The Massachusetts ex-cop who is on trial in a Boston federal courtroom on charges that he killed Sandra Birchmore and her unborn baby told the judge overseeing the proceedings that it is unlikely he will take the stand in his own defense.
“At this time I do not elect to testify,” former Stoughton Police Detective and union president Matthew Farwell told Judge Denise Casper after the jury set to decide his fate left the court Wednesday afternoon for a lunch break. He can change his mind up until the time his defense team rests its case, which is expected to take place Wednesday afternoon after the testimony of Dr. Thomas Andrews, a medical examiner.
Farwell is on trial for the Feb. 1, 2021 killing of 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore, who was ten weeks pregnant at the time of his death, and for staging her bedroom to look as if she hung herself. Government witnesses have testified that Birchmore’s hyoid bone was broken, which is a “red flag” that she was murdered, rather than a suicide by hanging.
The trial has raised alarming questions about the handling of the death investigation by the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office and its homicide investigators from the Massachusetts State Police known as the CPAC unit. The case was ultimate solved by the FBI who was alerted by Stoughton Police Department officials who had undertaken what they described on the stand as intentionally walled-off and “exclusive” investigative if the CPAC unit case.
Farwell was arrested in August 2024, a month after he crashed his GMC truck into a utility pole with such force, gas was knocked out in the area. The crash, first reported by Los Angeles, came after he wrote what prosecutors call a “goodbye letter” to a friend saying he would “see him on the other side.”
The post ‘At This Time I Do Not Elect To Testify,’ Accused Killer Cop Tells Boston Federal Judge appeared first on LAmag.
