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Serialously with Annie Elise
268: Karen Read Trial Recap Week 2: Jen McCabe Lied to FBI & Expert Admits John's Phone May Have Entered 34 Fairview
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- [00:00]
Annie Elise
Karen Reed, accused of the January 2022 death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, has consistently asserted her innocence, alleging a concerted effort by law enforcement to frame her.
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Elena Johnson
Charged with hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, with her SUV early Saturday morning and leaving him in a snowbank, the closely watched murder trial has.
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Annie Elise
Ended in a mistrial.
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Elena Johnson
The prosecution is indicating that it will retry this case and the question becomes one of how will they do it? Hey, true crime besties. Welcome back to an all new episode of Serial Asleep. Hey everybody. Welcome back to an all new episode of Serial Lessly with me. Annie. Annie, Elise. Today we are doing our Karen Reed trial week two recap. I always have a tough time saying that's like say times five times fast. Karen Reed Retrial Week 2 recap no, we're giving you the recap today like we do every Friday. And there is quite a bit that went down this week like last week. I'm going to have Elena, our correspondent who is there in Boston, boots on the ground, come in, join us, let us know firsthand what went down, what happened this week in the trial. And don't worry, for those of you who listen to the recap, last week we got Elena a better mic. We're working out some of the tech issues. That was her very first time ever being on camera, being on Mike. So I appreciate all of the supportive comments. We love Elena, guys. We she's the best. So thank you guys for being supportive as we work out any audio tweaks. But anyway, she's going to be joining us and letting us know what went on. But just to give you a little bit of like a taste for what we're going to be talking about, it was jam packed this week. I mean, we had cell phone experts weigh in from Cellbrite where they had talked about where the phone was traveling, the movements that morning. If John's phone could have been inside the house, which of course a lot of that detail was not shared. When it was direct examination, he was saying that his phone went all the way to the flagpole, that it never showed as going inside. Yet on cross, when they brought up a diagram where it showed this like big white circle around the property. And they were challenged and the defense team pushed back saying, well, couldn't it be true that his phone could have been anywhere in this white circle, even on the edge, which is near the house? He says of course, yes. And that he omitted that from his presentation that he gave the previous day because Again, he is only supposed to present his version of what fits with the state's point of view. So there's a lot of interesting things we need to talk about regarding all of the cell experts testimony. Then Jen McCabe took the stand. The friend, the one who was there the morning they discovered John's body, the one who invited everybody back to Nicole and Brian, Brian Albert's house that evening. So she takes the stand and feels very more emote like seems very more emotional than the first trial in my opinion. A lot of people were suggesting that she was maybe coached that she needed to look a little bit softer, that her appearance had even change bit. But she walks through the events leading up to the discovery of Jon's body, how Karen was acting. Something I did not like is that she kept calling Karen crazy over and over again. It was. She was acting batshit crazy. She was a lunatic. She was unhinged, like all of these things. And I'm like, okay, it's not really freaking necessary. Like maybe it's authentic because she is trying to find her boyfriend who she loves and then she does discover his body. Like how is she? How would you expect her to act? Right? So anyway, then on cross it gets really interesting because the defense is going in hard. Alan Jackson is not holding back on this cross. And he basically, in my opinion, is trying to illustrate that Jen's credibility is not really there. Similar to what happened with Carrie Roberts last week. I think he was trying to catch her in a lie. And it got very heated. So much so that on Wednesday Judge Bev kind of ended the cross a little bit abruptly. I mean, I know court was scheduled to end that day around that time anyway, but it was just very interesting. And what has come out a lot this week, more so than last week, but definitely not new information is a lot of the people out there who are watching this trial go down are commenting on Judge Beverly Kanoni and how it seems that she is siding with the state much more often than the defense. That she is saying things to almost put the defense like not in timeout but like shaming them for how they're approaching things, how they're asking questions, their behavior. And I'm even seeing legal commentators out there who have not chosen any side