State Police. Anyway, the defense called Proctor's civilian friend to confirm that yes, he was on the text thread when the Trooper said terrible things about the defendant. But didn't have him read any of them. How and when the jury is going to hear those words read out loud, the way Proctor was forced to at this exact same point in the first trial:

… is yet to be determined. All we can do is trust that everything is proceeding according to Read's team's grand plan. 

And this is when that plan involved taking things to the next level. With perhaps, all things considered, the most compelling witness in either trial. Pound-for-pound my favorite, former Canton Police Officer, now with the Boston PD, Kelly Dever. If Topps printed a set of Karen Read Trial Trading Cards, I'd complete the whole set of hers. Dever had me at the "Hello" that was her absolutely dripping with sarcasm every time Alan Jackson mispronounced her name as "Deever":

The Anne Hathaway looks. Aubrey Plaza attitude. The utter contempt for the whole proceeding. To quote the great April Ludgate herself:

Giphy Images.

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So here's the background on Kelly Dever. She was working at the Canton Police station when John O'Keefe was killed. She's the dispatcher in this clip where she gives the address as "32 Fairview" (O'Keefe was found outside 34) to Officer Paul Gallagher, who replies, "It's not even his house. Perfect!":

Making most of us assume the "his" he's referring to is Brian Albert, of the Boston PD, who owned the property O'Keefe died at.

So a year and a half went by. And on August 9, 2023, two FBI agents asked her about that day. She told them that she could see the monitor of the security camera in the sally port that Read's Lexus SVU was towed to. And that ATF Agent Brian Higgins (he of the excruciating texts with Read and the destroyed phone) was in there with Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz "for a wildly long time." 

This is huge for several reasons. First, because Higgins was at least a witness in the case, since he was at the Waterfall Bar drinking with O'Keefe and Read, and believed by many to have been at 34 Fairview. And is considered by many more to at the very least be a Person of Interest in the case. But here we had a police officer on duty who watched Higgins have full access to what is alleged to be Read's murder weapon. Just him and Dever's boss at the time, who is excused from testifying due to a death in his family. His own. So the taillight that was alleged to have been completely shattered into a hundred pieces, all of which were recovered, not right away as Proctor's team searched the crime scene, but days and even weeks later, was at the complete disposal of one of the witnesses in the case. An ATF Agent who had no legitimate reason to be poking around in that garage, given there was no Alcohol, Tobacco or Firearms to be had anywhere. 

And it took a lot of denistry for Jackson to get Dever to even admit there was a camera in the sally port:

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But here's were it gets really interesting. Shortly after she told the Feds about Higgins and the sally port, 34 Fairview owner Albert retires from the BPD:

Dever ends up getting a new job. One with the Boston PD. Coincidentally enough, the same employer as Albert. With a nice bump in pay. She then gets called up to the office of Police Commissioner Michael Cox. Which apparently is rare in and of itself, for a young cop to get a private audience with the top guy. (Unless you're Officer Blake and the Commissioner is Jim Gordon and Bane has taken control of Gotham. Then the protocols be damned.):

…  Dever’s testimony today is either thinking WAY too hard and trying to over analyze this or you’re simply part of the problem. A rookie patrolwoman does NOT get a private meeting in the commissioner’s office just to say hello. Unheard of. The message was sent and her behavior was abhorrent. 

And the purpose of that meeting was to tell Dever to "do the right thing" and the Boston PD will have her back.

What that "right thing" was, we can only speculate. But since Dever immediately changed her story:

… Berkowitz go into the sallyport together and alone with the SUV for a wildly long time?   

KD: That was my recollection at the time.   

AJ: So you did say that at the time?  

KD: That was what I recollected. Okay.   

Devers now says that is "distorted" memory. 

… and got another nice bump in pay:

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… at City of Boston and had an annual salary of $143,562 according to public records. 

------------------------------- 

In year 2023 Kelly Dever's salary was 36 percent lower than average Police Officer salary in the state of Massachusetts. 

In year 2024 Kelly Dever's salary was 7 percent higher than average Police Officer salary in the state of Massachusetts.

Now, because this is Massachusetts and everything is always weirdly connected, this same Commissioner Cox was the victim in a BPD coverup, when he was working undercover. He was chasing a perp and allegedly got jumped by other cops and was beaten. The original finding on that incident was that he accidentally fell on a patch of ice and went boom:

… him to fall and crack his head.” 

