The Murder of Sandra Birchmore: Pt.2

The internal investigation, more perpetrators, and an indictment

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Episode Transcript

(00:37):
Hello everyone, welcome back to The Victim's Voice.
I'm your host, Lorelai. This week we will continue with
the case of Sandra Birchmore. Last week we talked about the
last day that she was seen alive, her body being found, and
about her time in the Stoughton Police Department's Explorers
program. We also found out about her

(00:58):
interactions with several local police officers and their
inappropriate behaviour with Sandra when she was a minor,
along with the fact that Sandra was pregnant when she died and
the father was allegedly one of these officers.
We ended with the police chief'sstatement at the press
conference where she released the results of an internal
investigation into these officers, which led her to

(01:21):
request that they be decertified.
Today we will talk more in depthabout each of these officers and
about what the investigation uncovered.
First, let's talk about the obvious Officer Sandra's alleged
baby daddy, Matthew. Farewell, Matthew Farewell had
been a member of the Explorers during his teenage years and had

(01:43):
been designated the rank of Deputy Chief within the program
in 2002. After high school he joined the
military but later acted as a quote UN quote guest instructor
in the Explorer program. Under the direction of Robert
Devine. He became a Stoughton Police
Officer on March 27th of 2012. Matthew Farewell was found to

(02:08):
have violated Stoughton Police Department's rules and
regulations by demonstrating conduct that is unbecoming to an
officer. He demonstrated immoral,
improper, and disorderly personal conduct that discredits
him as an officer. The investigation found that
Farewell had lied during his interview with the State police
about his and Sandra's relationship not starting until

(02:31):
2020. It was found that he started
having a sexual relationship with Sandra when she was just 15
years old and he was 27, two to three years after she joined the
Explorers. The relationship continued for
many years and included sexual interactions and communications

(02:52):
while Matthew Farewell was on duty for the Stoughton Police.
While he was supposed to be upholding his oath he took when
he became a police officer to protect the citizens of
Stoughton, he instead was sleeping with an underage girl
and meeting up with her while onthe clock.
It was found that he failed to demonstrate quote UN quote,

(03:12):
sound judgment when he would text Sandra to meet up so they
could have sex or she could perform sexual acts on him while
in his patrol car and while on duty.
This scumbag had the nerve to tell Sandra that a police
officer's job is stressful and he needed her to do these things
to help relieve his stress. What a dirty piece of shit.

(03:35):
He knew Sandra was a vulnerable child and that she looked up to
him and he took advantage of it for his own pleasure.
On February 24th of 2021 Matthewwas put on paid administrative
leave and had to turn in his government issued equipment and
phone which he said was fine because he had quote UN quote

(03:57):
nothing to hide. However, on March 11th, 2022 he
put in his resignation and it went into effect on April 1st of
2022. Next we will talk about William.
Farewell Matthews twin brother. He became a Stoughton Police
officer on March 21st, 2017 and he resigned on August 1st of

(04:22):
2022 after being put on a paid administrative leave on April
12th of 2022. He was part of the Explorers as
a teenager also and in 2002 was given the rank of Lieutenant in
the program. Like his brother, he entered the
military after high school and was also a guest instructor in

(04:45):
the program under Divine. Matthew was interviewed on
February 11th, 2021 regarding Sandra's death.
He said he had met her around 10years earlier, also like his
brother, and that in 2018, whilehe was assigned to a paid
details, Sandra approached him and they began talking about her

(05:07):
interest in joining the Army. He said that he put her in touch
with an Army recruiter and Sandra began to contact him on a
regular basis after that. William admitted during his
interview, which just to let youknow how casual this interview
was, it didn't take place in a police station.

(05:27):
No, it happened while he was sitting in his patrol car in a
shopping center parking lot. He told the detective that he
had a sexual relationship with Sandra that went back about two
years. The relationship ended though
when Sandra crossed the line. She dared to approach him and
his family at a 4th of July event.

