Through her first trial and in multiple media interviews afterward, she maintained her innocence and claimed someone else killed O'Keefe.
Joseph Giacalone, a former NYPD sergeant and a criminal justice professor at Penn State-Lehigh Valley, told Fox News Digital he thinks prosecutors will have a hard time getting a conviction after the first case fell apart.
The first trial saw allegations of a police cover-up, the arrest of an online blogger accused of intimidating witnesses, the firing of the lead investigator and lingering questions about how O'Keefe died.
Prosecutors allege that Read backed into him with her Lexus SUV, then drove away, leaving him to die in the snowstorm.
An autopsy found the cause of his death to be blunt-force trauma to the head and hypothermia. O'Keefe had skull fractures, brain bleeding, swollen black eyes and cuts to his right arm, but the forensic pathologist held off on calling it a homicide, leaving the manner of death undetermined.
His name remained on a 150-person witness list unveiled Monday, along with that of Michael Proctor, the former lead investigator who was fired from the Massachusetts State Police this month.
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Read was arrested on hit-and-run and manslaughter charges.
A superseding indictment accused Read of second-degree murder.
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Read's first trial stretched on for weeks and ended with a hung jury. Judge Beverly Cannone declared a mistrial.
Prosecutors accused Read of a drunken hit-and-run. Her defense argued that O'Keefe had been attacked inside the home and suffered injuries to his arm caused by a dog before being carried outside and left in the storm.
After a months-long internal investigation into the lewd text messages he sent about Read in the initial investigation, Proctor was fired from the Massachusetts State Police after a 12-year career.
On the eve of jury selection for Read's second trial, Cannone released several impactful rulings on the case.
She rejected the defense's attempt to have a former FBI agent testify about failures to meet police protocol with the initial investigation and limited the scope of arguments the defense would be allowed to raise regarding potential third-party culprits, including Albert and ATF Agent Brian Higgins, both of whom were present at both the Waterfall bar and Albert's house the night O'Keefe died.
The witness list also revealed Proctor would take the stand, even after his firing, and so would Aidan Kearney, a local blogger and prominent Read supporter who has been accused of witness intimidation.
Jury selection in Read's second trial kicked off in Dedham, Massachusetts.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.