The Sandra Birchmore Case Details Get Worse
William Farwell, the accused murderer’s twin brother, had sex with Birchmore weeks before her suspicious death, according to a new document—while knowing she claimed to be pregnant with his brother’s child.
Left: Sandra Birchmore via Birchmore’s Facebook account. / Right: William Fallwell via the Stoughton Police Department.
Investigators have uncovered text messages between disgraced former Stoughton police officer William Farwell, whose twin brother Matthew is in federal custody for the alleged murder of Sandra Birchmore, that suggest he knew Birchmore was pregnant with his twin brother’s child when he met the victim apartment building’s parking lot for a sexual encounter 22 days before she was killed.
The alarming allegations are contained in a decertification order issued by the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission after Farwell, 38, gave up a civil fight to maintain his status as a hirable police officer after he resigned under pressure from the Stoughton Police Department on August 1, 2021, roughly four years after he joined the force.
“It is alleged that text messages between S.B. [Sandra Birchmore] and the Respondent [William Farwell] indicate the two met for a sexual encounter in the parking lot of her apartment building on January 10, 2021,” the decertification order states. The encounter came after Birchmore, 23, told him she was pregnant with his “twin brother’s child,” in December. Farwell, the order states, lied about that encounter in interviews with state police after Birchmore’s body was found on February 1, 2021.
Birchmore’s death was ruled a suicide, despite overwhelming evidence that suggested she was not suicidal—including plans she was making for her baby’s future on February 1, the day of her death. That same day, Matthew Farwell visited Birchmore’s Canton apartment during a blizzard, after dropping off his wife Michelle for a planned C-section at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Michelle Farwell gave birth to their third child, a boy, the following morning.
It would take nearly four years and a federal investigation for Birchmore’s family to learn how federal investigators believe she really died. Prosecutors now allege Matthew Farwell killed Birchmore to cover up a nearly-decade-long scheme of grooming and abuse investigators say she suffered at the hands of the Farwell twins and veteran Stoughton officer Robert Devine. Matthew Farwell is also accused “of the crime of statutory rape,” after the FBI and private investigators uncovered text messages about how he took Birchmore’s virginity when she was 15, which is illegal in Massachusetts.
Matthew Farwell was arrested on August 28 by an FBI SWAT team that pulled him from a gravel hauler in a Revere shopping plaza. He has been held since after waiting a detention hearing scheduled for this month.
William Farwell and Devine have not been hit with any criminal charges but remain embroiled in a legal civil suit filed in Norfolk Superior Court by Birchmore’s aunt Darlene Smith—the twin sister of Sandra’s late mother who died in 2016—that accuses the Farwell brothers, and a former Stoughton animal control officer Joshua Heal, of exploiting an emotionally and mentally ill woman. Devine ran the Stoughton Police Explorers program when Sandra joined at 13 in 2010, and the Farwells were her instructors as volunteers for the mock academy in 2011.
The decertification agreement with William Farwell includes what the Stoughton Police internal affairs report calls the “highly suspect and unusual” queries he ran on himself in the law enforcement database CJIS within months of joining the police force in 2017, 24 in all that continued after Sandra’s death. He also ran Sandra’s name through CJIS twice in 2019, an act that an internal affairs report commissioned by the Stoughton Police called “highly suspicious and unusual.”
William Farwell is still an active member of the National Guard, a military spokesperson confirmed to Boston, but transferred his service from Massachusetts to Arizona. His attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for comment. His brother Matthew also entered into a voluntary agreement with POST after he resigned from the Stoughton PD April 1, 2022, more than a year after he was placed on paid leave in connection with an investigation in Birchmore’s death.
