Sandra Birchmore was 23 and about two months pregnant when she was found dead in her Canton, Massachusetts, apartment in February 2021. Police called it a suicide. Now, more than five years later, a former police officer is on trial in federal court in Boston, accused of strangling her and staging the scene.
Jury selection in the trial of Matthew Farwell, a former Stoughton police detective, wrapped up this week, and opening statements were expected Friday. Farwell, 40, has pleaded not guilty and says Birchmore took her own life.
What is Matthew Farwell accused of?
Prosecutors say Farwell met Birchmore when she was 13 and in the Stoughton Police Department’s Explorers program for young people interested in policing, where he volunteered. They say he groomed her for years and began a sexual relationship with her when she was 15 and he was 27, CBS Boston reported.
According to prosecutors, a friend of Birchmore’s called the Stoughton police in January 2021 to report that Farwell and Birchmore were having sex. An employee told Farwell about the call. Days later, Birchmore was dead. Prosecutors say Farwell killed her after she told him she was keeping the baby, which she believed was his, and that he did it the day before his wife was due to give birth to their third child.
DNA testing later showed Farwell was not the father. He faces two federal counts: killing a witness or victim, which carries a mandatory life sentence, and causing the death of an unborn child, added last October.
Why was her death first ruled a suicide?
Canton police and state troopers assigned to the Norfolk District Attorney’s office investigated and told the medical examiner it looked like suicide, WBUR reported. In May 2021, the state medical examiner made it official. Farwell resigned from the Stoughton department in 2022. The FBI opened its own investigation in 2023, and he was indicted the next year. In April, the medical examiner changed Birchmore’s manner of death to “undetermined.”
The trial will turn on one question: did Birchmore hang herself, or was she strangled? The judge is letting two prosecution experts, Dr. William Smock and Dr. Michael Baden, testify that her injuries, including to the hyoid bone in her neck, and the position of her body are more common in strangulation. The defense plans to call New Hampshire’s former chief medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Andrew, who couldn’t rule out suicide. The defense also argues Birchmore had a history of self-harm.
How long will the trial last?
Judge Denise Casper expects about five weeks, with 12 jurors and four alternates, running into November. Farwell has been held without bail in a Rhode Island detention center since his arrest in August 2024.
The BeezLoop Take
Whatever the jury decides about how Sandra Birchmore died, the part that isn’t in dispute is damning enough. A police program meant to mentor teenagers put a 13-year-old girl in front of a grown officer, and prosecutors say the department’s own employee tipped him off when someone finally reported the abuse.
Then the people investigating her death were local and state police working alongside the same law enforcement world Farwell belonged to, and it took the FBI to reopen it. Massachusetts has seen this pattern before. Police shouldn’t be the only ones investigating a death when a police officer is involved.
The open question: if the FBI hadn’t stepped in, would anyone have looked again?
Also on BeezLoop: what the data shows about domestic abuse among police and officials, and why the justice system punishes what it can prove.
Sources: WBUR · CBS Boston · NBC Boston live updates · U.S. Attorney’s Office, Massachusetts · WCVB
