34 Fairview Road: The Death of John O'Keefe and the Trials of Karen Read (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798175651059)

On the morning of January 29, 2022, Boston police officer John O'Keefe was found dying in the snow on the front lawn of 34 Fairview Road in Canton, Massachusetts. His girlfriend, Karen Read, told first responders she thought she hit him. Within days she was charged. Within months, the case against her began to unravel, and America started watching.

Was it a drunk driving death, plain and terrible? Or was John O'Keefe killed inside that house and left on the lawn, with an outsider framed by police protecting their own?

34 Fairview Road is the definitive account of the case that split a town and a country: two murder trials, a hung jury whose members later said they had already agreed to acquit, a lead investigator fired over texts he read aloud in open court, a federal grand jury, an independent police audit, a blogger under indictment, a pink-shirted movement, and a verdict that ended the criminal case while settling almost nothing. It follows the evidence wherever it leads, the taillight and the phone data, the unsearched house and the 2:22 a.m. call, the science on both sides, and the web of civil lawsuits still burning through the courts today.

Written with rigor and restraint, this book gives both of the case's stories at full strength and refuses to convict anyone the courts did not. It is the story of a catastrophic investigation, a defense unlike any in American history, a family's unbearable loss, and a justice system colliding with the internet age. Above all, it is the story of John O'Keefe, the man who raised his sister's orphaned children as his own, whose death became a national argument, and whose question remains unanswered on a quiet suburban lawn.

Two juries could not say what happened in those twenty minutes. This book tells you everything that is actually known, and exactly why the rest may never be.