Karen Read, Turtleboy, and New England Villains
A Masshole chat with Clover (and Lola!)
In April, Clover and I went to visit my parents in the Boston suburbs for Passover. Clover was sitting around perusing my parents’ copy of the Boston Globe and spotted an article on the upcoming murder trial of Karen Read, which described the case as capturing global interest. We were like…who? What? I soon learned that my entire family is closely following this trial, as is apparently the entire state of Massachusetts.
I grew up in the Boston suburbs, and Clover was born in Philly but moved to Western Mass at age 9, and then went to college in Worcester, MA and lived there until she was 25. We are both on some level Massachusetts d-bags, and that ancestral truth drew us into somewhat of a deep dive on this case. After watching a five-part HBO mini-series on Read’s first trial (yes, first…we’ll get to that) and reading some articles, we felt like a lot of the most interesting aspects of this case are not being discussed. We also invited our roommate Lola to contribute, as we had sucked her into this tangled web of deceit with us. Although perhaps this may seem like a bit of a random topic for this Substack as it has nothing to do with lesbians, this is my house and I MAKE THE RULES! :) Also, warning, it turned out we had a lot to say, so this is too long to read the full thing in your email. OK, let’s go!
Julia: Let’s start with the broad strokes. Karen Read is a tiny blonde South Shore chick who was dating a Boston cop named John O’Keefe. In January of 2022, O’Keefe died in the snow in Canton, MA on the front lawn of another cop named Brian Albert. That night, Read and O’Keefe were drinking heavily with other cops and cop-adjacent folk in a series of cavernous Canton bars, and then drove drunk (which is apparently what everyone in Canton is doing all the time) to the aforementioned Albert house to continue partying. O’Keefe went in while Read idled outside, to make sure they were indeed welcome to come hang with the Alberts. When he didn’t quickly come back out, Read started blowing up his phone and left him a series of angry voice messages. She drove home, still blasted. At 5 AM, when he still hadn’t come home, she rallied two girlfriends and went back to the house, where they found him dead in a snowbank. According to Read, she started panicking that she might have somehow unknowingly hit him and left him in the snow. According to some people who were there, Read was screaming “I hit him,” but there are lots of recordings from that morning and those words aren’t on tape.
Nonetheless, Read quickly became the only identified suspect. O’Keefe’s fellow cops declined to investigate the greater crime scene/the house where he was found AT ALL. Rather, they arrested Read and charged her with second-degree murder (a charge that pretty much everyone who’s not a cop agrees is insane) and vehicular manslaughter. The main evidence that the prosecution had against her was that pieces of her tail-light, which was broken, were scattered on the Alberts’ lawn, though it seems highly possible that these were planted by the cops. Her case was tried last July, and it ended in a mistrial: the jury determined that she was conclusively innocent of second-degree murder, but they couldn’t reach a verdict on the manslaughter charge. Now the her second trial has begun, and the prosecution is re-trying her on all charges. Her defense team alleges that Read is in fact not only innocent but is the victim of a widespread law enforcement conspiracy. We’ll get into some of the dozens of insane details that make this case so gripping, but first: the conspiracy narrative has been widely perpetuated by none other than Turtleboy, a Worcester blogger whose name made Clover snap to attention when he was first mentioned in the mini-series. Clover, would you care to tell the readers about Turtleboy and what he represents?
Clover: The way this docu-series, which is our primary vehicle for understanding this story (we are not true-crime heads and are not trying to get into some insane evidence/judgment vortex), functions is that it shows bits of the evidence and actual tale of the night of O’Keefe’s death, police investigation/total lack of investigation, and context for possible murder/conspiracy at different points when it’s most dramatically appropriate, but loosely based on the timeline with which that information comes to light in the actual court proceedings. This is interspersed with footage, interviews, and information from Karen Read herself, as well as her lawyers and other such talking heads interviewed for the show. I expected to know nobody in this show at all — I lived in Massachusetts for a while but would not consider myself well-versed in Boston culture and could not locate Canton on a map — so color me shocked and pink when the series reveals that a key factor in Karen Read’s popularity, a major factor in what’s making her case a (Boston) “Global phenomenon” is that she reached out to local Massachusetts blogger Aiden Kearney, aka Turtleboy.
