Former Massachusetts Police Officer Convicted in Killing of Sandra Birchmore and Her Unborn Child

A federal jury in Boston on Tuesday convicted Matthew Farwell, a former Stoughton, Massachusetts police detective, of killing Sandra Birchmore, a 23-year-old teacher's aide who was seven weeks pregnant when she died in February 2021, and of causing the death of her unborn child. The verdict, delivered shortly before 2 p.m. after jurors had reported a deadlock a day earlier, closed out a nearly month-long trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and ended more than four years of dispute over whether Birchmore died by her own hand or was murdered.

Farwell, 38, faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison on both counts. He was convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 1512(a)(1)(C), the federal statute covering the killing of a witness or victim to prevent them from reporting a federal crime, and under 18 U.S.C. § 1841, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Prosecutors had originally sought the death penalty on the witness-killing count, the only charge for which it was available, but Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts to withdraw that option before trial. Chief U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper, who presided over the case, set sentencing for February 3, 2027.

U.S. Attorney Leah Foley, whose office tried the case, told reporters outside the federal courthouse on Fan Pier that "justice has indeed been served," according to Boston.com's account of the post-verdict press conference. Birchmore's cousins, Barbara Wright, Angelique Pirozzi and Justina Danick, were present for the verdict; a neighbor, Jean Falletti, embraced Wright afterward. No statement from Farwell's defense team was reported following the verdict.

A relationship that began in a police youth program

According to trial testimony and the federal indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, Birchmore met Farwell as a young teenager enrolled in the Stoughton Police Department's Explorers program, a youth mentorship initiative for teenagers interested in law enforcement. Prosecutors told the jury that Farwell, then an officer in his mid-20s, began a sexual relationship with Birchmore when she was 15 — conduct they characterized as statutory rape — and that it continued intermittently for roughly seven years, even after Farwell married and after Birchmore moved out of Stoughton to Canton, where she worked as a teacher's aide and was pursuing nursing coursework.

Prosecutors said that in December 2020 Birchmore learned she was pregnant and believed Farwell was the father. The indictment alleges that on the evening of February 1, 2021, Farwell went to her Canton apartment, strangled her, and staged the scene — a duffel-bag strap tied around her neck and secured to a closet door — to resemble a suicide. Surveillance footage shown to jurors recorded Farwell entering the apartment building that evening and leaving roughly 30 minutes later. Her body was found three days later, on February 4, 2021, after she failed to show up for work and colleagues alerted police.

A posthumous paternity test conducted in 2025 determined that Farwell was not the biological father of the child; prosecutors said the test instead identified Jason Pickard, a former Army recruiter who also testified at trial about Birchmore's state of mind in the weeks before her death.

From a ruling of suicide to a federal homicide case

The case's path to trial was unusually long. Massachusetts State Police investigators and the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office initially treated Birchmore's death as a suicide, and in 2022 the DA's office said its review "found no evidence of foul play." Birchmore's family rejected that conclusion and sued Farwell, his twin brother and former fellow Stoughton officer William Farwell, a police supervisor, and the town of Stoughton in a wrongful-death action filed in December 2022.

No state criminal charges were ever brought. It was a subsequent FBI investigation that concluded Birchmore had been strangled and that the scene had been staged, leading a federal grand jury to indict Matthew Farwell in August 2024 on the witness-killing charge; a superseding indictment in October 2025 added the unborn-child count after the 2025 paternity test result. The medical examiner's finding on Birchmore's cause of death was later revised from the original suicide ruling amid the federal investigation.

At trial, the two sides offered sharply different medical theories. Dr. William Smock, a forensic physician called by the prosecution, testified that Birchmore "was the victim of a homicidal act." Dr. Thomas Andrew, testifying for the defense, said the true manner of death was, in his assessment, "undetermined." Farwell did not testify. His attorney, Kimberly Stevens, argued in closing that Birchmore — who had a documented history of mental-health struggles — took her own life after Farwell came to end the relationship. Prosecutor Brian Fogarty countered in closing that Farwell "cleaned up the mess by taking Sandra's life."

William Farwell, the defendant's twin brother and himself a former Stoughton police officer, also testified during the trial. He acknowledged having had a sexual relationship with Birchmore but denied it began while she was a minor.

What happens next

Farwell remains in federal custody pending sentencing on February 3, when Judge Casper will formally impose the mandatory life term on each count. His defense has not announced whether it will appeal the verdict. The case is likely to renew scrutiny of the Stoughton Police Department's handling of its youth Explorers program and of the initial state investigation that closed the case as a suicide; the family's 2022 wrongful-death lawsuit against the department, the town and Farwell's former supervisor remains pending separately in civil court.

• Verdict: guilty on both federal counts — killing a witness/victim and causing the death of an unborn child
• Sentence: mandatory life in prison on each count; sentencing hearing set for February 3, 2027
• Trial length: roughly four weeks of testimony before Chief U.S. District Judge Denise J. Casper in Boston
• Background: Birchmore met Farwell through the Stoughton Police Explorers youth program; a 2022 state review had found no evidence of foul play before the FBI reopened the case

"Justice has indeed been served." — U.S. Attorney Leah Foley, District of Massachusetts

The verdict closes the criminal chapter of a case that drew national attention over how long it took for a death inside a police department's own youth-mentorship program to be investigated as a homicide, and it leaves open the civil litigation the Birchmore family filed against the department years before federal prosecutors acted.