A DNA analysis indicates that Sandra Birchmore’s unborn child was not fathered by the former Stoughton police detective who is charged with killing her in February 2021, according to original reporting from The Boston Globe that cited two anonymous sources familiar with the case.
Text exchanges between Birchmore, a 23-year-old Canton resident, and 29-year-old North Easton resident Matthew Farwell suggests both Birchmore and Farwell believed he was the father of her unborn child. But DNA testing of the fetus and Farwell rules out the possibility that the former police detective was the unborn child’s father, the anonymous sources told the Globe.
Farwell has pleaded not guilty to a charge of killing a witness, in connection with Birchmore’s death in federal court. The Globe’s requests for comment from Farwell, the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office and others were not returned Wednesday afternoon.
Birchmore is known to have had multiple sexual partners, but it is unclear whether investigators have determined who fathered her unborn child, the Globe reported Thursday. It was approximately three months along in development when she died.
This photo provided by the Stoughton, Mass., Police Department shows Matthew Farwell, a former police officer who pleaded not guilty Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024, to charges of killing a woman he is accused of sexually exploiting when she was underage and then trying to stage the death as a suicide after she told him she was pregnant. (Stoughton Police Department via AP)AP
Instead of a murder charge, which would normally be filed by a district attorney, Farwell was indicted on the killing a witness charge in Birchmore’s death last summer. Her 2021 death was initially ruled a suicide, but the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office opened an investigation into the matter in 2023 after learning of new information suggesting her death was actually a homicide.
The Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner’s Office has so far stood by its original determination and declined to change the manner of death on her death certificate.
Prosecutors allege that Farwell — who was a member of the Stoughton Police Department from 2012 to 2022 — strangled Birchmore to conceal evidence that he had committed crimes, such as sexually exploiting Birchmore since she was 15 and he was 27. The former detective groomed her while she was part of his former police department’s youth program and often had sex with her while on the job, prosecutors say.
After killing Birchmore in early February 2021, Farwell staged her apartment to make her death appear to be a suicide, prosecutors allege. Security video from the lobby of her apartment building from the night of Feb. 1, 2021 — the last day she was seen alive — shows Farwell entering the building wearing a hoodie and surgical mask. Birchmore’s body was discovered three days later.
Though Farwell was, at the time, married with two children — and a third was born within hours of Birchmore’s death, Birchmore longed to have a baby with him. In the weeks leading up to her death, she told multiple friends he was her unborn child’s father.
But Farwell was not so keen on the idea and later denied being the fetus’ father to investigators. In text messages, Birchmore pressured him to be present for her delivery, put his name on the child’s birth certificate and have some involvement in its life, writing “your kid should matter.”
“You are truly the worst person on the face of the earth,” he texted back.
Birchmore’s pregnancy enraged Farwell so much that he assaulted her, witnesses have told FBI investigators. In one text exchange with Birchmore about the pregnancy, Farwell accused her of threatening him, writing “now you’ve got me” and “if I didn’t do and give you what you wanted you would ruin me.”
Legal experts told the Globe that the criminal case against Farwell does not hang on whether he is the father of Birchmore’s unborn baby.
Prosecutors assert that he killed her because she had evidence he’d committed crimes — at least some of which were supposedly committed long before she became pregnant. Birchmore’s insistence that Farwell act as a father to her unborn child simply caused him to feel increasing pressure to kill her.
“He doesn’t have to be the father — he just has to think he’s the father,” former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cohen told the Globe. “That’s what gives him the motive to be homicidal.”
The revelation that Farwell is not the father of Birchmore’s unborn child could strengthen his defense by lending credence to the idea that he was telling the truth when he told investigators he wasn’t the father, Cohen, who is also a professor at Boston College Law School, told the newspaper. But the fetus’ paternity “does nothing to disprove the prior relationship” between the would-be mother and former detective.
Any findings from other DNA analyses related to the case — which could include testing of Birchmore’s clothing or the ligature that was found around her neck — have yet to be shared with the public.
A date for Farwell’s trial has not yet been set. He faces a minimum of life in prison on the charge, but could be given the death sentence.