(05:50):
How dare she do that? The mistress cannot meet the
wife. What was she thinking after
that? He blocked her on social media.
I mean, he couldn't let his wifefind out that he was a cheating
scumbag now, could he? Even though she now knows,
however, he said even though he blocked her on social media, he

(06:12):
didn't cut her off completely and that they stayed in contact
off and on for a while. When he was asked about the baby
that Sandra had been pregnant with, he stated that it
definitely was not his. He said that Sandra had told him
the father was his brother Matthew.
William Farewell was notified onMarch 12th of 2021 that he was

(06:37):
under investigation. The police report states that
text messages show that William was in contact with Sandra going
back to at least April of 2020 and that there is evidence that
at least five of these text exchanges happened while he was
either working a shift or on paid detail.

(06:59):
A lot of what went on between William and Sandra was redacted
in the report, but he did meet up with her while on duty and
she had been in his patrol car. He also had met up with her at a
restaurant while he was on duty.He was found to demonstrate
conduct unbecoming of an officerand demonstrated immoral,

(07:21):
improper, and disorderly personal conduct that discredits
him as an officer. He was also found guilty of
coercing Sandra through text messaging, which what he was
coercing her to do was also redacted in the report, so we
don't know what that was. He was also caught lying about
the last time he saw her. He said he had last seen her in

(07:42):
December of 2020, the month thatMatthew claims that Sandra would
have gotten pregnant. But text messages revealed that
William and Sandra had sexual relations in the parking lot of
her apartment building after midnight on January 10th of
2021, less than a month before she was found dead.

(08:05):
Do these people not realize thatcell phones show times and
dates? Also, it was found that William
had conducted criminal justice Information Services searches on
Sandra and on himself over the years.
For what they were able to uncover, William had run 2 on
Sandra and one on himself in October or no.

(08:28):
He ran 2 on Sandra. One of them was in October of
2019 and the other one was in November of 2019 and 24 on
himself between the dates of October 2017 and January of
2019. A Criminal Justice Information
Services, or CJIS, search is a request for criminal justice

(08:52):
information from the FBI. It is a massive database on
people. It's one of the largest
divisions within the FBI. It is available for law
enforcement agencies on federal,state and local levels and is
used in the investigative process.
It includes a wide range of sensitive information like
fingerprint records. It is the largest database for

(09:16):
this and contains over 77 million fingerprints.
It has over 3 million iris scans, also known as eye
recognition software or a biometric matching model, which
is a way to identify people. They say that eventually the FBI
is going to switch over completely from fingerprints to
iris scanning. It contains criminal histories

(09:40):
and information about investigations in individuals
involved in the criminal justicesystem.
They can be used for things suchas law enforcement employment
checks, concealing carry permits, or military Protection
Orders. So why was William running his
and Sandra's names, current investigations and warrants are

(10:03):
listed on CJIS. Was he worried that he was going
to be investigated for somethingthat had to do with Sandra?
William was accused of having inappropriate texting
conversation with Birchmore while on duty, misusing a law
enforcement database for unauthorized searches, and being
dishonest with state police investigators about his

(10:23):
communications with Sandra. Next we have Mr. Robert Devine,
the leader of this pathetic group of perverted officers of
the law. He became a member of the
Stoughton Police Department on October 4th of 1999 and was the
designated officer in charge of the Explorer program from 2002

(10:44):
to 2014. He was placed on paid
administrative leave on April 4th of 2022 until he too
resigned on August 16th of 2022.Robert told investigators that
he quote UN quote desired to cooperate but then started
making outrageous accusations ofaccounts being hacked.

(11:05):
The investigators weren't dumb though and knew he was trying to
cover his own ass. During his interview, Robert was
asked if he kept in touch with Sandra after she left the
Explorers and he said that he had not but that Sandra would
find him but that she never had his cell phone number.