Who is Turtleboy? Turtleboy is a vile ghul of a man whose body pumps a foul ichor rather than blood, whose cowardice and pitiful degradations spill out of him passively like water from a fish’s gills. He’s a little piece of shit who was known by me for years in my time in Worcester as nothing more than a racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual little gnat biting at the city from his dingy hovel in the woods of Holden, MA. I knew of Turtleboy because he was a sort of low-status nemesis to iconic Worcester Good Guy Independent Journalist
(he writes the newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It), who was constantly mocking Turtleboy and occasionally reporting on his more heinous antics. Turtleboy would usually respond in kind with juvenile insults directed at Shaner, and repeated demands to debate him. Turtleboy was like this Simpsons character to me, just occasionally popping up to be a meaningless gag that could get beaten down. It was sad and annoying to understand that he had some platform, that he couldn’t just be silenced or be a better person, but it also never felt like he had real influence on anything. If this is all sounding very provincial and silly, exactly.Aiden Kearney picked up the name Turtleboy (from an iconic Worcester fountain that looks like a boy riding a turtle bareback to full orgasm, and which whispered dark missives to its creator) in an attempt to spew his putrid filth in anonymity, since he knew being a person who sucks could have consequences, but his identity was almost immediately discovered in 2015, because he registered the blog as a business and listed his home address as the business address, and people learned that he was in fact the same Aiden Kearney who once worked as a high school history teacher in Worcester until he chose to resign rather than face punishment for sexual misconduct with a student. So, that’s the guy we’re talking about here. A little toad outside Worcester who writes his terrible little blog with his stupid little opinions, the epitome of Massachusetts trash, who I had not given any real thought to in years.
All of a sudden he’s a huge fucking deal in Boston, which might as well be the entire galaxy to a man with such limited imagination and sense of worldly weight as Aiden Kearney, and he’s on an HBO documentary that I’m watching, and I’m going “Wait a second is that fucking Turtleboy??”
Julia: I feel like Clover kind of breezed past the statue of it all, so I just want to reiterate: Turtleboy’s namesake is a statue that appears to depict a gently smiling boy nailing a moaning turtle from behind. In the process of creating this unspeakable work of art, the sculptor, Charles Harvey, began hearing voices coming from the statue telling him to take his own life, which he tragically did. Absolutely chilling.
So, it turns out that Karen Read was a Turtleboy fan, and she reached out to him to try to get help publicizing her case prior to trial and generate some public outrage on her behalf. As Clover discussed, Turtleboy is a vile racist, misogynist, ableist, etc etc etc piece of shit!! The fact that KR was a fan of his speaks to the fact that everyone in this story is a villain. But, crucially, being a cop-loving fan of a bigoted blogger troll doesn’t mean you are also a murderer.
So, Karen Read reached out to Turtleboy and started feeding him a bunch of evidence in support of her case, and then he started posting about it and mobilizing people to show up to her hearings and protest on her behalf. Because he’s a lunatic, he then took it way too far and is now being charged with witness intimidation after showing up to a pizza shop in Canton owned by Brian Albert’s brother to grill him about Albert’s role in O’Keefe’s death (BTW, that role is definitely “murderer,” in my opinion, but we’ll get to that.) Turtleboy openly said, on camera, that he was trying to poison the jury pool! He’s a lunatic, and I think that he probably wants to boink Karen Read.
