They didn’t want me to speak the truth,” Kelly Dever, now a Boston police officer, testified on Monday about the defense.
During what was one of the most intense moments of Karen Read’s retrial, the woman, a former Canton police officer, testified Read’s defense lawyers told her if she did not take the stand and testify she saw witness Brian Higgins and former Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz in the garage of the station with Read’s SUV, they would charge her with perjury.
A current Boston Police Department officer, Kelly Dever, testified that she was a patrol officer in Canton when Read’s boyfriend, John O’Keefe, was found unresponsive in the snow outside 34 Fairview Road. She said her sergeant had called her in to support the police department’s dispatch operations after a call had come in on “a person in a snowbank.” 
Defense lawyer Alan Jackson noted that the first time Dever was interviewed in connection with Read’s case was in the August 2023 meeting with an unidentified law enforcement agency — ostensibly the secret federal probe of the state’s investigation. Monday, he inquired of Dever whether she wanted to be at Norfolk Superior Court.
“I am placed on the stand in a murder trial,” replied Dever coolly. “I don’t know why I’m here. This case has nothing to do with me.”
“Have you no clue why you are here?” Jackson pressed.
Dever said that no one from the defense had spoken with her since before Read’s first trial, “So I don’t have any idea why I’m here.” But she denied being uncomfortable in the witness stand.
Dever later said she continued to work mapping orientation until her shift ended in the afternoon of Jan. 29, 2022. Jackson inquired if she could remember seeing “anything unusual” that stood out to her in the police station’s sallyport garage when she was previously on duty as a dispatcher.
“I can’t say that on this stand, because I have been given information released by the defense,” Dever said. “It was a distorted memory. But I can’t say that, because at this point, it would be a lie. I can’t say that that you’re wanting me to say that up there, that I’ve been instructed would be a lie.”
Jackson denied that he asked Dever to testify in one way or the other, repeating what he had asked him about.
“No,” Dever replied tersely. “No, not with fact. I mean, given facts that I know now, no,” she responded.
In her testimony, she said her August 2023 interview with law enforcement was a “willing” conversation, and that she had ultimately been given factual information “that indicated that something I said was a false memory.” Dever said she gave that first account in good faith and withdrew it upon learning the information that proved it could not be true.
Dever also accused the defense of “threatening to charge me with perjury during our phone call right before the first trial if I didn’t lie on the stand right now.”
“I am telling you, I did not see anything.”
Jackson pushed again, asking Dever whether she told agents that she saw Higgins and Berkowitz entering the sallyport together “for a wildly long time” while Read’s SUV was in the garage. Dever confirmed that it was her first memory of the situation, but then told jurors she later remembered that she had left the station before Read’s SUV got there. A federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives agent, Higgins was a guest at 34 Fairview Road the night that O’Keefe was shot and killed, and is one of the men Read’s attorneys have tried to cast as a suspect in their third-party culprit defense.
Dever also admitted she had a conversation with Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox at some point, but “not anytime malicious.” The department was supporting her “no matter what I need to say on the stand,” Dever said.
She denied that Cox had told her anything in an attempt to steer her testimony, saying, “He just wanted me to tell the truth up here.”
Special prosecutor Hank Brennan cross-examined Dever, who said she had only a minor role in Read’s case.
“This was a routine shift for me, three-and-a-half years ago, at a desk that I was not asked to remember for … a year-and-a-half after the events of that day,” she testified.
Brennan said Dever appeared “nervous” during the interview, and Dever said she was not “nervous” as much as “confused” about why she was testifying. She repeated that defense attorneys pressured her to say she saw Higgins and Berkowitz “somewhere back there in the sallyport” with Read’s SUV, but said she told them it wasn’t a true recollection.
“They became very aggressive, they raised their voices, and the one word that I can very definitely remember is that they said that they were going to charge me with perjury,” Dever claimed. “To me, it feels like frustration that your legal counsel would go that route.”
Dever also rejected defense arguments that anybody in either the Canton or Boston police forces had influenced what she should or shouldn’t say from the stand. She informed the jurors she had experienced some “discomfort” with the defense’s alleged “attempts to ‘guide’ her testimony,” adding: “But I don’t feel any need to fall into it, because I’m here to provide the truth on the stand. That’s my livelihood.”
On the way back to more questioning, Jackson noted that it’s not the role of lawyers representing criminal defendants to charge people with crimes, but rather that of prosecutors. No one, he said, ever threatened to charge Dever with perjury.
Jackson flubbed Dever’s last name in a subsequent question about whether the defense read from a report on her August 2023 law enforcement interview during a prior phone call with her.
“You don’t know my name, and I don’t know yours,” Dever shot back.
She testified that she had not spoken with anyone since 2004 from the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office about her role in Read’s case, however, she acknowledged that she maintained a personal friendship with prosecution witness Sarah Levinson, another guest who was at 34 Fairview Road following midnight, Jan. 29, 2022.
Dever admitted having seen “clips” from previous court hearings in Read’s case and said she didn’t know about witness sequestration orders that had been imposed during the retrial.
And in a subsequent question from Brennan, she also answered that she did not receive any “reward” or “consideration” for amending her account of the Canton police sallyport. She also added that she never could have spotted Read’s SUV in the garage since the car didn’t pull in until more than an hour after she had left.
The defense, she said, “did not want me to tell the truth.”
So Brennan had it confirmed that when Dever first told the tale, she wasn’t suggesting that Berkowitz and Higgins had done anything wrong, including evidence tampering or framing someone for a crime.
“Is there someone you’re covering for?” he asked.
“I have no one to protect,” Dever responded. Leaving the courthouse Monday as she spoke to reporters, Read refuted Dever’s assertion that Read’s attorneys had coerced her, saying the defense had only wanted Dever to “say back what she’d said to other law enforcement agencies under penalty of perjury.”
When Hicksao asked whether she was implying that Dever could have been manipulated into altering her testimony, Read answered, “I didn’t, she did. She was brought to the Boston police commissioner, she, her whole story changed, she recanted.”
Read said the defense had subpoenaed Dever “to testify as to what she reported to other authorities, and then we just needed her to be as truthful with us as she was with them. And now she is telling us that was a lie today.”
