Boston cop’s murder suspect Karen Read cries as she describes finding him with ‘blood dripping from his face’

Karen Read, a suspect in her boyfriend’s murder, cried as she described finding her partner in a “heap” on the lawn with a bloodied face on the night of his death.

Read, 44, who claimed she had been charged with the murder of Boston police officer John O’Keefe, spoke to Dateline to discuss the moment she found her boyfriend on January 29, 2022.

“I see him immediately, I see his body immediately,” she told Dateline’s Dennis Murphy in an exclusive clip obtained by DailyMail.com from Friday’s upcoming episode. “It was a windswept lawn and there was just a pile.”

“And that was him?” asked Murphy, who has been with the show since 1994, as Read nodded.

“It didn’t look like John,” she said, stumbling over her words. ‘But I knew it was him. I knew it was something that didn’t belong on that lawn.”

John, who is 6 feet tall and weighed 220 pounds, was found around 6 a.m. outside a house where Read had dropped him off after an afterparty.

The financial analyst and former Bentley University professor is charged with murder and manslaughter for allegedly supporting her in a snowstorm after an argument with her SUV.

Her defense instead claims that O’Keefe, 46, was beaten by people at the party and thrown outside, where he died on the lawn.

“Karen Read was framed. Her car never hit John O’Keefe. She did not cause his death and that means someone else did,” Read’s attorney David Yannetti said in his opening statement in May.

Read woke up in a panic around 4:30 a.m. when she discovered her boyfriend had not come home and called Jennifer McCabe, a friend of O’Keefe’s with whom he had been drinking the night before.

She and a woman named Carrie drove to the house, where Read told her companions he “was there” and they told her she was “hysterical.”

“We’re driving slowly because the weather is bad, but Carrie doesn’t stop the car,” Read told Murohy. “So I jumped out of the passenger side and ran over there.

“His eyes were swollen shut and blood was dripping from his nose.”

Read had tried to perform CPR, but it was unsuccessful.

When Murphy asked if O’Keefe was still alive when she found him, she hesitated before saying, “It looked like he might have been.”

First responders who treated O’Keefe at the scene admitted that the Boston officer could have been beaten to death.

Two police officers and two firefighters were among the first on the scene that fateful morning and they testified on the second day of the trial in May.

Initially, Timothy Nuttall, a Canton firefighter who treated O’Keefe at the scene, said he could not say whether the injuries — including a hematoma over his right eye — were the result of a struggle.

But under pressure from Read’s lawyer Alan Jackson, Nuttal acknowledged the injuries were consistent with being beaten up.

A key part of the prosecution’s case is that Read essentially admitted to the crime on the spot by shouting, “I hit him!” over and over, along with “this is my fault.” I did this’.

Prosecutors also alleged that Read said, “Could I have hit him? Did I hit him?’ and ‘what if he’s dead? What if a plow hits him? I can’t remember anything from last night, we drank so much I can’t remember anything.’

Read’s defense succeeded in getting both officers to acknowledge that they never heard Read say she had hit O’Keefe.

The defense also used testimony from police and firefighters to raise broader doubts about the investigation.

They were able to get Canton police officers Steven Saraf Stephen Mullaney to acknowledge that they had never seen pieces of broken taillights at the scene.

Prosecutors allege the fragments were found near O’Keefe’s body and are evidence that Read backed her SUV into O’Keefe. She says it was broken when she left her house in a panic that morning to look for him.

When police and paramedics arrived, they found Read still trying to revive her friend, her face covered in blood from mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

All witnesses in their evidence described Read as distraught and screaming and that O’Keefe had no pulse and was not breathing.

Officer Saraf and Nuttall were both asked about their claims that Read said she hit O’Keefe.

Defense attorneys on Tuesday sought to discredit Saraf and cast doubt on the integrity of the investigation by pointing to errors made in the police log, including the wrong address where O’Keefe’s body was found.

They also pointed out that Saraf never wrote in his police report that Read said, “This is my fault,” only that she screamed, “Is he dead?”

In response, Saraf said yes, but when Jackson tried to suggest that Saraf’s memory of that morning was evolving, Saraf said the discrepancy between what he initially wrote and what he later testified at trial was “a mistake.”

The defense team also tried to cast doubt on what Nuttal heard, suggesting he was too focused on saving O’Keefe’s life to hear the conversations around him.

The trial ended in July with a hung jury.