Sandra Birchmore: Part 3

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. At the time of Sandra Birchmore's death, the police department in Stoughton was run by a woman, the first in the town's history. Her name is Donna McNamara. The day after Sandra's body was found, McNamara opened an internal investigation. Her reasons were obvious. First, Sandra had been a police explorer in the town's program for kids interested in law enforcement.

Sandra applied when she was 12, officially started when she was 13, and stayed active in the program until she graduated high school. Second, rumors swirled immediately after Sandra's death that she had been dating one of McNamara's detectives, Matthew Farwell, and that he had gotten her pregnant. McNamara must have understood this could get complicated fast, and so she ordered her deputy chief to find out exactly what relationship Sandra had to the Stoughton Police Department and to the men inside it. It would take a year and a half for the results of that investigation to come to light, but when they did, it would forever change not only the story of Sandra's death, but the story of her life.

I stand before you today as a civil servant who is heartbroken and incensed by what has transpired and who pledges that this chapter in the Stoughton Police Department and the town of Stoughton is over.

From iHeart Podcast, I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and this is What Happened to Her? The Sandra Birchmore Story, Part 3.

I'm here today because it is my duty, a duty that I take very seriously, to report to our community on the findings of a nearly 19-month-long complex and resource-intensive investigation.

On September 23rd, 2022, Chief Donna McNamara held a press conference. She stood alone in front of a collection of microphones as cameras clicked around her. She shared the massive scope of the internal investigation, which included nearly 100,000 pages of cell phone records and text messages and more than a dozen interviews, including with several outside experts.

What I'm about to brief you on is something deeply troubling to me as a human being and as a police chief. On February 4th, 2021, 23-year-old Sandra Burchmore was found deceased in her apartment. I am not here today to talk about the subsequent investigation into Ms. Burchmore's death. Her death was investigated by the Norfolk District Attorney's Office.

What I am here to talk about today is her life and how she was failed by, manipulated by, and used by people of authority that she admired and trusted right up until her final days.

Chief McNamara was reading from prepared remarks, but she kept looking up while she spoke, scanning the rooms, seeming to make eye contact with the press. She went on to sum up the findings of the report.

In 2010, Ms. Birchbaum, then age 13, entered the Stoughton Police Department Explorer Program. It was there as a child that she met Matthew Falwell, an instructor in that program. The evidence demonstrates that Matthew Falwell began an inappropriate relationship with her when she was 15 and he was 27.

To those in the room and the public at large, this was a bombshell. Farwell had told state troopers in that school parking lot that his sexual relationship with Sandra began in 2020 when she was an adult. It didn't. According to text messages recovered from Sandra's laptop, it started years earlier, when she was 15.

The investigation uncovered many hundreds of digital messages and explicit exchanges between Matthew Falwell and Ms. Birchmore over the course of several years. Our investigation discovered that Matthew Falwell exploited Ms. Birchmore, a young woman who was 13 when she met him until Matthew Falwell decided to end the relationship on February 1st, 2021.

Exploited. That's a powerful word, powerful especially coming out of the mouth of a police chief regarding one of her own officers. McNamara didn't give many details about the exploitation and why she chose to call it that, but having spent a lot of time on this case and having read through the investigation many times, I can offer my own insight. Sandra was 13 when she first met Matthew Farwell.

She was a kid, In a program full of kids with ambitions of becoming police officers. Trying to impress the adults who could help them get ahead. Farwell was one of her instructors. He had authority and influence and respect. And he took advantage of that. For two years, he spent time with her. Talking to her. Making her feel special.

Building trust. Grooming her. When Sandra was 15... Farwell had sex with her for the first time. Under Massachusetts state law, the age of consent is 16. But even setting the law aside, does it matter if she had been 16 or 17? In a relationship like that, the power dynamic is so skewed it's dangerous. Because how can you really say no to a man who's not only physically far, far bigger than you, remember, Sandra was tiny, but also has a badge, carries a gun, and holds your future in his hands. This wasn't just sex. This was sexual abuse.

Abuse that appears to have gone on for years in secret. I should note here that Matthew Farwell has denied the allegations in full.

Ms.

