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Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

Staging Suicide: The Death of Sandra Birchmore

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.72.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sandra Birchmore is 23-years-old and 3-months pregnant when she is found dead in her apartment. Her death is ruled a suicide, but her family doesn't believe it so they hire world renowned forensic pathologist, Dr. Michael Baden, to review her death. The former chief medical examiner of New York City writes a letter of his findings in which he details why he believes the death of Sandra Birchmore is not a suicide, it is a homicide. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how Dr. Baden came to his conclusion and how the Federal Government got involved in the case that ended up with the arrest of Police Detective Matthew Farwell who is now charged with Murder and staging the crime scene.

 

 

Transcript Highlights
00:42.43 Introduction: Trust
02:12.59 Discussion of becoming numb to investigations
04:57.94 Discussion of "explorer" group
07:37.19 Discussion of police officers involved with children
10:01.54 Talk about investigation of suicide
15:01.44 Discussion of getting all possible info at scene
20:08.48 Discussion of Post Mortem Lividity in seated position
25:15.37 Talk about conversations among those who work closely
30:09.57 Discussion of victim being involved sexually with police officer, allegedly
35:21.22 Discussion about autopsy
40:04.86 Talk about what level of contact between law officers in different departments
44:17.43 Conclusion - Will Update 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Body Facts with Joseph Scott Moore.

0:05.0

It's hard to try to understand how people define the word trust any longer. It seems as though that ever since I was a

0:16.4

child that there has been this kind of evolution in what the word trust

0:22.4

actually means.

0:24.0

When I was little, if you were doing something you should not have been doing.

0:30.0

There was this perception that you could trust others, even outside of your family, to essentially tell your parents what you had been doing.

0:41.0

And that went both ways for other people's kids as well.

0:47.0

But trust is kind of taken on a different meaning I think it comes down to this idea of protection and when we

0:59.1

turn over if you, our precious young children to those in authority and they violate trust.

1:12.0

There's something very, very dark about that. Today we're going to talk about that

1:19.0

that darkness and we're going to talk about the impact that trust placed with the wrong folks had on a young lady by the name of Sandra Birchmore. I'm

1:39.6

Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body backs.

1:46.0

Dave I've often said that, you know, as an investigator,

1:50.0

if you, you know, you work cases where you kind of get numb to it relative to you know you have two

1:57.6

adults that get into a fight and they wind up maybe killing the other one back in the 80s. I remember it

2:07.4

seemed like night after night I would go on so-called drive-by shooting homicides, rival gangs that were going after one another.

2:16.7

They're involved in this street life and that sort of thing and there's an inherent risk with that.

2:21.2

There's an inherent danger with it, but they when it comes to

2:25.2

kids there's something about it that you can never really get numb to. It's like a

2:30.8

fresh wound that opens up every time for an investigator and in this particular case we're talking we're talking about a young woman who she died as a young woman, but this story actually begins a decade earlier,

2:47.0

where she was involved in an Explorer program.

2:50.0

I don't know if everybody knows what the Explorer program is. It's an extension of Boy Scouts.

...

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