They should have sprinkled some tail light on him. 

Just don't let this little subplot distract you from hearing Dever again snap back at Jackson for saying her name wrong. Find yourself a girl who'll stand by you as much as Kelly stands by the correct pronunciation of "Dever."

Like I said, this is Massachusetts. More to the point, it's Canton Massachusetts. Which means everyone has some direct personal connection to this trial. In Dever's case, she is longtime friends with Sarah Levinson, a friend of the Alberts who testified in the first trial she was at the house and didn't see O'Keefe or anything happening outside:

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And in fact, she watched some of Levinson's testimony, because she had never heard of "a sequestration order" when testifying in a criminal trial. 

Here's a few important notes before we (begrudgingly) move off Kelly Devers. She introduced the very first mention of the FBI in either trial when she said she contacted them after talking to Read's lawyers about the change in her story:

She insisted on direct that Read's team threatened her with perjury for recanting her story. Though Jackson got her to admit the minor point that in the history of jurisprudence no defense lawyer has ever successfully charged someone with a crime. You can try a Sicilian curse or wish bad juju on a witness, but that's as far as your trial attorney powers go. 

Next, her story of her "timeline" at the sally port video monitors doesn't add up. She said her memory became faulty due to media coverage. In 2023. But the sally port video was never discussed in public until the first trial, in the spring of 2024. Finally, she adamantly defended her current version of events, which you can take in one of two ways:

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She's either defiantly insisting she speaks the truth because her job depends on it. Or she's saying if she doesn't stick with the story that she didn't see Higgings and Berkowitz around the alleged murder weapon, her highly lucrative career is over. Moving on …

Next was Dr. Marie Russell, the forensics expert from the last trial, here to discuss the wounds on John O'Keefe's arm. And to, in not so many words, be asked if she's a dementia patient by ADA Hank Brennan:

I say again, you can't expect to see a reaction like that in real life. That audible, exaggerated GASP is the stuff of a stage play, not a criminal proceeding. Lord help me, how I love it so. 

In brief, Russell said the marks on O'Keefe's arm are more consistent with dog bites than pieces of taillight. She explained the infamous "I hit him!" hysterics out of Read as "an acute grief reaction":

And Brennan attempted to score points with the oft-cited tests that supposedly showed no presence of dog DNA:

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 Which caused Atty. Robert Alessi to go full Al Pacino in And Justice for All, chewing the scenery and demanding a mistrial because Brennan chose cross examination to bring up the DNA tests instead of during the 38 witnesses the Commonwealth called:

The motion was denied. Which is bad for Read. But a win for anyone who wants this programming to last months. Or at least until football season. 

Which brings us, at last, to Dighton PD Sgt. Nicholas Barros. I've said a couple of times now that everyone in this trial has some connection to someone else. Because Canton is more incestuous than Game of Thrones. Barros is unique in all this because his only connection to anyone is that he was on duty in his town when he was contacted by Proctor that day, asking if he could arrange to have tow truck come to collect Read's SUV, saying it was used in a murder. 

Barros did make the arrangement. Then arrived at Read's parents' house to supervise the tow, in accordance with his duties. He mostly stood outside by the vehicle to figure out how to get the tow truck into the driveway with a foot of snow on the ground. Which gave him ample time to see that the taillight was not completely obliterated like Proctor would later say. But just crackedd down the middle. With a few inches missing:

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As with the nice doctor lady who came across as nice and sweet as Jim Lovell's mom in Apollo 13, the best Brennan could do was get Sgt. Barros to sort of half concede that human memory is not infallible. Or something. Which is kind of rich, given how many calories Brennan has had to burn to make the jury ignore all the inconsistencies, mistakes, and outright falsehoods his own witnesses have admitted to. 

But at no point in his testimony did Barros waver. He was insistent he saw the taillight and it looked nothing like the completely non-existent one in Proctor's photos. And by the way, Proctor didn't take any of the Lexus before it was towed to the Canton sally port. So before the comedy duo of Higs & Berky were alone with it for "a wildly long time." Allegedly. 

Make of it what you will. The jury may see it differently than me. But one of the few LEOs we've heard from who has no connection to Canton, no involvement with the Norfolk County DA's office, and therefore no motivation to lie, says the lead investigator in John O'Keefe's murder is a filthy liar. 

All this, and the defense is still just getting warmed up.