September 13, 2023 • 32 mins
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.”
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review! How to Leave an Apple Podcast Review: First, Open the podcast app on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad. Then, hit the “Search” tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the page and search for Zone 7. Select the podcast, scroll down to find the subheading “Ratings & Reviews”. and select “Write a Review.” Next, select the number of stars you’d like to leave. Please choose 5 stars! Using the text box which says “Title,” write a title for your review. Then in the text box, write the review itself. The review can be up to 300 words long, but doesn’t need to be much more than: “Love the show! Thanks!” or Once you’re done select “Send” in the upper right-hand corner.
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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: coldcase2004@gmail.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
When I was fifteen years old and was starting to
drive a car. My mother and I were traveling just
on kind of a lonely country road, and up ahead
there was some children playing in the street, like kickball
or something. I remember I blew the horn, thinking the
children just get out of the street, but I did
not reduce my speed. After I got safely past them.
(00:30):
She said to me to always be real cautious, that
children were unpredictable, that they could have changed their mind
and gone back into the roadway or tried to run
across the street, and that I didn't ever want to
be a part of any type of incident where something
happened to a child. She said, you would never forget it.
(00:52):
And she said when something like that traumatic happens, since
you can't forget it, you just got to live with it. Today, y'all,
when I tell you, I am like a kid myself
because I get to talk to a legend an extraordinary
human being. We've got Barbara Butcher with us. She is
(01:15):
a legendary death investigator out of Manhattan. She was the
first woman to have that job longer than three months.
She knows the underbelly, the dark side. She knows what
human beings can do to each other. She knows the dangers,
and you know what, she couldn't get enough of it.
(01:37):
For more than twenty years, she worked homicides, double homicides, suicides,
horrible accidents. She also worked underage victims of rape murder scenes.
She has that New York attitude. I'm told y'all know
that bravado. She has been to more than five thousand
(01:59):
and five one hundred death scenes. She knows what death
looks like. She knows what murder looks like. She will
tell you work and death every day teaches you about life.
But I'm gonna let her tell you. Barbara Butcher, Welcome,
Welcome to Zown Heaven.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Thank you so much, Cheryl. It's a pleasure to be here.
And thank you for that lovely introduction. Wow makes me
sound kind of cool, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh honey, you are the coolest. I'm telling you right now.
And let me just prove to people how cool you are.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
So.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
She has a book. It's called What the Dead No. Now,
I read an answer that you gave to another person.
I'm going to read a little bit of your answer,
and I want you to finish it for us. Just
to show people how cool you are, you said, and
I quote, this is a memoir of my life as
(02:54):
an addict, a recovering alcoholic who struggled to say sober
throughout the work. I ultimately came out on the other
end better able to live a life with beauty, creativity,
and enjoyment. I could bemoan being an alcoholic, but being
(03:15):
an alcoholic got me that job. The Employment program for
recovered alcoholics sent me to vocational training, where they gave
me a budget test and said, you should be a
poultry veterinarian or a corner If you work with puppies
or kittens, you'll always be upset if they're sick. But chickens,
(03:37):
those beady little eyes.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Nobody cares about chickens. I said, hmm, I'll tick dead people.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
So there you go, folks. It's just that simple.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So I tell you, your career is so vast and
so interesting and frankly incredible that you don't even really
know where to start.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
But I'm going to start where I see it in
my head. A lot of times, Barbara, when I'm thinking
about a particular person in their work life, a movie
starts to play in my head and for you. I
see you rolling up on the scene and there's a
bunch of cops stand in there, and you're like Butcher
(04:23):
for the medical Examiner, and all I can think of
is New York City cops. I'm sure the jokes were
effortless and abundant.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Constant, absolutely constant. There's nothing better than NYPD. And yes,
you're absolutely right. I love rolling up in that car
and you know, lights and sirens, and i'd maybe do
a little boot boop on a siren, say hello and
jumping out of there and flashing that nice gold shield.
How you doing, boys? What do you got for me?
(04:57):
And they'd be like, oh, it's doctor Butcher. I say,
I'm not a doctor. Yeah we know, but it just
sounds so damn good.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
You gotta love NYPD. I've told this story before, but
not to you, so I will tell you. When I
was a little girl, I used to tell my mama
that I wanted to marry an Italian man because I
thought I thought, going into police work, that's the last
name you needed, you know. But of course when I
fell in love with Walt, you know, she told me, Look,
(05:31):
there's a long, solid history of good Irish cops in Boston,
so I felt a little okay with it. But there's
just nothing to me like a humor of police officers anyway.
In that camaraderie and that humor, I think their love
for you comes through in the way they treat you.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Absolutely. I mean it didn't start out that way, mind you.
As you mentioned, I was the first woman in Manhattan
to last more than three months. The woman before me
ran out screaming. I don't know if it's from the
work or from working with the guys at the office.
The first time I rolled up to a case on
(06:10):
my own, I stepped up to the doorway and the
detective stopped me and he said, yeah, honey, how can
I help you. I said, well, I'm high, I'm Barbara
Butcher from the medical office, and I want to examine
the body and you know, do the death scene investigation.
He said, yeah, honey, don't worry about it. Crime scene's
already here. They're taken care of it. I said, no, no, no,
(06:33):
you know, I have to do my job real meek,
you know. And then I thought, you know what, this
is bullshit, this bullshit now, this is this is not
how it goes. So the next time I went out,
and a detective stopped me and said, yeah, honey, how
can I help you? I said, you know what, you
can't help me, but you know what I'm talking about.
(06:54):
I'm going to go in there. I'm going to examine
that dead guy. I'm going to tell you why he died,
how he died, how long it took, how long he's
been dead, and maybe even who did it. And then
when you go to court, you can say, Barbara Butcher
told me, so, how's that?
