When local author Dave Wedge first heard about the death of John O’Keefe in January of 2022, it seemed to Wedge like a relatively simple — if tragic — case: a Boston Police officer found dead in a snowbank in Canton, the victim of what seemed like a straightforward hit-and-run.
But O’Keefe’s death and the trial of his then-girlfriend, Karen Read, soon spiraled into a complicated, high-profile saga revealing institutional corruption, police cover-ups, chaos, and a web of lies. Read was acquitted in 2025, leaving O’Keefe’s death an unsolved mystery.
Wedge shines a new light on the story in his latest, New York Times bestselling book, “Blizzard of Lies: Karen Read, John O’Keefe, and the Shocking Unsolved Murder in Cop Town, USA.”
Wedge joined host Tori Bedford on Morning Edition to discuss the book, the case and new revelations from his reporting. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Bedford: So initially, you hear about this story, the death of a Boston cop. When did you first start to suspect that there was more to this story?
Wedge: At first, it did appear just a tragic hit and run, but it was a police officer. So it was a pretty big story, but then the stuff started coming out in the court filings that raised a lot of questions. And honestly, I’ve covered hundreds of murders throughout my journalism and author career, and there was a lot of irregularities that came out in court. There’s a lot of things that just didn’t add up, decisions that were being made by the judge in the courtroom that kind of raised red flags to me. And I was like, ‘Something weird is going on here.’ Now, does that mean there was a cover-up and a conspiracy to frame Karen Read? I don’t know, but certainly there were things worth looking at.
Bedford: The book provides two potential theories about what happened on that fateful night. Can you just summarize those for us?
Wedge: The first theory, or the first scenario, is what the prosecutors laid out in court in charging her with second-degree murder. Karen and John had a fight. They were drinking. She brought him to this after-party. He gets out of the car. She’s in a fit of anger and rage. She speeds backwards, strikes him or clips him, and he falls, hits his head. She takes off, leaves him there to die in the snow. He’s found the next day.
The second scenario is the one laid out by Karen Read and her defense attorneys, where they say John O’Keefe got out of the car. Karen watched him walk up to the house or go into the house, and she never saw him again, went home and that was it. Then they lay out a theory that he went in the house and was attacked by occupants of the house. There was a dog in the house. The dog bit him, and then they dumped him on the front lawn.
Bedford: When you set out to write this, did you think, 'I’m going to solve this. I’m going to finally answer what happened.’ And did you find yourself swayed in either direction? Because you present these two scenarios in the book, but you don’t take a stand on either of them.
Wedge: It’s choose your own adventure, Tori. It was a way for me to explain the complexities of the case without me saying, 'Here’s what I think happened.’ Because I’m not a detective. I’m not a sleuth. I don’t know what happened. I’m a reporter. I’m a storyteller. I think I tell a pretty good story about what happened. You learn the entire case from beginning to end, and you could go down rabbit holes for weeks. So I’m not going to sit here and say I know what happened. I think there’s only one person that knows exactly what happened, and he’s dead.
Bedford: Do you think it’s possible for us to ever have answers about what happened after the case was handled so poorly from the beginning?
Wedge: Yeah, there were a lot of mistakes made, and that was a big part of the case. Obviously, it’s a big part of why she was acquitted. You know, the police work was sloppy at best, some would say corrupt. In my opinion, as a journalist, I think there were a lot of mistakes made. And I think if a lot of those cops had a do-over, they would have done things differently just to dot some i’s, cross some t’s, and button things up to eliminate doubt.
Bedford: You mentioned that they did think this was kind of an open and shut case in the beginning. The DA Morrissey, do you think that if he had brought manslaughter charges instead of murder, do you think any of this would have happened?
Wedge: No, I don’t. I think that was the crucial mistake in the case. I think that David Yannetti, Karen’s attorney, in those initial arraignments was saying this was an accident, she loved John, there was no ill intent. That changed once DA Morrissey decided to charge her with second-degree murder. All of a sudden now Karen Read is fighting for her life. She’s fighting life in prison. That’s a big difference than a manslaughter charge, which probably would have been pleaded down. She probably would have got maybe three to six months in jail, lose her license for a year, I mean, for several years, and pay some fines. I think the case would have gone very differently. Now Karen Read and her defense team says no, she’s innocent, she didn’t do it, and she was framed. So you’d have to ask her if it would be different.
Bedford: This case is still unresolved, but it’s still ongoing in a lot of ways. Just in terms of the impact, so much was brought to light from this — even just the amount of drunk driving that these officers were doing, right? You write about it so consistently throughout this book, it’s shocking.
Wedge: There’s a lot. At the end of the day, you can think that Karen Read did it, or you can think Karen Read was innocent. But what I think everyone can agree on is that there was inexcusable police behavior here and even corruption. These guys drinking and driving, going to a funeral in New York and drinking all day, and then going to bars and drinking all night, driving from bar to bar, driving to an after-party at one in the morning with a bunch of young kids there and continuing drinking, and then going home and drinking more. It’s shocking the level of alcohol that was involved here. And I think one thing everyone should take away from this, honestly, and not to be a teetotaler here, but if there wasn’t so much drinking involved, John O’Keefe would probably be alive. Drinking is the reason he’s dead, because everyone involved was drunk.
Bedford: And then explain these lawsuits that are playing out right now.
Wedge: Well, how long do you have? I mean, you have several suits. You have a wrongful death suit. That’s been filed by the O’Keefe family against Karen Read and also the bars that served her. That’s really the big one. That’s the one that could give the family some solace. Separate from that, Karen Read is suing the state police, Canton police, and several of the folks that were in the house that night. And then there’s a lawsuit by that group, Brian Albert, the Boston police officer who owned the house where John O’Keefe’s body was found. Him and several of the other people that were there at that afterparty that night are suing Karen Read and Turtleboy, [Aidan Kearney], the blogger.
They’re suing them for defamation. He has a blog and he has called them murderers. And they’re suing him saying that that was over the line.
Bedford: You spent a lot of time talking to John O’Keefe’s family. And I really appreciate how you focus so much of this book on who he was and his life. It seems like it never ends for the O’Keefes. And when you’ve talked to them, do you feel like they are still looking for justice or closure, or is it more now about privacy and peace?
Wedge: I they’ve moved on to wanting some privacy. They want the noise to stop, you know. I don’t think that they have much faith that they’re ever going to get any sort of justice here, but I do think that they are moving forward with the process in hopes that maybe they get some more answers out of the civil process. The families trying to grieve. But as I mentioned in the book, they’ve received a lot of harassment, a lot of really horrible text messages and social media messages. They don’t deserve that. At the end of the day, a good police officer lost his life. And John O’Keefe, by all accounts — I didn’t have anyone tell me that he was anything other than a really good guy. And it’s sad that his life was lost under such horrible circumstances. And now all this chaos around it.
Listen to the full interview by clicking on the audio player above.
