Episode 336: NYC Medicolegal Investigator Barbara Butcher

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
You're listening to The Mike the New Avent podcast hosted
by media personality and consultant Mike Cologne. Good to be

(00:42):
with all you on a Monday night. We're coming off
excellent week of shows in the Mike the New aven Podcast.
This will be another good week, so welcome back. We
previously had Deputy Chief Al Pratts. That was volume four
of the Best, the Bravest, the Nationwide edition. Of course,
we have two versions of that mini series. One is
FT and y oriented, the other one goes around country
when it comes to fire service. So Chief Bratts is
currently Special Operations Chief of North Hudson, New Jersey's regional

(01:06):
Fire and Rescue. So we talked with him about his career,
which started with the department in two thousand and four.
Prior to that, he was in the Marine Corps a Reserve.
Prior to that, he was working in juvenile corrections for
period until he made the switch to fire And if
you haven't checked out the show before that, that was
retired NYPD Detective Dave Sarney, who have of course, had
a distinguished twenty seven year career with the department, including

(01:26):
in the Detective Bureau's Training unit. He finished up as
a second grader a couple of years ago, so you know,
we'd like to bounce around within the first responding community.
And tonight's guest is someone who I've seen quite a
bit on other programs. Of course, we all know Duty round,
we all know Bill Cannon, Phil Grimaldi and the great
work they do on Police off the cuff. Finally wanted
to get her on my program, and finally tonight we

(01:46):
get the opportunity to do that, and we will get
to her in a moment. I'll introduce her in a moment.
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(03:32):
sponsor of the Mike Den Newhaven Podcast. Now, before I
introduce my next guest in a moment, I want to
give a quick shout out to the members of New
York FEMA Task Force one, which is comprised of both
members of the FDNY and members of the NYPD Emergency
Service Unit, including some very good friends of mine on
that task force. They're out and about in the south
right now southeast to be specific. We know that damage

(03:52):
to Hurricane Helene is causing a Category three numerous deaths,
including some of sadly, some firefighters killed in a lone
of duty and some police officers as well, swept away
in the floodwaters. So to the men and women that
comprise that task force, including some good friends of mine
on the ESU side, just wanted to say, guys, please
be safe and I thank you if what you're doing. Again.
New York Task Force one, one of the more premier

(04:14):
units in FEMA amongst many. And what's unique about that
what I believe it's one of only a few, if
not the only one to actually have law enforcement personnel
on it. So shout out to them. All right. My
next guest played a central role in quite literally thousands
of homicide investigations over the years. She's backed by an
extensive medical background. We'll talk about that tonight, and it
would serve her well in her role from nineteen ninety
two until twenty fifteen when she was working in the

(04:37):
New York City Chief Medical Examiner's Office, and from two
thousand and seven until twenty fifteen specifically as the chief
of staff for that office. She's also an author. Her
book What the Dead No Learning about life as a
New York City death investigator, chronicled her experiences in depth.
And that is retired New York City medical legal death
investigator Barbara Butcher, who joins us tonight on the Mike

(04:58):
de Nuavent Podcast. Barbara, welcome.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Oh it's so good to see you, Mike. Thank you
so much. I've been waiting to be on this show.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
All right. Yeah, we reached I reached out to you
a few months ago. I know your schedule is quite busy,
so I appreciate you being here, and it's good to
finally have you before we get into everything involving your career,
both not just on the medical legal side and investigating homicides,
but also before that, as we were talking a bit
about off here, tell me where did you grow up?
Where did it all start for you?

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island out in Massapequa,
and you know, spent well my school years out there
and then got back to the city as soon as
I could.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Now, where did the fascination with the medical side, if
at all, begin for you or did you have other
interesting career ambitions as a young one.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
No, I had two ambitions. One was to be a doctor,
and the other was that kids in the neighborhood used
to bring me roadkill and I'd like to dissect it.
I had dissecting kit and microscope. I like to dissect
it and figure out what happened. So they'd bring me

(06:06):
a or a raccoon or a little what of that thing, Yeah,
a raccoon or something like that, and I'd look at
it and I'd say, oh, look, you see these strange
little zigzag marks that's a tire mark, so obviously he
was run over. Let's look inside and see what the
damage was. So that's an odd thing. But with my

(06:30):
chemistry set, my microscope and my dissecting kit, I was
off to the races. I loved figuring things out. I
had to know how it worked. And then my parents
started buying me, Like for my birthday, I got a
fish in framaldehyde and a couple of other small animals,

(06:52):
and there you go. I was a very normal little girl.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah. Good evening to John Costello and Bill Ryan and
the chat as well as Will Cooney and Joe Maliga.
Good to see all you tuning in tonight. If you
have a question for Barbara Police submitted in the chat,
you can utilize a super chet if you want. For
those of you watching on YouTube, and hello to our
friends tuning in via LinkedIn and Facebook as well. So
that would parlay into, of course, your educational pursuits. You

(07:17):
went to LU and got a Bachelor of Science. There
are master's in public health from Columbia as well. So
you mentioned the goal of being a doctor. As we know,
much like being an attorney, requires a lot of schooling.
So in something like that, you know, the commitment process
is intensive. There's a lot of studying going on, and
some people do get flustered with it. But you seem

(07:37):
like the kind of person that when you start something,
you do stick with it, even if the road takes
you too different places. You're not one to quit. So
during that period, what kept you with it?

Speaker 2 (07:47):
You know? I wanted to be a physician, and unfortunately
I wasn't quite smart enough. I took organic chemistry three
times and could never get better than A and that's
not good enough to get to med school. I had
no money for tutors or anything else. And someone mentioned

(08:08):
to me about being a physician assistant. They said you
could do all the good stuff under a supervision of
the doctor and it's only four years of schooling maybe five.
I said, hell, yeah, that saunds good to me. So
I became a PA, and I worked in surgery, of course,
and you know, then I became a hospital administrator that

(08:33):
was boring, this, that and the other thing. And then
like magic, a career counseling service gave me all those tests,
the Minnesota multi Phasic Personality Preferential Briggs Meyers whatever, all
the tests, and then my counselor said to me, you

(08:55):
should either be a poultry veterinary in or a corner
I said, poultry, white poultry. I said, well, you know,
working in surgery, you're very good with diagnostics, but you
get upset when your patients die or they don't do well.
And if you worked with puppies and kittens, you would

(09:17):
also be emotionally attached, and you wouldn't do well at all.
So chickens have beady little eyes, nobody particularly likes them.
That'd be good for you. I said, I'll take corner.
I figured that dead folks you couldn't get emotionally attached to.
Was I ever wrong? It is is so tragic to

(09:43):
see the way people die, and of course they have
families who I must talk to, and they're in shock
and grief and everything else. So emotionally it wasn't the
best place to be. But I loved that job, loved
every second of it.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Not to gloss over your time at Saint Barnabas, but
you sang that jocks to mind. An interview gave The
New York Post, where again the different facets of death.
A woman died of starvation. Now you would think, and
this is for the audience to know, just to give
a little context, you would think that, Okay, well, she
was probably not too well off. She probably lived Almont,
she did live alone, but probably in a neighborhood that was,

(10:22):
you know, somewhat impoverished. No, a very wealthy woman and
one of the wealthiest neighborhoods, not just in New York City,
as you said in that interview, but in the country,
maybe even in the world. Dying of starvation. So it really,
you know, as and it's fitting that your book was
titled what It Is, because death really, in a sense,
pains quite the conflicting but yet interesting picture about life.

(10:43):
And that was just one of several thousand cases that
you had over the years.

Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, that's I think the most entrancing part of the job. Well,
it's kind of a it's a balance. I love investigation.
I love figuring things out, looking for forensic evidence and
talking to witnesses. I love that part. But just as
interesting is the fact that you get to go and

(11:09):
see how someone lives, how wildly varied it is, especially
in New York City. There's a lot of interesting ways
to die here and a lot of interesting ways to live.
So I had always presumed that people lived pretty much
as I did, clean apartment. Uh, you know, food and

(11:30):
the refrigerator, a television, the whole thing. No, people live
in all kinds of ways. And this woman, in particular,
she wanted to lose weight to fit into a size
zero Laura Ashley dressed. She had rack of them, and
so she lived on butter land of lakes, whipped butter

(11:57):
and jugs of water. The thing that really got me
was that she also fed her dog the same thing,
a little white, sweet dog. Now I was upset enough
to see this woman in this fabulous white loft in
New York and Solo, the best neighborhood, and that was

(12:21):
upsetting to see how she starved to death on purpose.
But to see that little dog laying there next to
an empty water dish. Oh, we were all so upset.
The cops were like, oh my god, who does this
to a dog? You know, it was really upsetting. But

(12:45):
you know, then you'd see later that afternoon I could
be crawling under a what do you call those buildings,
abandoned buildings that becomes a squat, you know where drug
addicts and people will live in a squat cold water
if they have any Yeah, yeah, And you know, I

(13:10):
crawl under the foundation into the basement room full of
trash and see some poor heroin addict laying on the
top of the heap with the needle still in his arm.
And it was strange because there's almost a beauty to that,

(13:31):
seeing another person's life in this very strange situation and
a pile of trash that was very colorful. It was
blue and red. And I was there crawling along with
the rats. What a way to live. And then the
people like the hoarders. I'm sure you've seen things like

(13:52):
you know the hoarder shows. Yeah, I mean they're astounding,
you've seen them in person. And I remember one guy.
He was like one of the Conyer brothers. He packed
his apartment to the very ceiling with trash, but he
had like little tunnels to get to his bed and

(14:16):
to get to the toilet, very small tunnels, and in
them he put booby traps, a little like a rope
you'd step over and if you pulled it, it would
bring the trash down on your head. And that way
he could guard his treasures, which was all just garbage.

(14:36):
But it fell on him. He tripped his own booby trap.
He was crushed by his treasures and we had to
I mean getting in esu. God bless them, you know,
they'll think of everything. But they took out the windows,
put in a half sheet of plywood four by eight,

(15:00):
and we surfed along the top of the trash heap
and then dug him out because we couldn't get in
the front door there was too much drash. And I think,
how does a person live that way? How do they
get like that? Or rich people? The wealthy people I

(15:23):
saw who I'd show up and they'd say, you know,
there's a woman dead in the second bedroom, and I'd
say what happened? And they said, well, our maid had
a friend visiting from Central America and they were in
the room going to sleep, and the woman just died.

(15:44):
Could you please take her out the service entrance and
not let anyone see this and not let anyone know
what's going on. Okay, But the woman, the maid whose friend,
just her lifetime friend just died. The maid is standing
there crying, and these people can't have the wherewithal to

(16:09):
comfort her or to say, don't worry, we'll take care
of everything. So of course I go over to her,
put my arm around her shoulder, and I say, don't worry,
we'll take care of your friend. But these people were like, oh,
please just get her out of here. So rich put
And then there's there's kind rich people, and there's this

(16:29):
all kinds of people in the world, and they live
in crazy ways, and not just mentally ill people. There
was a neurologist from NYU who died in his home.
In his apartment, very chic, three bedroom, three baths, you know,
city views. And he had a thing about mail. He

(16:50):
sent for a lot of mail, a lot of catalogs,
but he never opened it. So there was a pile
about two and a half three feet high through every
single part of his apartment. He'd walk across it to
get to his things, and I'm slipping and sliding all
over this pile. You know, it's magazines and they slip
out from under you. I thought, well, a prominent neurologist

(17:14):
lives like this. I have a friend who lives like that.
She's an attorney. She's a brilliant woman. No one ever
goes in her apartment, never lets anybody in. One day
she called me and said, Barbara, I smell gas in
my apartment. I don't want to let anyone in. Could
you come and check it? Sure? I go over there,

(17:37):
boxes of stuff unopened. She had a thing about buying stuff.
She'd buy expensive things, antiques, things like that, but wouldn't
unpack them, just pile them up. And they were books
piled everywhere. I'm all over the stove. I opened the
oven and the oven is packed with books. And I

(17:59):
see around, I look, I do the dispray of the
soap bubbles. No, gastly, it was the smell of paint
from a renovation in an apartment next door. That's what
she was smelling. But I said, so listen, how come
you never opened the boxes? She said, Oh, I will, No,

(18:20):
I will, I just you know, I need to keep
them this way for a while. Never understood it. That's
how people are.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, No, it's it's a wide array, which goes to
show that you never know what goes on behind closed doors.
And you know ever, and it isn't until after post
mortem that you can get somewhat of a glimpse. Of course,
they're not around to tell you, but like we said, posthumously,
even you can paint a pretty good picture on how
someone lived and focusing on some of the more fascinating

(18:53):
aspects of their life. And it segues into nineteen ninety
two because when you got there to the Ammese office,
New York City was rocking with homicides. There was a
lot of them at the time. You know, this is
right before things started to take a turn for the
better in nineteen ninety four, but still in ninety two
there was the high point, and not a very positive
high point, of twenty seven hundred plus homicides in ninety

(19:15):
nineteen ninety two, it's still pretty high. So yeah, yeah, so,
I mean keeping up with that many victims of so
many different things, and this is not even counting those
that die of natural causes, those who unfortunately commit suicide.
Just to homicide victims alone, tell me about nineteen ninety
two and nineteen ninety three from your standpoint as the

(19:35):
rookie in the office trying to learn on the.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Fly, it was insane. We never sat down, well, we'd
have you know, we'd alternate street days and hospital days,
taking reports from hospitals, so you can sit down and
take a hospital case from a doctor, but being out
on the streets and going from one case to another,

(19:59):
and each of them is tragic. Each of them is.
You know, this is the occasional natural of a lonely
old woman who dies in her apartment. No one knows
she's there, she becomes decomposed until the neighbors smell it,
call the police. And then you'll go from there to
a double homicide. Drug dealers shoot two kids on the

(20:21):
roof because they held back. And then maybe you go
to an accident. Maybe you go to something where a
guy was, you know, stepping into the elevator and it
smashed down on him. That was my day, day after day.
I mean, now, if we get four hundred homicides, it's
a big deal. But then we were running from one

(20:43):
to the next. Now, I'll tell you a funny thing.
When I finished my training and went alone on my
first hop homicide, showed up at the department door, spoke
to the first officer. The detective stepped out and said, yeah, honey,
how can I help you. I said, Oh, I'm from
the medical Examiner's office and I need to examine the

(21:06):
body and you know, make my report. He says, oh,
don't worry about a crime scene, will cover it. I said, no,
I have to. This is my job, you know. He says, Hey, okay, whatever,
go ahead, come on in. I thought, this is some bull.
This is terrible right here. So the next homicide, I

(21:27):
went to detective says, Hi, honey, how can I help you?
I said, you know, I don't think you can. I
think I can help you because I'm going to go
in there and examine that body, and I'm going to
tell you how he died, when he died, and maybe
even who did it. And then when you're testifying in court,
the judge asks you, how did you know these things?

(21:50):
You can tell him, Barbara Butcher told me. Then he went, WHOA,
come on in. So I quickly got a reputation as
a tough girl, a little crazy. And I gotta say, though,
that going from homicide to homicide, especially in those days

(22:11):
when they were a lot of business killings it was
all drug related. That was that was crushing. It really was.
I mean, we detach, you know, we shut down our
emotions so that we can do our job. But some
things just can't be unseen. Some things haunt me to

(22:34):
this day, especially children. It's the worst, the worst with
that question. Yeah, the one, the one case that I think,
I you know, I've worked on it in therapy for years,
but I can't shake the image. That was a Dominican family.

