The Sandra Birchmore Case: Ex Stoughton Police Detective Indicted on Murder Charges
Federal investigators arrested former detective Matthew Farwell today in connection with the 23-year-old's death.
Sandra Birchmore / Birchmore’s Facebook account
Federal authorities indicted former Stoughton Police detective Matthew Farwell today on charges of allegedly murdering Sandra Birchmore, a 23-year-old woman that the 38-year-old North Easton resident had first met as an instructor of a Stoughton Police Department vocational youth educational program when she was a teenager. According to the Department of Justice, Farwell allegedly killed Birchmore “to prevent her from disclosing information about his longstanding sexual exploitation of her while he was on duty, beginning when she was a minor.”
On January 20, 2021, according to the federal indictment, the Stoughton Police Department received a phone tip saying that detective Matthew Farwell “had been having sex” with a woman named Sandra Birchmore—confidential information that was then relayed to the married union official.
Soon, detective Farwell was “losing control,” acting U.S. attorney Joshua Levy said today in a press conference.
On February 1, less than two weeks later, federal prosecutors allege that Farwell “killed Birchmore by strangulation,” and then “staged Birchmore’s Canton, Massachusetts apartment,” to make it appear that the substitute teacher, who was pregnant, “had committed suicide.”
Prosecutors alleged that Farwell left the crime scene to drive to Newton Wellesley hospital, where his wife was giving birth to their third child.
On Wednesday morning at 10:45 am, FBI Boston’s SWAT team pulled Farwell out of a gravel hauler at a Revere shopping plaza, federal investigators said. The former police detective’s arrest is a stunning end to a years-long sexual abuse saga that has shaken the Stoughton Police Department to its core: An internal affairs investigation into Birchmore’s death and a civil suit filed by Darlene Smith, Birchmore’s aunt, suggest Stoughton Police Department officials running the police mentoring program engaged in a pattern of grooming the troubled young girl. Farwell’s actions, FBI special agent in charge Stephen Kelleher said today, were “depraved,” and Farwell’s arrest will not only keep him from getting away with murder, but “harming anyone else.”
#BREAKING: #FBI Boston’s SWAT Team has arrested former Stoughton Police Officer Matthew Farwell for allegedly killing Sandra Birchmore. We took him into custody without incident. Details to follow at a 1:45 p.m. news conference with @DMAnews1 at the federal courthouse in Boston.
— FBI Boston (@FBIBoston) August 28, 2024
Federal officials say there is an active and ongoing investigation into other officers, including Farwell’s twin brother William, who are also accused of grooming Birchmore for sex. Matthew Farwell, investigators say, slept with Birchmore when she was 15, two years after she became a Police Explorer. The age of consent in Massachusetts is 16, and Levy said Farwell committed “the crime of statutory rape.”
Farwell’s alleged crime against Birchmore came a year after he was appointed to an instructor position in the Stoughton Police Explorer Program under Stoughton police officer Robert Devine. Devine is also accused of having sexual relations with Birchmore while on duty and exchanging explicit sexual messages and videos using a Facebook account under the name Marty Riggs, a moniker apparently inspired by the Mel Gibson police officer character from Lethal Weapon. (Meanwhile, Devine’s attorneys accuse lawyers who represent Birchmore’s aunt in her civil complaint of trying “to pull on the heart strings of its reader by inferring the outrageous allegation that Sandra Birchmore was some sort of underaged sex toy passed around between police officers.”)
William Farwell was also having sex, investigators say, with Birchmore while on duty. A former Stoughton animal control officer, Joshua Heal, has also admitted to having sex with Birchmore at the town’s animal shelter. Matthew Farwell’s encounter with Birchmore also occurred while he was on duty.
“I wish I could see footage of them putting that [alleged] murderer in handcuffs,” Birchmore’s cousin Barbara Wright told Boston.
If convicted, Farwell faces life in prison.
