Karen Read says she is not guilty of the murder of John O'Keefe . Hence her decision to allow a documentary crew to chronicle the proceedings, The Staircase -style, as she went on trial for murder last year in the January 2022 death of O'Keefe, a 16-year veteran of the Boston Police Department whom prosecutors allege she drunkenly hit with her car and left to die in blizzard conditions. The five-part Investigation Discovery docuseries A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read premiered March 17.
But though the fifth episode was called "The Verdict," there was no definitive ending: The jury said they were deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial on July 1, 2024. "I 100 percent believe that they thought there was going to be an acquittal in this case,” series director Terry Dunn Meurer told Vanity Fair about the show ending with Read's fate still up in the air. "So when they took this on, that’s what they were thinking.
And it would be a different film if that had happened. Everyone was surprised that it was a hung jury." The defense first alleged during pretrial proceedings that O'Keefe was badly beaten at the Canton, Mass.
, home a Boston Police detective, after which his body was dumped outside—and that their client was the victim of a law enforcement conspiracy to cover up what really happened. "Other than feeling wrongfully persecuted and prosecuted," Read told Vanity Fair last August, "I feel incredibly violated." Authorities and prosecutors vehemently denied t.
