Murder, Media, and the Need for Meaning: A Mimetic Reading of the Karen Read Case

1. The Ritual Breaks Down

It should have brought clarity. A trial. A verdict. A story that ends. But in the case of Karen Read, each turn of the legal process seemed only to deepen the confusion. The crowd gathered, not around the gallows, but around their phones. The courtroom became a stage, the lawyers performers, the media a chorus. And yet when the curtain fell, no one applauded. The acquittal left both sides unmoved. No peace. No closure. Only noise.

There is something ancient here, barely remembered: a need for release, a craving for satisfaction. We search for it now in headlines, in hashtags, in edited clips from cross-examinations. We want the guilty to be punished. Or perhaps more truly: we want someone to be punished. But the more we look, the less we see.

Kafka saw this coming. In his short story "In the Penal Colony," a machine executes prisoners by inscribing their crimes into their flesh. The Officer overseeing the ritual believes deeply in the justice of this system. But by the time the story begins, the machine is malfunctioning. The old logic doesn’t work. The crowd no longer believes. In the end, the Officer sacrifices himself to the machine, but it no longer inscribes; it only mangles. The ritual ends not with redemption, but with absurdity.

So it is with us. The sacrificial machine is still running, but no one is quite sure why. It no longer delivers peace—only spectacle.

2. A Trial Without Resolution

On a snowy morning in January 2022, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe was found dead in the yard of a fellow officer’s home. His girlfriend, Karen Read, was eventually charged with second-degree murder, accused of hitting him with her SUV and leaving him to die in the cold. But from the beginning, the case was strange. The injury patterns didn’t align cleanly with a car strike. Witness accounts were inconsistent. Evidence was missing or mishandled.

Two trials followed. The first ended in a hung jury. The second, in 2025, ended in Read’s acquittal on all major charges. She was found guilty only of operating under the influence—a misdemeanor with no jail time. And yet, few saw the outcome as justice.

Supporters of Read alleged a cover-up, pointing fingers at law enforcement insiders and a flawed investigation. Others insisted the jury had been swayed by theatrics and doubt. But underneath it all was something deeper: a failure of resolution. There was no catharsis, no narrative everyone could agree upon.

The courtroom became a proxy for something else—not truth-seeking, but tension-discharging. And as the crowd gathered, there seemed to be more and more reason to go take a peek and listen in. Something exciting is happening. The public didn’t know what to believe, only that belief had to be expressed. Some painted Read as victim, others as villain. Protests and online campaigns fed the narrative churn. And when it was all over, the mimetic pressure remained.

The story did not end. It only fragmented.

3. Media and Mimetic Madness

In the age of digital immediacy, trials no longer unfold in hushed courtrooms and afternoon papers. They happen in real time, across social platforms and YouTube thumbnails, chopped into bite-sized scandals. What matters is not the evidence, but the angle.

The Karen Read case became a perfect storm for mimetic escalation. There was just enough ambiguity to fuel both conspiracy and defense, just enough personal detail to invite emotional allegiance. Suddenly everyone had to take a side. But beneath the content and commentary, what spread most was attention itself.

Mimetic desire feeds on models. When someone we admire expresses outrage or certainty, we borrow their posture. The commentary class—lawyers turned influencers, influencers turned investigators—became models for how to respond. The more heated the take, the more mimetically contagious it became. And what began as tragedy turned into theater.

The machine no longer functions to establish truth; it sustains attention. Every rebuttal demands a counter-clip. Every thread becomes a tribunal. The truth may still matter to a few, but the algorithm does not reward truth. It rewards intensity.

We have not abolished the scapegoat. We have democratized it. Now anyone with a phone can help identify the next one. Or defend them. Or switch sides. The sacrificial impulse remains, but the ritual is improvisational, unstable, unending.

4. The Myth That Vanishes Into the Snow

A man is found dead in the snow.
No one sees it happen.
The crowd demands a story.

That could describe the Karen Read case. It also describes the plot of Death on the Orient Express.

In Agatha Christie’s novel, a man is murdered on a train surrounded by passengers who all know the truth. They committed the act together, and their guilt is collective. But when the famous detective Poirot uncovers the plot, he is offered a choice: the truth—or a story.

The story is this: a stranger boarded the train, committed the murder, and disappeared into the snow.

Poirot accepts the myth.

The myth is clean, elegant. It allows the guilty to go unpunished—not because they are innocent, but because the truth is too terrible to bear. The snow, like a sacramental veil, hides both the murder and the complicity. The scapegoat is fictional, but effective.

So too with the death of John O’Keefe. He is found dead in the snow. The public is offered a set of conflicting narratives—some factual, some speculative, all emotionally charged. The story doesn’t resolve; it fractures. There is no Poirot to declare which version we should believe. There is no single myth. The snow does not erase; it obscures and reflects. And the reflection divides.

In The Eumenides, the story ends with the transformation of vengeance into justice. The Furies become protectors of order. But in our moment, the myth does not resolve into civilization. It dissolves. Instead of law replacing vendetta, we are left with vendettas that wear the mask of law. Trials become theater. Verdicts become Rorschach tests.

