Sandra Birchmore: Part 1

0:00 Before we begin, the stories told in this podcast may be difficult for some to hear. Many discuss sexual assault, domestic violence, and suicide. Please take care while listening. Snow has been falling for hours when the woman appears in the surveillance video. The footage comes from a motion-activated camera in the lobby of her apartment building. She steps off the elevator and walks to the front door where she meets with the delivery guy. He's holding a food order.

0:35 It's long, wrapped in paper like a sub. The woman is young, 23, but she looks even younger because she's so petite, not even five feet tall. She's wearing teal leggings, a pink sweatshirt, Adidas slides, her hair tossed up in a bun. It's Monday, February 1st, 2021. around 5 p.m. At that moment, a blizzard is descending on eastern Massachusetts.

1:04 Dinner in hand, the woman heads back into the elevator and up to her apartment. Half an hour later, she reappears in the lobby. She's swapped her slides for sneakers, added a waterproof jacket. The woman goes out the front door, and a few minutes later, she's back carrying a snow brush. As she gets on the elevator again, Her hand goes into her jacket pocket before the doors have even shut.

1:31 She pulls out her phone. Her face looks down intently. She starts to text. It's 5.33 p.m. The elevator door closes. This is the last time Sandra Birchmore will be seen alive. From iHeart Podcast, I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and you're listening to What Happened to Her? The Sandra Birchmore Story, Part One.

2:05 My name is Barbara Wright, and I live in Northeastern Massachusetts. And Sandra and I are cousins. We talked every day, probably several times a day. We had this just ongoing, never-ending text.

2:20 I first heard the name Sandra Birchmore in 2022. Listeners of my first season, What Happened to Sandy Beal, had been emailing me nonstop, urging me to look into her case. Despite the nearly 50 years between these women's deaths, these keen listeners recognized patterns between the two cases. So I started digging. I reached out to Sandra's family's attorney, messaged her friends, interviewed a Boston Globe reporter who had covered her story, and then I just kind of stopped. Life got in the way. But Sandra didn't leave me. I put her in my back pocket, kept a Google alert for her name, and for four years, quietly followed every document as it surfaced. But when I connected with Barb, this was the first time I'd actually spoken with someone

3:10 who knew Sandra personally.

3:13 It helps me a lot to talk about Sandra and what happened to her. It helps make it feel a little bit more real because it... You know, it's one of those things, it's very hard to believe that it even happened because it's so horrendous.

3:27 Barb is 70 years old, a retired editor. She's Sandra's second cousin. They come from a big, sprawling Irish Catholic family living mostly in Massachusetts. And back when they were young, Barb used to babysit Sandra's mother, Denise, which means she's known Sandra since the day she was born. Even as a little girl, Sandra made an impression. She had opinions, strong ones.

3:53 I went to a family party one time and she was there and she was just a little thing, maybe six or seven years old. And I called her Sandy and she stomped her little feet on the ground and raised her fist.

4:04 And she's like, don't call me Sandy. I'm like, OK, all right. Well, I never called her Sandy again. She was a feisty little thing.

4:15 Sandra's mother, Denise, was chronically ill, which made it hard for her to work. For much of Sandra's life, they lived with family in a house on Holbrook Avenue in Stoughton. It belonged to Denise's aunt and uncle, who had raised Denise as their own. To Sandra, they were her grandparents. I've never been to Stoughton, but I asked a friend who grew up nearby what it was like, and she said it was just a town about 20 miles south of Boston, a working-class suburb on the commuter rail. My friend called Stoughton the Massachusetts version of the good old boys.

4:53 She didn't mean pickup trucks. She meant the kind of town where the same families have been there forever, where who you know is everything, where things don't seem to change. When Sandra was small, Barb lived about an hour away near Cape Cod. She was close with the family, but her own life had gotten complicated.

5:16 I was in a very difficult marriage and we only had one vehicle, so I didn't get to visit family a lot. I would see her at family parties once in a while, but we weren't super close until she was older.

5:32 After Sandra became a teen and got a cell phone, the two started texting. They played words with friends until Sandra quit because Barb kept winning. Hard to compete with a professional editor. Then, a family tragedy pulled them closer. In May 2016, when Sandra was just 18, her mother Denise had a stroke.