in the Karen Reed case commenting on Judge Bev's behavior, saying how it's unprofessional, how at times it borders unethical. And that seems to be a theme that we saw a lot this week. So definitely no shortage of the theatrics this Week. ARCA experts also have been now approved to be admitted. We'll get into more detail of that here shortly. But what I did think was interesting, too, and I'm sure Elena may touch on it, is that when Judge Bev was talking with the defense, first of all, she said, make your argument quick, like, trying to, like, hurry them up, because it was the end of the day, even though she just gave the state, like, seven minutes to explain their point of view. So, but. And before she does that, she scolds them and she cites something that isn't even applicable in this scenario as to the signal chats and what was being held and what messages had been deleted. So then when the defense attorney is, like, kind of countering that, being like, well, actually, that isn't applicable to what I'm talking about. It's almost. I don't know if she gets embarrassed or if she just, like, doesn't want to be called out, that she knows she's wrong, but she kind of says she's like, I know it doesn't. And don't worry, you don't need to argue this hard because I am going to approve it. Like, you are going to win this motion. And it was just like, okay, then why did you have to give him this public scolding beforehand? Right. And I, I. It's my personal opinion that the only reason she allowed this in is because she knows if they did not allow the ARCA experts in, that there would be grounds for appeal, that there would be appeals coming in, that she would not be that Karen Reed, her being she. That Karen Reed would not have gotten a fair trial. So as much as I think it pained her to do it, she knew she had to do it. And I think that's why she did this public scolding, because she was, like, doing this, like, just gritting her teeth and not wanting to let the ARCA experts in, but knew she had no other choice. That's just my opinion. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert. I'm just a viewer. And I'm here breaking it down for you. And breaking down what I think. As a reminder, I know that these recaps are meant to catch you up on the full week of trial, because a lot of us don't have seven hours to watch this trial every single day. But if you ever do find yourself wanting to watch live, if you're on your lunch break, if you have a free moment to yourself and you want to watch it live and watch it live with me on it commentating, our live chat going. Everybody commenting. You can do that over on my YouTube channel. Tend to life because we are live streaming it every single day. Just a little friendly reminder. Now I'm going to stop talking. I'm going to let our amazing correspondent Elena Johnson come in. She is there in Massachusetts breaking it all down for us, letting us know what's going on in court, out of court, what happened this week, the big takeaways. And we're going to start with just a very brief recap of what happened last Friday when the jury went out for Jury View. All right, Elena, thanks so much for joining us. Tell us what went down this week.
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Annie Elise
Hey, Annie, before we get into the testimony, let's cover two updates in the case in general this week. Each side got some good news and some bad news. On Monday, we learned that the U.S. supreme Court declined to hear Karen's appeal. We know that Karen's team has previously petitioned the Supreme Court to have two of her charges, including the most important charge of second degree murder, dropped on grounds of double jeopardy. But the court denied to hear her petition. This doesn't mean that they've ruled on the case at all or given their opinion, but rather that they're declining to review it altogether. On the other hand, on Tuesday, the judge made a very important ruling about the testimony of ARCA experts. These experts are expected to be very important to the defense's case because they testified in the first trial. But it was unlikely that John was struck by a car at all. The judge ruled that despite repeated and deliberate violations of rules about sharing evidence, she would allow the ARCA experts to testify. She agreed with the prosecution's arguments that they had been ambushed by the defense. But she admitted that, quote, the defendant's right to a fair trial is paramount to everything. So ARCA is in and I expect this to be a big part of the defense's case. So now let's move on to the Testimony on Friday, April 25th. It was a short day for us because the jury, judge and counsel took a trip to 34 Fairview, which is the Alberts residence, and of course, the scene of the alleged crime. We learned that Karen's old car, this infamous Lexus, of course, the alleged murder weapon, would also be on site. And although the media wasn't allowed at the viewing, we did get to hear both the prosecution and the defense instruct the jury about specific parts of the viewing that they should take note of. The prosecution asked the jury to specifically note the height of the car's bumper the height of the rear tail light and also the ledge