(11:26):
Robert talked about Sanders obsession with police officers
as if that was a bad thing and gave them the right to take
advantage of her. He admitted that he would meet
her while on duty and she would offer to bring him coffee.
He said that they would normallyjust talk for a while and then
he would leave. He said this happened about once
a week and that it was totally incident innocent.

(11:49):
He denied having any type of social interaction outside of
the Police Department and never communicated with her by
texting, messaging, any social media platforms, burner phones,
or any other forms of communications.
He then went on to talk about Sandra, how Sandra liked to

(12:09):
exaggerate stories and that one time around her 21st birthday,
he ran into her at a bar in Brockton, but that when she
approached him, he got up and left.
At first, Divine said that he didn't know about Sandra's
relationship with Matthew Farewell until he went out on
leave, but then later said that Sandra had mentioned the
relationship previously as a quote UN quote consenting adult.

(12:33):
Roberts said she had also spokento him about her relationship
with William Farewell, but that he didn't believe her.
When investigators told Divine that it that at that point they
had not found any direct communication between him or
Sandra yet, he replied because you won't find it.
However, that was a lie because they did in fact find it.

(12:58):
After his interview, investigators found an abundance
of evidence proving that Robert Devine was a lying sack of shit.
There was evidence in Sandra's phone that she had told William
farewell through a text message that she had sexual relations
with Robert Devine. There was also direct contact
between Sandra and Robert Devinethrough Facebook Messenger

(13:21):
between November 27th of 2020 and February 1st of 2021.
Their messages were sexual and content and there was also at
least one instance where Devine was on duty and met up with
Sandra at a local restaurant. There was also a Facebook
account that was talking to Sandra under the name of Marty

(13:43):
Riggs that was discovered to be Robert Devine.
He was found to fail to demonstrate sound judgment and
to be untruthful when he told the investigators that he had
not had any contact or relationship with Sandra.
When they tried to schedule a second interview with Robert,

(14:05):
that is when he chose to resign because he knew his dumb ass had
been caught. The investigators found 2
letters in Robert Devine's file during their investigation.
One was from Sanders mother and was dated April 17th of 2014.
It was a letter extending thanksto the Stoughton Police

(14:26):
Department, in particular Officer Robert Devine, for
running the Explorers program. The other letter was not dated
or signed, but was titled My Hero, Lieutenant Divine and was
wrote to Divine to recognize allthat he had done for the
community. Yuck.

(14:48):
They included these letters in the report to show the trust
that the public had in both the Stoughton Police and in the
Explorers and how their trust was violated.
They also found information during their investigation that
led them to believe that Devine had been improper with another
underage girl when he was working as a school resource

(15:10):
officer. It would chaperone a group of
kids who stayed after school foropen gym.
When they interviewed this woman, she admitted that at the
time she was 12 or 13 and was inthat after school program.
She said she was very open at the time about having a crush on
Robert Devine. She stated that she wrote a
letter to him that basically professed her love for him and

(15:33):
how beautiful she thought he was.
She admitted during her interview that thinking back on
it now, it's very cringy and embarrassing.
She said it was a very detailed letter about her feelings for
him. She knew she had written this
letter in October of 20 O1 because the events of September

(15:53):
11th had just happened. She stated that she handed him
the letter, he didn't read it infront of her but in the next few
days whenever he saw her he would give her a hug and laugh a
little bit but never said anything to her about the letter
at all. The investigators asked her

(16:14):
about this quote UN quote hug and she said it was definitely a
squeeze and that Robert initiated hugs from female
students all the time. When she was asked if he had
ever touched her sexually, she was very clear that he never
did. There was, however, an occasion
when Robert did take the girl into an office during open gym

(16:37):
time. She stated it happened a couple
of months after she gave him theletter.
She had found out that he had gotten engaged and she was
devastated. She was crying and Robert heard
her, so he came up to her and LED her to a room that she
thought might have been a gym teacher's office.
He took her inside, closed the door and lifted her by her waist