5:54 It happened on Mother's Day, and it came out of the blue completely. It was terrible. It was a terrible thing. Her mother was in a hospital bed, what they called basically body-locked. She couldn't move anything but her eyes, and so we were trying to decide whether or not to keep her on life support or not. Fortunately, the doctors were able to communicate with her mom, and so they asked Denise, do you want to stay plugged in to life support? And they said, you know, blink once for yes and twice for no, and she blinked twice for no.

6:35 She didn't want to be. left on life support. She wanted them to unplug her. So Sandra didn't have to make that decision, but she was extremely overwhelmed.

6:46 And just a month later, Sandra's grandmother died, another woman she'd lived with and been close to her whole life.

6:54 I believe it was June 2016, she lost her grandmother. So it was a very tough, tough year for Sandra. You know, it was just her and her mom. Her father wasn't in the picture at all, ever. And they spent most of Sandra's life living in the family home in Stoughton where her grandmother lived and her grandfather. And they were a very, very close family. It was devastating to her, but I think she was smart enough to know that she needed help. And she, you know, she did enter therapy and she did look for help. And she also leaned on the rest of her family as well as her faith. And she started communicating with me more regularly at that time. And we continued to stay close throughout the years. In 2018, I went through a

7:43 tough divorce and she held me up through that. And then, of course, after that was the pandemic.

7:52 The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread across the world and the U.S. in the winter and spring of 2020. Sandra and Barb, like everyone else, were forced indoors, their lives suddenly rearranged. Sandra tried to make the most of it, taking online courses at a local community college. She also spent a lot more time on the phone, texting and talking with Barb, who was living across the country in Seattle and was struggling.

8:22 I was in a crisis during the pandemic. I ended up losing four clients in one day in March when it hit. And like everybody else filed for pandemic unemployment. And then Washington state got hit with unemployment fraud situation. And my bank shut down all my accounts. So I had no access to funds for two months. And I remember telling Sandra about it. And all of a sudden my phone pings and it's like, it's from Facebook. And it says, Sandra Birchman wants to send you $ 50. Do you want to accept? And I'm like, she didn't even ask me. She just sent the money along.

9:04 This kindness, this awareness of other people's needs, it extended beyond Sandra's family. She seemed to have an innate desire to care for others.

9:14 For a 23-year-old, if you go to her Facebook page and look at it, you expect to see selfies, but her page was full of public service announcements. This street's going to be closed due to construction. School's going to be delayed tomorrow. There's this fundraiser for the community. A lot of quotes and stories from local police departments and the Massachusetts State Police.

9:41 Sandra was at an age where she was just figuring out what she wanted to do, and she kept circling public service careers. She got her associate's degree in criminal justice and had considered entering law enforcement, but worried her height, at less than five feet tall, might hold her back. She went to basic justice, for the Army Reserve, but came home early. She said she'd been kicked out because of asthma she hadn't disclosed. So for the time being, she was working as an aide at an elementary school and taking classes in preparation to apply to nursing school.

10:17 Healthcare felt like a good fit, a way to help people and also earn a stable living. It seemed important to Sandra to have Barb, who was in a different stage of life, to bounce these ideas off of.

10:31 She mostly talked about her future. She was very focused on her future and what she wanted to do with her life.

10:40 On the night of February 1st, 2021, as a blizzard was bearing down on New England, Barb got a message from Sandra.

10:49 I was sitting at my desk, and it was a live trivia game that was on Facebook Live that I would do every week. And being in Seattle, it was about 5.30 for me, which would have been 8.30 for her. And it was a text, just checking in to see how I was doing. And because it was a live trivia, I'm like, I can't talk right now because I'm in a live trivia. All these questions are coming up, and I have to think about them. And she said that...

11:19 She hoped everything was well, and that was the last thing I heard from her.

11:38 The blizzard that arrives with Sandra's dinner buries eastern Massachusetts overnight. On Tuesday, schools in Sharon, where Sandra works, are canceled. Wednesday's a remote day, which means it isn't until Thursday, February 4th, the first morning anyone is expected in the building, that Sandra's absence is something you can visibly see. She doesn't show. And by then, she hasn't answered anyone in days.

