Karen Read judge blocks Sandra Birchmore mentions; expert says cases should be wake-up call for police

A Massachusetts judge has agreed to bar references to an unrelated, botched murder investigation in Karen Read’s second trial on murder and other charges in the 2022 death of her Boston police officer boyfriend, John O'Keefe. 

Police in Canton, a suburb about 20 miles south of Boston, inaccurately determined the Feb. 4, 2021 death of Sandra Birchmore, 24, was a suicide before federal investigators said she had been strangled and charged a Stoughton officer with her murder.

The FBI arrested former Stoughton Police Officer Matthew Farwell, 38, in August in Birchmore's murder.

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He is accused of grooming her since she was a teenager, maintaining a sexual relationship for years and then killing her when she told him she'd become pregnant and staging the murder to look like a suicide. 

Canton Police were also the first to respond after O'Keefe was reported unresponsive outside another Boston Police officer's house Jan. 29, 2022, during a blizzard. 

Local police collected bloody snow evidence in red Solo cups and placed them in a Stop and Shop grocery bag. A Canton lieutenant used a leaf blower to move snow from where O'Keefe's body had been found. Witnesses were interviewed informally, off camera and not at the police station.

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O'Keefe was found dead on Brian Albert's front lawn. Albert's brother is a Canton Police detective. 

State police took over the investigation later that day. But their involvement wasn't without controversy. The lead detective was fired earlier this year after an internal investigation into unprofessional text messages revealed in court during Read's first trial, which ended in a mistrial.

Read the motion:

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"Gov. [Maura] Healey should have ordered the revamping of police training in the state after the debacle in Karen Read 1.0," said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and criminal justice professor at Penn State Lehigh Valley. "Everything from response to the scene by patrol officers to securing the scene to identifying evidence, the proper collection of evidence, the proper containers for that evidence and so on." 

The two cases prompted town residents to demand an audit into their own police department, and the town board hired a firm called 5 Stones Intelligence, or 5Si.

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The firm released its findings in a 206-page report April 1, the same day jury selection began in Read's retrial.

It found no evidence that Canton Police had conspired to frame Read, but the auditors recommended that all death cases be reviewed by supervisors in the future.

In the report, 5Si recommended that Canton detectives undergo "advanced training" on crime scene investigations and that all patrol vehicles be equipped with crime scene kits and evidence collection bags. They called for an increase in the police department's budget.

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There was also a federal investigation into the handling of O'Keefe's death. Read remains the only person charged.

She faces charges of second-degree murder, drunken driving manslaughter and fleeing a deadly accident for allegedly striking O'Keefe with her Lexus SUV during an argument and leaving him for dead around 12:30 a.m.

She and two friends returned at 6 a.m. and found O'Keefe on the ground, covered in snow that had intensified throughout the day. An autopsy found his cause of death was trauma to the head and hypothermia. The manner was undetermined.

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Read has denied striking O'Keefe at all, pleaded not guilty and suggested she is being framed by local police and their allies.

She was first tried on the charges last year, but jurors deadlocked, and Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial. 

So far in the retrial, at least one evidence bag appears to have been mislabeled, and another had more pieces of broken taillight than expected. Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Yuri Bukhenik was also grilled about a lack of photographs for some evidence and a delay of hundreds of days for some reports in the investigation.

"If nothing else, they should be taught documentation, documentation and documentation," Giacalone told Fox News Digital. "These aren’t small mistakes. These are errors that will cost you cases, will cause lawsuits in the state of Massachusetts and it just makes everybody in the criminal justice system look bad."

"If Massachusetts has this problem, what about other states?" Giacalone said. "Now's the time to nip them in the bud before we find out another Karen Reed trial disaster."

Special prosecutor Hank Brennan, a high-profile defense attorney whose clients have included mobster Whitey Bulger, was brought in to lead the second trial.

He asked Cannone last week to block the defense from bringing up the Birchmore case as Read's lawyers look to paint the investigation as unreliable and corrupt. She agreed, unless the "door is opened" by prosecutors. 

"They're not gonna open that door," said Linda Kenney Baden, a high-profile defense attorney who squared off against Read lawyer Alan Jackson, a prosecutor during the first trial of record producer Phil Spector in 2007. Like Read's, it ended in a mistrial.

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Still, she said, she believes there is plenty of room for jurors to find reasonable doubt.

"They gotta prove she hit him," she said. "It's really as simple as that. It's a drunk-driving hit-and-run."

Read's SUV has a broken taillight, and police witnesses described finding matching pieces on Albert's front lawn.

But the defense also played surveillance video from O'Keefe's garage that appears to show her backing her SUV into his parked vehicle shortly before she found his remains along with two other women, Kerry Roberts and Jennifer McCabe.

Still, the veteran trial attorney praised Brennan's handling of the case and how he's left out key witnesses who may have tanked the prosecution in the first trial and gave the defense less room to maneuver.

"The way Brennan has tried this case is that he's not letting any of the bad stuff in, so whenever Alan Jackson goes to the stuff that really hurts them, he doesn't have a place to go there," she said.

For one, he left former Massachusetts State Tpr. Michael Proctor off the prosecution's witness list. Proctor sent a series of rude, lewd and unprofessional text messages about Read and the investigation, which led to his firing.

He is still on the defense's witness list and could be called to the stand later.