Good morning from inside Boston's Moakley Federal Courthouse, where I am setup and ready to provide a full live-transcript for day 6 of the Sandra Birchmore and Matthew Farwell trial. I got a nod of approval from the court reporter on the way in. FBI Agent Heidi Kelsch is up later today. Her husband, Matt, was the "#1 best friend" of Brian Higgins --of Karen Read and John O'Keefe trial infamy-- and, further, Matt Kelsch "helped" Higgins extract part of his phone messages with John O'Keefe at a federal government office (prior to Higgins disposing of his phone, and destroying his SIM card, down the Cape at an army base.) But, prior to that, former Stoughton Deputy Chief Holmes will continue his testimony about a bombshell 2021/2022 internal affairs report (initially referred by Stoughton Chief of Police Donna McNamara, who took the stand on Thursday) that led Holmes to make a referral to the FBI about child sexual abuse and "crimes around the country" (yes, he said "country"). Holmes also made a referral to the TSA (where Farwell's brother, William (AKA "Billy) worked at the time, and to the army (where Jayson "Jay" Pickard, the father of Sandra's unborn 8-10 week old baby boy that Matt Farwell thought was his child at the time Sandra was killed on February 1st, 2021 after 9:30PM ET in her Canton Woods apartment). Further, before that referral, sometime in 2021 or 2022 (it is unclear when, exactly, at this point, although Holmes began his IA investigation as early as August of 2021, and the first call to the army and other federal agencies references in his report in October of 2021), Holmes began speaking to FBI agent Kate Kelley --who, it appears, is the supervisor of the FBI's Lakeville, Massachusetts, office-- about 30,000 to 50,000 messages on Sandra Birchmore's laptop extraction that were initially missed by state police investigators (including Brian Tully and John Fanning) working for outgoing Norfolk DA Michael Morrissey. Kelley, for her part, attended the retirement party for then-Canton Police Chief Kenneth "Ken" Berkowitz in July of 2022 (a date well within the window of when Kelley would have been told by Holmes of the ongoing IA investigation into the Farwell brother's nation-wide trafficking ring). Source (via @CantonCommunity) - vimeo.com/731195421 Importantly, Lesley Davis, one of Sandra's friends, told jurors on Thursday that she had "gone to the Canton Police department" in the days after Sandra's death with her brother and mother to "implicate Matthew Farwell." However, Davis told jurors, two "large fat police officers" met her in the lobby, refused to take a report, took no notes, said "they weren't able to talk about that," and never followed up with Davis (as of this point it is unclear who those two Canton cops were, but Michael Lank is on the witness list for the DOJ). Also of note, on Thursday, it was revealed that Brian Tully and John Fanning's formerly underling Nicholas "Nick" Guarino told Fanning and Tully (the first officer and commander of Guarino's infamous state police Norfolk District Attorney's CPAC/SPDU unit...a unit also involved in the prosecutions of Karen Read and journalist Aidan @TurtleBoy Kearney) as early as February of 2021 about the trove of messages on Sandra's laptop implicating Farwell and his cohorts in a litany of federal crimes, but, somehow, the Norfolk DA (via Lynn Beland) went along with Tully and Fanning's efforts to blame Sandra Birchmore's death on self-harm without even looking into the "masked man in her apartment at the time of her death" (as line-trooper, and coverup point-man, Matt Dunne, told jurors earlier this week while under a brutal direct (actually cross) examination by federal prosecutor Brian A. Fogerty. Guarino also, shockingly, revealed that it was Guarino, himself, who did a mysterious December 6, 2021, second extraction of Sandra's laptop (that was a full file extraction, as opposed to a limited message extraction as was done in February of 2021). That extraction occurred without John Fanning or Brian Tully's knowledge and, further, that December, 2021, extraction occurred while the laptop was in the possession of the Stoughton Police IA department (and just two months after Holms, while running that IA investigation, made his referrals to federal agencies). Shockingly, two years later, on August 15 of 2024, Fanning and Dunne were brought into a meeting with a large number of federal agents, along with the medical examiner's office (whom the Canton PD, and Fanning, had pressured to find Sandra's death the result of self harm within 24 hours of Sandra's body being found on February 4, 2021, and before the OCME had done an autopsy). At that meeting, Dunne told jurors, Fanning and Dunne were made aware that Farwell was the "target" of a federal investigation, and that Farwell would soon be indicted and arrested by the FBI and DOJ. Just 9 days later, on August 24, 2024, Tully and Fanning's state police unit "lost due to device failure" the external hard drive at the Norfolk DA's SPDU office that had "every Apple device we had ever extracted, including the first extraction of Sandra's laptop from February of 2021." [Towel note; I wonder what other Apple devices were on that drive that was "lost due to device failure," and I wonder how many of those files were related to the John O'Keefe and Karen Read case.] The second extraction of Sandra's laptop, from December 6 of 2021 (that Fanning and Tully did not know about), was not destroyed and still exists. Thus, I believe, with strong evidence, that the FBI started investigating Tully and Fanning's coverup of Sandra Birchmore's murder as early as October of 2021 (via a call from Holms to the FBI after Holms reviewed the 30,000-50,000 messages on Sandra's laptop). That would certainly explain why, just days later on October 15 of 2021, Holms asked Fanning to turn over Sandra's computer itself (a device Holms held on to until December 15, 2021, at which point Sandra's laptop was returned to John Fanning...without Fanning or Tully being alerted that a second extraction had been done on December 6, 2021 by Guarino while the computer was in the possession of the Stoughton Police IA department,) as the FBI would have wanted a backup copy of the device, in full. In turn, that means that when John O'Keefe was killed on January 29th, 2022, in Canton (a crime also covered up by Tully and Fanning's unit, according to many observers) --the very same town where Sandra lived-- the FBI was already watching the Canton PD, the Stoughton PD, and Tully's state police unit (along with the Norfolk DA's office) very closely. Karen Read, in turn, didn't approach the feds about that coverup. They approached Karen --and probably Aidan, too-- and everything from there was a modified limited hangout designed to confuse Tully and his unit so that unit, the people who they worked for, and the people who worked for them, wouldn't see the FBI investigation coming. And that, folks, is how you investigate a paramilitary state police unit that thinks it is still the heydays of LCN. Q.E.D. Live coverage begins below in 3 minutes. I wrote this story in about 30 minutes sitting in the overflow room waiting for court to start. I used no notes. God bless you all.