Karen Read Acquittal – A Court Reporter’s Perspective on Truth, Tone, and Reasonable Doubt
Such a compelling case, indeed
I watched the Karen Read docuseries. A friend asked me to weigh in—probably because I’m a court reporter, and I spend a lot of my life watching people under pressure, trying to lie, bluff, or convince. This one was hard to pin down. Some of it felt deeply compelling—like the part where she says she pulled a piece of glass out of his nose. But other parts didn’t quite make sense either.
Here’s what I noticed.
Usually, when someone’s done something as serious as killing another person, their calls afterward don’t feel real. Most of the time, you can hear the performance—the overly sweet voicemail, the fake calm. They try to sound clueless, loving, innocent. But the tone is wrong. You can feel it.
Karen Read didn’t sound like that.
She came across as full of passion—chaotic, raw, erratic even—but not calculated. I watched an interview that talked about how many times she called him after the incident. How much she screamed. And honestly, that kind of energy is highly unusual for someone trying to cover up a murder. The tone of her voice, the volume, the effort she poured into those voicemails? It wasn’t giving “clean getaway.” It was giving spiraling confusion. If she did hit him, I’m not entirely sure she knows that she did.
Robert and I talked about it, and we both landed in the same place: even if there’s a chance she did it, this case was nowhere near beyond a reasonable doubt.
And body language says a lot. Her tone, her physical responses—even the sheer number of calls she made before learning he was dead—all of it pointed to a kind of passion and denial that doesn’t align with guilt. If someone knows they’ve killed someone, they don’t call to scream at them. They usually call to pretend they didn’t have issues. They clean things up. They delete the evidence. They try to rewrite the narrative.
Karen didn’t do any of that.
She didn’t try to fix her broken taillight. She didn’t wipe off the hair found on the car. She didn’t act like someone with something to hide. And when she was giving her thoughts and opinions—on camera or in court—she consistently shook her head yes. That’s actually a well-known indicator of truthfulness. When people are lying, their body often betrays them. Take Scott Peterson or Chris Watts, for example. In their televised interviews, when asked if they knew where their wives were, they shook their heads no—while saying yes. Look it up. I noticed it years ago while watching their documentaries, and it stuck.
That kind of stuff matters.
And then there’s the other side. The lead detective in this case? He sent inappropriate, raunchy text messages and had personal ties to the family who owned the house where the victim died. The people inside that house the night it happened were all butt-dialing each other left and right—no one explaining why. And one of the men who was there took his phone and ran it over with a car. Who does that? Most people just trade their phones in or upgrade. I’ve never known anyone to destroy both their phone and their SIM card unless they’re trying to make sure nothing is left behind.
Put all of that together, and the verdict makes sense.
There may always be pieces we can’t explain. But guilt has a pattern, and so does innocence. And this case—despite its chaos—looked a lot more like the second.
