Are we ready for Karen Read, Season 2? | John L. Micek

It wasn’t the tidy resolution her supporters had been hoping for, but when Karen Read’s murder trial ended in a mistrial on Monday, it might have been the result we deserved.

The nationally watched courtroom drama, set in a tidy Boston suburb, replete with its colorful cast of characters, plot twists, a conspiracy-inclined cheering section and unsatisfying Sopranos in the diner ending, was purpose-built for our true crime-obsessed, parasocial age.

“Only Murders in Canton,” anyone?

In case you missed it, here’s the recap: Read, 44, of Mansfield, was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing personal injury or death.

Prosecutors accused her of intentionally backing her SUV into John O’Keefe, 46, her boyfriend and a Boston police officer, after a night of drinking amid turmoil in their relationship in January 2022.

And now it’ll be back for season 2. Because Norfolk County prosecutors say they intend to retry the case.

Read’s supporters once again will be looking for a happy ending. Prosecutors? One suspects only the “Law & Order” sound effects over the credits will do.

Experts tell us that we love true crime stories for reasons that include concerns about the fairness of the judicial system and having a front-row seat to a real-life whodunnit.

Read’s trial certainly had that, with a vocal band of “Free Karen Read” supporters convinced that she was set up by law enforcement and that others were responsible for O’Keefe’s death.

They were so loyal that when Read asked her supporters to wear pink, they went all in and made their own merch, MassLive’s Will Katcher reported.

There were “Free Karen Read” T-shirts and hats, “Not Guilty” tees plastered with American flags, and “Jackson and Yannetti 2024” campaign-style shirts, homages to Read attorneys Alan Jackson and David Yannetti, who have become household names to their client’s supporters, Katcher wrote.

“We were planning this for a week,” Read supporter Samantha Torres said.

It’s a safe bet that many of Read’s supporters saw themselves in the defendant, believing, like most of us, that they could be one bad day away from sitting in the dock and on trial for their lives.

Or maybe they saw themselves in Read and O’Keefe’s troubled relationship, whose final hours were marked by a series of increasingly frenzied voicemails, according to The New Yorker.

Those bonds, we know, are strengthened by social media, where relationships with people we don’t know, or scarcely know at all, often can feel as real, or more real, than the real thing.

And in the controversial blogger Turtleboy, Read had her staunchest evangelist. The online personality, born Aidan Kearney, separately faces charges of witness intimidation related to his coverage of the case.

He has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors were challenged from the jump; their case dealt a damaging blow by the case’s lead investigator, Michael Proctor, a Massachusetts State Police trooper who sent friends graphic and offensive texts about Read.

Proctor, who has been relieved of duty, also has become a stand-in for everything that’s wrong with a rudderless agency that’s been hit with wholesale calls for reform, and now appears set for even more scrutiny.

In a statement, the Massachusetts State Police Association, the union that represents more than 2,000 people at the agency, kept its feet firmly between two stools.

The trial “shined a bright light on our judicial process and the nuances of legal proceedings,” the union argued, even as it insisted that Proctor’s texts “[had] no relationship to salacious allegations of cover-ups, collusion or conspiracies offered by the defense.”

On a night that apparently was lubricated by epic amounts of booze, as The New Yorker noted, it may eventually end up impossible to know what really happened, or how O’Keefe, who has not stopped being dead, ended up in the snow on a frigid New England winter night.

And that, away from the T-shirts, the drama, and everything else, remains the one uncontested fact in the case.

Guilty or not guilty. For the defendant and the deceased, there needs to be a conclusive result next time out.