12:07 The school has tried to reach her. They've tried her emergency contact as well. Nothing. Nothing. At quarter to 10 that morning, Sharon's school resource officer, Michael Hawking, calls his counterpart in Canton, where Sandra lives, and asks for a well-being check. Officer Ensley Cotard agrees to help out. He drives to Sandra's apartment complex. It's a new build, about five stories high, boasting amenities like a pool and a gym.

12:37 After talking to the property manager, Cotard goes up to Sandra's unit on the third floor. He knocks on the door, but there's no answer. So he goes to look for her car in the parking lot. Here's some of Officer Katard's report, read by a voice actor.

12:55 I located the vehicle outside of Building 3 and radioed in to dispatch that I located her vehicle. Officer Brady and I visually inspected the vehicle and noticed that there was snow still on and around the vehicle that appeared undisturbed. The last time it snowed was on Monday, February 1st, into Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021.

13:16 Sandra's blue Chevy Cruze is still buried under snow three days after the storm. It's clear it hasn't moved. This, paired with the fact she's not answering at her door, is concerning. And so, Officer Katard calls for backup and requests a copy of Sandra's apartment key from the property manager.

13:38 A short time later, Officer Yeaton arrived on the scene, and we all made our way back to Ms. Birchmore's apartment 3307. Again, I knocked and announced our presence at the door several times with no response. With the key, all officers on scene made entry into the apartment.

13:57 As soon as Officer Cotard is inside, he observes Sandra's two cats running around. He begins checking rooms, starting with the bathroom. No one's in there. Then he sees the bedroom. The door is shut and the light is off. He opens the door, and that's when he sees Sandra. She's seated on the floor next to the bedroom closet, with something wrapped around her neck, attached to the closet door handle.

14:28 In various police reports to come, this ligature is described as a scarf and a belt. Much later, it's determined to be a strap from a duffel bag. Sandra's cell phone is on the floor, approximately 12 inches from her right hand and 6 inches from her right knee. Here's an excerpt from Officer Cotard's notes, again.

14:52 It was immediately apparent to this officer that Ms. Birchmore was deceased. As I noticed lividity about the skin, face, and rigor about the body's extremities, I also noticed a large pooling of dried blood around the mouth.

15:06 Officer Cotard exits the apartment, secures the scene, and calls for more help. A flurry of activity kicks off. A paramedic with Canton Fire EMT arrives and officially pronounces Sandra deceased. His estimate? She's been dead for several days. More Canton police officers show up, document the scene. They get the property manager, Aaron Porter, to show them surveillance footage from the lobby. The last videos of Sandra are the ones from February 1st, the night of the blizzard. There she is accepting her food delivery, getting the snow brush. It's clear from reading through the reports from the first responders that even this early, there's a prevailing theory of what happened to Sandra, just based on what the officers observe.

15:56 Here's how Detective Jonathan McCourt, who arrived minutes into the investigation, describes the scene, as read by a voice actor.

16:05 I was informed the party was deceased and had hanged herself. There were no visible traumas to the head or defensive abrasions on the hands. No signs of a struggle that were observed in the bedroom or the apartment.

16:18 In initial reports, Canton PD files the case as a sudden death. No crime involved. But because all death investigations in the county are overseen by the district attorney's office and investigated by state troopers, they report the case to them. Just before noon, troopers Matthew Dunn and Kevin Tufts get the call and head to the scene to take it over.

16:42 They walk through the apartment and share the same instinct as the Canton police as to what it all looks like. A young woman who took her own life. Here's some of Trooper Dunn's report as read by a voice actor.

16:57 After concluding the examination of the apartment, I noticed nothing suspicious and no sign of a struggle having taken place. Despite the clutter, all items appeared to be in their intended locations, and no items appeared to have been knocked over or strewn about in an unintended manner. The walls showed no signs of scuff marks or indentations. No drag marks were visible on the floor or carpeting.

17:22 A few hours later, state investigators submit their first report on the case. They title it, Birchmore Suicide Canton.