Birchmore was a vulnerable person who had one constant in her life since childhood. Her unwavering admiration for of police officers, of those serving the military, people in uniform, people with oaths and duties to protect and serve.

And the chief had more to add because the exploitation didn't stop with Matthew Farwell.

The admiration led her to form relationships with men who were willing to take advantage of her. Evidence discovered determined that at least three Stoughton police officers who were all known to each other, including Matthew Falwell, his twin brother William Falwell, had inappropriate relations with Ms. Birchmore. The investigation showed that William Falwell, in addition to having multiple inappropriate physical encounters with Ms. Birchmore, exchanged explicit messages and photographs with Ms. Birchmore while he.

Was on duty. Back when state troopers were still looking into Sandra's death, they'd interviewed William. He told them that, like his brother, he'd first met Sandra years earlier when she was in the Explorers program and he was an instructor. They crossed paths again in 2018 when she came up to him while he was working and asked about joining the Army. He put her in touch with a recruiter.

William told troopers the last time he'd seen Sandra was December 2020. But again, like with his brother, the texts told a different story. They showed that on January 10th, 2021, after midnight, William met Sandra in the parking lot of her apartment building, three weeks before she died. And there was more.

The evidence suggests that William Farwell also at the very least, attempted to introduce Ms. Birchmore to other men.

As McNamara continued, she didn't say who those other men were, but the implication was hard to miss. It appeared that Sandra wasn't just being used by one officer, she was, quite possibly, being handed around. I went looking for more in the Internal Affairs Report, but it's heavily redacted. In the section on William, there's a line that starts, some of the content has communications in which William Farwell encouraged Sandra...

The rest is blacked out. William Farwell has denied any and all wrongdoing. The report names a third man, and this one led up the ladder. Robert Devine was the longtime head of Stoughton's Explorers program.

Robert Devine began overseeing the Stoughton Police Department Explorer Program, approximately 20 years ago. Both William and Matthew Farwell were youth participants in the Explorer Program under Devine. And the Farwell brothers would later take part in that same program as instructors years later, which would put them all on a course to meet Sandra Birchmore.

According to McNamara's findings, Devine, who was also a lawyer, had had an inappropriate relationship with Sandra. But when internal investigators sat him down, he too denied it. In fact, he denied ever texting Sandra or communicating with her over social media in any form. Again, Sandra's laptop told a different story. After they spoke to Devine, investigators later found Facebook messages from an anonymous account Marty Riggs, like the crazy cop from Lethal Weapon. The user made mention of being an attorney, of working for Stoughton Police, and talked about meeting Sandra on duty in a patrol car. Investigators concluded Marty Riggs was Robert Devine. One afternoon in December 2020, while he was on duty, Riggs asked Sandra to meet

him at a local restaurant, The Chateau. The messages show he got there and she was on her way. Devine has denied all of this, including using the Facebook alias Marty Riggs. The internal investigation also turned up two more men. One was a former animal control officer in Stoughton, by then a police officer in another town, who eventually admitted to what the report calls illicit conversations with Sandra. The other was an Army National Guard recruiter. McNamara had shared their findings with both men's employers. As her remarks drew to an end, the chief announced that all three Stoughton officers, Matthew Farwell, William Farwell, and Robert Devine, had resigned. The Farwell brothers had quit before speaking with investigators. Resigning meant

none of them could be fired, but it didn't stop them from being hired somewhere else. So McNamara went further. She recommended all three be decertified, stripped of their police licenses in Massachusetts, and flagged in a national database so any department anywhere would know.

In years prior, a story like this would have ended here, or perhaps even earlier. Without criminal charges, no further actions would have been taken by a police department. Not today. All three men violated their oaths of office and should never have the privilege of serving any community as a police officer. Through a sustained and deliberate combination of lies, deceit, and treachery, they violated the policies and the core values of the Stoughton Police Department, not to mention human decency.

They're unfit to serve as police officers.

During press questions, McNamara noted she'd sent the full internal investigation to the Norfolk County District Attorney, the same office that had led the investigation into Sandra's death, and had concluded that there was no evidence of foul play. It was their job to determine if any criminal charges might arise from these new findings, like, for example, statutory rape.