Speaker 1 (07:08):
That might be the greatest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
He said, all right, all right, honey, you go in.
You go right in.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
All right, honey, you go in. That is fantastic. Now
you've had again some situations in your career that were
pretty unbelievable. Talk about the time you had a cast
on your arm.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Oh jeez, you know this still. I've been dining out
on this story for years, so I use it to
open the book. But I was bitching and moaning because
I had to I was out a sick time. But
yet my left arm wasn't a cast because I cut
a tendon with a saw trying to pretend to be
a woodworker. And I was bitching and moaning but I
(07:51):
had to go out on a case and they said, Barbara,
you got a hanging man. So when I got there,
police officers said, hmm, you know there's no light in here.
The electricity must have been cut off, but looks like
the guy committed suicide. Maybe that was just the last
straw having no electricity. So I went in and I
(08:13):
used his flashlight and my flashlight, and I did my examination.
You know, the guy was hanging, didn't look anything too unusual,
big heavy set fellow. Back then, this is in nineteen
ninety two or ninety three, we used polaroid cameras, nice
big flash and pictures that didn't last all that long,
but that's what we had. So I took all my
(08:35):
pictures and I examined him. I said, all right, looks
like a suicide. And then I went to do my usual,
which was to grab a buck knife out of my case,
and then i'd hold the ligature with my left hand
and just so I could steady him. Then i'd cut
the ligature and let him down, just so he wouldn't
(08:56):
crash down to the floor. Then I realized, wait a second, hmm,
I can't do this. My hands in a cast. I thought, well,
when the guys get here from the Morgue wagon, they
can cut him down. So I left him hanging there
in the dark, you know, no lights, no nothing, and
(09:16):
that poor police officer had to sit in there in
the dark and watch him sway and back and forth
in the little air condition breeze. So I got back
to my office and I'm writing my reports and I'm
looking at my photos and I see, hmm, this is interesting.
Under his neck the ligature was actually an outdoor extension cord,
(09:38):
those orange heavy duty ones. That's pretty good because that
won't break. And then the next photo I saw that
it was actually plugged in to the wall. Now wait
a second, why would his ligature this extension cord. Why
would it be plugged in and there's no electricity anyway.
Then it came to me, damn. I called a police
(10:02):
officer the scene. I said, look, don't let anybody cut
him down. He said why, I said, look, go screw
in the light bulbs check him. He went. A couple
seconds later he came back. He said, yeah, there's light.
The light bulbs were all loose. And then I explained
to him this guy in his suicide had plugged himself
(10:24):
into the wall and pretended there was no electricity, so
that whoever cut him down would be killed or hurt badly.
Because he was an angry suicide. It wasn't enough to
kill himself. He wanted to take somebody with him, And
if I didn't have my hand in a cast I
(10:44):
would have cut him down and been electrocuted.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Said the Morgan, New York. Kind of paint us a picture.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Well back when I first started, it was an absolute
hell hole. It's down in the basement and it's just
those green tile walls and then endless rows of more drawers,
a kind where you pull you pull out a drawer
and there's a body laying in there. Now, the problem
with that is now that those drawers were stacked like
(11:18):
three high, so it's hard to get the bodies up
and down. But more than that, behind the wall of
drawers there are just endless racks. They're all open, so
the maggots will fall down from the bodies and land
on the floor, and then they'll crawl off and develop
(11:41):
into poopa and then flies, and then birds come in
to eat those little maggots. So you could walk down
in the morgue any morning to go do daily rounds
and see what kind of cases were on the menu,
and you see little bluebirds and sparrows flying through the wall.
I used to call them the bluebirds of Happiness, just
(12:04):
for Irony's sake, but they were out there plucking maggots
off people and going in and out of those drawers.
The more tables were pretty cruddy, but a couple of
years later they finally renovated it and made big walk
in refrigerators so that we could at least wheel people
(12:27):
in and then put them on racks. But it was
easier to keep clean because that smell was mighty bad.
As you know.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Well, I asked her to paint a picture there you go.
You know, it's kind of funny sometimes when friends will
say to me, Hey, I'm watching this new show and
you know, the crime scene investigator pulls up to the
scene and there's the homicide detective and they're both real sexy,
and there's this sexual tension. Is it like that? I'm like, sugar,
(12:56):
it's just like that. Yes, it's exactly what it is.
And don't listen to Barbara Butcher.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
That's right, night and day sex. Sex sex, that's all
it is.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
That's all it is. That's what we do when we're
not somewhere having fabulous cocktails. You know it Sometimes when
I watch TV, it just makes me laugh. And then
when I get those questions, you know, it really makes
me laugh. And then when I hear you paint the
picture of the morgue, I'm like, well, she's gonna break
some hearts when she starts talking. But you know, one
(13:29):
interesting thing about your job as a medical examiner death
investigator that I think people don't always attribute to y'all
is y'all help save lives too, because y'all are exposed
to things long before the general public and sometimes law
enforcement has even put together. So talk about things like
(13:50):
car accidents and the seat you know, seat belts because
y'all see what the steering.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Wheel will do. Yeah, that's one of the things that
you know, kept the job. It made me happy. It
kept the job a little lighter. And that was that
medical examiners and investigators were the ones seeing little kids
go out the windows in New York City. So we
reported it, collected the data, and then epidemiologists said, yeah,
(14:18):
they're right, there's too many. So they made a law
for window guards if you have a child in the home.
