Sandra Birchmore’s name showed up in a place nobody expected — in a text chain between a Canton police sergeant and the state police trooper who led the investigation into the death of John O’Keefe in the Karen Read case. According to an eighty-seven-page lawsuit filed against Canton and the Massachusetts State Police, former Canton Sgt. Sean Goode allegedly responded to Birchmore’s story by calling her a derogatory slur in a message to fired Trooper Michael Proctor. A sworn officer — texting about a dead woman who, according to federal prosecutors, was allegedly pursued by police officers beginning when she was a teenager. And his response was contempt.

That text connects two cases already linked by geography and institutional failure. Sandra Birchmore was found dead in her Canton apartment in February 2021. Her death was initially ruled a suicide. The state medical examiner changed her manner of death to “undetermined” more than five years later. Former Stoughton detective Matthew Farwell faces federal charges alleging he killed her and staged the scene. According to federal prosecutors, Farwell was one of three Stoughton officers who allegedly became involved with Birchmore after meeting her through a police youth program when she was thirteen. Four officers connected to her case have been decertified or permanently barred from law enforcement.

The documented record — from the federal filings in Birchmore’s case to the decade of alleged messages between Proctor and Goode — reveals officers across multiple departments who allegedly treated the people they served with open disdain. And when confronted, every response followed the same pattern: minimize, deflect, redirect. Nobody has acknowledged the culture that allowed it. This piece asks whether that culture is still the one running these departments — and who is still paying the price for it.

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Sandra Birchmore trusted the people who were supposed to protect her. She was twenty-three, pregnant, and full of life when she was found dead — and for five long years, the official story was that she did it to herself. Her family never believed it. They fought. And now, finally, the record has changed.

This community has stood with Sandra from the start, and this is the update so many of you have been waiting for. Months before the trial of the former police officer accused of killing her, the state amended her death certificate — taking away the word suicide and replacing it with undetermined. Experts say medical examiners almost never do that. It happened for Sandra.

And the news kept coming. A judge refused to let the accused out on bail, writing that the evidence against him is very strong, if not overwhelming. The man prosecutors say strangled her and staged the scene is staying behind bars until trial.

We sat down with an attorney and legal analyst to talk through what this all means for the family — why the changed death certificate matters so much, why the defense keeps losing, and the one piece of testimony waiting at trial that could finally give Sandra the truth her loved ones have demanded for half a decade.

For everyone who refused to accept the first version of this story — this one's for you, and for Sandra.

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Sandra Birchmore believed things were getting better. Matthew Farwell brought ginger ale to her apartment. She texted a friend that he was coming around. She was contacting lawyers. She was building a plan for child support. She was preparing for a future with the child she was carrying — a future she believed was finally within reach.

Farwell was allegedly having different conversations entirely.

According to federal prosecutors, he told one person that if Sandra did not end the pregnancy, he would "take care of the problem himself." He told another he needed to "put crazy back in the bag." He told a third that "the problem was going to take care of itself." Three people. Three conversations. All allegedly pointing toward a man who had decided that a pregnant twenty-three-year-old — the same girl he allegedly began a relationship with when she was fifteen and enrolled in his police youth program — was a problem to be eliminated.

On January 20, 2021, Sandra's friend called the Stoughton Police Department and reported Farwell's involvement with Sandra. The employee who took the call told Farwell. Eleven days later, Sandra was dead.

At 9:27 PM on February 1, Farwell entered her Canton apartment building. At 9:56 PM, he left. Twenty-nine minutes. Sandra's phone recorded its final movements while he was still inside. She was found three days later in the same clothes. Her death was classified as something other than homicide for years.

The forensic evidence prosecutors have since assembled tells a different story. Farwell's DNA on the duffel bag strap they say was used to strangle her. His sperm cells in her underwear — contradicting his claim of months without contact. An injury to her right clavicle sustained while she was alive, matching a buckle behind her head. A broken pink flamingo necklace — one Sandra wore regularly — tangled in her hair on the bedroom floor. And a reenactment at a private gathering where an inebriated Farwell reportedly demonstrated how she supposedly died, describing details no one outside the investigation should have known.

DNA testing confirmed Farwell was not the biological father of Sandra's unborn son. But both he and Sandra believed he was. Prosecutors say that belief — combined with Sandra's growing willingness to tell the truth about how their relationship began — is what made her a threat he allegedly could not allow to speak.

Sandra put her trust in the police. They allegedly broke it in every way a person can be broken.

Farwell has pled not guilty. His defense maintains Sandra took her own life.

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