Murder or Suicide? Breaking the Sandra Birchmore Story

Boston Globe

20-02-2025

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the Feb. 20 episode of the 'Say More' podcast.
Jazmin Aguilera:
A note before we begin. This episode contains descriptions of suicide and violence. Take care while listening.
Aguilera:
Welcome to 'Say More' from Boston Globe Opinion. I'm Jazmin Aguilera.
Some important stories never see the light of day, and that might have been the case with the death of Sandra Birchmore if it weren't for one reporter who kept asking questions.
Laura Crimaldi spent years unraveling the case of 23-year-old Birchmore who was found dead in her apartment in 2021.
At first, while tragic, this death seemed relatively straightforward.
In the initial investigation, her death was ruled a suicide. She was a troubled young woman, and she hanged herself after being dumped by her boyfriend.
But as the months and years wore on, Laura felt there was a big piece of this story no one was talking about.
Sandra's boyfriend, himself, was a police officer. He was married, much older. He'd been filmed leaving her apartment the night she died. Birchmore had claimed she was pregnant with his baby. She wanted to keep it, and he wasn't happy about it.
Laura asked herself 'Why weren't the police asking hard questions about his
involvement in her life… and maybe even her death?'
Laura followed the trail and brought new attention to Sandra Birchmore.
A story that would have been swept under the rug came to light.
Multiple men in the Stoughton Police Department had been abusing their power, having sex with minors, and in the process, destroyed Sandra's life.
I'm joined in the Globe studio by Laura
and her reporting partner, Yvonne Abraham, who have been covering this story, unpacking the life and death of Sandra Birchmore.
So, let's start at the very beginning. I want to know how this story first crossed your desk, Laura.
Laura Crimaldi:
I got a tip from a colleague about the death of Sandra Birchmore. A colleague knew a family member of Sandra Birchmore, and that relative had reached out to the Globe soon after she died and asked for some help in looking into the case and the circumstances of her death. So, that colleague kindly forwarded the email to me, and I got in touch with the relative.
Aguilera:
And what did she say?
Crimaldi:
I spoke with Angelique Pirozzi, who is a cousin of Sandra Birchmore's. She told me about how Sandra had been found dead in her apartment in Canton about a week beforehand. The circumstances of her death were alarming to her family members because authorities had said that she had killed herself.
This didn't jive with what family members knew about Sandra and where she was in her life at that moment. At that moment, she had started to tell people that she was pregnant, and she was really excited about it. She had always wanted to become a mother, and this was well known throughout her family.
The other thing that they started to learn after her death was that she had been in close contact with a Stoughton police detective. He was married, yet had been in a long time relationship with Sandra because of his role in a youth program for Stoughton teenagers who have interest in police careers.
Word had gotten through to the family that there had been a long relationship between them. Sandra had told some people that they started having sex when she was 15 years old. They also knew that Sandra was telling some people that he was the father of her baby.
Aguilera:
There were a lot of discrepancies between the initial investigation– which ruled her death as a suicide– and what came out in later investigations, what were some of those clues and red flags?
Crimaldi:
There was a lot of evidence that was available to investigators and it does not seem to have been pursued. What we found was that there seemed to be little interest in understanding Sandra. And without putting in the work to understand Sandra in her life, her death was going to be a mystery.
There were a couple of key factors here. One was her pink flamingo necklace, which was not found during the initial search of her apartment. It was later found by a relative and handed over to investigators. That broken necklace, with a chain that was broken, not at the clasp but in the middle, gave a medical expert grounds to believe that Sandra Birchmore had been engaged in a struggle before she died. This was opposed to the troopers recording no signs of any struggle when they first went into her apartment.
Sandra left behind a body of evidence. She told the story of her life and her death in the cell phone that she kept, in the text messages that she exchanged, even the feature in her phone that keeps track of her movements had information about the end of her life. What the FBI found when they did the analysis is that her phone stopped recording movement by Sandra when Matthew Farwell was still in her apartment.
If you know one thing about Sandra Birchmore, it's that she was always on her telephone, so any sign that she was not on the phone meant Sandra wasn't being Sandra anymore.
Aguilera:
So it really does look suspicious, or just not right in some way, that they had all this information and yet still ruled the death as a suicide?
Yvonne Abraham:
I would say not right more than I would say suspicious. We found no evidence of a cover up here.
What we found were mixed signals, an inability to see things that were significant as significant. A tendency to give Matthew Farwell the benefit of the doubt, a benefit they did not seem to extend to Sandra.
For example, a couple of days after Sandra died, troopers met Matthew Farwell in Stoughton School's parking lot to interview him for the first time. They did not record the interview, as far as we can tell. They did not bring him to the police station. It seemed very friendly, the kind of interview you would do if you were just checking a box with a colleague. I wonder, how it would have been different, how they would have behaved differently if Matthew Farwell were not a police officer.