17:34 A day or two went by and I didn't think a lot of it because I knew that Boston, they had a big snowstorm. So I figured, well, maybe her phone isn't working or, you know, something's going on. And so I waited a day or two. And so that was Wednesday. I started to worry. And then I got a text from my sister telling me what happened. I had to sit down. I was in shock. It just said they found Sandra deceased in her apartment. That's pretty much all it said. And I went numb. I'm like, I sat down. I'm like, what? I had to keep reading it over and over because I couldn't believe what I was reading.

18:13 And what were you told in the beginning? Like, what was the story of what had happened?

18:22 Well, in the very, very beginning, nobody knew. But then as the days went by, I heard that she had committed suicide. And I'm like, no, no, I couldn't believe it. Not even for a minute. Not even for a minute. She had too much going on. She was so excited about life.

18:45 The choice to die by suicide rarely makes sense to the people left behind. But as Barb saw it, her doubt wasn't just grief. In the months before her death, Sandra wasn't retreating from life. She was building a new one.

19:01 She had just moved into her very first apartment, and everybody knows how that feels. You're so excited. Life is good. And she was looking forward to nursing school. I had co-signed for her to buy a new car. She had a brand new car. Everything was looking up for Sandra. She had a new apartment. She had a new car.

19:20 And then she found out she was going to be a mother.

19:35 Did you know that she desired to become a mother?

19:38 Yes, she talked about it a lot. She had had a couple of miscarriages. She told me that that was very devastating. She talked about becoming a mom all the time. It was something she really wanted to do. She desperately wanted a family. She had lost her mother, her grandmother. She had lost her favorite aunt, Alice. Alice died in 2019.

20:02 And she just wanted a family. She wanted someone to love and someone to love her back.

20:06 How did you find out she was pregnant?

20:09 She woke me up at 4 o'clock in the morning, Seattle time, 7 o'clock Boston time. She didn't realize it was 4 a.m. She says, I got to tell you something. I'm going to be a mom. She was very, very excited. That's how I found out. She was planning a baby shower. She was looking into, you know, how she was going to take care of the baby, who was going to help her with the baby. She had, you know, her aunts and different people in the family who were going.

20:37 To help out.

20:38 She was so careful about this baby and the health of this baby that she would call me or text me before she ate anything. One day she texted me and she said, is it okay to eat bagged salad? I'm like, it should be fine. I said, just make sure you wash it because even though they say pre-wash, God knows what kind of water they're in.

20:59 Sandra was only 8 to 10 weeks pregnant when she died. But Barb tells me she had been taking motherhood seriously from the day she got a positive pregnancy test.

21:09 She would call me and ask me for advice, you know, and said, OK, this is going on. I feel this way. I got this pain. I mean, she was really, really careful. One of my other cousins gave her a ride in their car to go somewhere when she was pregnant. And Sandra insisted on sitting in the back seat because she was afraid if they had an accident, the airbag would hit her and hurt the baby. That's how concerned she was about her pregnancy and careful about it. She wanted everything to be perfect for this child, as we all do, right?

21:41 Barb had known that Sandra was dating someone, but Sandra had been reticent to share any real details other than the fact he was already married.

21:50 She was very secretive about her personal life. She didn't tell me a whole lot. She called him the married man. She wouldn't give me a name. When she became pregnant, she called him the father. And I'm like, so who is that? She goes, the father of the baby. And that's all she would tell me. The only thing I knew was that he was married. And of course, as her older cousin, I tried to advise her and say, hey, this is not going to end well. You should be with somebody who wants to be in a relationship with just you. You deserve better. I went through the whole spiel with her, but she kind of, Kind of just laughed that off. I was under the impression she was very much in love with this man. And she thought

22:37 he was too.

22:39 When the state troopers assigned to Sandra's case call her emergency contact, her Aunt Darlene, they learn the name of Sandra's boyfriend, this married man she said was the father of her unborn baby. It's Matthew Farwell. He's a police detective in Stoughton, the town where Sandra grew up. from Trooper Dunn's report, as read by a voice actor.

23:04 She was aware Bershmore was pregnant and that the father of the baby is Matthew Farwell. Bershmore had previously mentioned that she and Farwell had been talking through issues regarding Farwell signing the birth certificate.

