Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
What the Dead Know: Learning about Life as a New York City Death Investigator (Large Print Edition)

What the Dead Know: Learning about Life as a New York City Death Investigator (Large Print Edition)

Butcher, Barbara

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralTrue Crime

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798885795203
Publisher: Thorndike Press a Part of Gale a Cengage Comp
Published: Dec 27 2023
Pages: 481
Weight: 1.30
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A riveting, deeply personal memoir of more than twenty years of death-scene investigations by New York City death investigator Barbara Butcher.

Barbara Butcher was early in her recovery from alcoholism when she found an unexpected lifeline: a job at the Medical Examiner's Office in New York City. The second woman ever hired for the role of Death Investigator in Manhattan, she was the first to last more than three months. The work was gritty, demanding, morbid, and sometimes dangerous--she loved it.

Butcher (yes, that is her real name, and she has heard all the jokes) spent day in and day out investigating double homicides, gruesome suicides, and most heartbreaking of all, underage rape victims who had also been murdered. In What the Dead Know, she writes with the kind of New York attitude and bravado you might expect from decades in the field, investigating more than 5,500 death scenes, 680 of which were homicides. In the opening chapter, she describes how just from sheer luck of having her arm in cast, she avoided a boobytrapped suicide. Later in her career, she describes working the nation's largest mass murder, the attack on 9/11, where she and her colleagues initially relied on family members' descriptions to help distinguish among the 21,900 body parts of the victims.

This is the fascinating and stunning real-life story of a woman who, in dealing with death every day, learned surprising lessons about life--and how some of those lessons saved her from becoming a statistic herself. Fans of Kathy Reichs, Patricia Cornwell, and true crime won't be able to put it down.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Butcher, Barbara

View All

Also in

True Crime

View All