Sandra Birchmore’s Body Had Evidence Her Investigator Never Noticed

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is HiddenKillers With Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:11)

Matthew Farwell Trial continues on, and it just keeps getting a little lickier by the day for Mr. Farwell and the alleged actions that he took against Sandra Birchmore, who was an adult at the time of her life ending. But if you've been following along, Farwell has allegedly had relationships with her since childhood.

Yeah, he's a winner. Other tripper Matthew Dunne spent the entire day on the stand in the Matthew Farwell trial. He was the prosecution's witness, and the most devastating testimony he gave wasn't about what he found at Sandra Birchmore's apartment. It was about what he didn't do. Yeah. The lack of investigation. The looking the other way. The, what do you mean that looks suspicious? Huh? Someone on a door handle that we know has been in a illicit relationship with a married couple. She was a child, and now she's dead. And she supposedly made a deal with him to get pregnant, and she did, and now she's dead. And he happened to be there that night at the same moments that she died? That's not a coin. There's nothing to see here. Nah. He wears the blue. Couldn't be him. All that. All of that came out today. It was like a reverse job interview of like, here's all the reasons I'm not qualified to do a whole hell of a lot other than work at a closed down show biz pizza as the animatronic operator. Wouldn't that be kind of a fun job? The Rockafire explosion, the weird characters pressing the buttons. Yeah.

He didn't collect the broken flamingo pendant from around her neck. He didn't inspect the duffel bag in the bedroom, the bag that held the strap she was found hanging from, or more like laying or sitting down next to a door with that around her neck. There wasn't the weight that one would need to really hang themselves from the strap. He didn't look there. He didn't record his first interview with the man who had been inside her apartment the night she died, didn't take notes and didn't flag her death as suspicious.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to flag Trooper Matthew Dunne as suspicious. Not that I think he had anything to do with the murder, but I'm sorry if that much obvious shit is right in front of you and you're not doing anything about it. What are you doing exactly? Are you just... It's a shit day at the job and you don't care? Like, you just got to get home, want to get back, pick up a little Arby's on the way home, catch some reruns of Matlock, go to bed.

All this investigative police stuff, that's, you know, it's a paycheck. Or I mean, that would be the explanation but I, it wouldn't be a good explanation. It certainly would be better than the other very real reality, unspoken that we might be dealing with here, of someone actively helping a child predator cover up the murder of the young woman he groomed her into becoming. I mean, what is going on here? How? How? Why?

All fair questions, all questions. The prosecution asked in trial what the prosecution built across a day of testimony, what the defense accidentally confirmed. Is the case for why the investigation that called Sandra's death an ass was never built to find the truth? Farwell, a former Stoughton Police detective, as you know, is charged with killing Sandra to keep her from reporting to federal authorities about a relationship prosecutors say started when she was 15 The defense says she took her own life after he ended the affair. The prosecution called Dunne, the lead state police investigator, on Sandra's death, and for more than two hours, Assistant US. Attorney Brian Fogarty took that investigation apart. The jury saw photos. They saw photos of Sandra's apartment, an ultrasound picture on the refrigerator, her phone beside her body, then a close up of her face. Around her neck was a broken flamingo pendant on a snapped chain. Dunne testified he didn't notice it at the scene. The breakage, he said, came up significantly later. Police never collected it. A relative found it weeks later while cleaning out the apartment. The prosecution argues that pendant was broken in a struggle. The man charged with examining the scene never saw it.

In the same bedroom sat a duffel bag. Dunne didn't inspect it, didn't seize it. The strap Sandra was found hanging from came from that bag. Without what Dunne called an obvious indication of foul play, he testified, they wouldn't collect an item like that or send it to a crime lab. Obvious indication of foul play. Somebody that was hanging from a place they really couldn't physically be hanging from. In a way that 99.9% of S's don't occur in. The strap that killed her was in the room where she died, and the investigation just left it there. Asked whether he took steps to preserve items in the apartment. Dunne said, no.