Inside The Career Of a Death Investigator

Summary

Podcast Summary: Inside The Career Of a Death Investigator

Podcast: How Much Can I Make? — Real Jobs. Real Stories. Career Insights
Host: Mirav Ozeri
Guest: Barbara Butcher — Veteran NYC Death Investigator, Author, TV Consultant
Date: May 18, 2026

Overview:

In this gripping episode, Mirav Ozeri delves into the rarely-seen world of death investigation with Barbara Butcher, who spent over two decades probing more than 5,500 death scenes in New York City. Barbara offers candid reflections on the realities of her career—sharing harrowing case stories, emotional costs, professional requirements, life lessons from the dead, and inside info about pay scales, training, and her segue into writing and television. Her unique mix of unflinching truth, compassion, and dark wit creates an unforgettable portrait of a job at the intersection of science, justice, and humanity.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Does a Death Investigator Do?

• Role Defined:

  • Arrives on scenes of unexplained, suspicious, or traumatic deaths (e.g. homicide, suicide, accident, unattended deaths).
  • Determines the manner of death (homicide, suicide, accident, natural) while the pathologist determines the cause (e.g. gunshot, poisoning).
  • Collects critical information, documents the scene and body, collaborates with police, family, and writes reports informing autopsies.
  • “In any scene, the body belongs to me, the scene belongs to the police… but it’s an independent investigation.” (A, 03:09)
  • “I’ll examine the body…I’ll look for trauma, head wounds, bullet wounds, stab wounds, signs of poisoning.” (A, 03:24)

• Methodology:

  • Takes in the environment before interacting or asking questions to get a holistic sense for who the deceased was, which can hint at cause or manner of death.
  • Uses scientific methods for estimating time of death (livor mortis, rigor mortis, algor mortis).

2. Training, Background, and How to Break In

• Education/Training:

  • Barbara began as a physician assistant with medical background, then received on-the-job training, attended homicide schools and FBI crime scene courses.
  • Modern investigators often have forensic science or anthropology backgrounds.
  • “You no longer have to be a physician or physician assistant, but you have to have experience in trauma…Very technical now.” (A, 19:35)

• How Barbara Landed the Job:

  • Bored in hospital admin, went to career counseling; told she’d make a good coroner or poultry vet.
  • Joke: “I’ll take the dead people!” (A, 05:53)

3. Emotional and Psychological Toll

• Handling Families:

  • Must balance compassion with skepticism; “One of them could be the killer.”
  • Always tell families the truth about how their loved one died: “Give them the truth and nothing but the truth. Once you lie even once…your word is no good for anything else.” (A quoting her boss, 09:02)

• Emotional Armor:

  • Describes developing a “Plexiglas shield” to keep emotions at bay; admits it had a lasting personal cost (difficulty with vulnerability and relationships).
  • “When you close your heart down for 20-something years…it’s hard to go home and reopen it.” (A, 12:50)
  • Critical advice to newcomers: Take care of yourself first.

• Coping Mechanisms:

  • Advice from a mentor: “When you leave here every day, go home and surround yourself with things of beauty, nature, art, music, food, love…” (A, 13:38)
  • Barbara eventually found peace in nature, animals, and self-care.

4. Notable Cases & Stories

• Unsolved Case:

  • Wealthy man dies of insulin overdose. Note reads “sorry.” Suspicious circumstances—involvement of wife and psychiatrist, palpable chemistry noted, but cannot be proved.
  • “That one still pisses me off…Did he do it or did somebody else do it?...I never will know, and that makes me mad.” (A, 24:55, 25:07)

• Case Cracked Decades Later:

  • Mother and developmentally disabled daughter strangled; home health aide’s boyfriend suspected but not in DNA database.
  • Thirty years later, after boyfriend arrested for a minor crime, his DNA finally matches.
  • “So they called me and said, you got to come into court and testify on this one… I was very happy to sit up on that witness stand and look at him and talk about the cruelty of it.” (A, 27:37)

• Mass Fatality (9/11):

  • Barbara led recovery of human remains at Ground Zero, a near two-year process.
  • “Fortunately, we get therapy for free for the rest of my life.” (A, 15:06)
  • The experience contributed to relationship breakdowns and lasting trauma.