(22:56):
They mother and father lived up in Washington Heights, had
three kids, a seventeen year old son who was working
for local drug dealers, an eight year old son, and
a three year old son. And when I came in,
the first thing I saw was a man, the father

(23:19):
on my left. He was on the floor with the
gunshot wound to the head. Straight ahead of me in
the kitchen was the mother, little flowered dress, very pretty,
gunshot wound to the head. And then I looked right
in front of me and I saw little tiny footprints
in blood, like a toddler, and they were perfect. They

(23:43):
were in the blood of his parents. But they tracked
through the room from the father to the mother, and
I said, gee, what's that. The said, oh, yeah, there's
a three year old. He was hiding behind those drapes
over there, but it looks like he walked out to
see if his mama and daddy were okay, and I

(24:07):
guess he heard everything. But I said, well, where is he?
They said, CPS picked him up. He's okay. I said, oh,
you really think so? Do you really think he's okay,
witnessing the slaughter of his parents. All right, yeah, you
got a point. So I was working with one of
my favorite crime scene detectives and he said, hey, Barbara,

(24:30):
you know this is this is going to be a
lot of documentation here. Why don't I do the mother.
You go into the room of the room and do
the eight year old and then we'll switch off. I said, yeah, sure, okay.
I walked in that room and you know, it was blue,
and it had little, you know, Star Wars things and

(24:53):
little boy's room, and right in front of me, face
down was the most beautiful little boy with soft brown
curls and golden brown skin, and his cheek was so
soft and downy, and he was beautiful. And he had
a gunshot wound to his head, and he had a

(25:17):
knapsack on his back that had Star Wars on it,
like he was getting ready to go to school and
someone came in and shot him. Now, I couldn't do it.
I couldn't do it. I could not detach. The shock
was too great. I walked out back to the room

(25:39):
and I said, what is the story here, guys? And
one detective says, they, oh, we think that the seventeen
year old drug dealer held back. So the guys came
over here and said to the father, where's the money?
And he said, I don't know. They shot him. Then
they went to the mother, where's the money? Don't know?

(26:01):
And they shot her. But why that, he did, Why
do you shoot a kid? How can you do that?
What would he know? And I thought about his terror,
like did he see it? I prayed, please, God, please
don't let him know that was coming. Please let it
be that he died in peace. I went back out,

(26:24):
you know, I saw a big, tall cop and I said, listen, officer,
would you come into the room with me and witness
my examination? You know, just in case? He said, just
in case or what I said, you know, evidentiary custody,
you know whatever, just come in. He was like all right,

(26:48):
he didn't want to go in, but he walked in
ahead of me. He stood over to the side. He
didn't look at the child. And then was someone there
to make me feel safe. I was able to proceed
with the examination. And then after that when I started,

(27:13):
I have no idea what happened? None. Well, my therapist said,
you have no idea because you weren't there. You completely
turned off your emotions, your thoughts, everything you did your
job like a robot. You can't remember it because the
Barbara was not there, and that's true. But I cannot

(27:39):
let go of the sight of his little head, his beauty,
and that. You know, I've had every therapy you can
think of since World Trade Center, and you know we
got PTSD therapy. But I just you know, I don't
know how I can ever get rid of that. It sticks.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
In line with that And to Darreen murnaine, and I
do see your question the chat I will highlight a
little bit later, but I want to ask this first.
When civil servants are killed in the line of duty,
that's another tough one. Firefighters, police officers are sure you
dealt with plenty of that, even prior to the World
Trade Center and certainly after when you have And I
don't want to ask you which one sticks out, because

(28:22):
I don't think that's appropriate warfare to you or those
officers or firefighters. But when you have situations like that,
someone doing the job, trying to do good for the community,
rather be a fire rather be a shooting cut down
in the line of duty, what helped you manage that?

Speaker 2 (28:39):
Well? We used to have, we used to receive them.
If a police officer or a firefighter was killed, they
would bring them with a special escort, ambulance, fire trucks,
police cars, and everyone in my office would line up
both sides of the street Downeth Street and salute them.

(29:03):
And I would sob hysterically. I would be crying throughout
the whole thing. But what I think what got me
through that is seeing his colleagues, you know, or her
colleagues following behind, and just their emotion, their their community

(29:26):
embracing each other. You know, it's a thin blue line,
but once you get into that line of police officers,
it's a family. It is a family. I come from
a police family and a firefighter family. My dad left
out as a deputy inspector. But you know, it's it's

(29:52):
you can't you can't unfeel that. It's too awful.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I appreciate you shedding some
light on Doreene's question in the chat was did oh, sorry,
did Barbara work with Ken Dotson from the Brooklyn office.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yes, I did, Yes, I did.

Speaker 1 (30:08):
Thank you Dereene for submitting that, and it's popping up
as LinkedIn user. But I know it's a Stelle, Toddy,
and I appreciate you watching a Stelle. If we could
highlight her comment, Producer Victor says Homicide New York. I
loved her in it. She's brilliant. The Collier Brothers, in
light of what we were talking about earlier about hoarders,
brought to like the epidemic of hoarders and their quote
unquote treasures. So thank you Stell for that comment. Don Marie,
I see you in the chat as well, and James C.

(30:30):
Says you can't get better than Barbara Mike, She's the best.
So I appreciate that comment, James C. So one of
the things I wanted to ask you about as well
as from the investigative standpoint. You kind of touched on
it with that terrible case in Washington Heights. You're coordinating
with the DA's office, you're coordinating with the police. You
can't have one without the other. So, just from a
tactical standpoint, an investigative standpoint, what did you most enjoy

(30:52):
about that. You don't enjoy the death, obviously, but being
able to piece things together as you did starting from
childhood with those roadkill that people would bring you know,
that does seem like a really fun process for a lot.
That's what gravitates many to either what you did or
what the NYPD detectives do with detectives and other police
departments throughout the country too. So tell me about the
joys of that specifically, Well.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
You know, the main the joy of that for me
is the interchange between colleagues. Like I mentioned my favorite,
one of my favorite crime scene investigators, Hale Sherman Halena.
I mean, he's aces and we would be standing over

(31:34):
let's say, blood spatter, a trail leading out of Central
Park on seventy ninth Street for the Central Park murders,
when those two fifteen year old kids, Daphne Abdella and
Christopher Vasquez killed a man, slaughtered him, stamped him to
death for no good reason, no good reason. Hale and

(31:57):
I are standing there and he says, listen, do you
notice the directionality of the blood spatter?

Speaker 1 (32:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (32:04):
I do. Okay, it's leading us out towards Central Park West.
He says, yeah, but there's something else here. It looks
to me like an arm was moving, like it was
flung ahead. So maybe it's the blood drip off the knife. Yeah,
that's good. Hell let's see, let's get that. We'll get sampled,
he said. You know, and when we start talking about

(32:27):
the physics, the notion of how this crime was committed,
you know, we look at everything, we look at the body.
You know, there was those who used to say, well,
the investigation between the medical examiner and the police is
completely separate. Yeah, okay, technically the body belongs to me,

(32:51):
the scene belongs to the police. But the scene is
what defines the body, and the body is what defines
the scene. So we had to work together. Of course,
our conclusions can be independent. At times, it can differ.
But it was that joy of seeing the guys and
the women who felt the same way I did, who

(33:15):
knew what I knew, who enjoyed the work and being
able to get justice for people being with them, and
you know, just talking over evidence or likelihoods of this,
that and the other. It was wonderful. And I love
to teach and love lecturing conferences and stuff, and you know,

(33:40):
sometimes i'd have a couple of new cops and rookies
and I'd say, okay, hey, look, guys, you see the
position here where the liver mortis the blood settling. It
seems to be on both sides of his body. What
does that mean? I don't know so well. When he
was killed, he was laying out his back and then

(34:01):
the blood settled into his back. But a few hours
later somebody moved him. They rolled him onto his stomach.
So what does that teach us? I said, I don't know. Said, okay,
how about the fact that this is a shooting gallery.
This place is where drug addicts come to get high,