23:17 Darlene told police, when asked, that she wasn't aware of any allegations or signs of abuse between Sandra and Farwell. She had spoken to her niece that Monday afternoon. The trooper asked her to check her phone for the exact time, and she did. 4.25 p.m., February 1st. Sandra was talking about what she was going to order for dinner. Nothing was wrong. Everything was ordinary. Which lined up with what investigators saw when they pulled the security footage from the lobby of Sandra's apartment building. Sandra picking up a delivery, going out for a snow brush. All signs pointed to a quiet night in by herself. But the investigators missed something.

24:03 After the state troopers leave Sandra's apartment building, the property manager, Aaron Porter, decides to go through the security camera footage again. It's unclear why. I reached out to her, but she declined to participate in the podcast. Barb has her own explanation.

24:23 She got a gut feeling to look at that video again. She's my angel, I gotta say. Because she looked at that footage and went, whoa.

24:31 This time, when viewing the footage alone, Porter sees him. At 9.14 that night, the last night Sandra is seen alive, a man enters the lobby. He's tall, heavyset, hood pulled up, a COVID mask covering his face. Porter doesn't recognize him as a tenant, but something about him is familiar. She emails Canton police that night. Here's a report written by Canton Sergeant Michael J. Lank, read by a voice actor.

25:03 Thursday evening, I was contacted by email by Erin Porter, who's the property manager. She stated that she'd seen somebody entering the building.

25:11 On the video footage.

25:12 I advised her that we would look into the matter when we were able to access the video footage again.

25:18 On Saturday afternoon, Canton Police and State Police meet back at the apartment building to review the video once more. Here's an excerpt from Detective Jonathan McCourt's report, as read by a voice actor.

25:31 At approximately 1 o'clock p.m., Sergeant Lang, Detective Albert, and I went to assist the state police in obtaining video from Birchmore's apartment building. We were met at the leasing office by Trooper Dunn and Trooper Tufts. Maintenance Supervisor Carlos Ruisimo assisted us in reviewing the video footage. Carlos informed me that he recognized everyone on the video that enters the lobby on Monday, except one individual. The individual is a tall, burly male... The individual is wearing work boots, jeans, a black jacket, and has a black hood on his head.

25:59 According to the video footage, the man enters the elevator at 9.14 p.m. He comes back out at 9.43, 28 minutes later.

26:11 When the individual exits the elevator, his jacket coat is open, and a white symbol is seen on his upper left portion of his black sweatshirt. The symbol resembled what I believe to be the Nine Line logo. Nine Line is a military apparel line.

26:24 While the building's maintenance supervisor didn't recognize the man, another employee, Michael Sturgeon, did. He told police that the guy on camera looked an awful lot like the man who helped Birchmore move into her apartment. He didn't know his name, but it didn't matter. The masked man would soon be identified as Stoughton Police Officer Matthew Farwell. He appeared to be the last person to see Sandra alive. Coming up on What Happened to Her, the Sandra Birchmore story. This case, there was something more to it. You got these officers riding around with these young explorers and unsupervised for.

27:17 The most part. Victims are groomed to keep secrets and Sandra was very good at that, unfortunately.

27:23 That had gone on for so long and at such a young age.

27:28 Because she was getting older, that's how she realized that what happened to her wasn't right.

27:35 She was putting all this pressure on him.

27:38 She'd given him an ultimatum.

27:40 It wasn't about the baby.

27:41 It was about his secrets getting out. Around the time that she died, he was tracking her every move. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. I would describe it as like a powder keg, ready to blow.

28:00 What Happened to Her is hosted, reported, and written by me, Melissa Jeltsin. Additional writing and story editing by Marissa Brown. Editing, sound design, and mixing by Evan Tyer. Original music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive producers are Jason English, Lauren Hanson, Ryan Murdoch, and Melissa Jeltsin. If you have a story you think we should look into or just something to say, you can reach us at whathappentoherpodcast at gmail.com. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline at thehotline.org or call them at 800-799-SAFE for free confidential support 24 hours a day. Thank you so much for listening.