Sandra Birchmore's Sign Said THIS to the Cop Charged With Killing Her

Tony Brueski (0:00)

This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today.

SPEAKER_2 (0:14)

Sandra Birchmore made a sign to tell a man he was going to be a father. Homemade, sprinkled with glitter. Congratulations, you're going to be a father. Her ultrasound picture was on it. Her family found it when they cleaned out her apartment after Canton Police found her there on February 4, 2021

There was a stroller still in the box and baby onesies and a load of laundry left in the washer with another in the dryer. On the last afternoon of her life, she'd booked a newborn photographer and at 8.25 that night, she was still shopping online for baby furniture.

The man that sign was for is a Stoughton Police Officer. She met him when she was 12 years old. In a program, the Stoughton Police Department ran for kids who wanted to grow up and wear the badge. He was her instructor. He was also the last person to see her alive. And federal prosecutors say he's the reason she's dead. The Stoughton Police Department's own investigators put in writing when it started. She was 15

The men at that department who got close to her could see exactly what they had. A kid with no one.

Sandra grew up in Stoughton, south of Boston, in an apartment with her mother Denise. Denise was chronically ill and couldn't work. She'd been a widow since she was 31, and Sandra's father was never part of the picture. His name isn't on her birth certificate. The other grown up in her life was Claire Gaudet, her mother's aunt, who'd raised Denise too. Sandra called her grandma. A relative put it plainly. Sandra was never brought up like a child. What she had was a dream, and it was a specific one. She wanted to be a cop. The Stoughton Police Chief would later say Sandra idolized police officers, and in March 2010, a few weeks before she turned 13, she applied to the Stoughton Police Explorers. An Explorers post is a police department's youth program. The department signs an agreement with a scouting affiliate called Learning for Life, and teenagers from 13 to 18 get uniforms, ranks and police officers as their mentors. They learn to shoot and collect evidence, and they ride along in cruisers. Stoughton ran its post like a junior police academy, with drills and a chain of command, and for a kid who idolized cops, it was everything. The scouts have a rule for adults around children. They call it too deep leadership, and it means an adult is never alone with a kid. Police explorer posts got an exception, so a teenage explorer can ride alone in a cruiser with one officer. One national investigation counted at least 194 allegations of misconduct by officers against their own explorers since 1974, and most of those harmed were teenage girls. Sandra got in off the standby list at 12 She stayed 6 years, all the way through high school. In 2016, the year she turned 19, her mother died on May 18

Five weeks later, on June 24, Claire died too. That's a 19-year-old with no mother, no grandmother, no father, and one institution in her life she still belonged to. She kept trying to get in. She got her criminal justice degree from Massasoit Community College in 2018

By September 2019, she had passed the civil service exam, and her name was on the hiring list for the Stoughton Police Department, where the officer who'd started with her at 15 was still on the force. The man who ran that explorer's post was Robert Devine. He ran it for more than a decade, and while he was running it, he rose all the way to Deputy Chief. The department already knew who Devine was. An internal probe found he'd used a subordinate officer to chase down messages tied to his own affair and that he lied about it. The department demoted him from Deputy Chief to Patrolman and suspended him for 60 days. And then it kept him. A woman who'd been a middle schooler in a program Devine ran says he once sat her on a desk in a storage closet and told her she was a knockout. When she turned 18, he said, he'd take her on a date. The department's report on Sandra took note of that history. When reporters later asked the town for the explorer's paperwork, Stoughton could come up with exactly one agreement with Learning for Life, covering a single year. Learning for Life requires the adults running a post to complete youth protection training. Stoughton couldn't find a record that any officer had ever taken it. Its own investigators later described the program's oversight as lax and its culture as tolerant of flirting, which is a polite way to describe a room full of teenagers and no rules. The Farwell twins, Matthew and William, came up through that room. They were explorers themselves from the age of 12, and when they were grown, Devine brought them back as instructors. The department's own report called them his understudies. The department knew what these two were like before it ever hired them. As a teenager, William drove a white police-style Crown Victoria with a flashing light on it and lit it up at another driver during a road dispute. Devine counseled him.