(34:25):
and this guy's laying dead here and decomposed. He was
in the way, He was in the way. He probably overdosed,
but he was in the way of other atticts who
wanted to sit on the bed or stand on this
part of the floor, and he was annoyed. So they
moved him all around the room and he's decomposed. You

(34:47):
can see little bits of his skin adherent to the floor,
adherent to the bed. They're like, wow, See that's the
psychology of a scene. That's the understanding, and it takes
a lot of experience, but that's the understanding of what
leads to a death, what happens to a person to

(35:09):
put them in this position. So I love teaching them
stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Oh, it's great to learn it's always an education. And
even in what police will sometimes call public service homicides.
Now on the surface level, you know, people don't necessarily
feel bad when gangsters and drug dealers kill each other whatever,
that's what they chose to get themselves into. But even
with deaths like that, two things a still a science
behind it, as you just so eloquently explain, Still a
lot to learn there. And two again from the human component,

(35:37):
somebody loves them. Somebody loves them, all the more reason
to still make sure you go all out as you
would for the eight year old, as you would for
the fallen police officer or firefighter killed in the line
of duties. So every scene, there's always something you can learn,
even if it's a natural causes death. Would say it's
a one hundred and five year old man had a
long life, just that of natural causes. Even there, you
pick something up and you could use it for the

(35:58):
next scene and the next scene.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
That's right. And I always felt bad about the public
service homicide comments because you know, it's funny at first.
But my brother John was a heroin addict and he
died on the Long Island Road, thank you. He overdosed
the day after he got out of Detox on the
Long Island Railroad in the bathroom, and his death was

(36:26):
a huge shock to my family, and my mother never
quite got over, you know. So when I see a
drug addict dead, you know, in Grand Central or something,
I know he's got a mother somewhere who loves him,
and a father and brothers and sisters. So that always

(36:46):
bothered me. Every single death counts. Now, I will say,
you know, I always theorize that the reason we were
having so many homicides back in the early nineties is
that it was a time of enormous drug use. You know,
it was heroin, crack and every other damn thing. And

(37:07):
he the killings were so predictable in a way. So
two guys got shot on the roof, the two kids,
two teenagers, and then within a day another drug related

(37:28):
murder on the street right near that building, and then
two days later another homicide in that neighborhood. So I
thought that it was like, the reason the homicide rate
dropped is not just you know, changes and drugs, but

(37:48):
the fact that they were killing each other off. If
Joey kills Bill and Larry, then Bill and Larry's people
go back and kill Joey, but Joey's people come back
and kill Bill and Larry. I mean, it was like
not exponential going up deponential kill all the drug dealers,

(38:09):
or up to our ears and homicides. But eventually, eventually
they kind of kill.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
Each other off right. The hits keep on coming, literally,
and that's not even need trying to be funny. But
as you said, one gangster says, all right, we're gonna
put a hit out on this guy. They retaliate the
hit of their own, and it's a vicious cycle. No
one's happy to see it. We all wish to would
make better life choices. But it's interesting because again, it's
night and day if you look at and it's going
to sound like I'm being facetious, but I'm not. But

(38:38):
the original Law and Order is such a great time
capsule of nineties New York City because you see where
the city was in nineteen ninety and then compare that
to the New York City of nineteen ninety nine. It's
two completely different worlds, oh completely different worlds. You could
almost divide it into halves ninety to ninety three, ninety
four to ninety nine, and a lot of that is

(38:58):
changes in drugs, changes in police, but also that and
I never thought of it that way. So it's actually
really interesting to bring that up, because you're right, it's
not just the fact that they're killing each other off.
The clients that they have can't get their hands on
the stuff that's killing them so easily now, right, and
they're not dying.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Either, right. But now that the drugs have changed again
to OxyContin, fentanyla and all that stuff, more drug overdose deaths,
less homicides. So it's like it's an infinite loop. And
then don't forget the accidents and the suicides. The suicides
are awful, really awful, and you know, especially when they

(39:36):
write a note and you see their pain. I could
feel it, you know. But the accidents again, the woman
who stepped into an elevator as the doors opened, there
were two people inside, and as she stepped in, the
elevator suddenly plummeted and caught her in the mid section

(40:01):
and slowly, you know, she died. Yeah, there's two people
in the in the elevator who saw it. Will never
be the same. I don't even think that went to trial.
I think the building owners and the elevator maintenance, just
gave them money. Here here, we'll settle it right now.

(40:22):
You deserve money and care and all the psychiatric here
you can get. There were a lot of awful accidents
that you know again stick in my mind. Now I've
become I've become a catastrophic thinker. Between all the cases

(40:43):
I saw and nine to eleven, I walk into a
friend's house, one of the first things I do is
look at their smoke alarms, make sure the batteries in,
make sure they's working. In fact, at one time, when
a young woman, I mean she must have been like
twenty six, she dropped a cigarette in a chair. It
was smoldering, and the smoke rose up to the ceiling,

(41:05):
crawled across to her in the bedroom, and came down
and just suffocated her. She never moved. And after that
I started carrying D cell batteries around, not decel, the
nine bolt batteries around with me when I go to
my friend's houses. Here, please, if you just take this,
change this, then so that. And with my grandchildren, Oh

(41:31):
my god, I want to like put I said to
my daughter, Can I put a leash on them? No,
you can't do that. But there's so but there's so
many people out there waiting to get them pedophiles. There's
the cars running up on sidewalks. I need to keep
them near me. No, you're not doing that to my kid.
And you're not putting a chip in them either. I

(41:53):
went through that for a while. Try to get one
of those apple tags to put under the skin so
the accidents everything. Look, the people who do our job,
your job, my job, everyone in the community. We get
our souls crushed. And it's about time that someone stood

(42:17):
up and said this is not right. You can't ruin
a person's life because they're doing a good job of
keeping evil off the streets of getting justice. You ruin
their lives. And recently, only recently has there been a
little bit of funding to get a peer counselor to

(42:38):
stop into the medical disaminer's office once a month. You know,
if we don't talk to each other, who will. You
can't go home to your wife or husband and say, hey,
today I saw the blah blah blah, and you know
the head came off, and you can't do that. Who
can you talk to your colleagues. I saw something really

(43:01):
awful today. This guy is beheadedah blah, blah, we need
to do that more. I mean the police. When do
you get You get a a debriefing after a.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
Shooting, fire department too.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah, but you know, but if you see two dead
babies in an apartment because the carbon monoxide was going on,
was built up, you get counseling for that. No, So
it's yeah, it's time. Really is. Every lecture I give,
every talk I do, I say, you know, it's time

(43:38):
to take care of the caretakers. If you want us
out in the street finding evil, you better be good
to us. And the beating that the police department has
taken over the past couple of years, it makes me
sick to my stomach. They have no idea what you do?

(44:00):
What I do? No idea. They think, Oh they look,
how mean they are? They hit a protester? Yeah, did
you know what happened to them that morning? So it's awful,
it really is, and things have to change. That's another
for now.

