We Saw the Devil: A True Crime Podcast

"If anyone should be scared it's not you." Sandra Birchmore wrote that to Matthew Farwell in December 2020, weeks before she was found dead in her Canton apartment. This week the jury in Farwell's federal trial stopped hearing about Sandra and started hearing from her. Over three days on the stand, an FBI agent read their messages aloud: the October 2020 ultimatum after she learned his wife was pregnant, the sign announcing her own pregnancy, his reply calling her "the worst person on the face of the earth," and his texts the night a friend called his police department. Then a Stoughton...

"We wanted to make sure we got a statement out of him, whether truthful or otherwise."


That's the Massachusetts state trooper who investigated Sandra Birchmore's death, explaining to a federal jury why he and his supervisor interviewed the married Stoughton detective at the center of her life in a school parking lot. No recording. No notes.


Week one of United States v. Matthew Farwell is in the books, and the federal government is prosecuting two things at once: the former detective accused of killing Sandra, and the state investigation that called her death a...

Luminol on Monday. Human DNA on Tuesday, per police sources. An excavator in the backyard, a shed torn down, and dirt sifted three feet deep like a mass grave. Then on Thursday, the medical examiner pulled up to 417 West Chew Avenue because somebody found bones.


Nobody knows yet whether they’re human. Philly PD isn’t confirming a damn thing. And Eugene Horsch’s lawyer went on CBS Philadelphia to call the whole investigation a “runaway train,” which is a bold choice for a man whose client was arrested with a cattle prod in his car.

February 6, 2024. A pastor calls Horry County police and reads them his wife’s location in real time. He isn’t following her, he explains. He’s “watching her on the map.” Over the next ten weeks, Mica Miller contacted police at least fourteen times for help involving her husband, John-Paul Miller, pastor of Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach. Five of those contacts involved tracking devices.

South Carolina already had harassment and stalking laws built for exactly this kind of pattern. Mica used them herself. On March 26, 2024, her restraining order case was dismissed without prejudice. Netflix gave you her life...

"Basically, I'm a sociopath, always have been."

R.C. Horsch said that into a public radio microphone in 2014. This week, law enforcement sources told CBS Philadelphia they consider him a suspected serial killer, and the FBI and Philadelphia police began taking his Olney house apart.

This week in breaking news: 
- What "suspected serial killer" means for a man who can never be charged
- Peter Crimmins' lost WHYY interviews with Horsch: the sociopath line, the stolen name, and the imaginary patron in Boca Raton
- Phase Two of the search: hazmat suits, t...

February 1, 2021. A blizzard is closing in on Boston. According to federal prosecutors, a Stoughton police detective texts 23-year-old Sandra Birchmore and asks if he can come by for a second. At 9:40 p.m., her phone logs eight steps. It never moves again.

Three days later she's found dead in her Canton apartment, eight to ten weeks pregnant. By May, Massachusetts had ruled it a suicide.

Today, jury selection began in federal court in Boston in the trial of former Stoughton detective Matthew Farwell. Prosecutors say he killed Sandra to keep her from exposing federal crimes, including...

NOTE: For whatever reason, even after correctly stating her age multiple times, around 22 minutes in, Robin incorrectly refers to Jane Doe as 21 years old. 

At 1:42 a.m. on October 20, 2024, according to a civil lawsuit, a Chi Phi brother at Cornell University told a Snapchat group of more than fifty fraternity members there was "free p*ssy upstairs." Upstairs was a twenty year old sophomore. Not one person in that chat went to the police.


Two years later, nobody has been charged. Then Jane Doe sued, the Tompkins County DA reopened the case, Governor Kathy Hochul p...

At 1:42 a.m. on October 20, 2024, according to a civil lawsuit, a Chi Phi brother at Cornell University told a Snapchat group of more than fifty fraternity members there was "free p*ssy upstairs." Upstairs was a twenty year old sophomore. Not one person in that chat went to the police.


Two years later, nobody has been charged. Then Jane Doe sued, the Tompkins County DA reopened the case, Governor Kathy Hochul pulled it from him, and New York Attorney General Letitia James opened an active criminal investigation.


This update covers everything that has broken...

On Wednesday, September 30, the State of Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike. It couldn't.


Pike was convicted of the 1995 torture and murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old fellow student at the Knoxville Job Corps. After a morning stay from the Sixth Circuit and an evening reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court, she was given two rounds of pentobarbital at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.

According to media witnesses and her lawyers' court filings, she stayed conscious, said her arm felt like it was about to burst open, and was still audibly snoring behind...

Lindsay Clancy was back in court for the first time since her murder trial ended in a mistrial, and it was chaos. Plus, Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee's death row, is scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. CT on September 30, 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.