A spokesman for the office of District Attorney Michael Morrissey told the press that prosecutors would review the new information. However, he added, Reading through the lines, with Sandra gone, the main witness was no longer around to testify. I don't know if you read the internal investigation that Stoughton did about the Explorer program and the fact that there were other men who had also taken advantage of her, his twin brother and.

The head of the program, Robert Devine. Can you talk a little bit about learning just the scope of this, that it was beyond what had even initially been assumed?

Yeah, that was tough.

Tracy Strausbaugh, another one of Sandra's cousins, was at work when she got the call about the results from the internal investigation.

That was very confusing to me. And I didn't understand. I didn't understand. I mean, and we had known she was in that program as a kid, but mentors of the program?

Like, I.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Unfortunately for me, it just sent me to such a dark place because that is just unbelievable. And it's, it's scary. That's a program for the community.

Uh, they were children.

Like I just, it's, I guess the best word for it is undigestible. I just, I just, it's awful to think of the whole scope of it. Like cops, more than one, a department, um, And those.

Were just the abusers. For Sandra's cousin Angelique, who had been demanding answers about Sandra's death, Stoughton PD's internal investigation felt like some sort of admission.

It was seismic.

For the first time in like over a year, someone from law enforcement was saying, there's a problem here. And we should all be concerned about this. And I hadn't been getting that from the state police.

For Sandra's cousins, it was heartbreaking to realize that the place Sandra had gone for support, the place her mother had thought would be good for her, was where it all began.

Her mother had such great intentions. Her mother wanted her to be around positive male role models and just positive role models. And I'm just sickened by the whole thing.

The Explorers program was a big part of Sandra's identity. She stayed for six years, longer than most kids. On her Facebook page, she posted photos of herself with Stoughton police officers, her 4'10 frame dwarfed by men more than a foot taller. In picture after picture, she had the same expression, a wide grin, a little whimsical look in her eyes. She looked like a young girl who had found a place to belong. Here's Tracy again.

She was really proud at what she was doing.

I was really proud of her.

But something was happening to Sandra behind her wide grin. Something she wasn't letting on. Something not even her family understood until well after Sandra's death.

I was flabbergasted. Overwhelmed. So deeply sad for her.

And what became clear as a pattern of systematic abuse.

There's a lot that we still don't know about those early years between Sandra and Farwell. What he did to earn her trust, what kind of interactions they had, how their connection developed. Grooming, by its nature, occurs in private, but court documents have revealed some details. They met through the Explorers program when Sandra was in middle school. When she was a freshman in high school, Farwell began to meet her at the library to help her study. In her sophomore year, he sent her a Facebook friend request.

By April 2013, when Sandra was still a sophomore, he was having sex with her. Under Massachusetts law, Farwell could have been charged with aggravated statutory rape. Sandra was under 16, that's statutory rape. Farwell was nearly 12 years older than her and a mandated reporter. Either fact on its own makes it aggravated. And by any definition, what Farwell was doing to Sandra was sexual abuse. But grooming is complicated and insidious, and because of that, I don't know if Sandra initially understood these interactions as abuse. I've read some of the messages she sent Farwell in the last year of her life, the ones quoted in court filings. The reason we know the date he first had sex with her is because they texted about it repeatedly. I'll read

some of them. Sandra writes, I had butterflies so bad the day you took my virginity. Farwell responds, me too, it was such a big day. Sandra tells him she still knows the date. April 10th, 2013. Best day of my life, she writes, and then she adds an emoji, the face with a heart. Me too, he replies. In another exchange, Farwell writes, I wish it had been a year sooner after helping you study at the library. He goes on, I absolutely would have fucked you in 12.

Sandra asks, in 12? He clarifies, 2012. Reading through the text, every so often the power imbalance breaks through the surface. Farwell tells Sandra that if he had pushed, he absolutely could have had sex with her without condoms from day one. When she was 15, she doesn't argue. Probably if you really pushed it, she writes, then, quote, I was kind of scared to say no in the beginning, not knowing how you'd take it. So yeah, you would have got no condoms, lol. And then there's one instruction from Farwell that comes up again and again. Clear this out, meaning delete this text. When they talked about how it started, when he told her he wanted to have sex with her even earlier, he wrote, clear that part out, baby.