The thing that’s been a bit mind-blowing to us is that Turtleboy has successfully drummed up a sizable movement of white Southie townies to rally around Karen Read’s case, which means rallying against the police. These are people who, demographically, are likely to be total Thin Blue Liners, but they are rabidly harassing the various cops and cop wives serving as witnesses in the case and posting up outside the courthouse for 12 hours at a time in support of KR. (Note: Karen Read is such a firstie-lastie, I somehow can’t refer to her as Karen or Read….she’s Karen Read.) In the docu-series, Karen Read’s lawyer says that he thinks people are sick of the police good-old-boys club and how corrupt it is, and that’s why they’ve been so easily mobilized. While there is probably some element of truth to this, again, I think that these are people who under other circumstances are neutral-to-positive on the police. For the most part, they are not the ones suffering from police corruption.
Basically, this phenomenon is much closer to QAnon than to BLM. The reason that this case is invoking so much fury in these white Bostonians is because it’s being framed as a government conspiracy. Which, to be clear, it definitely is! They are not wrong about that. But I think it’s fair to say that the fury around this will not, in many cases, lead to a wider-scope critical analysis of police violence. Anyway, speaking of “everyone in this story is a villain,” let’s get into KR’s legal team.
Clover: Karen Read’s star lawyer, Alan Jackson, did try to dress up the QAnon-esque fervor of the townies as a simmering resentment of police corruption and impunity, but that has to be put into the context of who Alan Jackson is: an LA celebrity lawyer formerly working for the DA’s office before an unsuccessful DA run moved him into private practice. He was most recently in the spotlight for defending Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Saudi Prince Majed Abdulaziz Al-Saud from rape charges. For Weinstein, Jackson argued that two women accusing him of rape were “making it up”, and another two took part in “transactional sex” for career advancement, but that it was “100% consensual”, and that “regret is not rape”. So, he’ll kind of say whatever. He has a 96% success rate taking on difficult cases. He’s a lawyer, not a politician (but he is a Republican, if you didn’t know).
So the point is, this is a highly cynical story. Karen Read is being wronged, but she is also conniving, almost certainly racist, and is okay working with Aiden Kearney, definitely racist, and abides by him harassing witnesses who, for the most part, are just cops and family of cops, who are being attacked by a lawyer who believes in nothing and a weird South Shore population who believe in conspiracy detached from any real historical or political context. It’s a clusterfuck, but somehow no one’s talking about that, people are only talking about whether the phone chip metadata shows that O’Keefe took two steps forward then one to the left or if it was one step forward and three to the right.
One time, in Worcester, a cop died trying to save a child from a pond on the hill where people drown every year. The city has done very little to combat this evil pond or make it so more people know how to swim. I heard about his death through local news sources, but also through a highway LED sign that said something like “RIP MANNY WORCESTER POLICE OFFICER”. The insane boho bookshop/cafe I temporarily worked at offered their Audre Lorde Smoothie (all the smoothies were named after poets?) to police officers free for a month, because it was purple, which is kinda like blue.
When John O’Keefe died, absolutely pissing drunk in the snow, either from getting bonked by a car from his crazy girlfriend, beaten and left for dead by his own Lieutenant and his lieutenants dog, or simply by asphyxiating on his own vomit in a blizzard, off-duty, he was given a Highlander’s funeral involving every cop in town, 50 to 100 bagpipes, and the closure of a major highway, proving that actually cops are okay with shutting down public infrastructure for a reason that only matters to some people, sometimes. So that’s the kind of town we’re dealing with. How Aiden Kearney managed to get a huge vocal contingent of that town out to a court every day to harass police officers and their children is a phenomenon worth study. The South Shore is an area filled with directionless hate and, apparently, lots of people with nothing to do between 7 AM and 5 PM.
Julia: So true. Now I want to say a few words about what we think actually happened to John O’Keefe. As we’ve made clear, we both firmly believe that Karen Read is innocent. There is no convincing evidence against her; the only real “evidence” the prosecution has is that pieces of her taillight were found on the yard where O’Keefe’s body was found, and, based on the timelines, it seems likely that these were planted by a cop - specifically a relation of Brian Albert’s. O’Keefe’s wounds do not seem remotely consistent with getting hit by a car.