Same thing with seat belts. Medical examiners and investigators see
the injuries in the chest, the reason you need shoulder
belts and the air bags. And then there's the crazy
(14:38):
things like subway surfing. You know, I describe in the
book The Sports of New York Now subway surfing is
one of the most dangerous sports in the world. That's
when you jump on the back of a subway and
then you climb up on top and you ride through
those tunnels. Maybe your head gets knocked off by a
(14:59):
piece of equipment, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you try jumping
from one subway to another one that's going even in
the opposite direction. I've seen and these kids they ride
the subways. There's about oh, I think we've got four
deaths this year, or is it three, whatever it is,
(15:21):
even if it's one death, I mean just telling the
public about things like this, that there is subway surfing,
there's elevator surfing. That's where you jump from one elevator
car or the other back and forth. You know, this
is these are crazy things that kill people. And then
of course it's stuff like you know, COVID or AB
(15:43):
and flu and you know, various diseases that we notice
a sudden uptick and deaths. So yeah, we did. We
get together. We got to do some good in the world.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
And you mentioned earlier when you first started how you
were kind of treated. But I will tell you I
was speaking to my buddy Scott Wagner just a couple
of days ago, and in mid sentence he stops and says,
you got to connect with Barbara Butcher. And I told
him you don't already have I promise you she's going
to be on Zone seven. But the level of respect
(16:15):
that he has for you just resonated with every accolade
that he gave you and every just I mean, he
just used every glowing word he could think of to
describe you and working with you. And I want you
to talk a little bit about you know, once you
kind of make your bones, so to speak, working with
(16:39):
the guys, working with the media, working you know, with
even other experts. But again, you are so revered and
renowned that I think any advice from you as far
as hey, this is how you make your way.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
God, that's so. You know, you're making me cry a
little bit here. I miss those days so bad. Oh
my god, Oh, well, I longed to be out on
the street with the guys again, and then the men
and women of NYPD just such a great, great team.
But you know, it did take me a little time
to make my bones, as you say, and that I
(17:15):
think was based on a couple of things. One is
being tough, not taking any nonsense, as I've described before,
but also really caring about my work and their work.
I studied all the time, I learned all the time.
I took advantage of every course there was, and I
(17:37):
did go to all the NYPD courses they're homicide, CIC,
special Victims, cold killings. I'd take my time off my
vacation time and use it to go to their courses.
They were fantastic. But I think the fact that when
I'm on scene, I'm focused because my responsibility is not
(17:59):
just to get justice for this victim, but answers for families.
And my job was to be a resource for the
police department to explain the physical findings, the medical findings
that they needed to do their job. And I have
(18:19):
great respect for their job, and I think that translated
back to respect for me. And I also enjoy teaching.
I love teaching, so whenever i'd go to a scene,
I'd wait for the crime scene guys to get there
before I started messing with the body, so i'd do
my scene photos, my measurements and all that, interview witnesses
(18:41):
when they got there. Then I'd examine the body and
point out to them every little thing I saw, Like,
you know, see, guys, how the abrasion and this gunshot
wound is on the lower corner here, see that, so
how we angle it up so he was shot from below?
Or you know, this doesn't match with a bullet impact mark,
(19:02):
so therefore we know this body was moved, and just
things like that, you know. Then they'd teach me some things,
and they'd say, Barbara, we're going to go in and
question this witness. You want to come with us? Hell, yeah,
I do. I want to do everything. Oh and even
though I'm kind of a scaredy cat now, I'm always
(19:23):
worried about disasters, having lived through several of them, back then,
I loved doing crazy things like going up in the
helicopter with the aviation guys and they take me out
over the beach, and then they'd know I'd be sitting
in that jump seat and just holding onto a strap
and they'd tilt the chopper so that I could get scared,
(19:44):
but then I just yell yahoo, you know, and they'd
keep doing it and they couldn't scare me. Or climbing
up on upon ladders to go up on top of
those bulkheads on Broute to find a gun that somebody
threw up there, or you know, body part someone jumped.
(20:05):
Or crawling in the tunnels beneath Manhattan to find the
caves where the mole people live. That was adventure. To me.
That was like Huckleberry finn stuff. And I think the
guys enjoyed that. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
So much, you know, with how question Oh my gosh,
Now you mentioned living through a couple of disasters, So
I want to talk about nineteen ninety three in the
World Trade Center bombing.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
That this is going to Stalance. Sounds strange, but sometimes
scenes of great destruction are beautiful. They're so striking, so
outside the norm of our vision of our experience that
they're almost gorgeous. So in nineteen ninety three, a rider
(20:54):
truck drove into the garage of the World Trade Center
and set off an anphobomb fertilizer and it blew a
huge spherical hole of several acres across into the heart
of the World Trade Center. And now that day I
(21:16):
was supposed to be doing office work and you know,
working on hospital cases. So I had on a skirt
and heels, and my boss grabbed me and said, you
want to go down to the World Trade Center with me?
And bomb just went off. Well, hell, yeah, of course
I do. So I'm climbing through the brubble, and the
high heels helping me get a grip, you know, because
they dig into the brubble. And I'm so awestruck by
(21:41):
the sight of this huge crater with cars at the
bottom of it, with wires, you know, arcing, the electrical
bolt shooting out, and a huge water pipe must have
been two or three feet across, water pouring out of
it into the hole. And it's lit up by spotlights,
(22:02):
so everything is shining and glowing and pulsing with energy
and destruction and force. And my boss and I are
both all struck, and we're standing at the edge of
the crater, and suddenly I see about ten feet to
my right as a guy also standing at the edge
of the crater, and he starts slipping down its starting
(22:23):
to be like a little landslide. So we jumped back
and we're just standing there with our mouths open, and
then my boss said, Barber, there's some people down there.
I said, yep, oh, I guess I've gotter changed my clothes,
and I did, and we went down there and we
found the first five people. Only six people died. Can
(22:45):
you imagine that a bomb of that size, of that magnitude,
and only six people died, thank god. And we found
the first five very quickly, and then it took about
maybe a week to find the last person. But I
was down there day, digging around in the rubble and
just completely knocked out by the magnitude of destruction. It
(23:10):
was the biggest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I was in charge of the crisis response team for
the Olympic Games in Atlanta, which would have been nothing
to anybody except we had a bomb. And it was
the largest pipe bomb in North America at the time.