Speaker 1 (44:18):
No, And that's fine because it's you know again, it
covers the spectrum perfectly of some of the things that
most people go through a lifetime never having to see,
and yet it's being seen over and over and over.
You call the police you call the fire department during
your worst moments, and then right after that worst moment
is done and you come to terms with that one
trauma if you're a victim, which is terrible enough hit

(44:38):
and of itself. The police and the fire department in
Ems two, and you guys as well the medical Examiner
office are off to the very next trauma and the
next trauma, and Nick, after a while, it piles up
and Dave's already brought up a good point a couple
of episodes ago. We're talking about Detective specifically where he says, listen, burnout.
Burnout can kill because it's not just the burnout itself,
it's what it leads to, not just the suicide, the alcohol,

(45:00):
and just the social what I call social shunting, where
you wall up and you don't open up, like you said,
and that silence can bring down even the strongest of people.
Now you mentioned evil, and this brings up a case
I wanted to ask you about because Scotti Wagner and I,
as you know, a good friend of mine, good friend
of yours as well, have talked about this case quite
a bit and the defining and he had a lot

(45:22):
of cases during his twenty year career between Housing and
the NYPD. But the defining case of his careers I'm
sure he would tell you himself, is Aeron Key. Now,
Aaron Key was brutal with the capital B. And what
was scary about him is that, to a degree he
was almost charming. I could go as far to say
he was kind of the black version of Ted Bundy,
and that he could put on a facad and be
really charming, as Scott told me, speak to Queen's English,

(45:45):
you know, almost blend into any social setting. But underneath
that charisma, underneath that seeming charm, was a monster who
would target women, rape them, kill them. He left them
in shopping carts in some cases, one he burned alive
that case, working with Scotty and the other detectives assigned
to it with him and ultimately pinning it down to Aaron,

(46:07):
walk me through that, because people forget. Even though New
York City was safer by nineteen ninety eight when he
was going on this killing spree, it still rocked the city.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
Oh yeah, absolutely. But you know here's the sad thing.
Aaron Key, a handsome, intelligent, well spoken and charming man,
was able to lure fifteen and sixteen year old girls.
He loved teenage girls, adolescent girls. I think one of
his victims was thirteen. He would rape them, he would

(46:38):
kill them horribly. And I knew of one case. I investigated,
the one where the young woman was set on fire.
One of my colleagues did, the one with the girl
was strangled up on the stair landing. And the projects

(47:00):
that all happened. It was just one after the other.
There was so many rapes, so many murders over a
period of ten years. It happened in East Harlem. Now
that's all happening. Did you see it in the newspaper? No?
Did you see when the Time Warner executive, his son,

(47:23):
a teacher, white guy west Side, was killed by two
of his students. You couldn't get it off the front page.
It was everywhere at the same time. White man, child
of privilege, good Man school teacher killed by two students.
Oh my god, the horror. They didn't picked it up

(47:45):
out in La But meanwhile, over a ten year period,
little black and brown girls are being raped and killed,
and you never saw it anywhere, not the Post, not
the News, not the Times. That to me is one
of the great tragedies of how we see individuals. Every

(48:09):
single life matters. Everybody has a mother, a father, sisters, brothers,
people who loved them, and to not at least honor
their passing, to appeal to the math, to the public
to bring forth clues. It just didn't happen. I mean,

(48:29):
the police department put out the posters, but immedia, did
they recover it? How could you not do that? He
might have been stopped sooner, But there you go. Anyway,
So when I met Aaron Key, this was after the
I think the second would be the fourth murder. They

(48:51):
brought him to me to get a DNA sample. At
that time, we drew blood and we pulled hair and
you know, we had to get hair by the roots,
like thirty hairs. That's a lot. And they brought him
into me and he looked very shy. He did that
thing that Princess Diana used to do, tuck his head

(49:13):
down and then look up at you, very charming. And
I said, mister Key, I need to take blood samples,
exemplars and hairs from your head to get DNA samples.
And he said, okay, ma'am, do what you have to do. Okay,
I thought, wait, a second. This is the monster that's

(49:36):
been doing these things. How does this compute? When you
think of serial killers, you think in terms of sinister, nasty,
deranged people, at least I do. But now this guy,
he knew computers inside. Now he was a whiz, He

(49:58):
was smart, and he had a good life. But he
couldn't stop the impulse of killing little girls. Now, I'll
tell you what truly makes him even more evil. From prison,
he went to sell rape the cards online. Now what

(50:18):
is a rape card? It is a card on which
he writes the details of how he raped them and
what these girls said. He actually wrote this down and
you could buy them for twenty five dollars. Well they
shut that down real fast, of course, But can you

(50:41):
imagine describing the rape of a child? Can you imagine
that there were people who bought them?

Speaker 1 (50:50):
That's the sadder part to.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Me, that's the sadder part. I mean, if you're deranged
enough to be a serial killer and a rapist, okay,
a broken brain, there's something wrong with your brain. But
if you buy that stuff none, then you're then you're
just as evil. And I have to tell you about

(51:13):
one other case that also has led me to believe
that there is evil in the world, and it's walking.
I went to see a guy who had died, sitting
in front of his computer with his pants down, and
I looked on the computer and there was a strange picture.

(51:33):
And I looked and there were rows and rows and
file in shelves of DVDs and VHS tapes and they
were all carefully labeled. And then there was a box
on the floor and it was all black and white photos,
and it was photos of little children having sexual relations.

(52:00):
And I had always thought, I thought, no, that can't
be true. That can never be true. It has to
be like maybe there's you know, little people dwarves acting
it out, or very young looking teenagers. This can't be possible.
You can't have a five year old kid having sexual relations.
It's true, It's absolutely true. And all I could think

(52:23):
of was, boy, I'm glad he's dead. I am so
glad he's dead. I don't like to wish that on anyone,
but I was so happy.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
And of course, exceptions, yeah, there's exceptions.

Speaker 2 (52:36):
We called in, you know, of course, we called in
Special Victims and Child Born Task Force and they just
picked up everything and took it away and his computer
was loaded with contacts. I buy this stuff, so I
try not to think that the whole world is evil.

(53:00):
You know, when you see things day after day of
homicides and torment and just awful things, it becomes the norm.
That's your normal day. So you think that every day
is like that and everywhere is like that, not just
in my little world, but it must be the whole
world because I'm seeing it all the time. It's not true.

(53:23):
That's a first responder or last responder like me. That's
our syndrome where we start to believe that everything is
evil or bad. People can't be trusted. That's another shame.

Speaker 1 (53:37):
That's yeah, citicism.

Speaker 2 (53:40):
Yeah, I see citicism and a lot of my friends
and in myself. But I have found ways to remind
myself that there's beauty in the world and that most
people are good, most people, but they're I When I

(54:02):
was first in training, there was a pathologist, doctor Jackie Lee,
and she was doing the autopsy on an eight year
old girl who had been raped and smothered. And I said,
my god, how do you stand this? How do you
see this day after day and still live? She said, Barber,
you must when you leave here, you surround yourself with

(54:25):
things of beauty, art, music, love, food, nature. You have
to be surrounded by beauty is the only way to
counteract the death, despair, and destruction that you're going to
see every day. And then, for first I thought, well,
that's kind of hippie trippy, you know, But she was

(54:45):
so right. Eventually I got myself a little place in
the country upstate, and I got two dogs or two
cats and a dog, and I played with my lawnmower
and my trees and my flowers, and I fell better,
not cured, but at least better knowing them were good

(55:05):
things in the world. Is beauty in them? Do we
see it? And so much?

Speaker 1 (55:10):
It's there? Yeah, it is there for sure. We're talking
with Barbara Butcher here the Mike three Even podcast. This
is episode three hundred and thirty five. I want to
hit on the events of nine to eleven and your
book of course in a moment, and we'll move quickly
because we are coming up on that hour mark. But Joe,
you had a good question that chat earlier, Producer Victor,
if we can highlight that. Sorry I missed it, buddy,
but it's a great one. If someone dies from an accident.

