2025: PLLDF Calls For Justice For Baby Birchmore

By Lance Reynolds | lreynolds@bostonherald.com

PUBLISHED: October 28, 2025 at 3:37 PM EDT | UPDATED: October 30, 2025 at 1:40 PM EDT

The ex-Stoughton police officer accused of grooming, impregnating and then killing Canton woman Sandra Birchmore has been charged in a new indictment with causing the death of her unborn child, according to court documents.

A federal grand jury indicted Matthew Farwell, 39, of North Easton, with killing Birchmore’s unborn baby boy, whose gestational age, according to court documents, was “between 8 and 10 weeks.”

The revelation was disclosed in a superseding indictment posted to the federal docket on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors say Farwell groomed Birchmore while she was still a child. At just 12 years old, Birchmore joined the Police Explorers Academy, a youth program run by the Stoughton Police  that included Farwell among its teachers. Prosecutors say Farwell first groomed the girl and then took her virginity when she was 15.

Prosecutors say he impregnated her and then strangled the then-23-year-old to death in her Canton apartment on Feb. 1, 2021 — staging it to look like a suicide.

Farwell was employed as a Stoughton Police Officer the whole time. The former Stoughton officer is 12 years older than Birchmore. He had three children with his wife and maintained a sexual relationship with Birchmore, court documents allege, until her death.

Local authorities in Norfolk County deemed Birchmore’s death a suicide and declined to prosecute before federal authorities took up the case.

While Massachusetts is not a death penalty state, federal law allows for the death penalty, which prosecutors may take up in this case.

The federal case against the former Stoughton cop has been delayed numerous times. A judge earlier this month scheduled Farwell’s trial to begin next October.

Federal authorities arrested Farwell the morning of Aug. 28, 2024, after he was indicted for the alleged slaying of Birchmore. At the time, the assistant special agent in charge of the Boston FBI field office, Stephen Kelleher, called the former officer’s indictment “depraved and a gross betrayal of his sworn oath and the public’s trust.”

Birchmore, of Canton, was born in 1997, and in March 2010, at the age of 12, she applied to participate in the Police Explorers Academy, a youth program that Farwell ran for the Stoughton Police Department. She stayed in the program for about four years.

Prosecutors allege that Farwell worked to groom Birchmore early on, pretending to befriend the girl 12 years his junior by doing test prep with her at the library and friending her on Facebook. He began a sexual relationship with her when she was 15 and he was 27, taking her virginity, something he seems to be quite proud of based on messages uncovered during the lengthy federal investigation.

“It was such a big day,” Farwell said in a 2020 text to Birchmore. FBI agents were able to capture the texting and messaging from Birchmore’s iPhone, Apple Watch and computer.

The messages also included requests from Farwell to pretend she was as young as 13 and to say he was raping her as they had sex.

Birchmore learned she was pregnant in late December 2020, about a month before she would die.

Farwell is accused of murdering Birchmore in her Canton apartment, not too long after she had excitedly revealed to him that she was pregnant by texting him a photograph of a handmade card saying, “Congrats, we are going to be parents!”

The gruesome details of Birchmore’s murder prompted calls for the alleged murderer, Farwell, to be charged with the killing of the unborn baby. Some activists pushed for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act to be applied to Farwell.

The law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2004, “provides that persons who commit certain Federal violent crimes … and thereby cause the death of, or bodily injury to, a child who is in utero shall be guilty of a separate offense.”

The penalty for killing an unborn child is mandatory life in prison, according to the US attorney’s office.

Colbe Mazzarella, an attorney and president of the Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund, told the Herald weeks after Farwell’s arrest, “The accusation that a police officer killed his former student and their unborn baby strikes horror in every feeling heart.”

“Such monumental selfishness was the reason for the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act,” the attorney added. “This law was passed by Republicans and Democrats to punish and prevent many abusers who kill pregnant women or use violence to force a woman to abort their child.”