Farwell Typed THIS Into His Police Phone After Sandra Birchmore Died

Tony Brueski (0:00)

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On February 9, 2021, after handing his personal phone to Massachusetts State Police Detectives, Matthew Farwell picked up his other phone.

Sandra Birchmore had been dead for 8 days and found for 5

According to the FBI, on that phone, the one the town of Stoughton was paying for, he typed two searches. Whether deleted iMessages can be recovered by Cellebrite, which is the software police use to pull data off a phone, and whether consent can be revoked in Massachusetts.

Then he deleted both searches, and they sit in an FBI affidavit filed 3.5 years later. Those are the searches of a man who's worried about something. The State's Detectives, who had his phone in their hands, came away with no messages between him and Sandra. On her laptop, there were 32,709.

That number isn't mine. It's in the State Police Lieutenant's own search warrant affidavit, filed in November 2023, two years and nine months after she died. On May 21, 2021, the State Medical Examiner signed Sandra's death certificate. Asphyxia by hanging.

Suicide. Almost everything a homicide detective would need was in the state's hands within 48 hours of finding her body. What the state did with it took five years. Her family, a crowd of strangers, and the FBI to undo.

Sandra was 23 and 8 to 10 weeks pregnant. Matthew Farwell was a Stoughton cop who taught her in the department's youth program, and the department's own investigators found it started when she was 15

Building video shows him going into her Canton apartment at 914 on the night of February 1, 2021, and coming out at 943

Federal prosecutors say he strangled her in those minutes and staged it to look like a hanging, and his lawyers say she took her own life. Canton police found her on February 4, sitting on her bedroom floor with a strap around her neck tied off to the closet door handle.

Within an hour, prosecutors say, local officers had already told the medical examiner's office there was no foul play.

An hour. That's how long it took to decide what happened to Sandra Birchmore. The state police detectives assigned to the Norfolk District Attorney's Office got there the same day.

Trooper Matthew Dunn wrote, No sign of a struggle. No bruising, no trauma. Trooper Kevin Tufts filled out the form, and on day one he checked no for homicide and wrote, Suicide for manner. One Canton officer wrote down the thing around her neck as a scarf. It was the shoulder strap of a duffel bag, and that's how closely anyone was looking. The doctor who'd decide how Sandra died never saw the room. Dr. Maria Delmar Capo Martinez did the autopsy on February 5th with no DA investigators present, and she didn't ask for the crime scene photographs until May 1st, three months. By the next night, the tips were coming in, and they weren't subtle. A woman called the apartment complex's emergency line around 9 PM on February 5th. Sandra had been dating a police officer, she said, and he'd wanted her to end the pregnancy or he would take care of the problem himself. The property manager gave it to a Canton detective, and the detective gave it to Trooper Tufts. On February 6th, a Canton detective sat down with the building's video. A tall man in a black hooded jacket and a black COVID mask walks into building 3 on the night of February 1st and walks back out 29 minutes later. Maintenance staff recognized him. He was the man who'd helped Sandra move in. Prosecutors say multiple witnesses called the DA's homicide unit within 24 hours to tell them about the relationship. By the second day, the state had everything it needed to treat this like a homicide. That Saturday afternoon, February 6th, Lieutenant John Fanning and Trooper Dunn went to talk to Matthew Farwell. They met him in the parking lot of a Stoughton elementary school. They didn't bring him to an interview room, and they didn't record it. Almost everything he told them fell apart against the record, and the FBI later laid it out. He said the relationship started in 2020 The department's investigators and the FBI put it at 2013

He said two or three times in the past year, and the FBI counted at least ten. He said the last time was October, and their texts put it in November. He said he left her apartment at 930, and the camera says 943 He told them she had been sectioned many times, which means committed to a hospital against her will. Stoughton's own records show once, in May 2020, and she was evaluated and released within hours. He said she was crazy, the baby wasn't his, they had had a nasty argument and she was standing in her kitchen when he walked out. Lt. Fanning wrote it all up, and all through his summary, he called him Matt. Fanning had been a Stoughton police officer himself, years earlier, in the same department as Robert Devine. He was also on the state police team for the Karen Reed case. On February 11, William Farwell sat down with the troopers and admitted he'd had a relationship with Sandra too, and the state's police standards commission later found he'd lied to them about when he'd last seen her. Both Farwell brothers talked to the state police in the days after she was found, and by the state's and the town's later findings, both of them lied. On February 24, the Stoughton Police Department put Matthew Farwell on paid leave, and he stayed on the town's payroll for the next 13 months, paid to sit at home while the state police decided whether she'd killed herself. By March 8, 2021, the state's detectives had finally asked Farwell for a DNA sample to settle who'd fathered the baby. That day, his lawyer, Patrick Hanley, said no. Providing DNA was a step too far, Hanley said, because his client was a witness. A witness. The state didn't push it. It never sought a warrant, and prosecutors say it never seized his devices.