Neither case would exist in its current form if an early official conclusion had held. Sandra Birchmore’s 2021 death in Canton was first written up as a suicide; only after the file was reopened did it become a homicide, and only then did a former Stoughton police officer, Matthew Farwell, end up charged federally with killing a witness. John O’Keefe’s 2022 death, a short drive away, produced a murder charge against Karen Read that a jury ultimately rejected — leaving behind a civil fight over whether the investigation that built that charge was corrupt from the start.

In both, the story is really about the second look. What changes when someone reopens a case the police thought was closed? Who decides the first answer was wrong, and what does it say about the people who gave it? That question runs straight through Farwell’s reclassified homicide and Read’s framing defense alike.

The cases also share a courthouse geography and a defendant class that makes prosecutors uneasy: officers and the departments around them. When the accused — or the accused’s investigators — wear the same badge as the people gathering evidence, every ordinary step of a case gets read for bias. That is why both matters have become, in the public’s mind, less about a single death and more about the Massachusetts State Police.