Karen Read says in an interview that the murder case brought her to “purgatory”

BOSTON (AP) — The months-long murder case against Karen Read has put her in a “purgatory” and put her under “stress every day,” she said in an interview scheduled to air Friday night.

Read, 44, is accused of ramming her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, with her SUV and leaving him to die in a snowstorm in January 2022. Her two-month trial version ended in July when the jury declared they were hopelessly deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial on the fifth day of consultation.

“This is no life. I'm not in prison, but this is no life. I'm stressed every day. I'm waiting for the next hammer to fall,” Read said in her interview on ABC's “20/20” before her trial. “It just feels like some kind of purgatory.”

Last month, Judge Beverly Cannone denied a defense request to dismiss several charges, allowing the case to proceed to trial, which is set for Jan. 27, 2025.

Prosecutors said Read, a former adjunct professor at Bentley College, and O'Keefe, a 16-year-old Boston police officer, had been drinking heavily before she dropped him off at a party at the home of Brian Albert, a fellow Boston police officer. They said she hit him with her SUV before driving away. An autopsy found O'Keefe died of hypothermia and blunt force trauma.

Read told ABC News that she felt a “huge sense of fear” while searching for O'Keefe. She admitted to having four drinks that night – some of which she left unfinished – but that she felt well enough to drive.

“I was afraid he might have been hit by a snow plow. That was my first thought,” Read said. “That was the only explanation I could think of as to why John had just disappeared.”

The defense portrayed Read as the victim, saying O'Keefe was actually killed in Albert's house and then dragged outside. They argued that investigators focused on Read because she was a “convenient outsider” who spared them from having to consider police officers as suspects.

After the mistrial, Read's lawyers presented evidence that four jurors said they were actually divided only on a third count of manslaughter. In the jury room, they unanimously agreed that Read was innocent of first-degree murder and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. One juror told them that “no one believed she hit him on purpose,” her lawyers argued.

The defense also said the judge abruptly declared a mistrial without first asking each juror whether they could confirm his conclusions on each count. Read's attorney, Marty Weinberg, had asked Cannone to call the jury back to court for more questions.

However, the judge said the jury did not tell the court during their deliberations that they had already reached a verdict on any of the charges.

“Since no verdict was announced in public, the reopening of the case against the defendant does not violate the principle of double jeopardy,” Cannone said in her statement.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to dismiss a “meritless but sensational post-trial claim” that was based on “hearsay, conjecture and a legally inappropriate reliance on the substance of the jury's deliberations.”