Aguilera:
There is a version of the story where it ends after that first investigation, and the official record that Sandra killed herself. So, what prompted these extra investigations then?
Crimaldi:
One reason that the case stayed in the public eye is because the Stoughton Police Department initiated an internal affairs investigation after Sandra was found dead.
Sandra Birchmore was found dead in Canton. The Stoughton Police Department doesn't police in Canton, but they did look into whether any members of the department had broken rules or regulations in their interactions with Sandra, who had been essentially a part of the Stoughton Police Department since she was a child because she had participated in the department's Explorer program.
Abraham:
Let's pause here to talk about why that should, and did, set off such strong alarm bells for the Stoughton Police Department.
Sandra was 12 when she joined this Explorers program and it was being led by police officers who were supposed to be mentors, who were supposed to be paragons of the community. The news that one of the people who was supposed to be mentoring Sandra, who had joined the program when she was a child, had entered into a sexual relationship with her, should have set off massive alarms.
The idea that he would have had sex with her when she was 15, below the age of consent, even more so. It should have set off alarms in the Stoughton Police Department, as I see it. It should have set off alarms among the troopers investigating Sandra's death, as well.
But it doesn't seem to have.
Aguilera:
Why not?
Abraham:
I often write about cases where victims are not seen with the worth they should be. I think Sandra was one of those people who is easy for some investigators to dismiss.
Somebody with a difficult childhood, had a reputation for not telling the truth. Someone who had multiple sexual partners and, whether we like it or not, we still live in a time where someone like that is seen as worth less than other people
Aguilera:
So then Laura, what was the fallout from that 2022 Internal Affairs investigation?
Crimaldi:
In September of 2022, the Stoughton Police Department convened a news conference to announce the findings of this internal affairs investigation.
In and of itself, it's kind of extraordinary. You don't usually see police departments convening news conferences to discuss internal affairs reports. At this news conference, the chief of the Stoughton Police Department, Donna McNamara, who had ordered the internal affairs investigation the day after Sandra Birch Moore was found dead, addressed reporters.
Donna McNamara (recording at news conference):
We take an oath to protect and serve. Our community and its people
Crimaldi:
She told reporters that the investigation had found that Matthew Farwell, his twin brother, William Farwell and their mentor, Officer Robert Devine had all broken department rules and regulations in their interactions with Sandra Birchmore.
McNamara:
I stand before you today as a civil servant who is heartbroken and incensed by what has transpired.
Crimaldi:
Chief Donna McNamara told the news conference that all three of those men had betrayed her trust, that they were unfit to serve, and that she was taking the steps to recommend that they be decertified by the law enforcement regulator in Massachusetts.
It was a public reckoning, it was national news, and it got more eyes on her case, including the eyes of other investigators from the Attorney General's Office in Massachusetts and later the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Abraham:
It was shocking that she had been preyed upon, allegedly exploited, not by just one police officer, but by three and that two of them were brothers. It was so shocking and bizarre.
Abraham:
She was so young and she was so small. There's this picture of Sandra and other Stoughton Police Explorers that I'm haunted by.
It has all of these kids in a row and Sandra at the very end. She is the smallest of the lot. She was 15 at the time, but she looks like she's 10.
The picture was taken at, or around, the time she first allegedly had sex with Matthew Farwell. I remember thinking at the time just how appalling and how sickening it was.
Aguilera:
There is something to be said about the trust that we put in these institutions or these paragons of these institutions, these people that are supposed to keep us safe, being the actors that make us unsafe, that really strikes me about this.
Not only was she so young and not only was this possibly a triple-pronged abuse network, but also that it was a program specifically designed for children to get into police work. It's the last place you would want something like this to happen and yet, it seems like it was allowed to happen because there was very little oversight over that program.
Abraham:
We've seen it happen in police explorer programs elsewhere in the country. And before that we saw it in the Boy Scouts, and before that we saw it in the Catholic Church.
I think the thing that is so remarkable about this is that 20 plus years after the clergy abuse scandal first broke in this country, we still have these stories of people in positions of trust and authority exploiting children that they're supposed to be protecting.
Aguilera:
As of August 2024, Matthew Farwell has been indicted and now his case is ongoing, it's going through the court system. What are the next steps in the prosecution and what are they looking out for right now?
Abraham:
Matthew Farwell is being held at a facility in Rhode Island. He was charged, not with murder, but with the crime of killing a witness. It's a very specific federal charge.
One thing to look for at the trial will be the conflicting testimony of different forensic specialists, different medical experts. The state's medical examiner in May of 2021 found that Sandra had died of suicide. That finding would have made it much more difficult to bring murder charges at the state level. Since then, the family's expert found that Sandra had died from homicide and federal prosecutors have an expert on strangulation who say that Sandra was murdered. And that expert cited that all-important necklace as a key piece of evidence there.
