Former Massachusetts police detective and cop union president Matthew Farwell was found guilty by a federal jury Tuesday of killing 23-year-old teacher’s aide Sandra Birchmore and her unborn child in order to silence her about his past sexual abuse of her when she was a minor.
“Despite Mr. Farwell’s attempts to silence her, today her story is told,” United States Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said in the minutes after the verdict was read. Birchmore’s family members cried, a friend wept openly, and Farwell stared straight ahead as the verdict was rendered.
He will be sentenced at a later date, U.S. District Court Justice Denise Casper told Farwell, who has been held without bail since his arrest in August 2024.
The verdict caps a trial that spanned a month and included testimony from 50 witnesses from both the defense and prosecution. Some of it emotional about Birchmore’s joy at being pregnant and her own premonition that something bad was about to happen.
On Jan. 31, 2021 – a day before she died – Sandra Birchmore had a premonition, a “visit” her longtime therapist would come to recount on the witness stand. Birchmore described to her therapist of nearly a decade Dalia Alkhalil feeling her room go icy cold before seeing her late mother standing at the foot of her bed holding her baby.
Alkhalil testified that in the prescient vision, Birchmore shared she was afraid she was about to die and her body would not be found for days. The following day, federal prosecutors have now proven after a nearly-month long trial, Stoughton Police Detective Matthew Farwell showed up at her Canton, Mass. apartment building and strangled the 23-year-old pregnant woman to death and strung her body up to a doorknob to stage the scene as a suicide. Her body was not discovered until Feb. 4 when the elementary school where she worked as a teacher’s aide asked police conduct a well being check.
“He struggled with her. He strangled her. He staged her,” Assistant United States Attorney Brian Fogerty told the jury of that night in his closing arguments last week. Farwell was motivated to kill her, federal prosecutors say, to “clean up his mess,” the one he created when he began grooming Birchmore when she was in the Stoughton Police Explorer’s Program and he was an instructor. He then took her virginity when she was 15, which is too young to consent in Massachusetts.
With Birchmore was dead, Farwell then drove to a Boston area hospital where his wife Michelle was giving birth to their third child, also a boy like Birchmore’s unborn baby. Photos entered into evidence by the defense show him cradling the infant.
For years, Farwell nearly got away with his crime. “Cops covered up his murder. Covered up for him,” Birchmore’s cousin Barb Wright told Los Angeles. “No one believed Sandra committed suicide. We all knew Matthew Farwell had the means, opportunity, and motive to kill her and we shared that with the state police.”
For years, Birchmore’s family pushed for answers and filed a lawsuit against the Town of Stoughton and its police department accusing officials of allowing Birchmore to be groomed from the time she was a child, and then “passed around,” to other cops including Farwell’s twin brother and their mentor Robert Devine, also now an ex-Stoughton cop.
That Norfolk County state police investigation has been a centerpiece of Farwell’s trial. Federal prosecutors repeatedly pointed to outright failures of the homicide investigators in what is known as the CPAC [Crime Prevention and Control] unit under outgoing District Attorney Michael Morrissey. The same unit made national headlines in recent years for its shoddy investigation into the death of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, who died a year after Birchmore’s body was found, in the same town of Canton. CPAC investigators charged his girlfriend Karen Read, who was acquitted last summer by a jury who publicly stated they didn’t believe the cops.
In the Birchmore investigation, damaging testimony singled out Lt. John Fanning, who was also on the Read case and has since been demoted to a desk job at Massachusetts State Police headquarters. Farwell’s twin brother William, who was also pushed off the Stoughton Police force after an internal investigation found that he was also sexually exploiting Birchmore, often while on duty, testified that they had grown up with Fanning.
William Farwell told the court from the witness stand that Fanning had promised him protection in official reports, and insisted that Birchmore’s death would never be investigated as a homicide, during an interview in a parking lot in their hometown. The first investigators to the scene did not recover Farwell’s DNA from the ligature wrapped around Birchmore’s neck, and missed key evidence – including a broken necklace – later recovered by her family that prosecutors argued proved there had been a struggle. Trooper Matthew Dunne wrote in his reports, later cited by Farwell’s defense team, that there were “no signs of struggle – no drag marks, no footprints, items on shelving in the bedroom were left upright.”
Two investigators, a Canton Police Officer and a Massachusetts State Trooper, called the Office of Chief Medical Examiner the morning Birchmore’s body was recovered, telling officials it was a suicide without processing a crime scene. The state medical examiner also testified that she requested information from Fanning before making her initial ruling that Sandra’s manner of death was a suicide in 2021, a decision that she changed earlier this year to “undetermined.”
Throughout the trial, the prosecution has been heavily critical of the state’s handling of Birchmore’s death, which was only investigated as a homicide when the FBI was notified of the Stoughton Police internal affairs report, which former Deputy Chief Brian Holmes testified was brought to Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey in 2022, but no action was taken. Then he went to the FBI. The bureau’s investigation led to Farwell’s arrest in August 2024. He did not take the stand in his defense.
Weeks before he was arrested, Farwell knew the feds were closing in. He wrote a “goodbye letter” to his best friend asking that his children be taken care of and crashed his truck into a pole with such force it knocked gas power out nearby, Los Angeles exclusively learned.
Los Angeles was also the first to report that U.S. Army Recruiter Jason Pickard, whose DNA was taken by the FBI in 2025, which confirmed him as the father of Birchmore’s child, would take the stand in Birchmore’s case. He testified that Birchmore had told him Farwell was violent with her, and also confided in him about the statutory rape, which he pushed her to report.
Even before the jury reached a verdict, Farwell’s federal public defenders filed a motion for an acquittal, arguing that the government had failed to prove that their client killed Birchmore to keep her quiet about the sexual exploitation, writing that the charge was “highly unusual because, prior to Ms. Birchmore’s death, there was no indication whatsoever that Mr. Farwell was being or would be investigated by any law enforcement entity or prosecuted federally.”
But there was testimony about a call made to the Stoughton Police Department by a Birchmore friend, Julia Perlin, who told a dispatcher about Farwell’s relationship to the young woman on Jan. 20, 2021, which, prosecutors argued, sent him into a spiral that led to her murder. After that call, Farwell told the dispatcher who took it to never mention it again, telling him: “let’s never discuss it again. That girl is fucking insane. Well, both of them are.”
Farwell’s sentencing will be scheduled for a later date. Throughout the trial there have been hints that other police officers could face penalties for depriving Birchmore of her civil rights.
Both William Farwell and Jason Pickard testified under a federal immunity deal. William Farwell admitted on the stand to having sex with Birchmore while on duty. Pickard’s conduct with Birchmore as a U.S. Army recruiter, while married, violated the military code of conduct rules that could have ended with him facing a court martial.
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