Matthew Farwell's Attorney Told the Jury WHAT About Birchmore?!

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

Tony Brueski (0:08)

Defense Attorney Kimberly Stevens launched her opening statement side by side with Matthew Farwell, calling him Matt, putting her arm around him, touching his face even according to some reporting from in that courtroom. Good old Matt over here, really making him human as much as they can, because you really have to when you start hearing about, you know, someone in the Police Explorer program grooming a 15 year old, you better make him as human as you possibly can. Immediately putting a specific word out into the center as well, not groomer, not predator, not everything else that would get us flagged on YouTube. Affair.

Affair is how they were calling it. And at the age where it was going on at that moment in time, yes, that could be one of the many words you call the technicolor shit coat. Affair. There's a lot of other colors on that coat. Rather than denying the relationship, she framed it as a deeply regrettable human mistake, while adamantly denying that he killed Sandra Birchmore. The defense then presented a starkly different narrative using the victim's own phone data, pointing out Internet searches regarding mental health awareness ribbons on the day that she died. A lot of people are very skeptical of what is going on with this strategy. Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program and Master Class Instructor with us. Let's start on that.

They're pointing out that she was on her phone and she was looking up and asking, what color are the S prevention ribbons? Well, clearly she was going to do it to herself then, wasn't she? Because she wanted to know what ribbon to wear while doing it. I mean, it is certainly interesting that it was a search that was done right before this did take place. But other than that, she's booking appointments. She's got baby shower stuff coming up.

There's a lot of forward looking momentum in corporate speak on the part of Sandra Birchmore than there is, let's take the off ramp right now.

Robin Dreeke (2:16)

Yeah, the reason to look up S ribbons and stuff like that. So what group of people suffer the highest rate of S's in the country and in the world?

Military and law enforcement. And she was part of both. She wanted to be in the army. She tried, she couldn't do it because of asthma. And she would try to get back into it. So she knew people both in law enforcement and that. So I think prosecution can easily say, listen, she's doing this because it's something that matters to her. It had nothing to do with what her ideization was. And I think hopefully her, although they're saying that her therapist might say that she had it or talked about it before. I don't know. But I don't think it's a significant enough to say that she went from not doing it or contemplated because she did one search because there's a lot of reasons why people want to stand for it. Because again, if you're looking up the, so think about this. If you're looking up the ribbons for it, it's because you're trying to do something to help prevent it, not because you're thinking of it. If she was thinking of it, she'd be looking up things like, what's the easiest way to do it? Gunshot, hanging, or whatever. So see what I mean? So I think that's a weak comparison to show that. If anything else, it's shown the complete opposite to me.

Tony Brueski (3:31)

Yeah, I would agree.

Robin Dreeke (3:32)

And also to one of the comments about covering up the grooming, I honestly don't know. So here you are with a department of people, and you're witnessing what looks like grooming to you, especially when reports of him taking Sandra and going to the library with her when she's a teenager. And I have no idea why no one would report that, unless there's a lot of people covering this for you.

Tony Brueski (4:00)

We know three more of them were involved with her after the age of 18

You know, and that's on the record. So, again, and I do, I seriously question, those are just the ones we know about. And I do question the age range as well as to what truly was going on. Cause I'm gonna take a while guess and say, maybe some of those folks might have been doing things before the age of 18 Just a guess, I don't know, can't prove it.

Robin Dreeke (4:26)

She was destroyed by that. These people pissed me off so much.