A night of heavy drinking at local bars with friends. Blizzard-like conditions. A body found lying in the snow the next morning.
Karen Read's second murder trial over the death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, entered its sixth day of witness testimony April 29.
The case, which began when O'Keefe's body was discovered January 29, 2022, has turned into a years long whodunnit legal saga that has garnered massive intrigue from true-crime fans across the country, spurring an array of podcasts, movies and television shows.
Prosecutors allege that Read, a 45-year-old financial analyst, purposefully ran over O'Keefe, a 46-year-old cop, with her SUV while the two were drunk and fighting. They say she then left his unconscious body lying in the snow and cold in front of a Boston police officer's house.
But Read's defense has long argued that she was framed for the murder by law enforcement officers, paramedics and others. They floated a theory during Read's first trial that O'Keefe entered the other Boston cop's house, where he was beaten, attacked by a dog, and then dumped in the snow.
Arguments in Read's second trial are just heating up. Experts have told USA TODAY that witness testimony appears to be setting the stage for elaborate arguments down the road.
Evidence presented to jurors in the first week includes detailed phone location data of O'Keefe's whereabouts the night he died, which prosecutors say shows he never enter the cop's home; texts between O'Keefe and Read that revealed a fraying relationship; and blood tests revealing that Read was intoxicated when O'Keefe died.
The trial is expected to last up to eight weeks. Here are the latest updates from the sixth day of witness testimony.
Defense attorney Robert Alessi questioned witness Ian Whiffin, a digital intelligence expert with the company Cellebrite, about a call O'Keefe received from his friend Jeffinger McCabe at 12:29 a.m. Whiffin said O'Keefe answered the call, and then confirmed that two calls from Read at 12:33 a.m. and 12:34 a.m. went unanswered.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys have spent hours questioning Whiffin in what appears to be an attempt to show whether O'Keefe entered the home of a Boston police officer after he exited Read's car the night before he died.
Whiffin previously walked jurors through his analysis of O'Keefe's location by comparing data sources from his Iphone, including from the Waze navigation app, the health app and the battery temperature.
Together, Whiffin said the information indicated to a reasonable degree of certainty that O'Keefe never entered 34 Fairview after he left Read's car. He said the home phone remained in the area near the flagpole on the front lawn, from around 12:24 a.m. to when O'Keefe was found around 6 a.m.
Upon cross-examination on April 29, Whiffin said it was "possible" that O'Keefe's phone moved toward the home at 12:31 a.m. Defense attorney Robert Alessi asked whether the low accuracy of the location data could be a result of the phone entering a building, such as a house. Whiffin responded: "correct."
Alessi later questioned Whiffin's testimony about O'Keefe's phone battery. Whiffin previously testified that the battery temperature dropped from around 80 degrees when it reached the home at 34 Fairview to an eventual low of 37 degrees hours later.
When he conducted an experiment putting a phone's battery in the freezer, the temperature dropped by around 50 degrees in 15 minutes. He also placed a phone outside in temperatures of about 33 degrees. The battery dropped from 66 degrees to about 35 degrees in the same amount of time.
Alessia said there was a "much more dramatic drop in temperature" during the experiments than what occurred on O'Keefe's phone.
Prosecutor Hank Brennan upon redirect asked Whiffin to explain why he completed the experiments on the phone battery. Whiffin said the tests were designed to confirm that the phone's battery reacted to the temperature change, but that the exact temperature didn't matter as much.
CourtTV has been covering the case against Read and the criminal investigation since early 2022, when O'Keefe's body was found outside a Canton home.
You can watch CourtTV's live feed of the Read trial proceedings from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham, Massachusetts. Proceedings begin at 9 a.m. ET