Karen Read mistrial makes town spiral into even more chaos — with a dead turtle being left outside ardent supporter’s home days after his mom died

After the high-profile murder trial of Karen Read ended last week with a hung jury , the convoluted case that has divided a town has spiraled into even more chaos, confusion and conspiracy theories.

Last Monday was a one-two punch for Aidan “Turtleboy” Kearney , a controversial Massachusetts blogger who’s led a massive movement for months in support of accused cop killer Read.

Read, 44, of Mansfield, Mass., was charged with second-degree murder in the 2022 death of her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe.

Kearney and the hundreds of others who believe in Read’s innocence insist she was framed by corrupt cops in Canton, Mass., after they beat him to death.

But Read’s nine-week trial ended in a disappointing mistrial Monday — the same day someone placed a dead giant snapping turtle with a hole in its head on the banister of Kearney’s parents’ home in Worcester, Mass.

The ugly incident occurred just two days after Kearney’s mother, Mary Mullaney, 72, died of pancreatic cancer .

However, Kearney, 42, saw a silver lining in the mess.

“The Worcester police have done significantly more to investigate this murdered turtle than the Canton police did to find out who killed John O’Keefe,” Kearney told The Post.

“They’ve gone to every home and asked for surveillance video. The Canton police and the state police didn’t even go to the neighbors across the street from where John O’Keefe was killed to see if they had ring camera video.

“This turtle is getting more justice than John O’Keefe did from the Canton police and this death is being taken far more seriously,” he added.

Read was accused of allegedly backing into O’Keefe on purpose in a drunken rage with her Lexus SUV as she was dropping him off at the Canton, Mass. home owned by former Boston police officer Brian Albert where other cops were partying on Jan. 29, 2022.

Karen Read attorney Alan Jackson steps out with wife after he was spotted canoodling with client

Prosecutors claim Read, a former adjunct lecturer at Bentley University, then drove off, leaving O’Keefe to die outside as a snowstorm set in.

Read’s lawyers at the trial — which has been live-streamed during the two months of proceedings — argued she was framed in a sweeping law enforcement cover-up involving local cops, state police and the Norfolk County DA’s office.

They say O’Keefe actually died after getting into an altercation with his officer pals who then dumped his body on the snowy lawn in front of the Albert home.

Norfolk Country DA Michael Morrissey has said the state plans to re-try Read, but no date has yet been set.

Rabid followers of the case have continued to be stymied by what has appeared to be an unprecedented parallel investigation of O’Keefe’s murder by federal authorities.

The feds have been tight-lipped about their case but it’s known the US Attorney’s office convened a federal grand jury beginning last summer.

It came out in state court proceedings that at least 11 people in the Albert home the night O’Keefe was killed were subpoenaed to testify.

Read supporters like former DEA agent Sean McDonough, who has a YouTube channel devoted to the case with more than 27,000 subscribers, are convinced the feds are going to drop a bombshell on the Canton police, the state police and the Norfolk County DA’s office.

“The federal government will come back with a massive public corruption case that involves the murder of John O’Keefe and others,” McDonough told The Post. “I’m staking my reputation on it.”

McDonough’s theory has been bolstered by the fact that the state police lead investigator Michael Proctor was “relieved of his duties” after the mistrial and is reportedly being sent to a desk job in South Boston stripped of his badge and his gun.

Proctor was forced on the stand to read disparaging texts he wrote that called Read, 44, a “wack job c–t” and “retarded.” He also called her a “babe” with “no ass.”

‘Smirking’ Karen Read taunted family of Boston cop beau during murder trial, his brother says

Those who believe in Read’s guilt say McDonough is delusional and add that the feds have had plenty of time to come out with charges against the DA and the police if they were planning to.

Officer O’Keefe’s brother, Paul, told a local Boston TV reporter last week that his family remains convinced of Read’s guilt and complained that she “smirked” at him and his family in the courtroom during the trial.

He said he walked up to Read after the mistrial was declared.

“I just said, you know, ‘You are not done yet.’”

In the meantime Read found herself at the center of a new controversy last week when a photo emerged of her apparently cuddling with one of her two high-profile defense attorneys, Alan Jackson , outside a high-end Boston steakhouse as jurors were still deliberating in her case.

The iPhone live photo appeared to capture Jackson, a star criminal defense attorney from Los Angeles, wrapping his client in an embrace — with one arm around her midsection and another tight across her chest — on June 27 outside Smith & Wollensky in downtown Boston.

“I think anyone judges something from a live picture is jumping to conclusions,” Kearney told The Post. “From what I could tell, they were posing for a server who wanted to take a photo and Karen was too far out in the line of something and Alan Jackson pulled her back. But I don’t care.

“Even if they were making love in the middle of Main Street, it’s nothing more than a distraction — and the Commonwealth wants us to be distracted in this case.”

But the photo simply served to muddy an already complex and polarizing case, which has set the residents of Canton, a middle-class town 20 miles southwest of Boston, against each other and spawned an equally contentious fleet of bloggers and Youtubers who feud with and dox each other over the myriad minutiae of the case.

“It’s crazy, I’ve never experienced or seen anything like this in my life,” Olivia Lamb, one of Read’s more well-known supporters, told The Post. “I’ve been threatened and I’ve been harassed. The other side just resorts to awful ad hominem attacks sometimes.”

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Lamb, a Massachusetts native, has been accused of being part of Read’s ‘shadow public relations’ team by Read’s detractors, who are also considerable in number and just as vocal as her supporters.

Lamb said her low point came earlier this year when someone in the anti-Karen Read camp, she said, found out her 88-year-old grandfather Julian Binstock , had tragically died in the 2018 fire in Camp, California.

“They wrote (on social media): Olivia Lamb’s grandfather had to burn alive to get away from her.” Lamb said. “It was pretty bad.”

But North Attleboro resident Kate Peter, 36, who is often referred to as a spokeswoman for what Karen Read supporters call “the McAlberts,” — the entwined Albert and McCabe families who were in residence at the Albert home the night of O’Keefe’s death — insists Team Read has been especially vicious toward O’Keefe’s family as well as the Alberts and the McCabes.

“It’s been something horrendous against the families every single day,” Peter told The Post. “Death threats, abuse, ridicule, you name it. People drive by their homes all hours of day and night and I mean literally every single day.”

Peter, who has her own YouTube channel, Masshole Troll Mafia , used to work with Kearney on his blog, TB Daily News , but the two fell out and have been feuding for years.

Kearney has two hearings set for July 11 on charges involving witness intimidation, picketing and felony wiretapping. He denies the charges and says he was set up by the same police who framed Karen Read.

Peter is also facing charges of witness intimidation involving Kearney himself. She said she “vehemently” denies the charges.

Peter has as much of a tight grasp on the minute details of the case as the biggest Read supporters — and is not shy about calling them out.

“Actually this is a message for all the #freekarenread dregs and the turtle cultists,” Peter wrote in a pinned post on X June 27. “You make me relevant and you hang on my every word, compelled to engage with me. I do not reciprocate those feelings.

“You can’t make one salient point that stands up to any scrutiny. That’s why you resort to ‘Kate’s a terrible person.’ I don’t dispute that but being smarter than all of you is some comfort at least.”

McDonough disagreed and predicted to The Post “the state’s case against Karen Read will not get better in time. Her case will. I know, she knows, her team knows how it ends.”

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