We think that Lieutenant Brian Albert did it. Yes, in part we think this because he looks like this:
Not to do phrenology, but that’s a murderer’s head shape. He looks like a man who ate a smaller man and is still digesting him. But also, as you have brought up to me several times in conversation, Clover, it’s mentioned early on in the docu-series that Brian Albert is literally known for beating up junior cops. I don’t know why he did it, and I don’t know if it was an accident or on purpose, but I am certain that he did it for the following reasons:
-John O’Keefe had what looked like bite marks all over his arms. Brian Albert had a German shepherd (randomly named Chloe) who he re-homed shortly after O’Keefe’s death.
-Albert, his sister in law (a shady tanned bitch named Jen McCabe), and Brian Higgins (another cop who was having a text flirtation with Karen Read [we’ll get to that]), both of whom were there that night, all have a bunch of calls going back and forth with each other from late that night and early in the morning. All three claim that these calls were all “butt dials.” Obvious lies.
-When the body was found on his lawn that morning, Albert didn’t come outside for several hours, because “he was already dead, so there was nothing I could do to help” (paraphrased).
-Brian Higgins, who it seems is complicit in the cover-up, then got rid of his phone by cutting up his SIM card and throwing his phone and the pieces of the card into separate dumpsters on a military base. He claims that this was the most convenient way for him to get rid of an old phone because he “happened to be cutting through” the base. What??
The fact that none of these guys have been investigated really does go to show that cops can get away with anything. It’s appalling, and it’s the reason I spend 7 to 10 hours a day in a pink shirt screaming outside a courthouse in Boston. Okay, now I want to kick it over to Lola to share some thoughts on Karen Read’s mystique.
Lola: So I joined the Karen Read train a little after Clulia/Jover, and immediately got completely sucked into this story. It’s engrossing on so many levels. The total lack of any truly likable actor, everybody being either a corrupt and possibly murderous cop, or someone who consorts with cops and likes to drive blackout drunk. The absolute frenzy of people in the greater Boston area being stirred up, to the point where otherwise probably identical conservative middle-aged white Canton women don pink or blue shirts and scream at each other from opposite sides of a cordon while KR and her lawyers shuffle into the courthouse. The 19 subreddits picking apart the minutiae of the case. Etc etc.
But I feel most enthralled by Karen Read’s character. She has undeniable star-power and I understand how quickly these Canton girlies have rallied around her. This case is a harrowing ordeal for her but she also clearly relishes being the eye of the storm and plays the part of affronted, innocent-cop’s-girlfriend-turned-righteous-whistleblower exceedingly well. She is comfortable with the camera, speaking to us loudly and animatedly in an eternally quivering voice, as if to underline her shock and outrage at being framed. She has these huge piercing brown eyes and a wide Joker-like mouth that breaks into a triumphant smile whenever another egregious piece of evidence incriminates the dumb cops who probably killed her bf. She also has style—day after day she enters the courtroom wearing these smart, cutting corporate fits, her ombre hair freshly heat-curled, smiling and waving at her supporters like a politician. She’s undeniably crazy, but she knows she’s innocent and she knows she’s the star of this trial, and this is why we love her. #FreeKarenRead #AllCopsAreBostonians
Julia: Hahahahaa, thank you Lola for your insights as an outsider to Bostonian culture.
Now we’re going to wrap up with some quick hits on some of the many crazy elements of this case that we haven’t yet touched on. First, the various witnesses are basically like the seven dwarves of the Boston PD (Horny, Pervy, Trembly, Ragey, Sex Pest…). These include:
-Trooper Proctor (pronounce Troopah Proctah), the lead investigator for the case, who was revealed in the court room to have been MESSAGING HIS HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS IN A FACEBOOK MESSENGER GROUP about searching Karen Read’s phone. His friend asked if she was hot and he said “yeah, but she has a weird Fall River accent and no ass.” Then he said “no nudes yet.” Fucking GASP. He has been suspended.
