
What the Dead Know
Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
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Narrated by:
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Barbara Butcher
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By:
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Barbara Butcher
“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
Now featured in the five-part docuseries on Netflix, Homicide: New York
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.
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Thank you, Barbara, for your authenticity and for all the work you did in your career. Thank you for pouring yourself into this audible!
I could not turn it off once I started listening. Thank you to Duty Ron for introducing your work through h podcast.
Poured her heart into this book!
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Raw, beautiful, and surprisingly full of hope
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looking forward to more books from you... there are not many book that talk about lesbians in the forensic field or lab setting when in real life that is the case. if there is I need the name if the book or series plz.
this book was simply inspiring
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Excellent book
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Wonderful Read
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Wow, love it!
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What the Dead Know
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Gritty and real
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Thank you Barbara for putting it all out there. The level of honesty and vulnerability could only come from a strong, brave woman.
There are no coincidences.
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Thank you, Barbara F**king Butcher, for choosing to be present for others, eventually also for yourself and for those who care about you.
For all if us: may we be inspired to be advocates for ourselves and others who are struggling with the weight of life so our stories may also be authentic tales of hope and the power of love and connection even through the darkest times.
Be well
Authentic Raw & Present
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