The call came into the Stoughton Police headquarters on January 20, 2021, from Julia Perlin, who was in a dispute with her friend Sandra Birchmore over a $248.00 debt. Stoughton PD dispatcher James Fitton took the call in the presence of a desk officer when Perlin dropped a serious allegation about a department detective, Matthew Farwell, who, she said, had been sexually involved with her friend Birchmore, he told a federal jury Tuesday.
Fitton said he put the caller on hold and walked into the detective’s office where Farwell was sitting alone and reported what had been said. Farwell’s face went dark, Fitton testified, and he immediately “got visibly and audibly upset with me.”
“His facial expression changed to anger and he told me — including expletives — to never talk about this again,” Fitton said on the stand. His supervisor, whom he identified as former Robert E. Letendre, a now-former Stoughton cop who had recently returned to work after being acquitted on a slew of criminal corruption charges in a state trial.
“I returned to dispatch and reiterated what had happened to the desk officer. He told me to forget about the call,” Fitton testified. His notes for the day, and the name he had written down, were “thrown out,” Fitton told the court. The call had been recorded, but not maintained as evidence by Massachusetts State Police investigators in the
The call has been described by federal prosecutors as a possible catalyst for Birchmore’s murder weeks later at her Canton home. That day he sent a series of furious texts to Birchmore about the call, which were read aloud for the jury earlier this week.
“Dude your fucking friend called my job Sandra wtf? You’re [sic] friend Julia just called my fucking work to complain about me wtf,” Farwell texted, according to the FBI. “You told me nobody knew about us…can you please tell wtf is going on?”
He wrote that Birchmore’s friend Julia told his job, “we were fucking,” and added: “Like you have no idea how bad what she did really is. How does she know anything about me?”
Fitton said he also received a text from Farwell that day that described Birchmore and Perlin as “crazy,” and told him not to talk about the call with anyone.
Jurors in Farwell’s ongoing trial have heard testimony about the night of Feb. 1, 2021, when the hulking detective arrived at Birchmore’s apartment building wearing a mask and hood, and left three minutes after the pregnant 23-year-old teacher’s aide’s phone last registered movement.
Farwell has pleaded not guilty. His lawyers say Birchmore had a history of mental illness and hanged herself after he broke off his relationship with her while she was pregnant with a baby she believed to be his. The state investigation determined that Birchmore committed suicide, and it was only when an internal affairs investigation was shared with the FBI by Stoughton Police officials that her death was determined to be a homicide.
On Tuesday, Birchmore’s OB-GYN, Dr. Priyanka Venkataraman, testified at length about Birchmore’s excitement about her pregnancy in the weeks leading up to her death. Birchmore told her the father was a police officer.
In fact, another man, Jason Pickard, who was in explicit videos with Birchmore recovered from Farwell and his twin brother William’s devices, is confirmed to be the father, a fact that even the FBI did not know, according to testimony from Special Agent Heidi Kelsch, until after Farwell’s arrest in 2023. Pickard is scheduled to take the stand on Thursday.
Farwell’s federal public defender, attorney Kimberly Stevens, focused on the anti-anxiety medication Zoloft that Venkataraman prescribed Birchmore in late January. Stevens asked Birchmore’s doctor about the drug, saying: “It can cause suicidal thoughts or actions, can’t it?”
Venkataraman said yes, it could, though Birchmore had reported taking it or a similar medication before and tolerated it well. She also testified that she was “surprised” when she learned that police classified her patient’s death as a suicide.
“We had no indications of her destabilizing from the 29th when we last communicated,” Venkataraman told the jury. “She was doing everything… She was communicating with us. She was holding a job, holding all of her appointments. I expected her to follow up if there were any changes in her health.”
Testimony also laid out a timeline of activity Birchmore was undertaking on the day she died, including making a hair appointment, applying to nursing school, scheduling baby photos, planning a Winnie the Pooh-themed baby shower, setting up cat care for the time of her delivery and a Valentine’s Day gender reveal.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper ruled that federal prosecutors could call three other women that Farwell had extramarital affairs with to the stand after Farwell’s attorneys opened the door to that testimony in her opening arguments by describing his masking as a way to hide his relationship with Birchmore from his wife. She instructed prosecutors to keep their testimony limited to the “issue of concealment, deletion of texts or not, masks or disguises, or otherwise being covert.”
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