(55:31):
He says, let's say about a defective machine, do you
and your colleagues let a manufacturer know or is it
up to the family to sue for change.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
No, that's a great question, Joe, thank you. No, I
work on that. I call OSHA, the Office of Safety
and Health and Occupations. I can't remember how its OSHA. Yeah,
they will send an investigator immediately to take possession of
the machine or the elevator or anything that's related to

(56:02):
this accent. I will call the manufacturer, and I had
a forensic engineer working with me at the Medical Examiner's office,
and we call the manufacturer and ask them to send
us the blueprints, the safety manual, the instructions, everything for
this particular machine. We'd give it over to OSHA, and

(56:24):
if the family had any questions, I was always there too,
you know, give them what I could. Because there's a
lot of accidents out there and it's just due to
negligence and greed. You know, it's easy to pass up
on the maintenance for the elevator or the box crusher,
cardboard box crusher. I had one of those that was bad. Yeah,

(56:48):
this nasty way is to die. But I want to
help so it doesn't happen to the next person.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
Thank you for that question, Joe in a quick acknowledgement
to Steve Stephanokis, of course are frequent comment to this program.
He's currently detective, for those of you that don't know,
assigned to the NYPD Emergency Service Unit, one of its
longest serving members. So as always, very good to see you, Stefan.
The thing that comes to mind before I get to
nine to eleven with that is just me being a
fire above the Deutschebank fire. Those two firefighters were killed

(57:19):
there because of negligence and greed. They took two standpipes
out for crying out loud, which in a high rise
in New York City firefighters kind of need to be
able to put out the fire. There's a classic example
right there. Had it not been for negligence and greed,
those two gentlemen will still be with us today.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
Yeah. Absolutely, that's sinful. That's evil to not take care
of your workers, of people who serve you and save
your life, you don't take care of basic maintenance to
keep them safe. I see.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
Yeah, So with the events of nine to eleven, and
we don't have to get into the graphic nature of it. Obviously,
as we know, the mme's office from two thousand and
one even to this day is still dealing with the
after effects of it. But two thousand and one and
two thousand and two alone, and even two thousand and
three were very, very busy in all the worst ways.
I'll just touch on it briefly from the standpoint of

(58:11):
where were you that day when the event's unfolded.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Well, this is what I call a god shot, when
something happens that might seem bad, but it actually saves
your life. It's like an intervention of a guardian angel.
Nine to eleven. Just before that, I had gone out
for six weeks for surgery, and I was supposed to
come back to the office Monday, September tenth, I believe

(58:39):
it was, and something happened over the weekend. I just
felt a weird feeling and I called my boss. I said, David,
I can't come back yet. I need a couple more days.
He said, no, No, you can't do that to me.
You're on the schedule, I had nobody to cover for you,
and you're out of sick time. You can't do that,
I said, David. I'm sorry, I have to. I can't

(59:02):
come in. What's the matter with you? I don't know, David,
I can't. I agreed to come in on Wednesday, September twelfth,
and so when the planes hit the towers, I was
in New Jersey. I was at home in Asbury Park,
and I missed it. Immediately. I called the police department

(59:28):
in Asbury I said, if you, I said, I need
to get into the city. Can you get me in?
Remember everything was shut down, the Toronto was everything. And
they said, yes, we have a we just sent a
van in full of officers. Well sending another one in
an hour. You've got a seat on it. And then
they called me back and said they're not letting anyone in.

(59:49):
It's all shut down. This can't be. I waited until
dawn the next day and I drove in and I
got to the Lincoln Tunnel and it was a cop.
You know. The cops stopped me the barriers and I said,
I'm with the Medical Examiner's Office. My friends are down there.
I have to get in. Showed them my shield. They

(01:00:10):
searched my car and they let me in. And I
will never forget that moment of walking to my office
and seeing F sixteen jet fighters going overhead, and the
army was there in full you know, full riot gear
with massive weapons, and I was like, oh my god,

(01:00:35):
this is the whole world has just changed. And but
I thank God for the fact that something was in
my head that told me not to go to work. Now,
the nineteen ninety three bombing of the World Trade Center,
of course, I was there immediately with my boss, doctor Hirsch,

(01:00:58):
and Day had on a skirt and heels, which was
good because then I could climb through the rubble much easier.
With the heels. They dig in right. So I was
foolish enough to go right to the rim of the
crater and I was standing on the edge and doctor
Hirsch was next to me, and we're looking into this

(01:01:19):
enormous crater and there's people down there. And suddenly I
looked to my right and as a guy who starts
slipping down the ground beneath him is caving in, and
he starts slipping down the into the crater, you know,
turns around, throws himself and we jumped back just in

(01:01:40):
time because a whole wall of dirt was coming down.
Everything just slipping into the crater. And you know, I
spent two I don't know, a week and a half there,
because we found the first five victims immediately. There was
one guy missing and it took us about a week
to find him.

Speaker 1 (01:02:00):
We'd feed them Metcado.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Yeah, yes, took a while.

Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
It took a while to find him. And that was
just a last note on it before I mentioned your book,
is that it's imperative, as we've discussed tonight, to decompress,
and you're a New Yorker on top of that, you're
part of the first responder community. I have no doubt
that just on the New Yorker level alone, this is devastating.
You had to have known several of the police officers

(01:02:27):
who were killed that day. I'm sure you even knew
some of the firefighters perhaps that were killed that day
as well. Just being in the throes of it as
you were during that time period. It's one thing to
heal from just one scene, but this was the scene
of all scenes and it just kept going for eight
months alone at the recovery site. What helped you to

(01:02:48):
decompress for this with on top of that, Flight five
eighty seven a couple months later.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
Yeah, yeah, November, Yeah, Flight five eighty seven came down
and I handled that the recovery process as an identification
because my boss, the director of investigations, was working on
the nine to eleven, so so I came out, did
that and then went back to nine to eleven. What

(01:03:13):
helped me decompress. The only thing I can think of
is kindness, and that was the kindness of the Salvation
Army who came and fed us night and day and
gave us warm sweatshirts and dry socks. They took care
of us. Therapists came and tried to help us, but

(01:03:36):
they were young women's social workers. They couldn't get it,
they couldn't feel it. So what worked for us then
was sitting around the tables, the picnic tables at Salvation
we called it sALS the Salvation Army Cafe, and just

(01:03:57):
talking to each other. Therapists couldn't do it. We did
it for ourselves. And we had people from Dmort, from
all over the country, and my Oklahoma boys, you know,
in the morning they say, hey, borrow, how y'all do,
and come and sit by me. Let me get you
a cup of coffee, girl, And just that normal, the
normality of human kindness, the small things food, coffee, try,

(01:04:23):
dry clothes. It made all the difference in the world.
But I do have to say that I had enormous
PTSD after that, and just recent I've been in therapy
for like on and off for like twenty years now
twenty two years, and one of the things that really

(01:04:48):
helped me is this thing called DBTPE is prolonged exposure
to things that have upset you that happened. So my
therapist sent me down to the Wor World Trade Center.
She said, I just want you to walk around where
it was, where it happened. And I went down there,

(01:05:10):
and as soon as I saw the surroundings that have
all the names of the victims in there. When I
saw the police names, the firefighter names people I knew,
I started crying and I could not stop. And I
don't mean just little tears. I'm talking about sobbing my
heart out. And tourists were looking at me like oh's

(01:05:36):
and I see them putting their ice cream, putting it
down on the names of the dead, and I started
to flip out. I started to get very angry. It said,
excuse me, it's disrespectful, and the anger was welling up

(01:05:57):
for me. And then I remembered that anger is so
much easier than grief and sorrow, but it postpones the
ability to get through the grief and sorrow. You have
to cry, you have to feel the feelings, and you
just keep doing it and doing it until it softens
and dissipates. But that was one of the hardest things

(01:06:21):
I've ever done, just being down there and seeing those names. Especially,
there were many families that I worked closely with. We
split up the duties. I was direct deputy director to
do the remains recovery down at the site, and there
was another team that did the identifications. And when I'd

(01:06:47):
meet with the families, oh my god, their pain, absorbing
their pain, feeling it. That was radically difficult. But I
remembered the kindness done to me, and I just kept
giving it back to the victims' families. Just be kind,

(01:07:08):
be and be honest.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
Yes policy, because people would.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
Say to me, I understand, you found a piece of
his foot, can you tell me where it was and
maybe how he died? Did he get burned? And I
had learned from doctor Hirsch that if you don't tell
the truth always, that anything you say after becomes suspect.

(01:07:40):
You can never be trusted if you lie to a family,
even once, so I would tell them the truth. I'd say,
he was not burned. It looks like the trauma of
the explosions or what affected would what effectively effectively exploded
his body. If he suffered, I don't think it was

(01:08:02):
for long, because it appears by the impact that his
remains were found scattered around that it was right in
the beginning when the planes hit and and I thought,
I thought, I said to doctor hersh people can't handle that.
He said, yes, they can. They can hand they can

(01:08:24):
handle the truth. They can hand handle the horror, but
they can't handle is not knowing because their imaginations are
much worse than anything you could know. And that was
a big lesson. Always tell the truth, even if it's awful.
So I did, and people, I think they really appreciated it. Knowing.

