The trial of Matthew Farwell went into its second week on Monday, October 19, in the federal courthouse in Boston, and it was the telephone that testified. Special Agent Heidi Kelsch of the FBI sat on the stand and read jurors the messages one by one: years of texts between a Stoughton police officer and the young woman he is accused of killing, along with notebook entries, an Instagram cache and a Walmart receipt. A person’s life, once it has passed through an investigation, ends up as exhibits.
Sandra Birchmore was 23 when she was found dead in her apartment in Canton on February 4, 2021. Prosecutors say Farwell strangled her weeks after he learned she was pregnant and then arranged the scene so it would look like suicide. The state medical examiner’s office first ruled it exactly that. Farwell, now 40, has pleaded not guilty to killing a witness and to causing the death of her fetus, a boy. His lawyers say Birchmore took her own life after he tried to end the relationship, and they point to her history of mental illness. That is the question the trial opened with, and it has not changed.
A name
On Monday the jury heard a name that had so far come up only in legal arguments. Kelsch said the father of Birchmore’s child was a man named Pickard, as the Boston Globe reported. It was the first time he had been identified that way in front of the jurors. He is on the list of possible witnesses, and the Globe said it had tried several times without success to reach him.
The Enterprise identified him as Jason Pickard, an Army recruiter who first met Birchmore in 2019. Federal investigators took DNA from both men, and Pickard reportedly had a sexual encounter with Birchmore around the time she conceived. She was about eight weeks pregnant when she died. A defense filing earlier this year had already said the DNA excluded Farwell. The prosecution’s answer is that biology was never the point. In its account, Birchmore and Farwell both believed the child was his, and that belief is what counts.
The terms of a bargain
The texts, as Kelsch read them, describe something closer to a hostage negotiation than a love affair. In October 2020 Birchmore found out that Farwell’s wife was expecting the couple’s third child. On October 5 she wrote to her friend Joshua Heal: “He took my virginity before I was 16.” She told Heal that Farwell had once tried to force her to have an abortion. She showed him a draft of a message to Farwell’s wife saying her husband had been cheating on her since before they married. Heal asked whether she would send it. “Once he makes his decision,” she replied. “I have the upper hand in this.”
That same day she told Farwell she would expose the relationship unless he agreed to give her a baby. He went to see her that evening. Afterward she told Heal he had agreed, so that his wife would not find out. The argument then went on over the fine print: how many times, on what conditions, which promises he had made. On October 20 she asked if he would be OK with her getting pregnant. “Not really, but you made it clear I don’t have an option,” Farwell wrote.
In December she told him she was pregnant, and the Globe reported the text she sent: “Congrats, we are going to be parents.” He did not reply for several hours. According to Kelsch, Birchmore told at least eight other people about the pregnancy in that time. Then Farwell wrote: “I literally have nothing to say right now.”
A key
In January 2021 one of Birchmore’s friends called the Stoughton Police Department to complain about Farwell and told them about his sexual relationship with Birchmore. The secret had reached his workplace. “Your [expletive] friend called my job. WTF?” he texted her. “You told me that no one knew about us, yet she claimed we are [expletive].”
A few days after that he came to her apartment, and the messages she sent friends describe a different man. On January 24 she wrote that “He asked me if I’d give him a key, and said that if I keep it a secret, he’ll be around,” calling it “a complete 180 from where we were at.” A Walmart receipt shown in court shows she had a copy of her key made the next day. She told Farwell the conversation had given her “some kind of hope and reassurance that we could make it work and be OK again.” Eleven days later she was dead. The timeline of that final night is still being argued over in court.
The Explorers
Everything leads back to April 2013. Birchmore was 15, a high school sophomore in the Stoughton Police Department’s Explorers Program, a program meant to bring young people closer to police work. Farwell was 27 and one of its instructors. Kelsch described evidence that he first sexually assaulted her that month and that the abuse went on for years. In a journal entry from October 2013, when she was 16, Birchmore wrote about sexual acts she was considering for his upcoming birthday. Other entries and texts show a pattern of Farwell threatening to punish her through sexual acts. In one exchange she asked whether he would hold her afterward. “No, I’m going to tell you to get dressed and be mean,” he replied. Kelsch said she found about 18 conversations like it.
This is the motive the government has laid out: a girl abused as a child who grew into a woman holding evidence of federal crimes, including that he sexually exploited her as a minor and met her for sex while on duty. In that account, she was a witness who had to be silenced.
Prosecutors also put into evidence records from a disability benefits evaluation Farwell underwent in June 2021, a few months after her death. The report said he described an affair in 2016 or 2017 with a woman who later threatened to tell his wife. “According to Matt, the woman later completed suicide in response to the entire situation,” it said.
The other ledger
The defense used cross-examination to make its own record from the same material: journal entries and messages in which Birchmore wrote about self-harm and distress, and her history of suicidal thoughts. Kelsch agreed that Birchmore had also talked about an earlier suicide attempt. From her Instagram cache the lawyers showed images recovered from February 1, three days before she was found. One read: “Can I die just for a day? I just want to see who will cry when I’m gone.”
So both sides are working from one archive, sometimes the same documents, and arguing for opposite conclusions. The jury will have to weigh a young woman’s despair against a man’s reasons to fear her, and decide which explains how she died. Pickard, according to the Enterprise, is expected to testify for the government.