Karen Read claims police bungled the investigation. What did they supposedly do wrong?

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Blood samples gathered in red Solo cups and kept in a brown paper grocery bag. Reports about the case that took over a year and a half to be written. Critical evidence that was logged a month after police collected it.

Defense lawyers at the trial of Karen Read – a Massachusetts woman accused of hitting her cop boyfriend with her SUV and leaving him for dead – are aggressively going after evidence being used against the 45-year-old woman. The goal is to raise doubts in the case over the death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, 46.

The move to question evidence is the latest tactic defense attorneys are using to distance Read from O’Keefe’s death outside a Canton, Massachusetts home in January 2022. Evidentiary attacks, such as those made famous during the O.J. Simpson trial, typically target police who defense attorneys argue did not follow best practices.

“You can’t convict someone based on a sloppy investigation and this could be enough to create a reasonable doubt,” said Kate Mangels, a Southern California criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the case. “These are more technical arguments but they really do matter when the prosecution is asking jurors to rely on these pieces of evidence.” 

Prosecutors say the former finance professor hit her boyfriend of about two years with her black Lexus in a drunken rage and left him in the snow. Read’s lawyers say the police investigation was marred by bias and incompetence.

Read’s lawyers used the same tactic at trial in 2024, according to experts. She is back in court after the trial ended with a hung jury.

Among evidence supporting prosecutors’ theory against Read are shards of a taillight discovered where O’Keefe was found and the damaged state Read’s vehicle was in after O’Keefe’s death.

Defense lawyers say police bungled the investigation. Issues, according to the defense, include everything from how long investigators took to write reports about the case – as many as 581 days – to the unorthodox ways police went about collecting evidence.

“It’s hard to say these anomalies are instances of a police cover-up but I do think it’s enough to say there's concerns here with the integrity of the evidence,” Mangels said. “It definitely isn’t best practices. That said, in the reality of a crime scene, it happens sometimes that things are collected in a way that seems odd.”

How was evidence collected?

In the fraught hours after O’Keefe’s body was discovered outside the suburban house of a fellow Boston cop, Lieutenant Paul Gallagher of the Canton Police Department was among the first responders on the scene collecting evidence.

Gallagher – now retired – drove to the scene in his own four-wheel drive vehicle, testifying that his police cruiser would not have been able to make it through the snow that left O’Keefe buried.

Among the officer’s first moves to collect evidence was to use a leaf blower to clear away the four inches of snow covering the blood-stained spot where O’Keefe was found and then collect samples of “coagulated blood” in red Solo cups. 

“I wasn’t going to get a second chance at it,” Gallagher explained on the stand. “It was either collect it or never have it.”

Gallagher never wrote a report about his evidence collection and did not create a diagram of where evidence was found, he testified in court.

How Read's lawyers used the tactic before

David Ring, a California-based trial attorney following Read’s trial, said he expected defense attorneys to attack evidence again because it’s a common tactic and because it’s exactly what they did at Read’s first trial in 2024.

“It’s a common tactic because it’s the easy tactic,” Ring told Paste BN. “In the first trial this tactic was definitely successful for the defense. The lengthy delays, failure to interview witnesses, the red Solo cups— all that clearly added up to a hung jury.”

The question jurors should pay attention to, according to Ring, is whether the issues raised even matter. He called issues like collecting of blood samples in improvised containers a “shoulder shrug” because they likely belonged to the victim.

“The defense wants them to focus on red Solo cups because that's inflammatory," Ring said. "But the jury hopefully is looking at the totality of the evidence."

Ex-NYPD cop on how evidence should be collected

Patrick McLaughlin, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said police need to improve how they approach crime scenes to leave defense attorneys fewer issues to raise. 

“It’s a game to try to catch the person napping or not having done the report the right way,” said the retired New York City Police Department crime scene technician. 

The 20-year NYPD veteran who faced tough cross-examinations over his investigations said investigators should aim to arrive at the scene as soon as possible, take their time collecting evidence and write reports without delay.

“The best thing in the world,” McLaughlin said, “is to hand the defense attorney 2,000 pages of documents and say, ‘Here you find the flaw.’”

What to know about the state police investigation

Massachusetts state police eventually took over the case from Canton police and Read’s lawyers also grilled them over their handling of the investigation.

Read’s lawyers also questioned them about steps, including taking over a month to book evidence from the crime scene and waiting over a year to interview key witnesses.

Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Yuri Bukhenik vigorously defended his agency’s handling of the investigation.

“You claiming that it wasn’t booked into something doesn’t mean it wasn’t properly handled in custody and under our control,” Bukhenik said in response to sharp questions from Read’s lawyers about why it took so long for police to book pieces of tail light found at the scene.

Among witnesses police waited over a year to interview was Heather Maxon— a significant witness for prosecutors who testified that on the night before O’Keefe died she saw what appeared to be Read and O’Keefe in a black SUV outside the house where the officer was ultimately found.

Read’s lawyers questioning of evidence against the former finance professor comes amid strong arguments from the prosecution— including a bombshell admission she allegedly made to first responders and her own admission of her heavy drinking.

But experts say missteps from police investigating the case could work in Read’s favor.

“This is why people don’t trust the cops sometimes,” said Sydney Rushing, a criminal defense attorney out of Michigan who has been providing analysis of Read’s case on Tik Tok. “How is the jury supposed to look at this report and think they’re accurate when they take 581 days to write.”

Contributing: Karissa Waddick