Karen Read Murder Trial, Week 7: We're Finally Talking DNA. As in 'Didn't 'Nvestigate the Alberts'

On a personal side note, this week I went to two Patriots practices, the Tom Brady Tribute, and a golf tournament. And had more people approach me to talk about the Karen Read trial than any subject I've covered in recent memory. Patriots staffers. People. Friends. Complete strangers. I've spent most of my adult life oddly obsessing over a football team, written a billion blogs and several editions of books about it. But the prospects of a woman charged with Murder-by-Taillight in the death of her Boston Police officer boyfriend is what people are fixated on. So be it. I'm just glad I went against my instinct to give this whole topic a good leaving alone. The public has spoken. 

Here's a recap from earlier in the week, with a link that will take you down the rabbit hole of all the other installments in this saga.

There's a term you hear a lot in the course of a proceeding in any court. A sort rhetorical device for framing a legal theory. It is, "In the light most favorable to ... ." Essentially, it's lawyerspeak for "Just for the sake of argument ... ." Making a point by semantically accepting as fact something that you actually are not accepting to be true, in order to refute it. In your own life, this would work like this. "In the light most favorable to your family, let's assume I did crush eight 16-ounce Double IPAs and did tell that joke about 'There are 3 billion women in the world, but the place still isn't clean.' That doesn't change the fact I got dragged to your niece's Gender Reveal party on US Open Sunday." 

Well, in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the prosecution did, in fact, finally submit some evidence that Karen Read's left taillight had some contact with John O'Keefe.

Thanks to the 50,000 episodes of procedural crime drama TV shows over the last two decades, we're all conditioned to believe that there is tangible, irrefutable, objectively scientific evidence at the heart of every criminal case that will bust it wide open just before the last commercial break, the epilogue and the "Created by Dick Wolf" closing credits. Though the truth is, the vast majority of trials come down to whom you believe among the witnesses telling different versions of the same story. I did literally hundreds of OUI trials. And there wasn't a one where the jury didn't ask about Breathalyzer results, so they could decide the case entirely by math. But instead, they were forced to rely on whether or not they believed ol' Tipsy McStagger passed his Field Sobriety Test by the side of the road at midnight on his way home from Applebee's 18 months ago. 

So finally the prosecution brought a little forensic science into the proceedings. Both of the DNA kind, and the phone records variety. Which a lot of the pro-Commonwealth people were celebrating as victories.:

Which is the lede of this story. And we'll get to shortly. But this is still a tabloid world. If it bleeds, it leads, and all that. And when you've got a lawyer drawing blood on the state's star witness after he admitted texting the world that the defendant - and these are all his words -  is a bitch whackjob retard cunt with no ass and leaking poo out of her balloon knot who should just kill herself, there's no other choice but to go where that takes you:

But whatever that inflammatory cross examination did to serve up Bulletin Board fodder to the (mostly female) jury, the big takeaway here from an analytical, non-sensational perspective, is the business about (quoting the attorney now) "That the cop homeowner, quote, 'wasn't going to catch any shit.' … Because you were out to quote 'Make this cut and dry.'"

Proctor answers that Brian Albert, who owned 34 Fairview, would not be on the receiving end of any sewer bombs because "Mr. Albert had nothing to do with Mr. O'Keefe's death." And if I can pivot from leaky poo talk to Shakespeare for a second, therein lies the rub. That quote is really the crux of the whole #FreeKarenRead movement in less than 10 words. 

From the perspective of everyone who believes in the Canton Coverup - or at least thinks it's plausible - Proctor and his team of investigators showed less curiosity about what went on inside Albert's house than you'll find expressed on an Altoid's tin. I started this trial seven weeks ago trying to be a neutral. But I cannot get past the fact a police officer was found next to death lying in a front yard. But 34 Fairview was immediately ruled out as being even remotely involved. Not even as a Home of Interest. 

I'm an old, so I find myself more and more diving back into TV from my misspent youth. And I cannot for the life of me imagining Columbo rolling up in his shitbox convertible to a homicide scene outside a house in the Hollywood hills and not having just a few questions for the rich art dealer who lives there. For the Canton PD or the Mass State Police, this is like finding a young woman drained of blood with puncture wounds in her neck lying outside a Victorian mansion with boarded up windows, and not asking the pale, nocturnal, Eastern European count who lives inside if he's seen anyone suspicious in the area.

It's frankly a big ask to expect the public to believe the aggressive lack of inquisitiveness toward anything that many or may not have happened inside 34 Fairview had nothing at all to do with Brian Albert's job. And that if he'd chosen a career in, say, HVAC or finance or writing Lowest Common Denominator drivel on the internet, he'd have been just as far off the hook just as fast. That the fact he also just happens to be a Boston LEO is just an incredible, unrelated coincidence. One of those wacky, hard-to-explain synchronicities that happen sometimes when a deceased person ends up on someone's property. Whatareyagonnado? Life is like that sometimes. 