And the way he had positioned it, he wanted it
to implode and then explode, which would have caused that
(23:39):
entire tower to come down and then shrapnel would have
been devastating. But because the young people that found it
kicked it over. It became almost like a roaming candle
just straight out and only killed Alice Hawthorne. But to
your point, it was one of those scenes that you
(24:03):
can't really describe because the magnitude that it was and
the magnitude that it could have been, it's parallel in
your mind as you're working.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It's a strange feeling. It's a feeling of awe in
so many different directions. You know, awe at the destruction
and awe at the fact that humans could survive it.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
And you and I have another thing in common a
little bit, and that's nine to eleven. During nine to eleven,
I was sent to the Pentagon with the crisis response
team while you were probably working World Trade Center again, yep,
and that's a case that talk about the magnitude you
(24:45):
had the unbelievable job of identifying people from body parts.
Talk a little bit about that again.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's awe inspiring to go down there and see skyscrapers,
the tallest skyscrapers reduced to just acres and acres of rubble.
To look at a place there that maybe just a
couple of weeks before, I had been up on the
top of the World Trade Center for a date, and
we were sitting there sipping on drinks or water in
(25:19):
my case, and looking out at the sunset, and it
was just romantic and beautiful. And now the piano that
had been up there, the bar, the bartenders, the people,
they're all at the bottom of a pit or in
a pile of rubble that was burning. So I went
down there, and again I was just awestruck, standing there
(25:43):
with my mouth open. And we had pretty much reports
of just under three thousand people dead, but they were
represented by more than twenty five thousand body parts and fragments,
and that was how we identified sixty percent of them.
(26:05):
The other forty percent who have never been identified. Now
after twenty two years, maybe they were vaporized. I don't know.
But so great were the forces, so overwhelming was the
magnitude of this attack that it just vaporized people into
absolute nothingness. And you may have heard the expression that
(26:26):
one death is a tragedy and a thousand deaths is
a statistic. Well, I'll tell you something. If you're crawling
around on that rubble looking for body parts and you
see a desk calendar that says lunch with Jim Tuesday,
or a little I found, like a little desk set
with a pen in it and a golf ball. It
(26:48):
was a souvenir of a holy one and that something
that that person who was so proud of and had
on their desk, or the worst graduation picture from elementary school,
somebody's kids. So it's not a statistic. Every one of
those little possessions defines a person, and that person is
(27:14):
a universe. They have feelings and thoughts and relationships, families, mothers, fathers, sisters, wives, husbands.
Each of them is the universe. And when you're crawling
around there on that rubble, it becomes very, very apparent
to you just how important every single life is. And I,
(27:37):
you know, I say that nine to eleven ruined me.
I mean, I'm sure I was ruined long before from
all the the tragedies I had seen. I was already
starting to get a little crazy, but nine to eleven
just knocked it way out of the park. That was bad.
That was real bad.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Again, you can't describe it to people. And I remember
one of the folks from our team that had been
in New York came and met us in Washington and
he said that he was talking to a police officer
right there in the center of it, and he said.
The police officer turned to him and he said, see
those people two streets over, he said, don't they even
(28:16):
know what happened? Like they're going on about their life,
They're shopping, they're going to brunch, they're doing these things
like we're not two streets over here.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Isn't that something when you're in the middle of the
worst chaos that human beings can inflict on each other,
and then you look a few feet away and there's
somebody over at the Levis store buying jeans. Perspective, Yeah,
there's a reality smack yep that hits you every so often.
(28:46):
I mean, any of us in this job, or these jobs,
police first responders, police fire EMTs, or last responders like me,
you know, you see these things that are so puzzling,
so damaging, so tragic, and then you look around and
(29:09):
the world's going on. But meanwhile, in our minds, the
world is full of destruction and evil and terrifying things
just waiting to happen. Because that's what we see all
day long. You do four or five cases a day,
you start to think everybody's a damn murderer or a victim.
And then you come home and your partner says, well,
(29:33):
I'm thinking we should plan a vacation. Why don't you
start looking at airfares? And I'm like, what the what
are you talking about? Do you know what I saw?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
To right? Dahiti ain't gonna get that out of my head,
but I'm gonna go anyway. It's worth a shot. But
you know, it's funny because you just said something that
is so true. A lot of times people will say, well,
as a first responder, and I will often correct them.
I'm a crime scene investigator. I'm a last responder. You know,
(30:08):
I'm the last shot of getting that evidence. And you
are too. You're you're after me, so you're the last
last shot. And I take that job very seriously.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
We get justice for people, and we prevent people from
going on and killing again and again and again.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Y'all see why I love and adore this woman. I mean,
everything you say is so true, and I know you
know the accolades and all that, you're not here for it,
but again, I just want to say, you are a hero,
and you're a hero to so many people, not just
law enforcement, but anybody out there suffering with addiction. I mean,
(30:47):
you give so much hope, and you give disrespect to
the job. You give respect to recovery, which I don't
think is done enough. And in our world in law enforcement,
there needs to be so much help and understanding with addiction.
So again I want to thank you on several levels.
But again for me. You know, I'm talking to one
(31:09):
of my heroes, and this has just been a fantastic,
fantastic time for me, and I just appreciate you so much.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Oh, thank you, Thank you so much. Your aunt means
a lot to me. And don't get me all crying now,
you know that's not my style.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Well, if you ever come through Atlanta, I got a
police car with some blue lights, we will go take
a ride.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
I like that.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I will pick you up at the airport and I
will change your life. It'll be awesome. I'm going to
end Zone seven the way that I always do with
a quote. This quote comes from Patricia Cornwell where she writes,
with Kay Scarpetta number twenty one, you don't ever get
over it. I think some things you won't get over.