Speaker 1 (01:08:47):
Yeah, this comfort disclosure too.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
Yeah. Yeah, sometimes it's not so comforting, but you know
at least you at least you know you don't imagine
anything worse. That was a rough time, My god, that
was an emotionally shattering couple of years.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
I appreciate you once again opening up on that. I
know it's not easy, but just for the purpose of
documenting the history as we go of everyone who was
involved in the reskin recovery efforts, both on that day
and in the days and months that followed. I always,
if appropriate, want to ask about that, So thank you
once again. Actually before I get to the book, and
I promise I will, and then we'll get to the
rapid fire. To conclude, I don't want to gloss over

(01:09:29):
your chief of staff years. I think those years were important.
That was their final assignment before you retired in twenty fifteen.
And there's two things you did that you can elaborate
on if you choose to. Which is the first thing,
restructuring the DNA lab, which is very critical and I'm
sure it's still helping to this day. And also the
creation of the Forensic Science is training program. So if
you don't mind touch on those two.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
Things, please, Yeah. I am very proud of the forensic
Science training program. Investigators across this country, a lot of
them are not medic educated. They are coroners who were
elected to the position with nothing more than a high
school diploma eighteen years old and a driver's license, and

(01:10:09):
then they have to take training. We're really going to
get training, well, I applied for a grant for the
National Institute of Justice, and I got a million dollars
to start an academy for death investigators. And we not
only taught them, but it was two or two week courses,
and we paid for their hotel and their flights and

(01:10:32):
their meals, because that's the way that the government wanted it.
They wanted us to make sure we covered everything so
that people could get advance take advantage of that training.
And I have to mention Patricia Cornwell, the famous writer
of Medical Examiner novels. Our character is doctor k Scarpetta,

(01:10:55):
and she became a good friend and she came to
me and said, you know, can you help He was
some information from my book. I said yeah. We talked
for a while and I told her about my academy.
She said, well, you know, I just gave a million
dollars to John Jay, but I could help you too. Really,

(01:11:15):
what can you give me? She gave us a million
dollars too, and we used that to hire and pay
the best forensic experts around. We gave them one heck
of an education, these investigators. And I still hear from
people today, this is like nine years ago, ten years

(01:11:36):
ago who say that was the best course I ever
took in my life. So I was especially proud of that.
Now the DNA lab not so happy. Was a serious
problem in the DNA laboratory. There was a young woman
who for a ten year or nine year period was

(01:11:57):
mishandling rape kits. She failed to test for biological evidence.
She just eyebowled and said, no, there's no seman on,
there no blood, toss it back in, or she would
open two kits at once, against all rules and commingle
the evidence. And the lab director came to a meeting

(01:12:22):
with the chief and I and said, you know, we've
got this problem. We need money to pay overtime for something.
Doctor Herr said what she said, Well, we need to
retest eight hundred rape kits in the past ten years
of a sloppy and poorly trained technician. He said, wait,
wait a minute, why didn't you fire her nine years ago?

(01:12:45):
Eight years ago? He said, well, you know, we tried
to a retrain her, We kept educating her, but she
never could get it. And it's so hard. Nobody helped us.
From Human resources says, really, something's wrong here, suspended that
director DNA and asked me to take over the lab. Now,

(01:13:07):
I am not a DNA scientist, but I'm an investigator,
and what he wanted was for me to go in
and do a deep dive and figure out what went
wrong in that lab, What is the training, what is
the quality control? How could this happen? And I did.
It took a year. I was the acting director and

(01:13:29):
we found out what was going on. We hired a
great director, Tim Kopferschmidt, and we figured it all out.
We cleaned it up. Now, of those eight hundred cases
that were retested, in two of them, justice was not done.
One guy who was not identified and should have been

(01:13:52):
because there was his blood in the kid, he went
on to kill another woman. So and then the other case,
the woman who was raped was afraid to come forth
and go to court. Now, after you know, nine ten years,

(01:14:12):
she was just she said, and I want to move
on with my life. So those two guys were able
to go out and rape again and kill them. So
that was horrible. I am proud of the work we
did to re establish the lab and to refine it,
and it's the finest one in the country. But that

(01:14:34):
was that was scary times. And of course you know,
we got beaten up by the city council. They had
me come down there with our lawyer and the chief
medical examiner at the time, and they just, you know,
beat How could this happen? How could this happen? You know,
we told him as the best we could, but it

(01:14:55):
was all you know, for TV and everything else, and
they beat the hell out of us. Wh I know,
I know it would have been so much easier just
to give us the money to do it. And you know,
the Times wrote about it all over the place, big story,
and that was beating enough. But you know, we fixed it.
We fixed it that. You know that academy, I mean

(01:15:18):
the government funding ran out eventually, but that was a
great thing. I'm really proud of that and the people
who worked in it, top notch, people like Eddie Wallace.
I made him director of the Academy, you know, crime
scene Eddie terrific guy and a real teacher, you know,
someone who could really teach and train. So Eddie's my boy.

(01:15:43):
I mentioned so many crime scene guys. I love crime
scene guys because they're doing incredibly interesting things.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
Absolutely, I'm trying to get I'm trying to get both. Halie.
I got hou'se number. I gotta give him a call again.
And I'm trying to get Eddie on the show too,
so I can talk about their careers respectively, both of them,
because yeah, it's not an easy it's not an easy
doing no unit, and the NYPD is a cakewalk you
gotta do working pretty much all of them, but that
one is such a tricky one because there's really no
room for error, but yet they routinely make it look

(01:16:15):
so effortless, you know. And I love I love their
old apparatus from the nineties where they were driving around
those station wagons and I'm like, was ask is somebody?
The other day, I'm like, I love the NYPDS nineties fleet.
I'm a police puff two, and I love the old
emergency vehicles. I'm like, that station wagon is so hideous.
What the heck where they're doing driving that? It's like, no,
it's the store equipment. There's a least behind it. And

(01:16:36):
even now with all that equipment that they have and
the way technology has been modernized, there's still carrying around
a crapt ton of stuff to do the job. But
they do a great job. So shout out to them.
And on that note, we'll touch in the book as
well before we get to the concluding segment, and that
once again, as I mentioned my introduction of you, what
the Debt No Learning About Life is? In New York
City Death Investigator. I put the link to it in

(01:16:57):
the chat for those of you that if you don't
have it already you can. It's you know, twenty three
years in this office, many different roles, many different incidents,
not even counting the major ones like five eighty seven,
nine to eleven in nineteen ninety three. How does one
condense it into a book?

Speaker 2 (01:17:17):
Was not easy because I have five thousand, five hundred
cases and to just pick out the few that meant
something more than just a murder or just a rape,
that that had some meaning, a larger meaning for the community.

(01:17:38):
That was what I intended to do. But I'll tell
you when I first started writing the book, it was
during COVID and my consulting business was falling to hell,
and I decided to write. And so at first I
was just writing all the interesting cases I saw and
what it meant and how we saw, how they were solved,
and what it was like to know people in that way.

(01:18:05):
And then I took it to my editor and he said,
he said, where are you. I said, I'm right here.
He said, no, where are you in the book? I
don't know what do you mean? He said, I want
to see what you saw, smell what you smelled, hear it.
I want to feel it like you felt it. I

(01:18:26):
was like, whoa, that's a whole other job, because I
had to go back and rewrite it and put me
in the story. How did I feel? What did it mean?
What did it do to me? And I did that,
and of course I cried all through it.

Speaker 1 (01:18:43):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:43):
It was easy to just write about interesting cases, but
to write about what it feels like, Oh, that's a
whole other story. And every one of those cases made
me cry when I the people who died and the
people who did it. But it was a much better
book for that, because it takes you there with me.

