Published in 2023
289 pages
9 hours and 47 minutes
Barbara Butcher spent 23 years at the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner as a death investigator, director of the Forensic Sciences Training Program, and chief of staff. There she investigated more than 5500 deaths, 680 of them homicides. She worked mass disasters including 9/11, the 2004 tsunami, the London Underground bombing, and the crash of Flight 587. She is a frequent podcast guest, speaks at conferences on death investigation and fatality management, and now consults for media producers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is writing a novel. She would also like to be a musician, but is without real talent. (She will try it anyway, just for the fun of learning.)
What is this book about?
“Butcher chronicles her career path and her journey to sobriety in unflinching detail, while her voice remains deliberate and measured, occasionally slipping into what sounds like a half-smirk when cracking a joke….She has a way with words, telling stories that are at turns hilarious, thought-provoking and, as might be expected, disturbing….This is a story of trauma, yes, but it’s also a glimpse into the dark side of a city that most never see up close.” —The New York Times Book Review
A “remarkably candid and sensitive” (The Wall Street Journal) memoir of more than twenty years of death-scene investigations by New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher.
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—and she loved it.
Butcher (yes, that’s 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 with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, 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 a 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.
This is the “breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw” (Patricia Cornwell), “completely unputdownable” (Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone) real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life—and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won’t be able to put this down.