And the corpse in the snow? It demands meaning. We project it. We narrate it. We post and repost it. But unlike Poirot’s fiction, our myths do not satisfy. They multiply. And the crowd, unable to settle on a scapegoat, turns inward.

What Christie offers as resolution—the scapegoat who disappears into snow—we are denied. We see too much. And so the ritual stalls.

In archaic cultures, the scapegoat functioned as a pressure valve: a ritual expulsion of mimetic tension disguised as justice. The guilty party, whether truly guilty or merely selected, was cast out or killed, and peace was restored. The logic was sacrificial: the death of one would bring unity to the many.

But under the influence of the Gospel, we no longer believe in the innocence of violence. We have seen the scapegoat for what it is. Christ, the innocent victim par excellence, unmasks the lie. His Passion reveals the scapegoating mechanism not as divine justice, but as human violence cloaked in sacred necessity. The Gospel does not invent scapegoats; it reveals them.

This revelation has profound implications. It creates a world in which scapegoats are harder to make but still deeply needed. We retain the mimetic pressures, but the sacrificial release no longer functions. When a scapegoat is named today, it rarely brings peace. Instead, it invites counter-narratives, factionalism, and recursive blame. We no longer kill the scapegoat; we livestream their trial.

The Karen Read case illustrates this condition with striking clarity. Despite the acquittal, the drama lingers. No satisfying catharsis emerges. The crowd cannot agree on who the scapegoat is. The courtroom becomes an altar without fire. Her defenders and detractors mirror each other: each side sees the other as the mob. Everyone cries out for justice, but no one agrees what that means. The ritual fails. And it fails in a dangerous way. As the Gospel notes after the Crucifixion, "they went away beating their breasts" (Luke 23:48). The crowd, deprived of satisfaction, disperses unsettled. Aristotle warned of the civic danger in stirring up powerful emotions in the theater without delivering catharsis. What we now experience is a political and cultural mirror of that failure. The passions have been inflamed, but not resolved. The sacrificial mechanism breaks down—and what remains is not peace, but volatility. The Gospel exposes what Caiphas once declared with conviction: "It is better that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish." Today, we feel the absence of such sacrificial consensus even in domains far beyond the courtroom. When the verdict of a high-profile trial or the outcome of a presidential election fails to deliver resolution—when suspicion remains, when no party concedes, when meaning fails to take hold—the catharsis collapses. These failures are both a symptom and a cause of the unraveling of cultural trust. The mechanism still churns, but the spell is broken.

This is the paradox of the post-sacrificial world. The scapegoat is visible. The sacrificial system is discredited. But the mimetic crisis remains. We cannot go back to believing the scapegoat is guilty. And yet, we have not yet learned how to live without the false peace that scapegoating once provided.

We are caught between crucifixion and resurrection, between sacrifice and forgiveness, between the mythic lie and the unveiled truth. The Gospel tells us there is a way forward, but it is not the way of drama. It is the way of self-sacrifice. Not the sacrifice of another, but the sacrifice of rivalry, accusation, and spectacle.

Until we learn that way, we will continue to replay the sacrificial drama without its resolution. We will keep trying to crucify our scapegoats, only to find that the crowd is too divided to chant in unison.

5. The Gospel Lens

The Gospel does not simply offer a critique of violence; it changes our vision. It trains us to see the victim. What archaic societies hid in sacred myth, the Passion narrative exposes with painful clarity. We are no longer permitted to believe that collective violence is righteous. We are shown that it is, more often than not, the product of fear, rivalry, and contagion.

This change in vision disables the old mechanisms. In a world where the scapegoat is visible, the spell no longer holds. The crowd cannot form a consensus. The sacrifice does not satisfy. Our dramas drag on precisely because we see too much. The veil has been torn.

Yet this very vision is also an invitation. If we can no longer sacrifice others to restore peace, we are invited to follow a new pattern: self-giving love. The Gospel reorients the structure of peace—from violence to mercy, from unanimity to communion, from spectacle to solidarity.

We do not yet live in that world. But we glimpse it every time the crowd refuses to stone, every time someone steps out of the mob and says, "I will not accuse."

6. Conclusion: Watching the Ritual Fail

We are left watching a ritual we no longer believe in, aware of its falsehood but unsure how to replace it. We gather for the drama, knowing it will not cleanse us. We click, we repost, we rage—but nothing resolves. The scapegoat walks free, or dies, or disappears—but still the anxiety lingers.¹

Perhaps what we are witnessing is not the end of justice, but the end of its theatrical imitation. The Gospel has made a quieter way visible: truth without spectacle, mercy without applause. It is harder, slower, less satisfying to our mimetic instincts. But it does not require a victim.

If there is a way forward, it will not be televised. It will look more like forgiveness than fury, more like memory than myth. And it will begin not with the crowd, but with the one who chooses not to join it.

1. In Homer’s Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis are mythical sea monsters positioned on either side of a narrow strait. To avoid one is to come dangerously close to the other. Scylla represents a visible and violent threat; Charybdis, a subtle and devouring force. In this essay, they stand as metaphors for two modern temptations: Scylla, the danger of exposing scapegoats without offering hope, and Charybdis, the sentimental collapse of truth into platitudes. True resolution lies not in hugging the edge of one danger or the other, but in navigating a path between them—one that only the Gospel fully illumines.