-Brian Higgins (to refresh you on the various Brians, another officer who was at the Alberts’ house that night) who was revealed to have been very bluntly flirting over text with Karen Read and was forced to read the texts out loud in the courtroom in front of, among other people, KR’s parents. They were literally texting each other “you’re hot.” Now imagine a cop flatly reading that out loud in a thick Boston accent. Wait, you don’t have to imagine it, the video is here (go to 12:11 lol). On a side note, Karen defended this behavior (she instigated the flirting) on the HBO show by being like “I was single! John and I didn’t have a mortgage together.” Girlie, LMAO! You know that’s not what “single” means.
-The cops also brought in a police crash reconstructionist (?) who was so nervous that his voice wouldn’t stop shaking wildly the entire time and the path that he suggested O’Keefe’s body took defied every law of physics. Boston’s finest.
-Moving on to a couple of other side characters worth mentioning. A few of John O’Keefe’s friends featured heavily in the HBO Show and they freak me out, man. One is a redheaded beta bro who looks almost exactly like Louis C.K. and seems on the verge of angry tears at all times. Another is O’Keefe’s ex-girlfriend who he dated in his twenties it seems like, who wears a necklace with O’Keefe’s police badge number on it. Both are clearly obsessed with/in love with him? I can’t tell if this dynamic existed while he was alive or if it’s a retroactive thing, but it’s incredibly off-putting.
-In the angry drunk voice messages that Karen Read sent O’Keefe on the night he died, she insulted him several times by calling him a “pervert.” (“YOURA FUCKIN PEHVERT JOHN!!”) This is never discussed further in the HBO doc but I for one would like to know more.
-Lastly I wanna share that John O’Keefe is doing bottom eyes in his police headshot
OK, we’ve got to start wrapping it up, but Clover, would you like to share any last thoughts? I know you wanted to comment on the alcohol consumption in this story….
Clover:
-It’s revealed early on that what cops and their friends do in Canton is drive to an empty bar, crowd around the bartop like gnats, drink seven (7) drinks in 1.5 hours, drive to another bar, have another 5 to 7 drinks, then drive to a lieutenant’s house to get murdered. In the case of Karen Read and John O’Keefe, that includes driving with cocktails from the bar in the cupholders. Karen mentions riding up to the Alberts residence with a walk-me-down car vodka soda, and the prosecution mentions O’Keefe having pieces of a cocktail glass on his person at his death, insinuating he drove and exited the car while holding a cocktail.
-AND ANOTHER THING, I’m not even the first person to laugh about this but early in the series Karen Read tries to defend her drinking, because her state of mind and memory is key to the prosecution’s argument. She goes on a ramble that raises more concerns than it quells, saying something like, “Okay, so we got shots and that was a double, so they’re calling that two drinks, but then I didn’t drink those and we got vodka sodas, those are also doubles. But I didn’t drink the vodka sodas really, but they’re calling that four drinks. Then we’re getting ready to go so I pour the shot into the vodka soda to drink it all. So somehow that’s four drinks!” Yeah babe, that is four drinks. It really goes on like that for a long time, Karen Read seeming to honestly think that if you put 2oz of liquor into an already existing 2oz of liquor, it’s just one “drink” of liquor. It’s revelatory.
-We all agree Karen Read’s evil lady lawyer, Elizabeth Little, is hot.
Julia: Yes, to me she looks like she would be a fellow PhD student from the English Department at Harvard who I would meet at a grad student workshop and unsuccessfully flirt with. Instead, she is a high powered lawyer who defends Kevin Spacey and Karen Read. Life is crazy. Be careful out there, folks.
thank you for the aside about the free Audre Lorde smoothies for cops, that is W I L D
I’ve also been considering writing about the Turtleboy angle—the only time I’ve gotten credible death threats have been when he’s covered my work. The memes he’s made about me are VILE. People not from Mass don’t understand this context. I was HORRIFIED when the doc revealed that she approached HIM as her media ally!!!