(01:19:05):
And I think it was a much better book for that.
And look, I don't hold back anything, you know. I
talk about what it did to my life, and there's
a lot of surprises in there.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Not easy to revisit. But did you find the process therapeutic?
At least?

Speaker 2 (01:19:25):
Yes? When it was all said and done. The fact
that I finally got it out, all of it or
most of it. That helped a lot. And then what
helped even more was that people in the business contacted me.
They wrote to me and went to my website and

(01:19:46):
told me how they felt seen for the first time.
Somebody wrote their story, this is what we do, this
is what happens. And people who suffered from alcoholism as
I did and do, they thanked me for showing how
you can come out of that, how you can rise

(01:20:08):
up and resilience. You can always get up again and
again and again. If you have the right strength and faith,
you can get through it. So that made me really
happy that I reached people who understood and felt better

(01:20:28):
for it. So that was a big deal.

Speaker 1 (01:20:32):
There's been a wonderful conversation. The time has flown by.
Now brings us the rapid Fire segment, which is five
hit and run questions from me, five hit and run
answers for me. You could say pass if you want.
And the first question I will ask you of the
five is best advice either on the job or about
life in general, that anyone ever gave you.

Speaker 2 (01:20:51):
I think the best advice was what Jackie Lee said
to surround yourself with things of beauty and nature to
remind yourself what life really is. The best advice I
ever gave to anyone was take your hands off your ears,
put them over your mouth, walk into a scene and

(01:21:11):
start talking. Just listen. Listen to the police, listen to
the witnesses, listen to the family. Then you can go
make your theories.

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
There you go. And second, funniest colleagues you ever worked with.

Speaker 2 (01:21:26):
Oh god, they were all funny. I think Jonathan Hayes,
medical examiner, had to be one of the funniest guys
I ever worked with. He's a British guy, and he's
a connoisseur of music, of food, and of travel. He

(01:21:48):
wrote for a lot of magazines, and he wrote two
very good novels. So he just devoted his life to
creating things. But he was his step directly funny. I
remember a lecture he gave it the table, your autopsy table.
Ladies and gentlemen, please witness here the stigmata of drug

(01:22:09):
abuse and it's inevitable conclusion, the overdose and death. Now
you will see the gang tattoo here crypt Oh you
will notice the tear tattooed on his eye. Someone died,
how sad, so he was just he delivered it in
this wonderful British accent. An amazing guy.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
That's good, sounds good. Third favorite cop show or cop movie.

Speaker 2 (01:22:36):
Mm. You know, I hardly watched them except well Lawn Order,
SVU and the original Law and Order. Yeah, I loved
them because they took real cases and they were in
Marishka hargateady beautiful woman, but a wonderful woman too. She

(01:22:56):
has a foundation for rape victims. She takes them to
Hawaii to go swim with dolphins and be in nature
and learn to heal themselves with therapy. What a wonderful person.
So of course I gotta watch the.

Speaker 1 (01:23:11):
Show, of course, Like I said, and I love I'm
the rare guy that loves all three Law and Daughters.
I love the Original, Love s FU, I love Criminal Intent,
but Original it takes the cake for me, just because again,
as I've said many times on this show, Jerry Orbach,
it just you can't. It's if he's on the show,
and I don't care who his partner is. I love
them with Mike Logan, loved them with Ray Curtis, loved

(01:23:32):
them with Ed green point is if he's in the
episode I'm watching it. You know, it was the quintessential
New York I've seen it all. I've been here a
thousand times. Detective.

Speaker 2 (01:23:41):
I loved him absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:23:43):
Before I move on to the next question, it's actually
an underrated one, Joe in the chat says, Quincy. It's
not actually qu Quincy was pretty good. I don't know
if you recall Quincy.

Speaker 2 (01:23:50):
Yeah, I do. When I was a kid, I watched
it and he was Yeah, that was a very interesting show,
and it, you know, fed my desire to get into
that business.

Speaker 1 (01:23:59):
So I love YEP. An honorable mention. Billy Ryan just
brought it up, and I was you read my mind,
Billy Homicide, Life on the Street one of the best,
one of the best cop shows, not just of the
nineties but ever. Very good show, said of course in Baltimore,
created also or by well, created by the same personnel
that would go on to create The Wire, and Dick
Wolfe was involved in it. Two, I believe. Fourth, and

(01:24:20):
this is where you could say multiple You don't got
to pick just one because I know it's hard. Favorite
bar or restaurant in New York City.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
MM. Favorite restaurant is probably Cafe Clooney in the village
favorite bar. I don't go to bars.

Speaker 1 (01:24:37):
Anymore, okay, ye, fair enough?

Speaker 2 (01:24:39):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
So and that brings us to the final and you've
kind of answered it, but I'll allow you to elaborate
on it here. The fifth and final question the rabbit fire,
is what advice would you give anyone entering your profession.
You've mentioned a few good points tonight, but what else
can you say?

Speaker 2 (01:24:54):
Talk to me? First, read my book, to a police detective,
a police officer, talk to me, talk to somebody, because
you need to know what it's like before you get
in there. You have to develop your character, your strength,
and your mental abilities and your emotional abilities before you

(01:25:17):
go into a job like that. So I have a
lot of young people who were referred to me, and
I always I'm glad to talk to them on the
phone or meet even meet with them and tell about this.
I like mentoring young people, so yeah, I tell them
the truth about the job. Here's what you have to study,
but here's what you have to know in your heart.

Speaker 1 (01:25:39):
Well said again, The time is flown by. It's been
a heck of a conversation. Stick around, we'll talk off
the air. Thanks to everyone who tuned in tonight via YouTube,
LinkedIn and of course Facebook. I'm getting used to not
saying Twitter anymore. We don't go live on Twitter because
I'm not paying eleven dollars elon, so we're going to
Facebook instead. So thanks to everyone that contributed to the chat,

(01:25:59):
and I appreciate your support. As always. Coming up next
on the Mike denu Even Podcast, is currently the New
York City Fire Department's Chief of Safety. He's been on
the job for thirty three years with New York City
Fire Department and spend some time in many different companies,
including Rescue four first at nineteen ninety eight until two
thousand and one. That's Mike Myers, who will join us
for volume sixty two of the Best of the Bravest

(01:26:20):
Interviews with the FD and Wives Elite. We don't have
a show slated for Monday, October seventh. We probably won't
do a show that day because Getting Salty is on
the same day. For those of you in the audience
to follow both programs, we'll try to have a show
for you the next Friday, which will be October ninth,
I believe, actually not October eleventh, excuse me, so's be
on the lookout for that Chief Meyers again, Volume sixty
two of the Best of the Bravest Interviews with the

(01:26:41):
FD and Wise Elite this Friday. Now, for those of
you listening on the audio side, tonight's outro song takes
us back to nineteen ninety four. It's fitting given tonight's
guest from the soundtrack of one of the better movies
of the nineties, The Crow. It's nine inch nails with
dead souls. In the meantime, on behalf Barbara Butcher and
producer Victor. I am Mike alone, and we will see

(01:27:01):
you next time. I have a great weekend, everybody, and
actually have a great rest of the week, and we'll
see your Friday.

Speaker 3 (01:27:06):
Take care.

Speaker 4 (01:28:22):
Some would take the streams away.

Speaker 3 (01:28:26):
That would be too a Jeli dress straight te realty.
I came on, I came on, Keep on, con I

(01:28:58):
came came the figus from past stand on.

Speaker 4 (01:29:14):
And mocking voice is ring imperialistic house and fam I'll
keep their doors and talk fresher.

Speaker 3 (01:29:31):
Thank you, coming you, dream of John, Thank you, drying
keep on dromling wit me.

Speaker 4 (01:30:28):
Three chap keep by chow, thank jaw.

Speaker 3 (01:30:43):
Thought chop. I can't cop keep my joy. I can't
call Hi

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
You God,

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Episode 336: NYC Medicolegal Investigator Barbara Butcher

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