At a series of pretrial hearings,
’s defense team fought bitterly to be able to pursue a theory it had suggested for years: that her boyfriend, John O’Keefe, was beaten up inside a Canton home before his body was placed on the front lawn.
But when Read’s retrial arrived, her defense largely abandoned the third-party culprit strategy that was at the center of her first trial. Instead, her lawyers cast blame toward investigators for failing to look at whether anyone other than Read could be responsible…