I mean, if Proctor's team had thoroughly looked into the Alberts, the McCabes, ATF Agent Brian Higgins, Chloe the dog and anyone else who was in the house at the time Read dropped Officer O'Keefe off, and exonerated them all, fine. There would still be scoffers, to be sure. But at least the Commonwealth could argue they were investigated and found not at all suspicious. But the investigation ruled them out before ever ruling them possibly in. It went out of its way to not go out of its way. 

They began with a presumption of Read's guilt, and worked backwards from there. I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise:

Though Proctor didn't seem to be so certain when he was asked whether he's seen pedestrian victims with no physical signs of bruising after being victims of the kinds of car accidents us civilians only see in Driver's Ed safety videos:

Which brings us back to the DNA we started with. As has been widely reported, almost with spinning newspapers emblazoned with "ALIENS DECLARE WAR!!!" sized headlines, forensics found evidence of O'Keefe's DNA on the taillight of Read's SUV:

Which sounds very much like conclusive evidence he was struck by her SUV. And a nuke dropped on any suggestion the whole theory of the case is a fiction invented on the spot to hide the truth of what actually happened. The dramatic, third act "Aha!" plot twist that wraps this case neatly up for the jurors to come back with a Guilty. That is, until you look just under the surface of the surface. 

This evidence raises more questions than it answers. First, none of the forensics experts testified it came from Officer O'Keefe's blood. Instead, it's so-called "Touch DNA." It was from him coming into contact with the cover of the taillight at some point. But they lived together, were raising his niece and nephew together, likely piled kids and sports equipment and groceries and Christmas presents in and out of the back of the Lexus 510 nonillion times. Which offers a pretty simple, benign explanation for his genetic material to be on her vehicle short of it being used as a murder weapon. Besides, he was found wearing a hoodie. Albeit one with puncture holes all over the sleeve where his arm wounds were. That doesn't mean it was impossible some exposed part of him came in contact with the light's housing. Just that it gave his skin a much, much smaller strike zone. 

The key question raised by the DNA tests has to do with O'Keefe's clothes. Which were, in fact, stained with his blood. And that of two other individuals. Who they might be, no one knows:

All we've got is which 50%  of the human race the people who bled on O'Keefe's clothes belong to. The male half:

Just to emphasize the point: This isn't from casual contact, some First Responders giving him medical treatment on the scene or whatever. Two dudes had their skin opened up enough to bleed into John O'Keefe's clothes. Presumably that night. Unless, as the laundry detergent ads always suggest, he was using an inferior brand. But once again, un-inquiring minds at the Mass. State Police didn't seem to be interested in finding out, preferring to keep the air of mystery around the identities of the bleeders. 

It also bears repeating for the 510 nonillionth time, this evidence came from the prosecution's experts. And Read's attorneys were only too happy to leave the question of whom the blood might belong to out there with a "The defense has no questions for this witness." The damage done.  As noted legal expert Napoleon Bonaparte famously put it, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." 

Circling back to the investigation, Proctor was followed by one of his team, Lt. Brian Tully. Who may or may not have helped the prosecution's case. But unquestionably did a huge favor to the internet meme crowd almost immediately:

Note that this trial is fast accumulating Brians the way the 2021-22 Patriots kept adding Joneses. And the same with Law Enforcement Officers with shaved heads:

Piggybacking on testimony from early on in the trial, Tully stated he didn't go into 34 Fairview because he didn't have probably cause for search warrant. Leaving a couple of things unsaid. One, that he did get one to search the home of the blogger who's been a pain in the Commonwealth's ass from the beginning of all of this:

Two, that you don't need probable cause or a search warrant if the homeowner gives you permission. An investigator can save a lot of red tape by merely asking politely, with all the requisite pleases and thank yous. As my sainted mother always said, "Good manners cost you nothing and go a long way." (In my experience, she was generally wrong on this. But it wouldn't have hurt this investigation any.) Here again, Tully never bothered to find out. A cynical person might convince themselves there's almost a pattern here. 

To somewhat support the prosecution's case, there was a lot of testimony about Tully talking to snowplow driver Lucky Loughran (because of course that's his name). Lucky is the guy who Turtleboy tracked down who said he never saw a body. But he did see a Ford Edge parked out front in the area where the body was later found:

Though Tully claimed his story changed at least three times and he was therefore an unreliable witness:

 tracking Karen Read's phone records on the night in question to track her whereabouts. There's some time unaccounted for, suggesting she may have detoured by Fairview Road long after O'Keefe was reportedly lying in the snow outside of No. 34:

But here again, as you retrace her night, the video evidence is sketchy, with a lot of missing footage:

The latest development is the kind of glitch you never would've found me involved in:

Because I would've been hiding out somewhere in an unused jury room writing Patriots blogs. 

Beyond that, here are some daily reminders that there is nothing so solemn and grim that some people cannot turn it into a ridiculous goatfuck:

Not even the unsolved killing of a police officer. Pray for the repose of the soul of Officer John O'Keefe. And pray for us all.