(17:01):
onto the desk. Robert told the girl she was a
knockout and said that he was going to take her on a date as
soon as she turned 18. What kind of Lifetime movie am I
reading right now? He then gave her a hug and

(17:23):
kissed her on the forehead. She said this room they were in
was not close to the gym and there's no way that anyone else
heard them. She said the only other adult
who was ever at the open gym wasone other officer who was there
occasionally. There was never anyone from the
school there and the farewells were also there.
They were teenagers at the time and she said they were under

(17:47):
Robert's wing. She stated that she got a hold
of Robert Devine on instant messenger and exchanged a few
short messages with him. That is until her dad's
girlfriend found out, called Robert a creep and blocked her
After that. She said that she remembers
after that she would see Robert driving around town with middle

(18:09):
school girls in his personal vehicle.
When she was asked if Robert wasacting as a Big Brother or
father figure to the kids at school, she stated quote, he was
definitely not like the father figure.
He definitely seemed to be showing off and lying loving
attention from kids and basking in kids admiring him.

(18:32):
End Quote. And there was more to Divine
shady behavior. Divine was demoted and received
a 60 day unpaid suspension in 2016 after a past internal
affairs investigation found thathe improperly ordered an
investigation into a possible violation of harassment orders

(18:58):
using department resources and technology.
The orders were taken out by himand his then wife against an
Easton woman with whom Divine was having extramarital affairs
with around 2015. Officer Devine, who was 42 at
the time, was having an affair with a 30 year old girl.

(19:21):
Eventually she broke it off withhim and he was pissed.
So he sent inappropriate photos of himself and this girl to
everyone in the Police Department and made it look like
the girl had sent them. He said she did it because he
ended the affair and she was trying to get back at him.
The girl was actually arrested and charged with violating

(19:44):
harassment prevention orders. The police chief at the time,
Paul Shastity, stood by his deputy chief divine seeing that
he was the victim in this case and stated the situation was a
quote, UN quote, personal matter.
Shastity said quote he is in sure due process, he is a victim

(20:06):
and when the case finds its way to court, the truth and all the.
Information that is circulating will come out, and what will
happen is that there will be an assessment we'll assess as we
move downstream. Well, an internal investigation
was done and the truth did come out, but it wasn't in Define's
favor. So he was demoted and suspended

(20:28):
for his actions. So he tried to cause a woman to
be charged and have a record while he plagued the victim and
spread nude photos around of herbecause she didn't want to see
him anymore. And he was the one that was
married at the time. That shows you the kind of
person we're dealing with. These three officers weren't the

(20:49):
only dirtbags that were on that were discovered to take
advantage of Sandra. On November 4th of 2021, while
going through Sandra's laptop that had been synchronized with
her phone, they discovered conversations between Matthew
Farewell, William Farewell, and a recruiter from the
Massachusetts Army National Guard who was believed to be

(21:11):
Sandra's recruiting officer. That William Farewell had set
her up with his name was redacted in the investigative
report. Whatever these conversations
were, they must have been reallybad because they were said to be
of interest to the US military and were in fact handed over to
them. They also found photos and
videos that had been exchanged between Sandra, William and

(21:36):
Matthew. And there was a fifth person who
was found during the investigation who was said to
have taken advantage of Sandra. This man was also introduced to
Sandra by William Farewell. He is the former Stoughton
Animal Control officer and in 2021 was a school resource

(21:58):
officer for a school in the townover from Stoughton.
It's sad when you can't trust the officers that are working in
your children's schools. This officer's name was
accidentally left unredacted in the report.
His name is Joshua Heal on December 21st of 2021.