(31:54):
Not ever, you can't. I'm Cheryl McCollum, and this is
Zone seven a
When I was fifteen years old and was starting to
drive a car. My mother and I were traveling just
on kind of a lonely country road, and up ahead
there was some children playing in the street, like kickball
or something. I remember I blew the horn, thinking the
children just get out of the street, but I did
not reduce my speed. After I got safely past them.
(00:30):
She said to me to always be real cautious, that
children were unpredictable, that they could have changed their mind
and gone back into the roadway or tried to run
across the street, and that I didn't ever want to
be a part of any type of incident where something
happened to a child. She said, you would never forget it.
(00:52):
And she said when something like that traumatic happens, since
you can't forget it, you just got to live with it. Today, y'all,
when I tell you, I am like a kid myself
because I get to talk to a legend an extraordinary
human being. We've got Barbara Butcher with us. She is
(01:15):
a legendary death investigator out of Manhattan. She was the
first woman to have that job longer than three months.
She knows the underbelly, the dark side. She knows what
human beings can do to each other. She knows the dangers,
and you know what, she couldn't get enough of it.
(01:37):
For more than twenty years, she worked homicides, double homicides, suicides,
horrible accidents. She also worked underage victims of rape murder scenes.
She has that New York attitude. I'm told y'all know
that bravado. She has been to more than five thousand
(01:59):
and five one hundred death scenes. She knows what death
looks like. She knows what murder looks like. She will
tell you work and death every day teaches you about life.
But I'm gonna let her tell you. Barbara Butcher, Welcome,
Welcome to Zown Heaven.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Thank you so much, Cheryl. It's a pleasure to be here.
And thank you for that lovely introduction. Wow makes me
sound kind of cool, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Oh honey, you are the coolest. I'm telling you right now.
And let me just prove to people how cool you are.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
So.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
She has a book. It's called What the Dead No. Now,
I read an answer that you gave to another person.
I'm going to read a little bit of your answer,
and I want you to finish it for us. Just
to show people how cool you are, you said, and
I quote, this is a memoir of my life as
(02:54):
an addict, a recovering alcoholic who struggled to say sober
throughout the work. I ultimately came out on the other
end better able to live a life with beauty, creativity,
and enjoyment. I could bemoan being an alcoholic, but being
(03:15):
an alcoholic got me that job. The Employment program for
recovered alcoholics sent me to vocational training, where they gave
me a budget test and said, you should be a
poultry veterinarian or a corner If you work with puppies
or kittens, you'll always be upset if they're sick. But chickens,
(03:37):
those beady little eyes.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Nobody cares about chickens. I said, hmm, I'll tick dead people.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
So there you go, folks. It's just that simple.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So I tell you, your career is so vast and
so interesting and frankly incredible that you don't even really
know where to start.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
But I'm going to start where I see it in
my head. A lot of times, Barbara, when I'm thinking
about a particular person in their work life, a movie
starts to play in my head and for you. I
see you rolling up on the scene and there's a
bunch of cops stand in there, and you're like Butcher
(04:23):
for the medical Examiner, and all I can think of
is New York City cops. I'm sure the jokes were
effortless and abundant.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Constant, absolutely constant. There's nothing better than NYPD. And yes,
you're absolutely right. I love rolling up in that car
and you know, lights and sirens, and i'd maybe do
a little boot boop on a siren, say hello and
jumping out of there and flashing that nice gold shield.
How you doing, boys? What do you got for me?
(04:57):
And they'd be like, oh, it's doctor Butcher. I say,
I'm not a doctor. Yeah we know, but it just
sounds so damn good.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
You gotta love NYPD. I've told this story before, but
not to you, so I will tell you. When I
was a little girl, I used to tell my mama
that I wanted to marry an Italian man because I
thought I thought, going into police work, that's the last
name you needed, you know. But of course when I
fell in love with Walt, you know, she told me, Look,
(05:31):
there's a long, solid history of good Irish cops in Boston,
so I felt a little okay with it. But there's
just nothing to me like a humor of police officers anyway.
In that camaraderie and that humor, I think their love
for you comes through in the way they treat you.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Absolutely. I mean it didn't start out that way, mind you.
As you mentioned, I was the first woman in Manhattan
to last more than three months. The woman before me
ran out screaming. I don't know if it's from the
work or from working with the guys at the office.
The first time I rolled up to a case on
(06:10):
my own, I stepped up to the doorway and the
detective stopped me and he said, yeah, honey, how can
I help you. I said, well, I'm high, I'm Barbara
Butcher from the medical office, and I want to examine
the body and you know, do the death scene investigation.
He said, yeah, honey, don't worry about it. Crime scene's
already here. They're taken care of it. I said, no, no, no,
(06:33):
you know, I have to do my job real meek,
you know. And then I thought, you know what, this
is bullshit, this bullshit now, this is this is not
how it goes. So the next time I went out,
and a detective stopped me and said, yeah, honey, how
can I help you? I said, you know what, you
can't help me, but you know what I'm talking about.
(06:54):
I'm going to go in there. I'm going to examine
that dead guy. I'm going to tell you why he died,
how he died, how long it took, how long he's
been dead, and maybe even who did it. And then
when you go to court, you can say, Barbara Butcher
told me, so, how's that?
Speaker 1 (07:08):
That might be the greatest thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
He said, all right, all right, honey, you go in.
