BOSTON — Karen Read maintained her innocence in the death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, in a risky interview with ABC’s “20/20” television newsmagazine that aired Friday night.

“I felt like I’d had alcohol, I felt that I had a buzz, but I did not feel it was unsafe to be operating my vehicle,” Read, who prosecutors say rammed O’Keefe with her SUV and left him to die in a Canton front yard in a late January blizzard in 2022, told interviewer Matt Gutman.

Read was tried in Norfolk Superior Court earlier this year for O’Keefe’s murder but it ended in mistrial. She is scheduled to be retried on the same charges in January.

During the interview, she admits that she was angry at O’Keefe. Prosecutors have said that she hit her boyfriend with her car following yet another blowout argument in the deeply troubled relationship.

“Could you have been angry enough, and slightly drunk, because he had annoyed you that, in a fit of rage, you just backed up —” Gutman asks as Read’s eyes grow large.

“Never,” Read said.

“… and tried to tap him? Not to try to kill him, but to try and —”

“To tap him with my 6,000-pound, full-size SUV?!” Read said, incredulously. “To hit John’s body with my car? No.”

“Did you kill John O’Keefe?” Gutman asked.

“I did not kill John O’Keefe,” Read said. “I’ve never harmed a hair on John O’Keefe’s head.”

The interview was titled “Karen Read: The Perfect Storm.”

Elsewhere in the program, Read recalled her discovery of O’Keefe lying dead or dying in the front yard of a fellow Boston cop’s home, who Read’s attorneys have accused of being at the center of a rotten police cover-up and of even being the killer himself.

“I said, he’s right (expletive) there,” Read said in the interview. “I jumped out the passenger side and I fell into the street. His eyes were shot and he had spots of blood in different areas on his face, and he was still, not stiff, but still. It was cold.”

A Massachusetts medical examiner would find that O’Keefe died from a mixture of blunt-force trauma to his head and hypothermia. The examiner, Dr. Irini Scordi-Bello, said that she did not have enough information to declare a manner of death.

Police and prosecutors say Read, 44, of Mansfield, struck O’Keefe with her Lexus SUV following yet another argument. When Read, with two other women, discovered O’Keefe’s body in the Canton front yard at around 6 a.m. on Jan. 27, 2022, prosecutors say her shock was feigned to cover up what she had done.

“I felt cold, but I didn’t feel dangerously cold. And it was just an odd feeling to know that I’m OK. I’m not dying, but he’s here with me and he’s dying and I can’t warm him up,” Read said.

The case grew to prominence over the past year for true crime aficionados and anti-police-corruption activists not just from Greater Boston but nationally, as the hyped “20/20” special proves. But a very important person was lost in the hoopla, O’Keefe’s family says in the program: John O’Keefe himself.

“He was lost in this whole circus,” a cousin, Renay, said in a group interview. “And I think none of us want him to be lost. I think that’s the saddest part of this whole situation, that he’s not remembered as who he is and who he was during this whole thing.”

Proctor disclosure

The special aired the same day that the Norfolk District Attorney’s office had to send letters in three cases to inform attorneys that they had received an extraction of the contents of lead Read investigator Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor’s work phone and his work cloud account because the materials could impact those cases.

Proctor was out of a job, though not quite fired, the same day Read’s case ended in mistrial, after his testimony in the case revealed admittedly unprofessional conduct regarding the Read case.

Now prosecutors say contents of his work phone could impact not only Read’s case but the case of Brian Walshe, who’s accused of murdering his wife on Jan. 1, 2023, in their Cohasset home and scattering her body in trash bins around the greater region, as well as the murder case of former urologist Dr. Ingolf Tuerk, of Dover, who’s accused of strangling his wife in an argument in 2020 and hiding her body in a pond.

Prosecutors say their preliminary review of the contents shows material related to “information about open investigations, surveillance video from unrelated investigations, personal identifying information and/or medical information of individuals involved in unrelated investigations, (and) location data of Proctor and third parties.” In a footnote, they also disclose that the information could contain the names and contact information of confidential informants as well as those of witnesses and victims, including minors.

“[R]eleasing the entire extraction report outside of law enforcement is anticipated to jeopardize open investigations, compromise the privacy and safety of civilians, and thus be contrary to the interests of justice,” the notice states.

Neither the DA office spokesman nor Read’s attorney David Yannetti immediately returned calls for comment Friday.

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