(22:24):
When investigators questioned Joshua, he was more than happy
to talk to them at first. He told them that he was friends
with Robert Devine and the Farewell Brothers.
He said he met Birchmore throughthem and she would often come to
meet him at the animal shelter. He stated that he tried to
discourage Sandra from having high expectations of where her

(22:47):
relationship with Matthew Farewell was heading.
When the investigators started questioning him about the
information they came across in Sandra's phone concerning him,
he stopped the interview and said he wanted to consult with
legal counsel. Later that month, the
investigators went to the Stoughton Animal Control

(23:09):
shelter. They attempted to locate
adoption papers where Sandra hadadopted a cat from the shelter
in 2018 or 2019. She had told several people that
she had adopted at least one of her cats from the shelter, but
no documents were found in relation to Sandra adopting a

(23:31):
cat. And then in January of 2022,
investigators requested a forensic analysis of a couch
that was located in the Stoughton Animal Shelter.
However, the results of the forensic analysis were redacted
in the police report. It's believed that something

(23:51):
they found during their investigation LED them to
believe that Hill solicited a sexual act from Sandra in
exchange for a cat and that the ACT took place on the couch at
the shelter. Joshua agreed to come in for a
second interview on February 9thof 2022.

(24:14):
Most of this interview was redacted, but there was a part
where he talked about some type of location sharing app that
Matthew Farewell had used to track Sanders location.
During the internal investigation, investigators had
trouble getting Sanders friends to talk to them.
They told investigators that some of the officers in the

(24:36):
Stoughton Police Department had reached out to them after
Sanders death, calling them liars and threatening them.
This led to investigators talking about filing witness
intimidation charges against these officers.
Other witnesses who had been members of the Explorers in

(24:56):
earlier years came forward and claimed that they had seen
inappropriate behavior being displayed by Robert Devine and
the Farewell Brothers. They stated there had been some
hugging and kissing and that inappropriate contact took place
in a closet. After the results of the
internal investigation came out to the public in September of

(25:19):
2022, Chief Donna McNamara said she was going to make sure what
these officers did to Sandra would never happen to anyone
else, at least at the hands of these morons.
They were going to make a recommendation to the POST to
revoke their certifications and enter them into the national

(25:39):
decertification database. This would ensure that they
would never get jobs and law enforcement again.
In December of 2022, the family of Sandra Birchmore filed a
wrongful death suit against the officers, the Town of Stoughton,

(25:59):
and the Stoughton Police Department.
The wrongful death lawsuit, which referred to Birch's death
as a quote UN quote alleged suicide, says that three members
of the Stoughton Police Department groomed Birchmore for
several years and engaged in illegal sexual activity with
her, and that their actions pushed her to suicide, according

(26:25):
to boston.com. The complaint also accuses the
town of Stoughton and its PoliceDepartment of negligence in
hiring Matthew Farewell and his twin brother, William Farewell,
and in supervising them and Robert Devine.
The lawsuit stated that the Farewell brothers were hired
even though members of the forceknew that when they were

(26:48):
teenagers they had impersonated police officers and pulled over
motor vehicles. The town in this police force
also owed Birch more A duty of care to protect her from the
abuse and inappropriate conduct that she faced from the Farewell
Brothers and Divine. There has been silence

(27:14):
concerning Sanders Case for the last two years and many people
even not many people even knew about Sanders case.
It wasn't well publicized by themedia outlets or by true crime
creators until Karen Reed and John O'Keefe happened.
Then people started talking about Sanders Case and the fact

(27:35):
that it's similar to Karen Reed because it involved some of the
same less than respectable officers and some other ones
from just the town over from Canton where John O'Keefe was
killed. Then this past June of 2024
something major happened that blew Sanders Case out of the
water and gave validation to thetheories that her family and

(27:57):
friends have had since Sanders death regarding the fact that
they weren't fully convinced that her death was a suicide.
World renowned forensic pathologist Doctor Michael
Baden, who has been involved in cases such as George Floyd,
Jeffrey Epstein and OJ Simpson took a look at Sandra's case at

(28:18):
the request of her family and what he found could change
everything such as reopening theinvestigation into Sandra's
death and holding someone accountable.
He stated in his report that there is evidence pointing to
Sandra's manner of death being ahomicide and not a suicide as it

(28:39):
was listed after her death. He stated that there was a
fracture in her hyoid bone whichmeans she was strangled to death
and did not die by hanging as ithad been stated she had in the
autopsy report. A sexual assault kit was also
performed on Birch Moor, but it was never tested.

