Barbara Butcher
Official Website
New Release
What The Dead Know
(2023)
In What the Dead Know, Barbara Butcher 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.
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Homicide: New York
From Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, Wolf Entertainment and Alfred Street Industries comes Homicide, a new docuseries that illuminates the stories of notorious murder cases as told by the people who know them best: the detectives and prosecutors who cracked them.
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“An unprecedented gutsy view of the Rue Morgue in New York City, told by one of its greatest characters. Barbara Butcher stares life and death in the face and doesn’t avert her gaze. She’s the real deal. Her stories and insights are breathtakingly honest, compassionate, and raw. What the Dead Know is impossible to put down. A must read, it’s destined to be a classic.”
Patricia Cornwell
#1 New York Times Best Selling Author
Praise & Reviews
"Within the first hour or so of WHAT THE DEAD KNOW the author and narrator Barbara Butcher makes clear that there’s no escaping the parallels between her real life and the crime dramas that have fascinated audiences for generations. Her biography feels lifted from a noir film."
The New York Times
"Her blunt-spoken and occasionally lyrical memoir of her career as a medicolegal death investigator with NYC’s OCME. Her remarkably candid and sensitive memoir reveals how she learned to navigate a heart-wrenching line of work and to overcome her own demons."
Wall Street Journal
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