A former Stoughton Police officer, Matthew Farwell, has been charged with the murder of Sandra Birchmore, a pregnant 23-year-old. Farwell is accused of killing Birchmore in her Canton apartment in February 2021 and staging the scene to look like a suicide.
Birchmore was three months pregnant at the time of her death. She had recently told Farwell that she believed he was the father of her baby. Farwell met Birchmore in 2010 when she was 13 years old, while she was a volunteer in the Stoughton Police Department’s Explorers youth program.
An internal investigation revealed that Farwell began sexually abusing Birchmore when she was 15 and he was 27. Farwell has denied these allegations but admitted to having a sexual relationship with her when she was over the age of consent in Massachusetts, which is 16.
Farwell is one of three former police officers implicated in the abuse. His brother, William Farwell, and Robert Devine are also accused in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Birchmore’s family. All three officers resigned from the department in 2022, but no criminal charges were brought against them until now.
Farwell was the last known person to see Birchmore alive. Surveillance footage from her apartment building’s lobby shows him arriving with his hood up and later leaving alone, just three days before her body was found.
The indictment charges Farwell with killing Birchmore “with malice aforethought, willfully, deliberately, maliciously, and with premeditation.”
