When federal authorities arrested Matthew Farwell on Wednesday morning in connection with the death of Sandra Birchmore in 2021, the subtext was clear, according to one legal expert: “the feds stepped in because the state investigation was very wrong.”
Jack Lu, a former Massachusetts Superior Court judge, dubbed the federal prosecution of Farwell for killing Birchmore, a woman prosecutors say he began sexually exploiting when she was 15 an “unfriendly takeover.”
“The federal government has stepped in because the state authorities (at best) made a big mistake,” Lu, an adjunct faculty member in UMass Lowell’s School of Criminology and Justice Studies, wrote in an email.