at the top of the car's hatch. The defense asked the jury to specifically note the distance between the second floor window of the house and. And the front lawn, as well as the distance from the flag pole to the front door. I think this is likely because the defense is going to make a point about how someone inside, next to that window, maybe someone named Brian Albert, could have and should have heard this big commotion going on in the front lawn. After the jury returned from their viewing, we heard from the prosecution's ninth witness, Dr. Gary Fowler, who's a pathologist. During direct examination, the prosecution established that Karen's blood alcohol level was.093 at around 9am on the morning of the incident, while the legal limit is 0.08%. On cross examination, Dr. Fowler said that his lab is not forensically accredited, and he admitted that the method that was used to test Karen's blood is not the same method that a forensic lab would use. But he argued that the method that he used should be equally accurate. We got into some very technical jargon, but to put it simply, he admitted that parents who. That patients who have Ms. Multiple sclerosis like Karen does, they can have higher levels of a specific coenzyme called NADH in their blood. But he testified that this increase wouldn't be enough to cause a false positive in the blood alcohol readings. Now, I generally thought that Dr. Fowler held up well against cross examination, certainly better than many of the Commonwealth's other witnesses that we've seen. And I'm interested to hear if the prosecution will do a retrograde extrapolation like they did in the first trial. This is basically a calculation that works backwards to say, well, if her blood alcohol level was.093% at 9am Then it would have been blank at, say, 12:30am when the incident is alleged to have occurred. We then moved to the 10th prosecution witness, Jason Becker, who's an EMT, paramedic and firefighter. Jason is Daniel Whitley's partner, who we heard from a few days ago, and the two of them were on the scene as paramedics for Karen on the day of John's death. Jason's direct examination was short, and I didn't feel it added too much to the prosecution's case that we hadn't already heard from Daniel, except for a discussion that Jason apparently heard Karen say that her last interaction with John had been a fight the night before. That brings us to Monday, April 28, where we heard from Ian Whiffin the 11th witness from the prosecution, he works for a digital forensics company and he was in charge of analyzing the phones of John as well as Jen McCabe. He first walked us through the search history on Jen McCabe's phone the night of the incident. This testimony was again, very long, filled with a lot of technical jargon. So let's see if we can break it down. The big question that both the prosecution and the defense are trying to answer is when did Jen Google, quote, house long to die in the cold? The defense is going to argue that Jen made that search between 2 and 3am, well before John's body was found. And if that's true, that would definitely be suspicious because it would suggest that Jen knew John was outside in the cold well before anybody else did. But on the other hand, the prosecution is arguing that Jen made the search between 6 and 7am after she, Carrie and Karen discovered John's body. And to support the prosecution's theory, Wiffen gave this timeline of events from Jen's phone. He said that at 2:27am a safari tab was opened and showed a search for Hockemok Sports scoreboard and Ozone Basketball. Then he said there was no new activity on the site, but the tab continued to operate in the background. Safari was then next used again at 6:23am, at which point this same tab was used to search how long to die in the cold. So in other words, his stance is that when Jen opened the old tab back up to make the Google search at 6:23am it actually registered the time from when the tab was originally opened, which was 2:27am to support this, he said, quote, it's not until you actually close the tab that the information gets written into the database. He also admitted that the search was deleted and he couldn't explain how or why. But he said he was confident that it was deleted by what he calls a systems event, not by the user manually removing it. He also pointed out that there were thousands of deleted records from Jen's phone, not just this one. And I thought this was an interesting point because which is worse? Deleting only the one most suspicious search or having thousands and thousands of deleted phone records? After this, he walked us through data on John's phone the night of the incident. Just like with Jen's phone, I think it's really helpful to identify the overarching point that each side is trying to make. And here the big question they're going after is, did John actually go into the house at 34 Fairview? We can Expect the defense is going to say, yep, he went in and he ultimately died. While the prosecution is arguing, nope, he never even entered the house and instead he died outside. To support the prosecution's claims, Whiffin gave us this timeline. He said that at 12:24am John's phone approached 34 Fairview, passed the end of the