And when she did, good girl. after he wrote about wanting to roleplay raping her, clear out this text. And in June 2019, nearly two years before her death, he told her to make sure all of their texts and Facebook messages were deleted, according to court filings. Sandra was carrying this in secret throughout her teen years, throughout all of high school. And that's devastating for her cousins, like Barb, Sandra's former Words with Friends partner, to imagine.

I mean, to just think of what was going on with Sandra and her mother had no idea. But that's what grooming's all about, right? You know, the victims are groomed to keep secrets, and Sandra was very good at that, unfortunately.

For Tracy, it was impossible to reconcile the Sandra she saw at family functions, laughing, always happy to be there, with what she was finding out now.

You'll learn that that was her life and that had gone on for so long and at such a young age.

How did she live?

How did she go to school? Like, so the thoughts that were going to my head was, how did she always show up with a smile? How did she finish school?

Like, what?

I don't understand. Like, she must be really good at compartmentalizing. I can't imagine what she had gone through.

Here's Angelique.

She was deeply ensnared from a very young age in this system of abuse. And more than anything, obviously, shock, but a deep, deep sadness for her. And what she endured and.

What she thought she had to endure for whatever reason, you know, like, That she might have thought it was normal or acceptable or that that's what she deserved in life.

Somewhere, somehow, along the way, Sandra had internalized the idea that this was normal.

It breaks my heart because she thought that this was, well, I'll speak for her. I swear she thought that this was genuine love.

She thought she loved this man. She thought she was in a relationship with him.

From reading through some of their texts, I got the same impression. Sandra appeared to believe she and Matthew Farwell were in a romantic love affair. A secret love, which only made it feel bigger. He was a grown man, a police officer. A month after he first had sex with her, he married someone else. And still, he kept coming back to her. To Sandra, it must have looked like he was risking everything. his marriage, his badge, to be with her. To understand how a 15-year-old comes to see her abuser as the love of her life, I talked to Elizabeth Jellick.

What we see in cases of adolescents, and particularly adolescent girls, is that they often fall in love, quote-unquote, with their perpetrator.

Jellick is a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She spent years studying how child sex abusers groom their victims.

These are girls that may not feel wanted or loved or they may, you know, have low self-esteem. And so this perpetrator makes them feel like they're important, that this is their girlfriend. And so they believe themselves to be in a consensual relationship with the perpetrator. They don't want the abuse, but they want the relationship and that feeling of specialness that that person made them feel.

Jellick says it's hard for these young victims to even understand what's happening is abuse.

It's only afterwards, and this can happen like many years after they are adults, that they recognize that they were just children that they were taken advantage of. They see how this was unhealthy and how they were manipulated and how this really was abuse, and it's not a relationship.

For Sandra, it would be years before she began to recognize herself as a victim. In the meantime, she and Farwell kept seeing each other, through high school, through her graduation, through his marriage, as he started a family of his own. Sandra went from a 13-year-old girl to a grown woman. She left the explorers, got jobs, made friends, had a life of her own. And still, she kept going back to him. Here's where it gets tricky. Once she was old enough to consent to the sexual relationship, was it still abuse? I asked Jalik to help me understand.

We consider grooming to be a psychological manipulation. So when that happens, when you're young and you're vulnerable, you know, all your experiences are shaped through that manipulation. So it's not like you suddenly cross this arbitrary line, like the person is no longer in a position of power over you, like let's say he was no longer a police officer, or she crosses the age of consent. It doesn't mean that that manipulation has ended. It's just a continuation of it.

The abuse started when there was this incredible power differential. You were a child. So while the law might say that you are of age, when that power imbalance has formed the relationship, it's not like you really have gained power at 18 because it's happened that way, right? So it's not like something magically shifts.

By the time Sandra was old enough to choose, Her whole life had been twisted by her entanglement with Farwell and the Stoughton Police Department. It was what she knew.

When you read the IA report, you can't help but think that they got their hooks in her really young, and she didn't have a chance.

You know, like she didn't have a chance.

