In her opening statement, Kimberly Stevens, the attorney for a disgraced Massachusetts police officer charged with killing a pregnant young woman he allegedly began sexually abusing when she was 15 and he was 27, told the jury: “Matthew Farwell is a man who had an affair.”
Now federal prosecutors want U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper to allow the government to call three adult women who Farwell, a married father of three, had affairs with while he was a detective for the Stoughton Police Department as witnesses in the case, arguing that he was “cavalier” about those relationships while hiding the one he had with his one-time mentee, Sandra Birchmore, who he is now on trial for killing, along with her unborn child, a boy.
Farwell, prosecutors argue, dropped his wife Michelle off at a Boston area hospital on Feb. 1, 2021, and then drove through a blizzard to Birchmore’s Canton apartment where he allegedly strangled her to death and staged the crime scene to look like she committed suicide. He arrived at her home wearing a COVID mask with a hood pulled over his head that night, according to surveillance video taken at her home.
Stevens argued that Farwell is “wearing a mask” because it “is what people having affairs might do.”
The government now wants to call the women Farwell had consensual affairs with – a move that had been previously denied in a ruling by federal judge Denise Casper – arguing in a new filing that their testimony is crucial to undermining the defense argument that he was merely trying to hide his sexual relationship with Birchmore from his wife, the mother of his three children. The prosecution argues that Farwell was trying to hide the criminality of allegedly taking Birchmore’s virginity when she was too young to consent, which is the crime of statutory rape in Massachusetts.
“Farwell’s adult affair partners will offer critical testimony that strikes at the heart of Farwell’s disclosed defense and Attorney Stevens’s purported innocent explanations for Farwell’s mask-wearing,” the government wrote. “The three affair partner witnesses will say Farwell never took steps to hide their encounters. He never wore a mask or disguise. In fact, he had a cavalier attitude about their encounters.”
On Friday, a jury of ten men and six women were seated to hear evidence in Farwell’s case, which also includes allegations that a shoddy police investigation allowed the cop to escape any real scrutiny after Birchmore’s death despite him being the last person to see her alive and believing that he was the father of her unborn baby. Farwell was a free man until August 2024, when the FBI arrested him on murder charges, more than three years after Birchmore’s body was found.
Farwell has pleaded not guilty and his defense attorneys continue to insist that Birchmore took her own life after he broke off their relationship the night she died. He met Birchmore when she was a young girl who entered the Stoughton Police Explorer’s Academy as a teen recruit pursuing a career in law enforcement.
On Tuesday, the government plans to call its first witness, Heather Cheever, a Stoughton Police Officer who knew Birchmore. Others on the witness list are employees at the elementary school where Birchmore worked as a teacher’s aide and two workers at her apartment complex, Canton Woods, including Erin Porter, who recovered the security video of Farwell coming into the building masked up and turned it over to Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office investigators. If time allows, one of those investigators, State Police Trooper Matthew Dunne, among the first to arrive at the scene of Birchmore’s death, could be called to the stand.
Los Angeles will be providing live updates from inside the trial beginning at 9 a.m.
The post Testimony in Ex-Cop Matthew Farwell’s Murder Case Begins Tuesday appeared first on LAmag.
