Listen Now: KAREN: THE RETRIAL

A blizzard in Massachusetts. A Boston police officer found dead in the snow.
His girlfriend, Karen Reed, accused of murder. After last year's mistrial left the country divided, the courtroom drama is back in the spotlight, this time with higher stakes, new prosecutors, and explosive evidence emerging as the case unfolds in real time.
Law and Crimes' hit podcast series returns with a brand new season, Karen the Retrial.

Hosted by Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Kristen Thorne,

each episode delivers exclusive analysis, behind-the-scenes access,

and expert interviews you won't find anywhere else.

With both sides fighting to control the narrative and new revelations coming to light, the search for truth is more urgent and more complicated than ever. I'm about to play a clip from Karen the Retrial.
Follow Karen the Retrial on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. In his opening statement, prosecutor Hank Brennan didn't just lay out a narrative.
He let Karen Reed tell it herself, using her own voice, her own words from her own interviews. I mean, I couldn't think I hit him, but I clipped him, could have tapped him in the knee and incapacitated him.
He didn't look morally wounded as far as I could see, but could I have done something that knocked him out and his drunkenness and in the cold didn't come to again? And this would have been the moment you dropped him off at the party. Yeah, yeah, would have had to.
The prosecution has played one clip of an interview that Karen Reed gave, and I guarantee they're going to play more throughout the trial because they're helpful to the prosecution. I think the defense was banking on her being acquitted.
And then it would have been this phenomenal story of, hey, here's a behind the scenes, everything that happened and look at we're right the whole time and she's acquitted. Whoops, mistrial coming back again for a second time.
All that stuff is now fair game. For the prosecution, it's an extraordinary opportunity.
For the defense, a glaring vulnerability. Here's why.
Because not only do they reflect Karen's changing story that night, from dropping John off at the waterfall to seeing him outside the home to etc. But it also goes to show something far more damaging to Karen, which is consciousness of guilt.
And it's not just the message, it's the delivery. Matt Timpanik puts it bluntly.
The documentary is probably going to go down as one of the worst decisions made by a trial team because the worst witness in any criminal case is yourself. And what's even worse when you're not even on the stand to be able to be cross-examined and explain that.
Hank Brennan is able to air I don't know how many hours of footage of the defendant's own statements without having to be cross-examined. He gets to show the video and move on, essentially have the defendant narrate her own murder trial and plug the holes wherever they are.
In a case already defined by blurred lines between courtroom and media circus, Karen Reed's decision to go public may be one of the most consequential of all. Her voice was meant to tell her side of the story, and now it's being used to tell the prosecutions.
But while the Commonwealth used Karen Reed's own voice to open their case, the defense struck a very different tone. The defense's opening statement was always going to carry weight.
After all, this wasn't a cold start. Jurors knew about the mistrial.
The public knew about the controversy. And the courtroom had already become a battleground long before opening arguments were even heard.
But on day one, things didn't go entirely according to plan. Ten minutes before openings were supposed to begin, Judge Fannoni ruled that the Reed defense had failed to comply with reciprocal discovery rules under Rule 14 and banned them from mentioning ARCA in their opening.
So not only was Reed restricted this time by a formal written order on the third party culprit, which exonerated Colin Albert, but Reed was banned ten minutes before openings started from mentioning ARCA. If you aren't familiar with who the ARCA witnesses are, Matt Tympanix got you covered.
They were independent accident reconstructionists hired by the federal government to investigate this crash. They are vital, whatever word you want to use for Karen Reed's defense, because you need somebody saying that this was not a pedestrian strike.

Here's the catch. It turned out that's not entirely accurate and that they weren't paid for their services.
That kind of came out in pretrial proceedings during discovery that there was communication between Alan Jackson and the ARCA witnesses. So there is going to be a real question about credibility.
Either way, that ruling drastically narrowed what the defense could say and how they could say it. Most critically, it blocked them from raising the possibility of a third party culprit, a cornerstone of their broader theory that John O'Keefe died not from being hit by a car, but inside the house at 34 Fairview Road.
Alan Jackson was, in my opinion, playing with one arm behind his back because the judge said he couldn't mention third party culprit and he couldn't mention the ARCA witnesses. That's their whole case.
That I thought really shifted the tone. It put Alan Jackson into a position where he had to read from notes and be far less effective than Hank Brennan, who could go up there with a memorized set of facts and law and looked a lot more polished, even if he walked away from the microphone a few times, which made it hard to hear on the street.
Alan Jackson, Reed's hotshot out-of-state attorney, did what he could with what he had. He attacked the integrity of the investigation.
He pointed to inconsistencies in the timeline. He emphasized that O'Keefe's injuries didn't align with a car strike.
The evidence will establish that John did not suffer a single injury on his body consistent with having been hit by a car, not one. There was no collision with John O'Keefe.
There was no collision.

There was no collision. John O'Keefe did not die from being hit by a vehicle, period.

But the narrative wasn't clean, and some argue neither was the delivery.

Alan Jackson came off a little combative during the opening statement. He was almost at times yelling at the jury.
People were saying he was being passionate. He really believes in the innocence of his client, and that's fine.
But the truth is, you can't go from the laying the soft spoken, laying it out, facts, data, evidence of Hank Brennan to basically yelling and overpowering the jury, which is what Alan Jackson did during his opening. He became more subdued after the first witness he crossed and realized that you don't need to do that to everyone.
Worse still, according to Grant Ellis, Jackson may have made a tactical misstep, claiming he'd show O'Keefe went into the house, a claim not fully backed by the digital evidence. The scientific evidence and the medical evidence will establish that John O'Keefe had to be injured somewhere else, somewhere warmer, and his body had to have been moved out into the cold.
Every piece of the evidentiary record, John's cell phone, GPS data, et cetera, shows that and even jurors who were sympathetic to Karen in the first trial that gave media interviews said John's phone data showed that John hit that lawn around 12.32 a.m. and never moved again.
And so now Alan Jackson has put himself in an untenable position where Hank Brennan's going to be able to show evidence after evidence. And maybe every juror, all 12, will agree that phone never left the lawn.
And if John never left that lawn, Karen doesn't have a defense. And I think she struggles to get an acquittal on all three charges and a compromise verdict on OUI manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter or motor vehicle homicide OUI is very likely.
Still, the defense leaned on what they believe is their strongest angle. You'll find when you hear the evidence that the Commonwealth's case is the literal definition of reasonable doubt.
There was not a word about Karen Reed was framed. The defense has absolutely abandoned that entire line of inquiry and seemed to suggest more that the investigation wasn't good enough to confirm Reed's guilt.
A challenge not just to the Commonwealth's theory, but to the investigation that built it. You'll see from the evidence in this case that this case carries a malignancy, one that is spread through the investigation.
It's spread through the prosecution from the very start, from the jump. A cancer that cannot be cut out, a cancer that cannot be cured.
And that cancer has a name. His name is Michael Proctor.
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