Karen Read, newly acquitted of murder in the high-profile death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, is now taking the fight back to the people she says framed her. In a sweeping civil lawsuit filed in Bristol County Superior Court, Read accuses Massachusetts State Police investigators and several former friends of orchestrating a cover-up to shield the real killers and pin O’Keefe’s death on her.
The lawsuit names eight defendants: former State Police investigator Michael Proctor, Sgt. Yuriy Bukhenik, Lt. Brian Tully, Brian and Nicole Albert, Jennifer and Matthew McCabe, and ATF agent Brian Higgins. Read says additional defendants — including the Massachusetts State Police itself and the Town of Canton — will be added once she is legally permitted to do so.
The filing marks the latest turn in a case that has consumed Massachusetts for more than three years. O’Keefe, 46, was found dead in a snowbank outside the Albert family’s Canton home in January 2022 with blunt-force head trauma and injuries investigators originally labeled consistent with a hit-and-run. Prosecutors accused Read of backing her SUV into him after an argument and leaving him to die.
Read has always maintained that she was framed. Her first trial ended in a mistrial; her second ended in June with an acquittal on the murder charge. She was convicted only of operating under the influence and received probation.
Now, in her civil complaint, Read outlines a radically different account of that night.
She alleges O’Keefe was killed inside the Albert home during a late-night gathering that continued after a night of heavy drinking. According to the complaint, a violent altercation broke out, and the “House Defendants” — as the filing describes them — worked together to avoid blame. Read claims they moved O’Keefe’s body outside, searched Google for “how long to die in the cold,” and staged the scene to look like O’Keefe had been struck by a vehicle.
The lawsuit argues investigators never seriously considered that possibility because of what Read describes as deep personal and professional ties between the Alberts and State Police. The Alberts are a well-known Canton family; Proctor, the filing says, “was close personal friends” with them. Higgins, another defendant, was a federal ATF agent, while Brian Albert is a longtime Boston police officer.
According to Read, that network of relationships guided the investigation from the start. She claims investigators failed to search the house for nearly a week, allowed witnesses to coordinate their stories, and ignored signs that O’Keefe had been assaulted — including lacerations to his face, a deep wound to the back of his head, and what the filing says were dog bite injuries to his arm. Despite that, Read says, investigators never examined the Alberts’ German Shepherd, a dog she alleges had a history of biting people.
The lawsuit also highlights a series of private messages sent by Proctor during the investigation, which Read says reveal bias, misogyny, and a presumption of guilt. In one exchange cited in the complaint, Proctor allegedly told a colleague he had “zero chance” of Read “skating… she’s [expletive]” — a message sent before he had entered the Albert home. In another, he allegedly wrote that he searched Read’s phone “looking for naked pictures” and later joked there were “no nudes so far.” One message, Read says, ended with: “Hopefully she kills herself.”
The Massachusetts State Police has not commented on the lawsuit. All defendants are expected to respond in court.
Read’s filing does not resolve the central mystery that has hovered over this case since 2022 — what actually happened inside the Albert home that night. But it does signal that Read, after years of being the accused, is now determined to force answers from the people she says put her there.