Aguilera:
It's clear that Farwell had an inappropriate relationship with her. When their texts were recovered, there was evidence that they had first had sex when she was 15 years old. Can you talk a little bit more about that power dynamic between these two?
Crimaldi:
There are layers to it, because on the one hand, there's the age difference.
There's more than a 10 year difference between Sandra Birchmore and Matthew Farwell. Then there's the backdrop of the Explorers program where Sandra Birchmore was the Explorer and he was the guest instructor, and he has all the authority that goes with being a police officer.
There are all sorts of layers of power imbalance here that favored Matthew Farwell and put Sandra in a subordinate position. When Sandra died, it seemed that some of those power imbalances carried over and followed Sandra into her death. The same kinds of advantages that Matthew Farwell had over Sandra Birchmore benefited him for years and may have allowed him to go free for more than three years after she died.
Aguilera:
This story seems like one of those case studies where women are portrayed in society in a particular way, especially young women. When there's some kind of sexual scandal involved, it's a scarlet letter, regardless of what the circumstances are, even if you're a victim.
There are implications from the police that she was troubled, that she was promiscuous, that she brought this on herself almost.
Am I imagining that? Does that seem to be an undercurrent that you've noticed in the reports or a theme that is playing out in this investigation and case?
Crimaldi:
I think her lawyer said it best when he said that they passed her around like a toy.
He used that word, and I think that captured how Sandra was seen by the people that she admired most, which were police officers. They didn't see her as an equal or they didn't afford her the dignity that she deserved.
There was another time that the attorney for her family said in court that she never had a chance. I think that there's a compelling case to be made that Sandra Birchmore never had a chance.
Aguilera:
In Sandra's life, it's pretty clear that she wasn't treated with the dignity and respect that she deserved while she was living. Do you think that that lack of respect extended into the investigation of her death?
Crimaldi:
Another thing about Sandra that made it more difficult for her to get the investigation that I think everyone agrees that she deserved, is that many of the people who knew her best and could be the best witnesses and the best advocates for her, were dead.
Her mother died when she was about 19 years old. Her grandmother died about a month after that. She had another aunt with whom she was very close to who died in 2019. She never knew her father. The people who, in other families, would be the strongest advocates for a person were just not there.
By the time Sandra died, she was abandoned by her family as a result of death.
Abraham:
She had friends who would have raised the alarm, but they told Laura that they felt powerless, that they were bedeviled by the same power imbalance that had bedeviled Sandra in life and in death. That, 'Who were they going to tell?' The people doing this were police officers.
Aguilera:
Yeah, who watches the watchmen.
Abraham:
Right, and I think the other thing here that's so vital is the role of Angelique Pirozzi. The cousin to whom Laura first spoke way back in the week after Sandra first died.
Aguilera:
Yeah, what was it like to circle back with her after the years of reporting that went into the story?
Abraham:
She stuck with this for so long and she was so grateful for Laura for sticking with it for this long as well. There's this exchange in one of Laura's interviews with Angelique, in which she really gives Laura credit for sticking with the story, for believing her, for never giving up on Sandra.
And we have some tape of that interview.
Angelique Pirozzi (recording of interview with Laura):
I want to say thank you for taking that first phone call. Thanks for what I am sure are thousands of hours of poring over terribly redacted documents. Thousands and thousands of pages for sticking with the story. For not chasing a new shiny object. For continuing to ask the tough questions in the face of closed doors. Thank you for being dedicated to understanding what happened to Sandra in a way that I would have liked law enforcement to be.
Abraham:
I think that what that speaks to is the power we still have at newspapers like ours to make a difference, but that power means nothing if we don't have reporters like Laura who refuse to give up.
Aguilera:
What do you want people to take away from the Sandra Birchmore story?
Crimaldi:
I think that what happened to Sandra Birchmore speaks to a character trait of Sandra Birchmore, which is never saying no. She was told many times that she would not become a police officer. She had told friends that she had had miscarriages, and she would not let go of what she wanted.
I think that Sandra had a certain life force that propelled her forward, that got her as far as she did in life. She accomplished so much against tremendous odds. In one of these cruel ironies in life, it seems that those same odds were stacked against her in death.
Abraham:
I think what her story shows us is something we've known for decades now.
That some victims' lives are considered worthy, and some are not. Despite all of the talk and the effort we've put into changing that, it still keeps happening.
What I hope for is that people who read our story, who know the story of Sandra Birchmore's life and death, will take a second to examine their own assumptions, to look more closely and more deeply, and to treat every potential crime.
As if the victim of that crime is the most important person in the world, because that's what they're sworn to do.
Aguilera:
Laura Crimaldi is an investigative reporter with the Boston Globe. Yvonne Abraham is a metro columnist for the Globe. We will link to your remarkable story in our show notes - I recommend it to listeners. Thank you both for being here.
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Jazmin Aguilera can be reached at