You go right in.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
All right, honey, you go in. That is fantastic. Now
you've had again some situations in your career that were
pretty unbelievable. Talk about the time you had a cast
on your arm.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Oh jeez, you know this still. I've been dining out
on this story for years, so I use it to
open the book. But I was bitching and moaning because
I had to I was out a sick time. But
yet my left arm wasn't a cast because I cut
a tendon with a saw trying to pretend to be
a woodworker. And I was bitching and moaning but I
(07:51):
had to go out on a case and they said, Barbara,
you got a hanging man. So when I got there,
police officers said, hmm, you know there's no light in here.
The electricity must have been cut off, but looks like
the guy committed suicide. Maybe that was just the last
straw having no electricity. So I went in and I
(08:13):
used his flashlight and my flashlight, and I did my examination.
You know, the guy was hanging, didn't look anything too unusual,
big heavy set fellow. Back then, this is in nineteen
ninety two or ninety three, we used polaroid cameras, nice
big flash and pictures that didn't last all that long,
but that's what we had. So I took all my
(08:35):
pictures and I examined him. I said, all right, looks
like a suicide. And then I went to do my usual,
which was to grab a buck knife out of my case,
and then i'd hold the ligature with my left hand
and just so I could steady him. Then i'd cut
the ligature and let him down, just so he wouldn't
(08:56):
crash down to the floor. Then I realized, wait a second, hmm,
I can't do this. My hands in a cast. I thought, well,
when the guys get here from the Morgue wagon, they
can cut him down. So I left him hanging there
in the dark, you know, no lights, no nothing, and
(09:16):
that poor police officer had to sit in there in
the dark and watch him sway and back and forth
in the little air condition breeze. So I got back
to my office and I'm writing my reports and I'm
looking at my photos and I see, hmm, this is interesting.
Under his neck the ligature was actually an outdoor extension cord,
(09:38):
those orange heavy duty ones. That's pretty good because that
won't break. And then the next photo I saw that
it was actually plugged in to the wall. Now wait
a second, why would his ligature this extension cord. Why
would it be plugged in and there's no electricity anyway.
Then it came to me, damn. I called a police
(10:02):
officer the scene. I said, look, don't let anybody cut
him down. He said why, I said, look, go screw
in the light bulbs check him. He went. A couple
seconds later he came back. He said, yeah, there's light.
The light bulbs were all loose. And then I explained
to him this guy in his suicide had plugged himself
(10:24):
into the wall and pretended there was no electricity, so
that whoever cut him down would be killed or hurt badly.
Because he was an angry suicide. It wasn't enough to
kill himself. He wanted to take somebody with him, And
if I didn't have my hand in a cast I
(10:44):
would have cut him down and been electrocuted.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Said the Morgan, New York. Kind of paint us a picture.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Well back when I first started, it was an absolute
hell hole. It's down in the basement and it's just
those green tile walls and then endless rows of more drawers,
a kind where you pull you pull out a drawer
and there's a body laying in there. Now, the problem
with that is now that those drawers were stacked like
(11:18):
three high, so it's hard to get the bodies up
and down. But more than that, behind the wall of
drawers there are just endless racks. They're all open, so
the maggots will fall down from the bodies and land
on the floor, and then they'll crawl off and develop
(11:41):
into poopa and then flies, and then birds come in
to eat those little maggots. So you could walk down
in the morgue any morning to go do daily rounds
and see what kind of cases were on the menu,
and you see little bluebirds and sparrows flying through the wall.
I used to call them the bluebirds of Happiness, just
(12:04):
for Irony's sake, but they were out there plucking maggots
off people and going in and out of those drawers.
The more tables were pretty cruddy, but a couple of
years later they finally renovated it and made big walk
in refrigerators so that we could at least wheel people
(12:27):
in and then put them on racks. But it was
easier to keep clean because that smell was mighty bad.
As you know.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Well, I asked her to paint a picture there you go.
You know, it's kind of funny sometimes when friends will
say to me, Hey, I'm watching this new show and
you know, the crime scene investigator pulls up to the
scene and there's the homicide detective and they're both real sexy,
and there's this sexual tension. Is it like that? I'm like, sugar,
(12:56):
it's just like that. Yes, it's exactly what it is.
And don't listen to Barbara Butcher.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
That's right, night and day sex. Sex sex, that's all
it is.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
That's all it is. That's what we do when we're
not somewhere having fabulous cocktails. You know it Sometimes when
I watch TV, it just makes me laugh. And then
when I get those questions, you know, it really makes
me laugh. And then when I hear you paint the
picture of the morgue, I'm like, well, she's gonna break
some hearts when she starts talking. But you know, one
(13:29):
interesting thing about your job as a medical examiner death
investigator that I think people don't always attribute to y'all
is y'all help save lives too, because y'all are exposed
to things long before the general public and sometimes law
enforcement has even put together. So talk about things like
(13:50):
car accidents and the seat you know, seat belts because
y'all see what the steering.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Wheel will do. Yeah, that's one of the things that
you know, kept the job. It made me happy. It
kept the job a little lighter. And that was that
medical examiners and investigators were the ones seeing little kids
go out the windows in New York City. So we
reported it, collected the data, and then epidemiologists said, yeah,
(14:18):
they're right, there's too many. So they made a law
for window guards if you have a child in the home.
