The Sandra Birchmore case, in which a former Stoughton detective was arrested Wednesday for allegedly strangling the pregnant woman to death and staging it as a suicide, is the second recent high-profile death investigation that federal prosecutors have stepped in on in one Massachusetts county.
The U.S. Attorney's Office for Massachusetts also conducted its own investigation into the highly-controversial Karen Read case, which ended in a mistrial last month. The Norfolk County District Attorney's office alleged that Read killed her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O'Keefe, by hitting him with her SUV, but crash reconstruction experts hired by federal prosecutors came to a different conclusion, a theory that Read's lawyers were able to discuss in front of the jury.
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And in the Birchmore case, federal prosecutors came to a different conclusion from their counterparts in Norfolk County, at least initially. Where investigators said soon afterward that there was no foul play involved in Birchmore's death, the federal case outlined in court now alleges she was killed by Matthew Farwell, a detective with the Stoughton Police Department. Farwell is accused of strangling her and staging her apartment to make it appear that she took her own life.
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Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy didn't directly answer a question Wednesday about whether, in light of the Birchmore and Read cases, it was rare for federal and state prosecutors to reach different conclusions on investigations.
"I'm here to talk about one case," Levy said at a news conference announcing the indictment of Farwell. "We have about a thousand cases in the office. I'm not going to comment on any other case in the office. I would just caution to not extrapolate too much from one out of all the things happening."
But legal experts agreed that it was unusual for federal authorities to become involved in a local investigation, especially twice within the same county.
"It brings up the question, were they investigating Read, were they investigating Birchmore or were they investigating the actions of the Norfolk County District Attorney's Office and uncovered this evidence that supports the indictments they’ve now brought?" NBC10 Boston legal analyst Michael Coyne said.
Coyne added that this latest development in the Birchmore case could further erode public trust in law enforcement in Norfolk County, which had already taken a hit after the controversy surrounding the Read case.
"It should be terribly concerning to people in Stoughton if the allegations are ultimately supported by sufficient evidence, that a number of different law enforcement officers in Stoughton at least contributed to where we're at in this case," Coyne said.
Shira Diner, an instructor at the Defender Clinic at Boston University, called the federal involvement "interesting," but did note important differences between the Birchmore and Read cases.
"In this most recent case, what is at issue is the conduct of the officer very directly," Diner said. "In the Karen Read case, they were more focused on the process and the investigation."
The Sandra Birchmore case
Sandra Birchmore joined the Stoughton Police Explorers Academy in 2010, when she was 12. She died 11 years later, the state medical examiner's office ruling the death a suicide.
An internal investigation followed, and the department said in 2022 that Farwell and two other Stoughton officers had inappropriate sexual relationships with Birchmore, with Farwell accused of starting to see her when she was 15.
The Norfolk County District Attorney's Office didn't bring charges against Farwell or the other two officers — both have denied wrongdoing, and they are not facing charges in federal court.
The department turned the results of the investigation over to prosecutors. Investigators said at the time that there was no foul play in Birchmore’s death.
All three officers resigned before they were interviewed as part of the Stoughton police investigation, police said. County prosecutors eventually handed over the investigation to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office; their probe was still ongoing as of Wednesday.
But Levy said Wednesday that his office reviewed existing evidence and uncovered new evidence that led to Farwell's grand jury indictment on a charge of killing a witness or victim.
In the indictment against Farwell, federal prosecutors allege that he killed Birchmore with the intention of covering up possible federal crimes.
"They're probably looking at the case differently and coming at it from a different perspective than the local police did, and not that one's better and one's worse, but I do think they tend to go into these with a different lens," Diner said.
The Norfolk County District Attorney's office noted in a statement on Wednesday that the investigation has remained open and active, that it's cooperated with investigators including from the FBI and that two officers assigned to the office were part of Farwell's arrest in Revere.
"We look forward to supporting and assisting Federal authorities as they pursue this prosecution," the spokesman said.
A spokesman also told NBC10 Boston that the office was limited by the medical examiner's ruling that the death was a suicide.
Evidence for the theory that Birchmore was killed was first brought forward in a legal proceeding earlier this year. In June, Stoughton Police Chief Donna McNamara wrote a statement to the Stoughton community on a report that left her "profoundly disturbed and troubled" from a pathologist hired by Birchmore's family as part of a civil lawsuit.
While NBC10 Boston has not reviewed the report, The Boston Globe reported that, in it, a former New York City chief medical examiner found that Birchmore's death was a homicide, not a suicide. Without mentioning its findings, McNamara said that the report warranted further high-level examination.
Birchmore's family "always thought that she was murdered," Justice for Sandra Birchmore organizer Melissa "Mizzy" Berry told NBC10 Boston Wednesday.
While investigators have not announced any links between the Birchmore and Read cases, Berry is among those who have linked them, at least because of issues they raised.
"People are upset, rightfully so. They see what happened in the Karen Read case, and they feel like the same thing is happening in Sandra's case, that there is a cover-up here," she told NBC10 Boston last month.
The Karen Read case
At the time of her death, Birchmore was living in Canton, where Read is accused of fatally striking O'Keefe with her SUV in a snowstorm. Read denies the charges and claims law enforcement framed her; the Norfolk District Attorney's Office denies that.
In the Read case, a federal investigation was initiated to look into how law enforcement handled the case. No federal charges have been filed to date, and may never be, but the investigation did end up impacting the trial, first by postponing its start date after lawyers received more than 3,000 pages of new evidence from the probe.
Explicit mention of the federal investigation into the handling of the case was not allowed during the Read trial's proceedings. However, crash reconstruction experts were questioned during a voir dire proceeding, after which Judge Beverly Cannone ruled that they could testify in front of the jury.
Daniel Wolfe and Andrew Rentschler, who work for forensic consulting engineering company ARCCA, said they worked on a third-party report about what caused O'Keefe's death, and testified that they did not believe the evidence was consistent with the commonwealth's allegation that Read backed into O'Keefe, fatally striking him.
NBC10 Boston's Michael Pescaro, Asher Klein and Eli Rosenberg contributed to this report.
