The tips of Matthew Farwell’s ears burned red on Friday as an FBI agent read sexually graphic text messages federal prosecutors say he sent to an underage girl in the lead-up to him allegedly raping her when she was a minor in 2013 to a jury in a Boston federal courtroom.
“Why did you want my virginity,” Birchmore asked Farwell in a text message read to the jury by Special Agent Heidi Kelsch.
“Because I was in love with you,” Farwell wrote of the incident, which federal prosecutors say took place on April 10, 2013. At the time, he was 27 and a police officer in Stoughton, Massachusetts, which made him a mandated reporter for child abuse. Birchmore was 15, under the age of consent, and a member of the Stoughton Police Explorer’s program, set up for troubled youngsters to be mentored by cops.
“I knew it was going to hurt,” Birchmore wrote to Farwell, before adding: “Have you ever regretted it?”
Farwell responded in the text chain, read by Kelsch and a federal prosecutor in a dramatic close to testimony in his ongoing federal trial on charges connected to Birchmore’s murder Friday. “Never.”
Kelsch testified that the text messages showed that both a state and federal crime had been committed by Farwell. “He was over ten years older than her and a mandated reporter,” for child abuse, she told the jury.
A month after this alleged rape of Birchmore in April 2013, Farwell married his wife Michelle. Despite his new marriage, Farwell is accused of continuing to exploit and coerce sex, often violent encounters, from Birchmore until Feb. 2021, when federal prosecutors say he killed Birchmore in order to keep her quiet about that coerced sex crime and staged the crime scene to look like she had taken her own life.
When Birchmore’s body was found on Feb. 4, 2021, Farwell’s colleagues immediately determined – without an autopsy or a medical examiner’s expertise – that the pregnant woman had tied a duffle bag strap to a closet doorknob, looped the other end around her neck, and committed what is known as a seated hanging.
Federal prosecutors, however, have raised alarming questions about the investigation conducted by Farwell’s coworkers in the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office, which is the office where he presented cases as a Stoughton Police detective alongside Massachusetts State Troopers in what is known as the CPAC unit. Former Stoughton Police Deputy Chief Brian Holmes told the jury Friday that he had commissioned an “exclusive and independent” internal affairs investigation into Farwell after Birchmore’s death and the results were staggering.
The report showed Birchmore had been the alleged victim of grooming as a small child by Matthew Farwell, and then later his twin brother William, and their friend Robert Devine. Holmes testified he brought the allegations to the Norfolk County DA, where officials declined to seat a grand jury to hear evidence, and then to the FBI. In 2022, the three cops were pushed off the job and have since been decertified as police officers.
“I saw some information in there that made me think times were happening in other places in the country,” Holmes told the court.
The state declined to continue its investigation, but the FBI did not.
In August 2024, Farwell was pulled out of a big rig in Revere, MA, the truck he had been driving since the end of his police career, by the FBI. One of his three children, a son, was in the truck when his dad was arrested and accused of the crime of statutory rape and the murder of Birchmore.
Later, he was also charged with the death of her unborn baby, a boy. Kelsch is expected back on the stand to continue testimony regarding the tens of thousands of text messages the FBI recovered from Birchmore’s laptop.
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