driveway and stopped very close to the flagpole. Then a few minutes later, that phone received messages from Jen McCabe and Brian Higgins. At 12:23am the phone then shows that 36 steps were taken and a minute later the phone was locked and not used again. At this point, Wiffen says the phone's battery was at about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Then at 6:15am the battery is then less than 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But Whiffin admitted that there was a large gap in temperature data from 1:30 to about 6am but still, Whiffin said that together this shows that the phone stayed close to the flagpole from 12:24am to when John was found, meaning that John, or at least his phone, never actually entered the home. Then on Tuesday, after more than three hours of direct examination, we then began cross examination of Wifn. Alessi handled this cross examination for the defense and I thought he was strong on cross. I think he has the ability to make some really compelling arguments without coming across as badgering, which someone like Jackson might come across as. So let's see if we can hit the key points covered. Remember, I'm trying to distill each day of testimony into just 10 or 15 minutes, so I won't be able to hit every detail starting with John's phone. We first learned that Wiffen included this quote in his final report. He said at 12:25am the device's bearing shifts to a westerly direction, as location records also show the device moving west from the roadside towards the house. But he admitted that he did not include that in his presentation to the jury. He further admitted, quote, it does appear that the device started to move towards the house, which contradicts his previous testimony, that the phone only stayed close to the flagpole for the entire night. He also added that the location data from the time between 12:25 and 12:37am is not very accurate. But he admitted that this inaccuracy could be because the phone was entering a building like, say, the Alberts house. Alessi then brought up Whiffin's testimony that the phone took 36 steps at 12:31am Wiffen said that those 36 steps would amount to about 84ft. And he admitted that that could place the phone within the house, since the distance from the flagpole to the house is only about 72ft. After that, we moved on to the temperature data. The defense pointed out that Wiffen conducted tests where he placed his phone either outside in the cold or in a freezer. Emmy's tests show that the phone battery drops by at least 2 degrees each minute. But Whiffin admitted that his data showed that the temperature on John's phone battery dropped at a much slower rate, less than one degree per minute. Now, during redirect, the prosecution pointed out that maybe this difference is because John's warm body was laying on the phone, and that's fair. But I think the bigger issue that the defense showed that whatever those outside conditions were, Wifn's test did not properly replicate them. Whiffin didn't test what the temperature would look like with the warmth of a body against it. And in fact, he couldn't really do completely accurate testing because he said he didn't even know the outside temperature in Canton that night. Then, moving on to Jen's phone, Wiffen admitted that some previous versions of his company's own software have the search for how long to die in the cold marked at 2:27am and he said that other reputable software on the market also has the search timestamped at 2:27am so where does that leave us with Whiffin? I'll admit that after his direct testimony, I felt like the prosecution was in a pretty good place with establishing that John never entered the house. After the cross examination, though, I did feel like Whiffin lost some credibility. I don't personally think he was like, outright lying, but I do think Alessi showed that Whiffen's original testimony was not the complete story and there might have been some cherry picking involved. Remember, on cross examination and even in the trial overall, it's not the defense's job to tear down the entire case or to present a different theory of what happened. All they need to do is poke enough holes in whatever the prosecution is serving to cast a reasonable doubt. To use an analogy, if the prosecution is bringing a balloon to the party, the defense doesn't need to give the jury a better balloon. All they need to do is give them the needle to pop it. And here I did feel like Whiffen's balloon was popped on Wednesday. We then moved on to the prosecution's 12th witness, much anticipated testimony from Jen McCabe. I'll try to give a very brief overview of Jen's involvement in the case. She's kind of all over the case. But to summarize, she was a close friend of John's because her daughter and his niece were friends. Jen was also out at the bar with John and Karen on the night of the incident, and she's the one who invited them to the after party at 34 Fairview. 