S18 Ep85: What The Dead Know: The Life Of A NY Death Investigator w/Barbara Butcher
Darkness Radio
Darkness Radio
4.7 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2023
⏱️ 173 minutes
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Summary
Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous – she loved it.
Butcher (yes, that is her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes about investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation’s largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members’ descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims. On Today's show, Barbara opens you up a little to her world, professional and personal, and shows us why it takes not just strength, but the best of our humanity to do what she does.
Get your copy of "What The Dead Know ..." here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/What-the-Dead-Know/Barbara-Butcher/9781982179403
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome in to the best in True Crime Podcasting. |
| 0:28.9 | This is True Crime Tuesday. |
| 0:29.9 | I'm your host Tim Dennis. |
| 0:31.6 | I'm excited for today's show folks. |
| 0:33.4 | I'll tell you why. |
| 0:34.6 | We have a very good show in store for you. |
| 0:37.4 | I read an exceptional book this weekend, finished it up today. |
| 0:42.6 | It was a great book called What the Dead Know. |
| 0:45.2 | Our guest is Barbara Butcher. |
| 0:47.4 | And Barbara has had a very interesting life. |
| 0:50.6 | To say the least, to say the least, in that she had one of the most interesting careers |
| 0:56.0 | I think you can have if you are interested in, I won't say a fan of because that sounds |
| 1:01.7 | weird. |
| 1:03.5 | If you're interested in True Crime, I think once you read this book, you'll change your |
| 1:08.4 | perspective on True Crime. |
| 1:10.2 | That's for sure. |
| 1:11.4 | I think you'll learn to become more human. |
| 1:14.4 | And I'll explain what that means. |
| 1:15.9 | And we'll go through it with Barbara Butcher, who is the Chief of Staff and Director of |
| 1:19.9 | the Friends and Science Training Program at the New York City Office of Chief Medical |
| 1:24.2 | Examiner. |
| 1:25.4 | She was responsible for overall agency management strategy and interagency relations, which |
... |
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