---
title: "Eight Steps at 9:40 P.M.: In the Farwell Trial, a Phone and a Thirteen-Minute Clock"
description: "At the federal trial over Sandra Birchmore’s death, an FBI witness traced her final movements; the defense disputes the clock"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-16T09:30:00Z
modified: 2026-10-16T18:36:57Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/eight-steps-at-9-40-p-m-in-the-farwell-trial-a-phone-and-a-t-943a36
language: en
tags: ["law", "police", "trump", "crime", "fbi", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Eight Steps at 9:40 P.M.: In the Farwell Trial, a Phone and a Thirteen-Minute Clock

*At the federal trial over Sandra Birchmore’s death, an FBI witness traced her final movements; the defense disputes the clock*

By Jan Sokol · October 16, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/eight-steps-at-9-40-p-m-in-the-farwell-trial-a-phone-and-a-t-943a36

## In brief

- Birchmore’s iPhone recorded eight steps at 9:40 p.m. on the night she died, then no further movement
- The defense says the lobby camera timestamp was off by 13 minutes and no evidence times Farwell’s exit
- Farwell sent Birchmore a Facebook friend request in 2012, when she was 15 and he was a 26-year-old officer
- The Jan. 20, 2021 call from Birchmore’s friend posed a hypothetical, ex-official Brian Holmes testified
- A federal grand jury indicted Farwell after an independent examiner found the injuries fit strangulation

BOSTON — A dead woman’s iPhone has become a witness at the federal courthouse. On Friday, prosecutors at the trial of Matthew Farwell laid before the jury what that phone recorded on the last evening of Sandra Birchmore’s life: eight steps at 9:40 p.m., and after that, nothing. No further movement was ever documented, an FBI witness, Beckstrom, testified. When those eight steps were logged, prosecutors say, Farwell was still inside Birchmore’s third-floor apartment in Canton. Surveillance video from the building lobby shows him leaving three minutes later, at 9:43 p.m.

The defense does not concede the clock. There is no evidence documenting when Farwell exited Birchmore’s unit, and the lobby camera’s timestamp was off by 13 minutes, Beckstrom conceded under questioning. On the measurement of minutes hangs the government’s contention that Farwell, a former Stoughton police detective, strangled Birchmore that evening — a contention [the jury has heard contested since testimony began](https://rews.cc/a/the-sandra-birchmore-trial-opens-with-a-single-question-suic-ef7017).

## The friend request

Beckstrom also walked jurors through the Facebook history between the dead woman and the man accused of killing her. Farwell sent Birchmore a friend request on Oct. 28, 2012. She was 15. He was 26, and a Stoughton police officer whom she had met through the department’s Explorers youth program. Prosecutors call this period grooming — gaining a teenager’s trust, isolating her, normalizing physical contact — and allege that about six months after the request, Farwell initiated criminal sexual contact with her.

![A watercolor blue ribbon tied in a large bow flows into an empty birdcage with an open door on cream textured paper.](https://rews.cc/img/725daadf2b5628ef235ac9cb4e4a189b71cd5793.webp)

Under cross-examination, [the Boston Globe reported](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/16/metro/sandra-birchmore-trial-live-updates/), Beckstrom confirmed that Farwell removed Birchmore as a Facebook friend in late 2012 and rejected a request she sent in 2015. Defense attorney Joanne Daley drew out what the defense wants the jury to see in Birchmore’s devices: a search on Feb. 1, 2021 for the color of a “suicide ribbon,” messages referencing self-harm, and a 2020 exchange using the internet acronym “KMS” — kill myself — which can also carry dark humor. Beckstrom testified he did not know the acronym’s meaning but confirmed the message was on her phone.

> “My anxiety is really bad tonight,” she wrote to Farwell on March 26, 2020. “I’m really scared you’re going to hate me after we talk.”

## The purged recording

Earlier Friday, Brian Holmes — formerly Stoughton’s deputy police chief, now chief in Kingston, and the man who led the internal affairs investigation into Farwell after Birchmore was found dead in 2021 — finished his testimony. The defense used him to undermine a pillar of the prosecution’s theory: that Farwell decided to kill Birchmore after her childhood friend Julia Perlin called Stoughton police on Jan. 20, 2021 and reported that she and Farwell were having sex.

![A watercolor scene shows a hanging telephone receiver with a fading waveform above a wooden desk holding an open blank folder and a dark uniform cap.](https://rews.cc/img/5db9d5061dc921dd844b426c8f022303f8c07cb6.webp)

Holmes acknowledged that Perlin did not accuse Farwell of a criminal sexual relationship in that call. She posed a hypothetical, he said — whether someone would face discipline for an extramarital affair. “To your memory there was no report of an adult having sex with a minor,” Daley asked. Holmes agreed. He listened to a recording of the call, he testified, and then went back to work — the implication Daley pressed being that had a report of child sexual abuse come in, a police officer would have moved with urgency. That recording was later purged from the Stoughton Police Department’s system. It has never been recovered.

Holmes told the jury he had not known Farwell was having sex with Birchmore; had he known, he said, he would have reported it to the chief and there would likely have been an investigation. Investigators learned of the sexual relationship soon after Birchmore’s death, he said, but evidence that the contact began when she was a minor emerged only later. In 2022, he testified, he told the FBI the internal inquiry had unearthed evidence suggesting Farwell had sexually exploited her as a minor. Perlin may yet testify.

![A watercolor depicts a gray filing cabinet with its bottom drawer open, spilling a red thread that trails across the floor toward a patch of sunlight.](https://rews.cc/img/cd66248132ae5c69a98512f6bbc17afb4be0c539.webp)

## What the state missed

Farwell, 40, is accused of killing Birchmore and her unborn child and staging the scene to look like a suicide. She was eight to ten weeks pregnant when she died in 2021 and had told Farwell he was the father; DNA testing later showed he was not. The state medical examiner originally ruled the death a suicide, and the Norfolk district attorney declined to prosecute — a pair of decisions that opened the door to federal jurisdiction. An independent medical examiner concluded the injuries fit strangulation, not suicide. A federal grand jury indicted Farwell, the FBI arrested him in August 2024, and he has been held without bail at a Rhode Island detention facility since.

He has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers say Birchmore had a history of mental illness and hanged herself after Farwell broke off the relationship. An FBI case agent was expected to testify later Friday — significant, because it was the bureau’s investigation, not the state’s, that finally brought a Massachusetts jury to weigh what happened in a Canton apartment between 9:40 and 9:43 on a February night.