Barbara Butcher is an expert in medicolegal death investigation and currently a consultant in forensic investigation, working with forensic pathologists, educators, television and mystery writers.
She is the former Chief of Staff and Director of the Forensic Sciences Training Program at the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), where she was responsible for Investigations, Disaster Planning, Identifications, Evidence, and Missing Persons. She oversaw the remains recovery effort at the World Trade Center after 9/11 and helped manage the response to the crash of Flight 587, and investigated the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Barbara has worked internationally, consulting for the World Health Organization and responding to the 2004 Tsunami in Thailand, the London Underground bombing, and assisted in disaster planning for the Hong Kong and Norwegian governments.
As a medicolegal death investigator at OCME, she investigated more than 5500 death scenes and 680 homicides. Her book “What the Dead Know” covering some of her most interesting cases, was published in 2023 by Simon and Schuster. In addition, Barbara is featured in the Netflix Docuseries “Homicide New York” by Dick Wolf.
INTERVIEW
LYNN: What’s the toughest lesson you learned while working on a murder case?
BARBARA: To keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Early on in my career, I tried to make puzzle pieces fit at the scene, to figure out what happened, who did it, and why. Doing that with incomplete information leads you to make suppositions that can mess up your case later. But it’s just so damned tempting to theorize with the cops, and it’s fun. After a mistake debating a suicide vs. homicide, I learned to never approach a scene as a murder, or anything else for that matter. If you’re told you need to come to a suicide, then the tendency is to approach it as such. That’s wrong. It could be anything, and I don’t decide without a full investigation.
LYNN: What’s the toughest case you were involved with?
BARBARA: There are too many to count. They were all tough for one reason or another—the suicide of a lonely man without friends or family is emotionally tough, and the death of a child is heartbreakingly tough. For sheer difficulty, it would have to be the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the largest mass murder in US history. We recovered the remains of 22,000 victims, and each had to be treated as a separate case because we didn’t know how many victims there were. Even now, 23 years later, 40% of the known victims have not been identified. That is so heartbreaking for their families.
LYNN: Is there a difference between working on a murder case and any other type of case when it comes to what you do? If so, what?
BARBARA: The short answer is no. The protocol is that each case is looked at without preconceived notions. Of course, one could argue that if you have any suspicion of a murder, you should approach the scene cautiously, suited up in Tyvek, and careful not to contaminate the scene. In an ideal world, that’s how it would be, but investigators are overworked and frequently run from case to case. Shortcuts are taken, and you hope for the best. I tried my best to give each case its full due. At any death scene, you should take care not to contaminate it by bringing anything extraneous in, and not touching anything until you know what you’re dealing with. If it’s a suspected homicide, of course you are going to be doing a whole lot of gathering evidence: DNA swabs, fingerprints, blood pattern analysis, etc.
LYNN: Did working murder cases affect your everyday life? If so, how?
BARBARA: Oh, hell yes. There is a syndrome common to first (and last) responders, in which we begin to believe that the whole world is dangerous and that most people have the potential to do evil. If you see several homicides a day, that becomes the norm for you, and you project it out onto the rest of the world, assuming that people are being killed left and right, and that the people you see on the street are capable of doing harm. The trick is to look at the statistics every so often, to remind yourself that it is not true, and your chances of being a homicide victim are quite slim depending, of course, on where you live.
"Forensic science offers great potential, as it draws on almost every discipline and, in doing so, creates widespread opportunity for innovation."
--Mark Walport
LYNN: If you had one piece of advice for a mystery author, what would it be?
BARBARA: Do your research. There are plenty of interesting ways to learn about forensics and police procedures but not from watching TV procedurals! Those are mostly fantasies; no police department in the country has big magic screens that can track a person's whereabouts with little green dots showing his escape route.
For the truly serious writer, there are books like Vernon Geberth’s “Practical Homicide Investigation” or Spitz and Fisher’s “Medicolegal Investigation of Death.” More accessible are books of the genre Forensics for Dummies or similar.
Learning about forensics can help you craft a story and lead the reader where you want to take them; the different findings between an accidental fall from a roof vs. a homicidal push can be found in our textbooks. A basic knowledge of forensics can help a writer see ways to cover up a crime, and then show how a smart investigator detects it later.
LYNN: After reading your book, I’m amazed at how unjaded you are toward life in general. You’ve seen some of the worst of the worst and yet didn’t seem to judge people. How did you do that?
BARBARA: Only with a lot of work and therapy. It was easy to believe the world was evil, given that I saw it in living color every day, and for a long time I did harbor those feelings. I also saw acts of grace and kindness, especially among the police. NYPD is known for its hard-ass detectives and tough cops, but a lot of that is a self-protective mask. They see the worst of people, yet still show compassion to victims and even some perpetrators. I’ve seen detectives give drug addicts a break when they are in bad shape, even taking them to the hospital instead of jail. I’ve watched cops dig into their own pockets to buy lunch for homeless guys loitering in parks. They might chase them off, but they will feed them first. I learned something from seeing that. If they aren’t going to judge people, neither am I.
LYNN: How did you learn to compartmentalize to such a degree that you could shut out the squalor, gore, smell, and brutality and just focus on the mechanics of your job?
BARBARA: I was able to do my job by dropping a curtain of detachment over myself. It didn’t always work, especially with murdered children. I reminded myself often that if I reacted emotionally, I wouldn’t be able to do my best for the victims. So, I would slam the door closed on my heart. Unfortunately, if you close off one emotion the others follow quickly—I became shut down in all areas of life, especially relationships. That took a long time to fix, and it lingers still.
A medical examiner gave me good advice while I watched her do an autopsy on an eight-year-old girl who was raped and smothered. “Surround yourself with things of beauty every day. When you go home, listen to music, look at art, dance, love, eat. Do it daily to remind yourself of the joy of life, and to counteract the despair of what we see.” It was good advice, and I wish I had followed it sooner than I did.
LYNN: Barbara, thank you. You have been very generous with your time, and I hope people will read your book. It was enlightening and made me realize how tough some of these jobs are and the valor with which people like you do them.
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