ABOUT THIS EPISODE
On the first day of Matthew Farwell's federal murder trial, prosecutor Torey Cummings put Sandra Birchmore's last text on the screen. She called it a message of welcome to the man who'd known Sandra since she was 12. Four minutes after she sent it, Farwell walked into her Canton apartment building with his hood up and a surgical mask on, a man Cummings said was actively opposed to masks. He left 29 minutes later. Three days after that, Sandra was found with a duffel bag strap tied from her neck to her closet door.
Sandra told friends he'd asked her for a key and that she'd found him inspecting her closet, Cummings said, and eight days later her body hung from that doorknob. She said the State Police unit that worked for the Norfolk DA, the same unit from the Karen Read case, never checked his story, gave him time to delete texts, and told the medical examiner it was a suicide.
Defense attorney Kimberly Stevens called him Matt, said he'd had an affair, and told the jury he did not kill her. She read Sandra's texts from that day: I couldn't sleep last night. I keep waking up. I took my medicine just to let you know. She said Sandra had looked up the suicide ribbon, that nothing in the apartment showed a struggle, that Farwell's DNA wasn't under her nails, and that more than one person's DNA was on the strap.
Both lawyers worked from the same 40,000 messages. This episode rebuilds what each of them made of it, using the reporters who sat in a courtroom with no cameras. It closes on a ruling the judge hasn't made yet: whether the word affair lets prosecutors tell the jury about Farwell's other affairs.
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