IA When Chief McNamara released the findings of the internal investigation, she announced that the Explorers program was shuttered for good. Then she took questions. Reporters asked about next steps and about the two men the report didn't name. Then someone asked the question that had been hanging over the whole thing.

The Stoughton Police Department isn't big, about 60 officers. Could no one else have known? McNamara could only answer for herself. She said she first found out when the Massachusetts State Police contacted her in the days after Sandra's death. That's what led to the internal investigation. She couldn't speak for anyone else. But the question remains. With three officers in the department found to have had inappropriate relationships with the same person, was it possible no one else knew?

Police work is a close culture and you don't want to be the guy that's the Tattletale.

That's Timothy Mayer. He's a criminologist, a former police officer, and one of the few people who have studied police sexual misconduct.

I think we're still in the dark because so much of it is unreported. Victims don't report it. The police certainly aren't going to report on themselves. And we don't know how many fellow officers don't report on fellow officers.

Mayor told me that even when other officers suspect the boundaries are being crossed, they often stay quiet.

Most officers said, you know what, if I learn of another officer having sex on duty with someone, but they believe it's consensual, whether it's a wife, girlfriend, someone they just met three hours ago, if they believe that it was not forced, that it was consensual, I would say the majority of line officers would not report on a fellow officer. I just don't think it would happen.

The Stoughton internal investigation was primarily focused on the misconduct of its officers while Sandra was an adult, likely because this was the information they could access. But her exploitation had started, at least with Matthew Farwell, when she was an underaged member of the Explorers program. And in that way, Sandra's case is not unique. The program nationwide has a long history of abuse. A 2017 investigation by the Louisville Courier-Journal looked back through the past 40 years of the Explorers.

What it found was extremely troubling that across the country, at least 137 girls and 26 boys had been raped, seduced, fondled, kissed, dated, or otherwise exploited by law enforcement officers or other authorities and advisors connected to the program. Since 2017, there have been explorer sexual abuse cases uncovered in California, New York City, and Kentucky. Explorers are especially vulnerable, Mayer told me, because many of them are hoping to be cops one day, so they have something important, their futures, at stake.

You want to piss off these people and ruin your chances of maybe getting a job later down the line. So they go along to get along.

There are hundreds of Explorer programs at police departments across the country. They run under guidelines from a Boy Scouts affiliate. But who enforces those guidelines is a harder question.

Explorer programs certainly invite opportunity and opportunity for corruption and problems, which is why I think there needs to be strict written policies for the Explorer program.

I found Stoughton's policy and procedure document for its Explorers program, updated in 2012, the same year Farwell sent Sandra that friend request. It's a page and a half. It lists what the kids would learn, physical fitness, drug awareness, canine demonstrations. But as far as I can see, there's nothing about how the officers were supposed to behave. That's not unusual.

When Mayer did his research, none of the departments he studied had a written policy on sexual misconduct. Even today, he told me, the main national organization that accredits police departments requires a policy on car chases. It doesn't require one on sexual misconduct. Without rules, Mayer says, it all comes down to who's in charge.

I think it starts with the supervisor. If they're going to tolerate this sort of thing, maybe even participate, that's when I think things go haywire on a squad.

For most of Sandra's time in the Explorers, the program belonged to Robert Devine. The investigation didn't find evidence that he had had an inappropriate relationship with Sandra while she was underage, just when she was an adult. But investigators did hear from someone who had known Devine long before Sandra did. Before he ran Stoughton's Explorers, Devine was the police supervisor for an open gym program at a local school.

After reading an article about Sandra's death in the Boston Globe, a woman contacted the district attorney's office about something that had happened to her in that program. This was back in 2001. The woman was in middle school. She had had a huge crush on Devine, who would have been in his late 20s. She said that one day, Devine took her alone into an office away from the other kids and closed the door. He told her she was, quote, a knockout and that he was going to take me on a date when I turned 18. She said there was never any sexual contact between them, but in her experience, he didn't act like a father figure. Instead, she said he definitely seemed to be showing off and loving attention

from kids. The woman also noted that the Farwell twins were at that same open gym program, being supervised by Devine. She said they were, quote, under his wing. The Farwell twins would go on to join the Stoughton Explorer program, also supervised by Devine. And years later, Devine sat on the hiring panel that brought Matthew Farwell onto the force.

