A former Massachusetts police officer is on trial for murdering his pregnant lover — a woman he first had sex with when she was 15 — after local and state authorities spent three years calling her death a suicide.
The trial of Matthew Farwell, 40, opened Friday in federal court in Boston. Prosecutors say the former Stoughton police officer killed 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore in her Canton apartment on February 1, 2021, strangling her with a duffel bag strap tied to a closet door handle. He did it, they say, because she was pregnant and he feared their secret would be exposed.
"She could end his life with the information she had, so he decided to end hers first," Assistant U.S. Attorney Torey B. Cummings told jurors, according to CNN.
Local and state authorities ruled Birchmore's death a suicide. For three years, that ruling stood. It took a federal investigation and relentless pressure from Birchmore's family before Farwell was indicted in 2024. The medical examiner didn't change the manner of death to "undetermined" until April of this year — more than four years after Birchmore died.
The system didn't move until it was forced.
Prosecutors say Farwell was supposed to mentor Birchmore through a police explorers program. Instead, he had sex with her when she was 15 and he was 27. He exploited her for years — sometimes meeting her for sex while on duty, according to Cummings. When she became pregnant, prosecutors say he killed her to keep her quiet.
DNA testing later ruled Farwell out as the father of Birchmore's unborn child, but prosecutors say he believed the baby was his at the time of her death.
The defense concedes the married Farwell had an affair and "made mistakes." But defense attorney Kimberly Stevens told jurors Birchmore was "anxious, lonely and struggling," with less than $3 in her bank account, and killed herself in an "impulsive act of despair" after Farwell broke up with her that night.
Birchmore's family says she was planning her future and excited to be a mother.
Farwell has been decertified as a police officer and barred from law enforcement work in Massachusetts. He's been jailed since his August 2024 arrest and faces life in prison if convicted. The trial is expected to last about a month.
Here's the question that ought to haunt every American who trusts institutions to police themselves: Sandra Birchmore was found dead on the floor of her apartment with a strap around her neck, and every local authority with the power to investigate looked at a cop's pregnant lover and called it suicide. It took her family refusing to shut up and federal prosecutors stepping in to get even this far. How many others never got that far?
