Prosecutor failed to tie Karen Read and pro-Read blogger together with witness intimidation conspiracy

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Oct 10, 2024

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BOSTON — The cases of Karen Read and pro-Read blogger Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney could have been more tied up together than they already are if a prosecutor had his way with a grand jury earlier this year.

Special prosecutor Kenneth Mello, a Fall River-based attorney brought in to handle multiple cases against Kearney including felony witness intimidation charges related to the Read murder case, brought charges that Read and Kearney had conspired to intimidate witnesses in her case to a Norfolk Superior Court grand jury.

Those charges were not approved following his grand jury presentation. Jurors returned a “no true bill” on the matter — which means they didn’t find enough evidence to support the charges.

A Norfolk Superior Court clerk confirmed to the Boston Herald the case existed and that was the outcome, but said all of the materials involved in it are impounded and are not available for public view.

Mello had dropped hints along the way that he was trying to indict the new charges. In January, a search warrant filed in Kearney’s case was unsealed and revealed that Massachusetts State Police investigators had seized two iPhones from Read.

The warrant alleged that Read and her defense team provided Kearney with non-public materials and orchestrated his coverage of the case and his alleged witness intimidation campaign. It alleges that Read committed the crime of conspiracy to intimidate a witness.

Kearney’s attorney Timothy Bradl at the time told the Herald that this was “an investigation without a crime.”

“It appears to me that there is zero evidence that Karen Read intended or had anything to do with any witness intimidation or interference, and rather is a woman fighting for her life as a target of a murder charge,” he said at the time.

While Read defense attorney David Yannetti said he couldn’t comment on the failed indictment, Bradl did give the Herald a short comment regarding how Mello hinted at the alleged conspiracy between Read and Kearney.

“The timing of the release of the information that there was an attempt to indict Mr. Kearney and Ms. Read is extremely troubling,” he told the Herald Thursday.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, faces charges including second-degree murder in the death of John O’Keefe, her boyfriend and a Boston Police officer at the time of his death. Prosecutors say she struck him with her SUV after heavy drinking and yet another argument in their troubled relationship and left him to freeze and die on a Canton front yard.

A first trial ended with a hung jury and a new trial is scheduled for Jan. 27. Her attorneys have argued that in post-mistrial disclosures, the jury was unanimously ready to acquit her on the murder charge as well as leaving the scene of an accident causing death, and were only hung on a manslaughter charge but didn’t know how to convey that in trial. They asked that the two charges be dropped in the upcoming trial. Trial Judge Beverly Cannone denied the motion but they have since appealed to the state Supreme Judicial Court.

The O’Keefe family filed a civil suit against her and she has requested that matter wait until the end of her criminal proceedings.

Her case has become a lightning rod for true crime junkies in the Greater Boston region and throughout the country.

Perhaps no person more than Kearney, a Holden-based reporter who blogs independently on his own website, YouTube channel and various social media platforms under the “Turtleboy” banner, has done more to keep the case front and center — from an exclusively and vehemently pro-Read point of view.

He serves as the de facto leader of a very visible group calling to “Free Karen Read,” which has taken the defense’s claims of a massive law enforcement and prosecutorial cover-up in the case and run with it.

But prosecutor Mello alleges that Kearney, 42, stepped far over the line of activism and into the realm of felony witness intimidation. Kearney was slammed with a 16-count indictment last December: eight counts of witness intimidation, three counts of conspiracy to intimidate witnesses, and five counts of picketing a witness.

Kearney has pleaded not guilty to the charges and he and his attorney have defended his actions on First Amendment grounds, with Kearney still not shy to speak for himself on the topic.

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