Same thing with seat belts. Medical examiners and investigators see
the injuries in the chest, the reason you need shoulder
belts and the air bags. And then there's the crazy
(14:38):
things like subway surfing. You know, I describe in the
book The Sports of New York Now subway surfing is
one of the most dangerous sports in the world. That's
when you jump on the back of a subway and
then you climb up on top and you ride through
those tunnels. Maybe your head gets knocked off by a
(14:59):
piece of equipment, maybe it doesn't. Maybe you try jumping
from one subway to another one that's going even in
the opposite direction. I've seen and these kids they ride
the subways. There's about oh, I think we've got four
deaths this year, or is it three, whatever it is,
(15:21):
even if it's one death, I mean just telling the
public about things like this, that there is subway surfing,
there's elevator surfing. That's where you jump from one elevator
car or the other back and forth. You know, this
is these are crazy things that kill people. And then
of course it's stuff like you know, COVID or AB
(15:43):
and flu and you know, various diseases that we notice
a sudden uptick and deaths. So yeah, we did. We
get together. We got to do some good in the world.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
And you mentioned earlier when you first started how you
were kind of treated. But I will tell you I
was speaking to my buddy Scott Wagner just a couple
of days ago, and in mid sentence he stops and says,
you got to connect with Barbara Butcher. And I told
him you don't already have I promise you she's going
to be on Zone seven. But the level of respect
(16:15):
that he has for you just resonated with every accolade
that he gave you and every just I mean, he
just used every glowing word he could think of to
describe you and working with you. And I want you
to talk a little bit about you know, once you
kind of make your bones, so to speak, working with
(16:39):
the guys, working with the media, working you know, with
even other experts. But again, you are so revered and
renowned that I think any advice from you as far
as hey, this is how you make your way.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
God, that's so. You know, you're making me cry a
little bit here. I miss those days so bad. Oh
my god, Oh, well, I longed to be out on
the street with the guys again, and then the men
and women of NYPD just such a great, great team.
But you know, it did take me a little time
to make my bones, as you say, and that I
(17:15):
think was based on a couple of things. One is
being tough, not taking any nonsense, as I've described before,
but also really caring about my work and their work.
I studied all the time, I learned all the time.
I took advantage of every course there was, and I
(17:37):
did go to all the NYPD courses they're homicide, CIC,
special Victims, cold killings. I'd take my time off my
vacation time and use it to go to their courses.
They were fantastic. But I think the fact that when
I'm on scene, I'm focused because my responsibility is not
(17:59):
just to get justice for this victim, but answers for families.
And my job was to be a resource for the
police department to explain the physical findings, the medical findings
that they needed to do their job. And I have
(18:19):
great respect for their job, and I think that translated
back to respect for me. And I also enjoy teaching.
I love teaching, so whenever i'd go to a scene,
I'd wait for the crime scene guys to get there
before I started messing with the body, so i'd do
my scene photos, my measurements and all that, interview witnesses
(18:41):
when they got there. Then I'd examine the body and
point out to them every little thing I saw, Like,
you know, see, guys, how the abrasion and this gunshot
wound is on the lower corner here, see that, so
how we angle it up so he was shot from below?
Or you know, this doesn't match with a bullet impact mark,
(19:02):
so therefore we know this body was moved, and just
things like that, you know. Then they'd teach me some things,
and they'd say, Barbara, we're going to go in and
question this witness. You want to come with us? Hell, yeah,
I do. I want to do everything. Oh and even
though I'm kind of a scaredy cat now, I'm always
(19:23):
worried about disasters, having lived through several of them, back then,
I loved doing crazy things like going up in the
helicopter with the aviation guys and they take me out
over the beach, and then they'd know I'd be sitting
in that jump seat and just holding onto a strap
and they'd tilt the chopper so that I could get scared,
(19:44):
but then I just yell yahoo, you know, and they'd
keep doing it and they couldn't scare me. Or climbing
up on upon ladders to go up on top of
those bulkheads on Broute to find a gun that somebody
threw up there, or you know, body part someone jumped.
(20:05):
Or crawling in the tunnels beneath Manhattan to find the
caves where the mole people live. That was adventure. To me.
That was like Huckleberry finn stuff. And I think the
guys enjoyed that. I enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
So much, you know, with how question Oh my gosh,
Now you mentioned living through a couple of disasters, So
I want to talk about nineteen ninety three in the
World Trade Center bombing.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
That this is going to Stalance. Sounds strange, but sometimes
scenes of great destruction are beautiful. They're so striking, so
outside the norm of our vision of our experience that
they're almost gorgeous. So in nineteen ninety three, a rider
(20:54):
truck drove into the garage of the World Trade Center
and set off an anphobomb fertilizer and it blew a
huge spherical hole of several acres across into the heart
of the World Trade Center. And now that day I
(21:16):
was supposed to be doing office work and you know,
working on hospital cases. So I had on a skirt
and heels, and my boss grabbed me and said, you
want to go down to the World Trade Center with me?
And bomb just went off. Well, hell, yeah, of course
I do. So I'm climbing through the brubble, and the
high heels helping me get a grip, you know, because
they dig into the brubble. And I'm so awestruck by
(21:41):
the sight of this huge crater with cars at the
bottom of it, with wires, you know, arcing, the electrical
bolt shooting out, and a huge water pipe must have
been two or three feet across, water pouring out of
it into the hole. And it's lit up by spotlights,
(22:02):
so everything is shining and glowing and pulsing with energy
and destruction and force. And my boss and I are
both all struck, and we're standing at the edge of
the crater, and suddenly I see about ten feet to
my right as a guy also standing at the edge
of the crater, and he starts slipping down its starting
(22:23):
to be like a little landslide. So we jumped back
and we're just standing there with our mouths open, and
then my boss said, Barber, there's some people down there.
I said, yep, oh, I guess I've gotter changed my clothes,
and I did, and we went down there and we
found the first five people. Only six people died. Can
(22:45):
you imagine that a bomb of that size, of that magnitude,
and only six people died, thank god. And we found
the first five very quickly, and then it took about
maybe a week to find the last person. But I
was down there day, digging around in the rubble and
just completely knocked out by the magnitude of destruction. It
(23:10):
was the biggest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
I was in charge of the crisis response team for
the Olympic Games in Atlanta, which would have been nothing
to anybody except we had a bomb. And it was
the largest pipe bomb in North America at the time.