Yesterday, Lindsay Clancy appeared in Plymouth Superior Court. The former Duxbury, Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children. She pleaded not guilty, and her jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of not guilty by reason of...

***Show note: Robin is still insanely sick with COVID and this episode is not closely edited.  

On January 12, 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer to an abandoned steam plant on the University of Tennessee's agricultural campus and tortured her to death. She took a piece of Colleen's skull back to her dorm and showed it off at breakfast. She confessed. She has never denied any of it.

She was also sexually abused from the age of two. At five, she drew her abuser for a kindergarten teacher, and the school called her parents. At eleven, a...

Robin has COVID, a 103 degree fever, and a voice held together with tape. The episode goes out anyway, because Olney won't stop breaking. It is 100% unedited, so what you're hearing is what you're getting. Sorry, folks. 


THE OLNEY HOUSE, PART THREE: ACCESS
New reporting from the Philadelphia Inquirer says the late pornographer Raymond "R.C." Horsch had access to a Kensington crematorium connected to the Garzone Funeral Home. The owners of that funeral home later pleaded guilty to selling more than 240 corpses for body parts. Sources say Horsch paid an employee in drugs and c...

In June, a federal park ranger wrote down a license plate on Independence Mall. Three months later, Philadelphia is running the strangest death investigation in the city since Gary Heidnik, and it has no bodies in it.


This is the second episode on the Olney house. Since I last covered it, the numbers have changed completely. Four missing women became seven. Two believed dead became five. Five percent of the digital evidence reviewed became thirty percent, out of more than a million images and videos, with fifty eight separate human beings identified inside them.


...

Eleven jurors voted to acquit Lindsay Clancy.

One didn't.

Six days later his dismissed charge, his divorce, and his eviction were on national television.

He has never spoken to a reporter. He has never been named. He showed up for jury duty and then did the one thing we tell every juror to do, which is refuse to move when you don't believe it.

This week the entire country argued about whether he should have been allowed in the building. Almost nobody arguing bothered to read the statute that answers it.
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This episode covers rape, drug-facilitated sexual assault, and the death of a woman. Nothing in it is graphic for the sake of being graphic. Resources are below.

Late on June 25, 2026, in the small Upper Austrian town of Marchtrenk, a teenage girl finds her mother unresponsive and bleeding. Paramedics pronounce her dead at 12:44 a.m. Her husband tells police it was rough, consensual sex that went wrong. That story lasts until the autopsy.

Austrian prosecutors have said on the record that she was extremely intoxicated and unable to defend herself; that her husband is under investigation for...

The jury foreperson has a name now. Roni Carlson. She and two other women from that panel sat down with NBC10 this week and told everybody what actually went on in there for seven days, and one detail has been rattling around my skull since.

The holdout admitted he had reasonable doubt.

Out loud. To the room. She was so relieved she started filling out the verdict forms, all three of them, signed her name on each one. And then he said, "But I'm still not going to say that she's not guilty by reason of...

***For speed and due to this episode being late, it is unedited.


The jury's last note got quoted everywhere Friday,

"It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision, and we will not be able to."

That last part is what matters. They weren't saying they were stuck. They were saying don't bother sending us back in, there's no version of Monday where this goes differently.

So after seven days and roughly forty hours, Judge Sullivan called it. And the reason he...

A judge in Plymouth, Massachusetts spent Thursday afternoon reading twelve adults the definition of a word.

Not the evidence. Not the eighty-odd witnesses. A definition. Reasonable doubt. Because a note came out of that jury room saying one person in there will not take it.

Disagreeing with eleven people is allowed. That's the job. Refusing the standard itself is something else, and it's about to blow up five weeks of trial.

Six days of deliberation. Thirty-six and a half hours. Split eleven to one. Judge Sullivan has already spent the dynamite charge, and under...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has a formal diagnosis for caffeine withdrawal.

It does not have one for postpartum psychosis.

That's where this episode starts, and it turns out to explain almost everything about the six weeks that followed.

As I record this, the jury in Plymouth has told the judge for the second time in two days that it cannot agree on whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible. Five weeks of trial. More than eighty witnesses. The judge has now read them the Tuey-Rodriguez charge, the last instruction he has...

Three days. Seventeen hours. Twelve jurors, five possible verdicts, and a door nobody can see behind.

Day three of deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy trial ended Monday afternoon with no verdict and instructions to come back Tuesday. Robin breaks down where the case actually stands...the criminal responsibility standard, what "not guilty" would really mean here, and why the jury's request for the pill bottles and the knife tells you they're doing the work.