The internal investigation Stoughton opened after Sandra's death wasn't the first time the department had looked into Devine. In 2015, it investigated how he'd used his position to handle a personal matter, a relationship with a woman outside his marriage. That investigation found conduct unbecoming an officer and found Devine wasn't credible. He was demoted from deputy chief to patrol officer.

The investigation after Sandra's death saw a pattern. It called Devine's history, quote, an expository example of exploitative, misogynistic, and risk-seeking behavior, and said that in both cases, Devine, quote, violated his inherent position of the public trust. Devine disputed the 2015 investigation's findings and fully denied the allegations in the 2022 report. When Chief McNamara recommended he be stripped of his police certification, he appealed.

Raise your right hand, please. You swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.

At a hearing in July 2025, under oath, Devine said his name had been, quote, dragged through the mud. He said if his name had showed up in Sandra's messages, it must have been because he'd been hacked. And he said it was Sandra who came to him, approaching his cruiser while he was on duty, starting in the summer of 2020.

Without fail, if she saw me, she pulled in. She would ask if I wanted a coffee or anything else and want to try to strike up a conversation. And what did you do? I spoke to her briefly, you know, usually, because I didn't really.

Want to get into it.

How often would you see her?

Like I said, once a week, maybe once every other week. And would you ever see her outside of work?

Never.

During the cross-examination, Devine testified that after a couple of weeks of these meetings, And seemingly out of nowhere, Sandra suggested they have sex.

Was there any other context around it?

No. That's what she does.

Or what she did.

What she did to plenty of people.

So you witnessed when she did this to other people?

No, other people talked about it. Who are these other people that talked about that?

Just people around the.

Station, you know.

Would say things that she would say, inappropriate things to people that she would everything else.

I mean, No one told me she directly.

Propositioned them, but that she would say things that were out of bounds. She would say things that are what?

Out of bounds.

In December 2025, the Post Commission sided with the internal investigation and Devine lost his certification. He has appealed. A final decision is still pending. Devine did not respond to a request for comment sent to his counsel. But back to that reporter's question. Did anyone know? Maybe Chief McNamara had been in the dark, but by Divine's own telling, other people in the Stoughton Police Department did know that something was up with Sandra. In his words, she said things that were out of bounds. It's hard to know exactly what he meant. Off-limits, maybe? Inappropriate? But it reminds me of another word connected to Sandra, the one her co-workers used to describe her. Oversharer. Sandra told them too

much too soon. She didn't seem to know where work ended and her personal life began. Her family saw a version of it too. Tracy told me Sandra would show up after years apart and launch into some detailed story as if they'd spoken that morning. Out of bounds, oversharing, these are two different ways of saying the same thing.

Sandra didn't seem to know where the lines were. And knowing everything we know now, it makes sense. Most of us learn appropriate boundaries as children, modeled by the adults around us. They teach us what's private, how to act in certain situations. But in Sandra's case, an adult she'd been taught to trust crossed every one of those lines.

Her childhood was interrupted. So maybe it's not surprising that she was described as young for her age, immature. In some ways, she was still the girl she'd been when it all started. That girl had learned to keep secrets. Big secrets. Secrets that could have ended Farwell's marriage, his career, and potentially implicated other men in the Stoughton Police Department too.

And yet, the people who knew her didn't remember someone who was quiet. They remembered how much she talked. I keep wondering about all that talking. Maybe some part of her hoped someone would ask the right questions. In the months before her death, Sandra told co-workers she was dating a police officer. She told them he was older. Others knew she had been an explorer and had deep connections to the police department. The pieces were there. No one put them together. Maybe Sandra was never an oversharer at all.

For years, about the thing that mattered most, she said almost nothing. Next week on What Happened to Her, the Sandra Birchmore story. Sandra's family goes to court. It was all of their hands around her neck. They were all responsible for that death. And another agency takes a fresh look at the case.

The FBI came knocking and it was like, oh my God, to have this case.

Someone say, can we talk to you? And it was like, whenever, wherever, now I'm free.

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. If you have a story you think we should look into or just something to say, you can reach us at whathappenedtoherpodcast 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

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