Jury convicts ex-police officer Matthew Farwell of killing Sandra Birchmore and her unborn child
His own department had ruled her death a suicide, murder charge came only when federal prosecutors took the file
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Matthew Farwell convicted of murder
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A Massachusetts jury has convicted former police officer Matthew Farwell of killing Sandra Birchmore and the unborn child she was carrying, CBS News reports.
The same death was for years classified as a suicide by the department's own investigators, and for years that was the official record. The classification changed only when federal prosecutors took over the file and charged the force's former officer with murder. The jury convicted him on both counts, for the woman and for the unborn child.
Farwell had known Birchmore since she was a teenager, when she took part in the police department's own youth program — the community outreach scheme meant to build trust between officers and local young people. The relationship that began there became the core of the federal case: a police veteran accused of killing a woman he met through a program run by his own employer.
The route from suicide to murder ran entirely outside the department. Its investigators reviewed the death and settled on suicide, a classification that asks nothing further of the force that produces it. A murder charge, by contrast, asks how the officer knew the victim, and through which program. The reclassification came from federal prosecutors with no stake in the department's own record, and nothing inside the department had moved the label in the years before they did.
Birchmore was a teenager in the police youth program when Farwell met her. The department that ran the program later investigated her death and called it suicide.