What the Dead Know: Barbara Butcher on the Realities of Death Investigation

Zone 7 with Sheryl McCollum

iHeartPodcasts and CrimeOnline

True Crime

4.4 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, sits down with legendary death investigator Barbara Butcher. Barbara's career spans decades and includes experiences ranging from the gritty New York morgue to the surreal aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. Barbara also describes the psychological toll of her work, especially after 9/11, and the emotional strain of switching between the harsh realities of her job and everyday life.

Show Notes:

[0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum.
[1:11] Sheryl introduces guest, Barbara Butcher to the listeners
[2:36] What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
[4:00] Sheryl begins to delve into the vast and exciting career of Barbara
[8:20] Barbara recounts a chilling case from 1992 involving a suicide by hanging
[10:57] Question: Can you paint the listeners a picture of the morgue in New York
[14:40] “Sports” of New York
[16:40] Discussion around Barbara’s early career experiences, including the challenges she faced and how she established her credibility
[19:20] Barbara shares some adventurous experiences with the NYPD
[20:30] Question: Can you tell us about 1993 and the World Trade Center bombing?
[21:20] The scene at the World Trade Center following the 1993 bombing
[25:00] Barbara describes her visit to Ground Zero, the overwhelming task of identifying victims, and emphasizing the individual tragedies
[31:40] “You don't ever get over it. I think some things you won't get over. Not ever. You can't.”
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Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidnapping cases.

You can connect and learn more about Sheryl’s work by visiting the CCIRI website https://coldcasecrimes.org

Social Links:

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @ColdCaseTips
Facebook: @sheryl.mccollum

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When I was 15 years old and was starting to drive a car, my mother and I were traveling just on kind of a lonely country road.
0:17.0	And up ahead, there was some children playing in the street, kind of like kickball or something.
0:21.6	I remember I blew the horn thinking the children would just get out of the street, but I did not reduce my speed.
0:27.6	After I got safely past them, she said to me to always be real cautious that children were unpredictable,
0:35.6	that they could have changed their mind and gone
0:37.8	back into the roadway or tried to run across the street, and that I didn't ever want
0:44.2	to be a part of any type of incident where something happened to a child.
0:49.9	She said you would never forget it.
0:52.3	And she said, when something like that traumatic happens, since you can't forget it, you
0:58.3	just got to live with it.
1:01.0	Today, y'all, when I tell you, I am like a kid myself because I get to talk to a legend,
1:09.5	an extraordinary human being.
1:11.6	We've got Barbara Butcher with us.
1:14.6	She is a legendary death investigator at a Manhattan.
1:19.6	She was the first woman to have that job longer than three months.
1:24.6	She knows the underbelly, the dark side. She knows what human beings
1:30.3	can do to each other. She knows the dangers. And you know what? She couldn't get enough
1:36.3	of it. For more than 20 years, she worked homicides, double homicides, suicides, horrible accidents.
1:45.8	She also worked underage victims of rape, murder scenes.
1:51.4	She has that New York attitude, I'm told.
1:54.1	Y'all know that bravado.
1:56.2	She has been to more than 5,500 death scenes.
	...

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