34 Fairview is of course, owned by Brian Albert and his wife Nicole. Albert and Nicole is Jen McCabe's sister. Jen said that John never came to the party, but she said she did see a dark SUV in the driveway during the party. Jen says that the next day Karen called her frantically saying that John never came home. And that's what's. That's what began this search party of sorts by the trio of Karen, Jen and Carrie Roberts. And we know they eventually found John's lifeless body in front of 34 Fairview. It's at this point, at around 6:30am that Jen says Karen told her to Google hypothermia, which is in line with Whiffin's testimony about the timestamp for that search. How long to die in the cold? Jen also testified that after discovering the body, Karen said, quote, I hit him three times to a female EMT on the scene. Now, Jen admitted that she didn't report Karen saying this right away, and she instead contacted Michael Proctor about it after the fact because she claims she sort of like suddenly remembered that it happened. Now, like I said last week, we can expect that the prosecution is going to call a lot of witnesses that claim that Karen said this. And each time, we can expect that the defense is going to do everything in their power to refute their testimony. Because in my opinion, this alleged admission is one of the strongest parts of the prosecution's case, and the defense knows that. So I would expect this to come up in cross examination quite a bit. Then we also heard the 911 call that Jen made just after they found the body. Now, a lot of the audience was sort of critical of Jen's very calm demeanor during this call. I personally disagree. I think that judging people on their demeanor during emergencies isn't very accurate because we all react differently. So I don't personally think that Jen's tone on the call really means much, but what I did take from the 911 call is that you can hear Karen in the background with what I feel were very genuine screams of fear, terror, panic, all of it. After that, by mid Wednesday, it was time for the cross examination of Jen this was done by Alan Jackson. I think we can expect that anytime a witness testifies to Karen saying I hit him, Jackson will probably do the cross. I think that's how they've divided the witnesses up. On the defense side, I will say Gen is a little bit difficult to listen to on cross. She knows she's a prosecution witness and she really never wants to give the defense an inch. Often when the defense asks her a question that she doesn't like, she'll give a sort of non answer over and over again or she'll ask her own question back. I don't necessarily think this means she's lying, but I don't think it's a good look either. I think if you compare her to someone like Whiffin who in my opinion was forthcoming across, even if he wasn't thrilled about it, I think in comparison he comes across as more reliable than someone like Gen. And actually yesterday was Gen on her best behavior. She was much more combative during the first trial. We did see a little glimpse of the old Gen at the very end of the day Wednesday. If you watch the livestream, you'll know what I'm talking about because everyone was talking about it. But basically that was how she behaved for the entirety of the first trial. And this time for most of cross, she was a little bit calmer. Now that I've given you the full Gen backstory, let's get to the content of this very important cross examination. So first, Jackson established some of the connections that the Albert family has with different law enforcement agencies. To highlight a few, we have, of course, Brian Albert. He's the homeowner and Jen's brother in law. He has five brothers, including Chris Albert, a Canton select board member, and Kevin Albert, who is a Canton police officer. Now, here's another important connection. The lead investigator on this case was of course, the now disgraced Michael Proctor. He's married to Courtney Proctor, who's best friends with Jill Daniels, who's the sister of Julie Albert, who's the sister in law of Brian Albert. Did you follow all that the first time around? I didn't either. But basically the point is that the Albert family is extremely well connected across various Massachusetts law enforcement, law enforcement agencies, including agencies that are very close to the case. After that, Jackson brought up an instance where Jen was interviewed by a law enforcement agency that was not the Massachusetts State Police or the Canton police. So basically a separate agency not connected to her family. And he showed that she was seemingly a little bit untruthful. Jen admitted that in the 10 minutes between the agency calling her on the phone and eventually entering her home for this interview, she says she called her husband and Carrie Roberts and she disclosed those calls to the agency. But she later admitted to making three additional calls that she didn't disclose to the agency, even when asked. Those calls were to John's mother, the District Attorney's office, and Brian Albert. After that, Jackson asked a lot of questions about Jen's claim that she saw Karen's SUV in front of 34 Fairview on the night of the incident. She testified that when she looked out the front door of the house, she could see from right to left Karen's Lexus, a Jeep with a plow that belongs to Brian Higgins and a truck belonging to Ryan Nagle. At first she said the Lexus was, quote, straight out the front door. Then Jen returned to the door several