Then the sidewalk: the pink shirts, the twenty-five-plus Etsy designs, the defense attorney fan merchandise, the free coffee at a verdict watch...

On Friday morning, twelve people in Plymouth, Massachusetts asked to see two things: a bag of prescription pill bottles and the knife Lindsay Clancy used on herself. That request is the entire factual content of the biggest news day in this trial since closing arguments, and within hours it had been publicly interpreted as a conviction, an acquittal, a hung jury, and a verdict coming Monday before lunch.

This episode walks Friday minute by minute, then does the thing this show exists to do: separates what happened from what people needed it to mean.

Also covered...

Day 21. The last day of evidence in Commonwealth v. Lindsay Clancy.

Judge William Sullivan opened with a line from Henry V. Four hours later, defense attorney Kevin Reddington was reading the prosecution's own opening statement out loud to the prosecution's own final witness and asking him if he agreed with it. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, forensic psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and senior psychiatrist for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, said the statement minimizes what Lindsay Clancy was going through.

That is the state's closer telling a jury the state's theory is too small.

...

***Due to time constants, this episode is unedited.

Day 20 was the last full day of evidence in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, and it was the strangest day of the whole five weeks.

The morning belonged to Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, the forensic psychologist the Commonwealth hired to explain postpartum psychosis to a jury. On cross examination, Kevin Reddington established that Heilbrun last treated a patient with postpartum psychosis in 1982, has never published a word on it, wrote his only article on psychosis in 1977, and has been paid roughly $54,000 at $300 an hour.

That same witness...

Day 19 of the Lindsay Clancy murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court, and the prosecution's rebuttal case fell apart in slow motion. Forensic psychologist Dr. Kirk Heilbrun called the postpartum psychosis defense "convenient," offered the clearest alternate theory yet, and then said the words "isn't suicide a mortal sin" in front of the jury. Kevin Reddington moved for a mistrial.

Judge William Sullivan denied it and then reprimanded the prosecution anyway. The jury went home early. Closing arguments are Wednesday.

But the story nobody is covering is the firm. Both of the Commonwealth's rebuttal experts were retained...

The Clancy defense rests after five days and ten witnesses. The prosecution's rebuttal opens with a psychiatrist who says depression is not psychosis. And in Texas, a retired judge has until Monday to decide whether Karmelo Anthony's murder conviction still exists.


First: where the Lindsay Clancy trial actually stands after Day 18, and every verdict legally on the table in Massachusetts. First degree, second degree, manslaughter, lack of criminal responsibility, hung jury. What each one actually means, why a finding of not criminally responsible does not mean she walks out the door, and the single word in the...

Day 17 was the shortest day of the Lindsay Clancy trial and possibly the day that decides it.


One witness. Sheila Cavanaugh, a board-certified chaplain at Brigham and Women's Hospital who has visited Lindsay Clancy roughly 200 times since her three children were killed. She was there the day after. She was there when they pulled the breathing tube out on January 31, 2023, and Clancy's first words were that she was glad her children were safe. And she was there when Clancy described a persistent male voice that told her if she did not follow the command, neither she nor...

The Lindsay Clancy trial stopped today and nobody will say why. Judge William Sullivan sent the jury home mid-afternoon citing an "unforeseen circumstance," told them not to speculate about it, and offered no further explanation. There was also an unexplained delay starting the morning. Two stoppages in one day, and no outlet has reported the cause.

This episode covers three days of testimony in Plymouth Superior Court: Days 14, 15, and 16 of the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury, Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
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Karen Riley paid a psychic to find her daughter. Not because she believed in psychics. Because after fourteen years, the psychic was the only one who would pick up the phone.
Gabrielle Amarando disappeared from Philadelphia in September 2012. She was 22. Amy McHale vanished in 2016 after leaving a voicemail saying she was fine. Maribel Fresses in 2018. Blair Tonzelli in 2023.

Four women, eleven years, one address in Olney, and not one of them got a task force.

Here's what finally moved the Philadelphia Police Department: on June 19, 2026, a park ranger noticed a BMW parked where it shouldn't...

On Thursday, August 13th, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts spent a morning of a triple murder trial walking a jury through a country music deep dive. Then Kevin Reddington got up and took about six questions to blow it up. 

Day 13 of the Lindsay Clancy trial in Plymouth Superior Court. Three witnesses: State Police Sgt. Kyle Pavao on the tablet, Sgt. Timothy Chiappini on the cellphone, and lead investigator Trooper Joshua McKelligan. Eight minutes of browser history from August 2022. Journal entries and affirmations read into the record. A note last modified the day before her children died. A bag o...

Did Patrick Clancy kill his children? No. And the Lindsay Clancy trial record says so, including in her own defense attorney's opening statement.

