The medical examiner who changed Sandra Birchmore’s death certificate earlier this year from cause of death “suicide” to “undetermined” admitted on the stand Monday that injuries and abrasions noted during her autopsy could be indicators that her body, or the ligature around her neck, had been moved.
Dr. Maria Capo Martinez, who works for the Massachusetts Office of Chief Medical Examiner, testified that two police officials called her office to report finding Birchmore’s body on Feb. 4, 2021, in her Canton apartment. Canton PD Officer Charles Eaton told an OCME intake worker that Birchmore committed “suicide by hanging” and that the decedent had a “scarf around her neck,” and noted “no trauma” and “no signs of foul play.” That same day, Trooper Kevin Tufts from the Norfolk County DA’s office reported to the OCME that the body was a “suicide” and the decedent had a “nylon strap around her neck,” with multiple depression medications recovered. In fact, there was only one, according to evidence photos: the anti-anxiety medication Zoloft.
Both officers made the determination that Birchmore had committed suicide without requesting a medical examiner respond to the scene, Capo Martinez testified, who added that she took note of abrasions on the pregnant 23-year-old woman’s body that “could be indicators” that her body, or the ligature tied around her neck, was moved after “peri mortem,” or before or near the time of her death.
Capo Martinez also testified that she removed Sandra’s hyoid bone at the direction of the FBI in Oct. 2024, well after Birchmore’s death. When she did, Capo Martinez said on the stand, the broken bone became “significant,” because “it was another indicator of injuries to the neck.”
Matthew Farwell, a former Stoughton Police Detective who was the last person to see Birchmore alive, is on trial in Boston’s federal court on charges that he killed Birchmore, a teacher’s aide he is also accused of sexually exploiting when she was a minor. Prosecutors say Farwell staged her body to look like she had committed suicide. He is also charged with killing her unborn baby, a boy that he, prosecutors argue, believed was his.
His attorneys have insisted that Capo Martinez was right when she declared Birchmore’s death a suicide, and that she had since been pressured by federal authorities to change her ruling, which she disputed on the stand. “I was not pressured,” she told the court, adding that she had not been given access to information about the ongoing investigation into Farwell by his colleagues in the Norfolk County DA’s CPAC unit.
Before she signed Birchmore’s original death certificate in May 2021, her office had sent an email to the lead investigator asking if there was an update on the status of the investigation. “Nothing new to report,” Lt. John Fanning wrote in response. Fanning did, however, share a 2017 journal entry about suicide with Capo Martinez, she testified.
Capo Martinez, who testified that she worked “for the decedent and the family left behind,” testified she was not aware that Farwell was fingered as a potential suspect by at least five witnesses by then. Investigators did not provide her with police reports and did not attend the autopsy she performed on Birchmore a day after her body was recovered.
The FBI confronted Capo Martinez and the Norfolk County investigators at a meeting at the OCME’s Boston office on August 16, 2024, with their own findings that indicated Birchmore was murdered, the medical examiner acknowledged.
Ten days later, Farwell was arrested, pulled from the big rig he had been driving since he was forced off the Stoughton PD in 2022 and decertified as a police officer. He has been held without bail at Donald W. Wyatt Correctional Facility in Rhode Island, where defense attorneys have noted he has a detail “cleaning officers’ toilets.”
“They wanted to bring information they had acquired in their own investigation about Sandra Birchmore’s death and Matthew Farwell,” Capo Martinez testified, adding that another medical examiner, Dr. William Smock, an expert on hangings, was in the meeting.
Smock, she testified, had come to the conclusion that Birchmore was murdered. By then she had updated Birchmore’s death certificate to the “undetermined” manner of death and had wiped out “by suicide” in the cause of death, leaving “asphyxia.”
Farwell’s twin brother William Farwell, also a Stoughton Police Officer accused of having inappropriate sexual relations with Birchmore while on duty, was slated to take the stand on Monday, but the intensive questioning of Capo Martinez moved his testimony to Tuesday. William Farwell told federal investigators that Fanning told him the Norfolk County DA would only treat Birchmore’s death as a suicide, despite mounting evidence that has been presented in court over more than two weeks of testimony.
“Sandra’s death was a suicide, that nothing was criminal, that they weren’t investigating and that they needed an investigation like they, quote, needed a fucking bullet in the head,” AUSA Torey Cummings told the jury in Matthew Farwell’s case in her opening statement. Fanning was listed on the witness lists of both the government and the defense, but is unlikely to testify. Sources told Los Angeles he indicated he could plead the fifth.
William Farwell also told the FBI that his brother was not clandestine about his extramarital affairs, according to court proceedings held out of the presence of the jury on Monday.
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