And the way he had positioned it, he wanted it
to implode and then explode, which would have caused that
(23:39):
entire tower to come down and then shrapnel would have
been devastating. But because the young people that found it
kicked it over. It became almost like a roaming candle
just straight out and only killed Alice Hawthorne. But to
your point, it was one of those scenes that you
(24:03):
can't really describe because the magnitude that it was and
the magnitude that it could have been, it's parallel in
your mind as you're working.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It's a strange feeling. It's a feeling of awe in
so many different directions. You know, awe at the destruction
and awe at the fact that humans could survive it.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
And you and I have another thing in common a
little bit, and that's nine to eleven. During nine to eleven,
I was sent to the Pentagon with the crisis response
team while you were probably working World Trade Center again, yep,
and that's a case that talk about the magnitude you
(24:45):
had the unbelievable job of identifying people from body parts.
Talk a little bit about that again.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
It's awe inspiring to go down there and see skyscrapers,
the tallest skyscrapers reduced to just acres and acres of rubble.
To look at a place there that maybe just a
couple of weeks before, I had been up on the
top of the World Trade Center for a date, and
we were sitting there sipping on drinks or water in
(25:19):
my case, and looking out at the sunset, and it
was just romantic and beautiful. And now the piano that
had been up there, the bar, the bartenders, the people,
they're all at the bottom of a pit or in
a pile of rubble that was burning. So I went
down there, and again I was just awestruck, standing there
(25:43):
with my mouth open. And we had pretty much reports
of just under three thousand people dead, but they were
represented by more than twenty five thousand body parts and fragments,
and that was how we identified sixty percent of them.
(26:05):
The other forty percent who have never been identified. Now
after twenty two years, maybe they were vaporized. I don't know.
But so great were the forces, so overwhelming was the
magnitude of this attack that it just vaporized people into
absolute nothingness. And you may have heard the expression that
(26:26):
one death is a tragedy and a thousand deaths is
a statistic. Well, I'll tell you something. If you're crawling
around on that rubble looking for body parts and you
see a desk calendar that says lunch with Jim Tuesday,
or a little I found, like a little desk set
with a pen in it and a golf ball. It
(26:48):
was a souvenir of a holy one and that something
that that person who was so proud of and had
on their desk, or the worst graduation picture from elementary school,
somebody's kids. So it's not a statistic. Every one of
those little possessions defines a person, and that person is
(27:14):
a universe. They have feelings and thoughts and relationships, families, mothers, fathers, sisters, wives, husbands.
Each of them is the universe. And when you're crawling
around there on that rubble, it becomes very, very apparent
to you just how important every single life is. And I,
(27:37):
you know, I say that nine to eleven ruined me.
I mean, I'm sure I was ruined long before from
all the the tragedies I had seen. I was already
starting to get a little crazy, but nine to eleven
just knocked it way out of the park. That was bad.
That was real bad.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Again, you can't describe it to people. And I remember
one of the folks from our team that had been
in New York came and met us in Washington and
he said that he was talking to a police officer
right there in the center of it, and he said.
The police officer turned to him and he said, see
those people two streets over, he said, don't they even
(28:16):
know what happened? Like they're going on about their life,
They're shopping, they're going to brunch, they're doing these things
like we're not two streets over here.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Isn't that something when you're in the middle of the
worst chaos that human beings can inflict on each other,
and then you look a few feet away and there's
somebody over at the Levis store buying jeans. Perspective, Yeah,
there's a reality smack yep that hits you every so often.
(28:46):
I mean, any of us in this job, or these jobs,
police first responders, police fire EMTs, or last responders like me,
you know, you see these things that are so puzzling,
so damaging, so tragic, and then you look around and
(29:09):
the world's going on. But meanwhile, in our minds, the
world is full of destruction and evil and terrifying things
just waiting to happen. Because that's what we see all
day long. You do four or five cases a day,
you start to think everybody's a damn murderer or a victim.
And then you come home and your partner says, well,
(29:33):
I'm thinking we should plan a vacation. Why don't you
start looking at airfares? And I'm like, what the what
are you talking about? Do you know what I saw?
Speaker 1 (29:46):
To right? Dahiti ain't gonna get that out of my head,
but I'm gonna go anyway. It's worth a shot. But
you know, it's funny because you just said something that
is so true. A lot of times people will say, well,
as a first responder, and I will often correct them.
I'm a crime scene investigator. I'm a last responder. You know,
(30:08):
I'm the last shot of getting that evidence. And you
are too. You're you're after me, so you're the last
last shot. And I take that job very seriously.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
We get justice for people, and we prevent people from
going on and killing again and again and again.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
Y'all see why I love and adore this woman. I mean,
everything you say is so true, and I know you
know the accolades and all that, you're not here for it,
but again, I just want to say, you are a hero,
and you're a hero to so many people, not just
law enforcement, but anybody out there suffering with addiction. I mean,
(30:47):
you give so much hope, and you give disrespect to
the job. You give respect to recovery, which I don't
think is done enough. And in our world in law enforcement,
there needs to be so much help and understanding with addiction.
So again I want to thank you on several levels.
But again for me. You know, I'm talking to one
(31:09):
of my heroes, and this has just been a fantastic,
fantastic time for me, and I just appreciate you so much.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Oh, thank you, Thank you so much. Your aunt means
a lot to me. And don't get me all crying now,
you know that's not my style.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Well, if you ever come through Atlanta, I got a
police car with some blue lights, we will go take
a ride.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
I like that.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
I will pick you up at the airport and I
will change your life. It'll be awesome. I'm going to
end Zone seven the way that I always do with
a quote. This quote comes from Patricia Cornwell where she writes,
with Kay Scarpetta number twenty one, you don't ever get
over it. I think some things you won't get over.
(31:54):
Not ever, you can't. I'm Cheryl McCollum, and this is
Zone seven a
Host
Sheryl McCollum
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