more times and reported that she saw it move to the right towards the flagpole, then again further up, and then it was finally gone sometime before 1am and interestingly, we have some record of exactly when she supposedly saw the car in each of these positions, because each time she looked for the car, she sent a text to John, and those texts are timestamped between 12:27 and 12:45am now, during Jen's unofficial lookout mission, she also observed tired tracks in the snow. But despite being able to see those clearly, she admitted that she never saw John's body, nor did she ever hear a struggle or a collision. She also admitted that when she left the house about an hour later and drove towards the flagpole, she didn't see John at that point either. Jackson then fast forwarded to the morning after John's body was found, specifically the point when Jen went back into 34 Fairview to wake up Brian and Nicole. She said that she came bursting through their bedroom door, but she admitted she had no memory of hearing or seeing their German shepherd, Chloe, despite the dog apparently usually sleeping in the bedroom with Brian and Nicole. Now, at some point around this time, the judge made another slip. The judge called Jen, Ms. Reed. Between that and when she called Carrie Roberts. Ms. McCabe, I think the judge is doing more favors for the defense than she really intends to with these sort of Freudian slips. Now, the last important point of Wednesday's cross had to do with this all important claim that Jen heard Karen say, I hit him, I hit him, I hit him. Jen said this is very vivid in her memory and Jackson calls it the cornerstone of her testimony. So if that's the case, then certainly it should have been in her testimony to the grand jury. Right. So Jackson gives her a transcript of her testimony to the grand jury from 2022 and asks her to find where she said it. She looks at it and says, this document is 227 pages. And then Jackson says, take your time. Lo and behold, this quote is not in the transcript because she never said it. Instead, she quoted Karen as saying, did I hit him? Could I have hit him? Is he dead? Is he dead? Is he dead? Jackson also brought up that reports of Jen's interviews with Proctor and Sergeant Lank from the exact day of the incident don't have this. All important, I hit him quote. So is she lying? Did she mishear? Are all these reports wrong? Did her memory truly improve in the three years since John's death? I'm curious to hear what you guys think. So that wrapped up court for Wednesday, but I don't expect that to be even close to the end of Jen's testimony. And I actually wouldn't be surprised if cross redirect. Re Cross redirect if all those take another full day. So I'm going to reserve my full opinions on Gen until I see the rest of her testimony. For now, I will say I honestly think she's faring much better during cross than she did in the first trial. But I also think that Jack Jaxon probably has a lot more up his sleeve for her to end this. I will leave you with the comments that Karen made outside the courthouse following Jen's testimony. She said, quote, another witness, another instance of perjury, or instances, I'd say. I wonder if the jury is feeling the same way or not. We'll have to see what happens next week. Talk to you later, Annie.
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Elena Johnson
All right, guys, you just heard it all from Elena. And like I told you in the beginning of this episode, it was a big week. This trial is slated to go six and a half to eight weeks. That was the orig. Eight weeks was actually the original estimation. I don't know if that's still on target or if they think it's going to be shortened up at all. But we are just getting started. We're literally going into week three now, and we're not even at the halfway point yet. So I think there is a lot to come. I also will be, it looks like, confirmed in Boston in about a week and a half here. No, about two weeks here in May. So I will be reporting live from Boston as well. But we still have so much testimony to go over. I mean, we have Higgins and his messages with Karen, him at the Sally port, him leaving, him moving the cars, the butt dials of it all. We have the Michael Proctor of it all. Not only his text messages and how he just like fumbled this case from the very get go, but also now new in this trial that wasn't there before is how he's been fired. He's been disgraced. He was fired for misconduct in this investigation. So now the jury's going to hear all of that. So we are just getting started. It is going to be a wild one. So like I said, we're straight live streaming it every single day on YouTube. Otherwise we will have these recaps prepped and ready for you every single Friday so you can keep up. And as we continue to work out the tech issues, we appreciate your patience, your feedback and thank you for your support. All right, guys, have a great weekend. I will be back with you first thing Monday. And until the next one, be nice. Don't kill people, don't join any cults, definitely don't drive drunk. And maybe just stay away from the Canton Police Department for a hot minute if you live in the area. All right. All right. Bye, guys. Sa.