Millions of people on TikTok and Instagram have convinced themselves that Patrick Clancy strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and framed his wife for it. This episode goes through that theory claim by claim against the actual trial evidence: the surveillance footage, the CVS and ThreeV timeline, the 911 call, the medical records, and the sworn testimony.

Robin covers what Kevin Reddington really said in his opening statement, the "he changed...

On December 20th, 2022, a doctor at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence looked at Lindsay Clancy's medication list and decided she was too medicated to safely enter their postpartum program. That doctor picked up a phone and called the nurse practitioner prescribing them. Nobody answered. Nobody called back.

Thirty-five days later her three children were dead.

Today that nurse practitioner testified, and Kevin Reddington read her the note.

Day 11 in Plymouth Superior Court, on what happened to be Lindsay Clancy's 36th birthday. Julie Paul retook the stand and got a one-minute cross that was...

Lindsay Clancy trial Day 10 recap. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, testified for five hours and revealed she treated Clancy fourteen times over five months without ever meeting her in person, never pulled her psychiatric hospital records, and never knew about two crisis line calls. Then the entire trial turned on an argument about a comma.

Robin breaks down every witness, what the Commonwealth is actually required to prove under Massachusetts law, why the jury is not entertaining any theory about Patrick Clancy, and a verdict prediction based on where the evidence stands after Day 10.

Become a...

Part 2 of Week 2. Twenty seven internet theories about Patrick Clancy, taken apart against the trial record, and the real critique of him that's been sitting in the transcript the whole time.

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A McLean psychiatrist admitted she has never treated a case of postpartum psychosis. Week 2 of the Lindsay Clancy trial, day by day: the journals, the stipulation, the missing fingerprints, the autopsy, and the doctors. Part 1 of 2.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

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AIPAC and its affiliates spent more than thirty million dollars trying to stop Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, the largest single-race investment in that organization's history. Total outside spending cleared sixty million. He won by fourteen thousand eight hundred ninety-three votes. Thirty million dollars bought a coin flip. So the left won. This episode is about why it probably loses anyway in November.









Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/we-saw-the-devil-a-true-crime-podcast--4433638/support.

Website: http://www.wesawthedevil.com

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Lindsay Clancy killed her three children. Nobody's arguing that.

What the state of Massachusetts wants you to skip past is the part where an entire medical apparatus watched a woman disintegrate in real time, handed her a fistful of scripts, cycled her on and off drugs like a science fair project, and then clutched its pearls when the worst thing imaginable happened in a house in Duxbury.


This week I'm walking through the Clancy case as her trial finally gets going in Plymouth County. Postpartum psychosis, the kind that's rare enough for every provider to...

Iris is back, and apparently we chose peace by discussing democratic socialism, Zionism, the war involving Iran, Israel and Palestine, Republican unity, Democratic dysfunction, and growing trans fatigue on the left. So, naturally, a very relaxing episode.

We dig into the Democratic Socialists of America, what democratic socialism means in practice, and the controversy surrounding Michigan Representative Haley Stevens. We also examine why Republicans remain so effective at closing ranks and advancing their agenda, even when that agenda is cruel, incoherent or wildly unpopular, while Democrats continue treating internal disagreement like an Olympic event.

Then we...

Every story this week is the same story: powerful men demanding that you prove yourself to them while refusing to prove a goddamn thing to you.

Prove your citizenship, in person, on paper, to register to vote. Prove you condemned the right slogans loudly enough to be allowed at a memorial in your own city. Meanwhile a sitting United States Senator cannot be produced on camera after 43 days, the Pentagon subtracts fifteen wounded Americans from its own ledger and offers a duty officer who is never at the desk, and the President of the United States announces a...

**This episode is unedited due to time constraints. 

In one twenty-four hour period, this administration signed an executive order to install warning signs on the sidewalk outside the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, because it has no legal authority to touch anything inside the building. The Pentagon's public casualty count for the Iran war read eighteen dead on Wednesday and fourteen on Thursday, after four service members killed in Jordan and Iraq quietly came off the list. The Department of Energy told a federal judge in writing that 284 canceled grants worth roughly $7.5 billion were pulled for one r...

Pete Hegseth told America the Iran war was a historic and overwhelming victory. Then he sat in front of the Senate and asked for 80 billion more dollars, and when Jon Ossoff asked him to repeat his own victory claims under oath, he wouldn't do it. This week the receipts came due all at once: a $37.5 billion war tab, a $95 billion reconciliation package, a $1.15 trillion defense bill passed by four votes, and drone attacks on American bases in three countries during month five of "mission accomplished."


On the docket: the full breakdown of the Hegseth and Caine hearing...