The Karen Read case was mentioned in a 2024 FBI memo contained in the Justice Department’s latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files.
The memo, dated June 4, 2024, was a roundup of various news stories the FBI was following.
The sender and recipient are both partially redacted but the sender’s identified as “FBI News Briefing” while the recipient’s listed as “FBINewsBriefing_Draft.”
The subject heading is “[EXTERNAL EMAIL] - DRAFT: FBI Daily News Briefing - June 4, 2024.”
Among the stories listed in the memo was a Wall Street Journal article about an Epstein accuser, as well as an Associated Press report on testimony that day in the first Read trial.
The Justice Department had launched a separate federal grand jury investigation into state law enforcement’s handling of Read’s case.
Read, 45, was charged in Norfolk Superior Court with second-degree murder and other counts in the death of John O’Keefe, her boyfriend and a Boston police officer.
Prosecutors said she backed her SUV into O’Keefe in a drunken rage after dropping him off outside a Canton home following a night of bar-hopping.
Her lawyers said she was framed and that O’Keefe entered the property, owned at the time by a fellow Boston police officer, where he was fatally beaten and possibly mauled by a German Shepherd before his body was planted on the front lawn.
Read’s first trial ended in a hung jury in July 2024, and she was acquitted in June at her retrial of killing O’Keefe, with jurors finding her guilty of misdemeanor OUI, for which she received a year of probation.
Dueling lawsuits filed by O’Keefe’s family against Read and by Read against several investigators and witnesses are pending.
As for the related federal probe, no one has been charged with any crimes directly related to O’Keefe’s death, although a federal grand juror pleaded guilty to leaking information to a friend.
It wasn’t clear how the FBI memo figured into the investigation of Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal child sex-trafficking charges.
The financier had hobnobbed with heads of state, Hollywood celebrities, stars of academia, and captains of industry for years after his 2008 conviction for procuring sex from a minor in Florida.
Material from prior Globe stories was used in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.