DEDHAM, Mass. — The infamous “hos long to die in cold” Google search has made its official debut in the retrial of Karen Read.

The introduction of the particularly important piece of evidence came the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court denied Read’s petition to strip two of the charges — including second-degree murder — from her case. The trial will continue unaltered.

Read, 45, of Mansfield, faces charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter while operating a motor vehicle under the influence, and leaving the scene of an accident causing death.

Prosecutors say that Read backed her Lexus SUV into her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, at up to 24 mph in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2022, leaving him to freeze and die. She was tried last year but that ended in mistrial.

The search

The Google search was performed by Jennifer McCabe, who has yet to take the stand herself so far in the new trial but has hardly been absent in spirit. Both the prosecution and defense agree that she made the search on the morning that O’Keefe died, but at what time that morning is hotly contested

On Monday, jurors heard from a prosecution expert witness named Ian Whiffin, who works for the company Cellebrite that is an industry standard for digital forensics analysis.

Whiffin said that while the data does have a timestamp of 2:27 a.m. — hours before McCabe, Read and another woman named Kerry Roberts would find O’Keefe dead or dying shortly after 6 a.m. — that is merely an “artifact” and doesn’t tell the true story of when the search was done.

Whiffin took the jury through a PowerPoint presentation of the many steps of his highly technical analysis as special prosecutor Hank Brennan asked questions that led to Whiffin’s testimony that the timestamp was merely when the tab McCabe used to perform the search was accessed last, not the time of the search.

Whiffin said the Safari tab on McCabe’s iPhone was last used at 2:27 a.m. to look at Hockomock Sports, a local high school athletics website, to check up on her daughter’s hockey scores before bed. Whiffin then said that the tab was never closed and was reaccessed when McCabe took out her phone much later in the morning.

Prosecutors say that McCabe actually performed the search a little after 6:20 a.m. at the request of Read. Whiffin’s testimony backs that theory.

It’s also McCabe’s story according to her testimony at the first trial last year. The third woman, Kerry Roberts, has already testified so far in the trial and the defense during cross-examination hammered her grand jury testimony that she heard Read ask McCabe to do the search.

“You painted a very, very detailed picture in front of the grand jury, didn’t you,” defense attorney Alan Jackson asked while Roberts was on the stand last week. “… Except it’s not true, is it?”

“I did not hear her ask that,” Roberts said.

The defense contends McCabe made the search at that 2:27 a.m. time and promise to bring in their own expert to prove it. If the search was made at that time, they will argue, then McCabe — and likely others — had prior knowledge of O’Keefe’s fate, which supports their theory of a conspiracy.

Defense attorney Robert Alessi had hardly started his cross-examination of Whiffin before saying that it was a good place to stop for the half day. Trial followers are surely in for an explosive and tense cross-examination on Tuesday.

O’Keefe’s phone

Whiffin’s testimony was not limited to McCabe’s phone, as he also analyzed multiple data points from the phone of victim O’Keefe. From location data from the Waze mapping app to Apple Health data, Whiffin’s testimony supports the prosecution’s version of events.

O’Keefe’s phone, and thus presumably the man himself, was still in an area — give or take an accuracy range of 10 meters — of the front yard of 34 Fairview Road in Canton from between around 12:30 a.m. to a little after 6 a.m.

That’s the time that Roberts testified she removed the phone from the ground, where it had been covered by O’Keefe’s body, and put it in her pocket to later give to a first responder.

“My opinion is that the device never moved far from the flagpole,” Whiffin said.

Whiffin’s appearance so early in the trial marks yet another dramatic departure from the trial’s structure from the last time. Whiffin was the 65th witness, called on the 24th day back then.

Supreme Court decision

Read’s team on April 1, the same day jury selection began for her retrial, filed a petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court in a final effort to have two of the charges dismissed against her. They argue that jurors came forward after last year’s mistrial to say they were ready to unanimously acquit her of the murder charge and leaving the scene of a collision charge and were only hung on the manslaughter charge.

Read’s team argues that these post-trial disclosures are tantamount to verdicts and that to retry Read on these charges would be a violation of her constitutional protection from double jeopardy prosecution.

The argument had failed before Judge Cannone, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the federal district court in Boston, and the federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit before Read’s team appealed to the Supreme Court.

“The jury’s not-guilty verdicts were not announced because the trial court, believing but not confirming that the impasse reported in a series of three juror notes applied to all, rather than only some, counts, never inquired regarding the scope of the deadlock and the jurors failed to volunteer to the trial court that their impasse was limited to one of the three counts rather than all,” the petition stated.

The petition argues that the First Circuit’s conclusions in the Read appeal “runs contrary to this Court’s repeated emphasis, over more than a century, that what constitutes an acquittal for purposes of the Double Jeopardy Clause is controlled by substance, not form.”

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