(29:01):
It's normal protocol to do a sexual assault kit anytime there
is a female victim just in case they need it later.
It can still be tested, but there are so many shelves and
backlog that they don't have thefunds to test all of them right
away unless there's a rush put on.
It. Also, swabs, nail scrapings,

(29:23):
nail clippings and hair might need to be pushed ahead of other
evidence as these things don't sustain as long.
The wrongful death suit filed bySanders family talked about
Matthew and Sanders relationshipsince she was 15 and the fact
that he was the alleged father of her baby.
However, in Doctor Baden's report, he stated, quote while

(29:45):
the state medical examiner foundthat Birchmore was pregnant when
she died, the office apparently did not send fetal tissue for
DNA analysis to determine who the father was.
Donna McNamara, the current chief of the Stoughton Police
Department, issued a statement acknowledging Dr. Baden's

(30:05):
statements concerning Sanders death.
Here's what she had to say. Quote.
As Chief of the Stoughton PoliceDepartment, I have directly
participated in this lengthy andaggressive internal
investigation. In September of 2022, I released
an executive summary which revealed for the first time the

(30:27):
horrific injustices include grooming and sexual abuse
inflicted upon Sandra Birchmore at the hands of one rogue and
corrupt former police officer and additional inappropriate
sexual react relationships by other former police officers.
I just need to be clear that ourPolice Department has no

(30:48):
jurisdiction over the investigation of Sanders death
which occurred in a different community which was Canton.
However, I will reiterate that the Stoughton Police Department
has assisted and continues to cooperate with other law
enforcement agencies. Sandra received not so much as a

(31:08):
slither sliver of justice duringher life, and we will not seize
in our efforts to ensure our duty to administer justice.
And she is not forgotten in the aftermath of her death.
However, as a police administrator and investigator
with decades of experience, I will be remiss if I did not

(31:30):
remark that I have reviewed the findings of the outside doctor
retained by Zander's family. I was profoundly disturbed and
troubled by what I read. While I am not a trained medical
examiner and I am not qualified to draw any direct conclusions,
the findings certainly warrant further examination at the

(31:52):
highest level. End Quote.
This is the problem. Even though Chief McNamara seems
on board with Doctor Baden's findings and she was quick to
take action against the officersfor what they did to Sandra,
Sandra's death happened out of McNamara's jurisdiction because
Sandra lived in Canton and died there.

(32:15):
It is up to the Canton police toinvestigate, which means we
would be relying on the same officers who investigated the
case of John O'Keefe and the same Norfolk District Attorney
Michael Mcmuffin Morrissey who is the one going after Karen
Reed. Which leaves much to be desired

(32:38):
and not much hope for an honest and thorough investigation, in
my opinion. Joseph Scott Morgan, a
distinguished scholar of appliedforensics who appears regularly
on shows such as Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and who hosts
the podcast Body Bags, made a statement about Doctor Baden's

(33:00):
findings regarding Sandra. He said when Doctor Baden
speaks, people listen. And boy did they.
On August 28th of 2024, Matthew Farewell was arrested and
indicted for the murder of Sandra Birchmore.
So next week we will go over that indictment and some new

(33:23):
info that has come out with the indictment and talk about why it
took so long to get to this point.
For photos from Sanders case, check out the Victim's voice on
Facebook and Instagram. And come back next week for the
third installment in the case ofSandra Birchmore.
Until then, peace out.