The judge overseeing the Karen Read murder case has granted prosecutors’ request for access to off-the-record interviews, notes and other documents involving conversations that Read had with a Boston Magazine reporter and recordings and notes with her family from a local TV station’s report.
Read has sat down with various media outlets to tell her side of the story about the death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, in Canton, Massachusetts, for which she has been charged. Insisting she was innocent and alleging a coverup, Read’s trial ended with a hung jury this summer.
Ahead of the retrial, the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office has been digging into those interviews, asking Judge Beverly Cannone last month to compel Boston Magazine to hand over all communications between its reporter, Gretchen Voss, and Read.
As prosecutors prepare for Karen Read’s second murder trial, they are asking for records of an interview she did last year with Boston Magazine.
On Thursday, Cannone granted prosecutors’ request in the Boston Magazine motion. But the records she ordered be turned over are only for the prosecution and defense to review, not to be released to the public without another order from the court, according to her order.
“Statements by a defendant regarding the crimes for which she is charges are evidentiary and relevant to her criminal prosecution. The defendant voluntarily made statements to Voss regarding the events that led to O’Keefe’s death, and such statements are admissible,” Cannone wrote.
Boston Magazine previously turned over some material from its interview, including audio where off-the-record conversation was redacted, but Cannone said that those “redacted materials suggest that the account she gave to Boston Magazine may have differed in certain respects from expected evidence at trial and from other accounts she has given; however, the redactions prevent the Commonwealth from fully understanding the defendant’s statements.”
NBC10 Boston is reaching out to Voss and Boston Magazine for comment on the ruling. A lawyer for the magazine and Voss has previously said that reporters have the right to keep confidential information private.
But Cannone wrote that there’s a difference between disclosing the identity of a confidential source and what a known source said off the record, and that, given that she was working with lawyers who sat with her for two other interviews with Voss, “Voss and the defendant knew or should have known that all of the statements in the interviews, whether termed on or off the record, were potentially discoverable.”
Cannone also on Thursday granted prosecutors’ request for TV station WFXT’s recordings and interview notes from Read’s mother, father and brother from an August 2023 report in which, prosecutors said, her father suggests she admitted colliding with something at the scene, something they plan to discuss further at the retrial. Cannone didn’t provide a rationale for the ruling beyond that “the Commonwealth has met its burden of establishing good cause pursuant to” established precedent on access to third-party records in Massachusetts.
NBC10 Boston is reaching out to the station for comment on that ruling as well.
The rulings in favor of the prosecution come after Cannone last week denied its request for the release of phone records between Read and her parents on the night of O’Keefe’s death.