• Haunting and Memorable Cases:

  • “Mostly that was when children were killed…murdered children, yeah.” (A, 22:58)
  • Experiences run the gamut—from Fifth Avenue mansions to basements in the Lower East Side. Finds beauty or lessons in all.

5. A Typical Day & Shifts in the Field

• Old Days vs. Now:

  • 1990s: 2,400+ homicides/year, constant calls, long hours, writing reports in the car between scenes—“80 hours a week and loving every second of it.” (A, 19:16)
  • Today: Fewer homicides, more digital tools, fleet vehicles, higher pay.

• Field/Office Balance

  • Investigators now use smartphones for documentation and reporting, immediate uploads.

6. How Much Can You Make?

• Current Pay:

  • Entry-level (2026): $100,000–$110,000 starting, plus overtime.
  • 10-year experienced: $130,000–$140,000, plus overtime, which can be significant.
  • “They make a lot more now…I think it’s $100,000, $110,000 to start before overtime.” (A, 20:28)
  • “Overtime, you can kill it.” (B, 20:43)

• Barbara's Experience with Overtime:

  • Featured in New York Post’s top overtime earners—twice ranked #3 citywide.

7. The Challenge of Detachment & Life Lessons from the Dead

• Critical Skills:

  • “The ability to detach.” (A, 13:25)
  • But also, after closing her emotions at work, had to relearn how to feel and enjoy life—found solace in nature, animals, simple joys.

• What the Dead Teach Us:

  • “Worry is the most useless emotion there absolutely is.” (A, 32:57)
  • Many people, in their final moments, experience "infinite regret.”
  • Live so you don’t die with regret.

8. Media, Memoir, and Late-Life Reinvention

• Writing and TV:

  • Pandemic downtime prompted her memoir (‘What the Dead Know’), picked up by Simon & Schuster after a serendipitous agent dinner.
  • Book led to consulting roles and starring on Netflix’s ‘Homicide New York’, Oxygen’s ‘The Death Investigator’, and now an NBC pilot produced by Dick Wolf.
  • “I had no idea…that I could ever have a TV show. That seemed ridiculous. And now I have two, and the third coming, and a podcast.” (A, 39:03)

• On Set:

  • As co-executive producer, she consults on technical accuracy (e.g. how to roll a body).

9. Future of Forensics: Technology and AI

• Virtual Reality Crime Scenes:
  • New TV project involves building immersive digital reconstructions of death scenes for cold-case investigations.
  • “Now…we’ll use genetic genealogy and DNA and we’ll create a virtual crime scene.” (A, 29:15)
  • AI cannot solve crimes, but VR helps experts and juries “walk through” the scene for new perspectives.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the difference between science and empathy at a scene:

  • “The only way I can be of use to this victim is to get them justice.” (A, 12:26)
  • “It’s really hard to keep your scientific mind focused in the moment and still allow the humanity to come in.” (A, 30:49)

• On surviving the job:

  • “Go home and surround yourself with things of beauty, nature, art, music, food, love…” (from mentor Jackie, 13:38)

• On regret at the end of life:

  • “Most people have a moment of infinite regret right before they died. And I don’t ever want to have that.” (A, 33:26)

• On what she hopes her legacy will be:

  • “I’d like it to be that I cared, that I worked hard to get justice, and that I reinvented my life over and over.” (A, 38:43)

• On career timing:

  • “I’m older—a bit older—and all these things started late in life…This chapter is extraordinary.” (A, 38:06)

---

Selected Timestamps

• What is a death investigator? [01:35–04:06]
• Training & entry paths: [04:06–05:53]
• Dealing with families & emotional cost: [08:29–10:21]
• Testifying in court: [10:21–12:24]
• Coping with trauma (Barbara's shield): [11:51–13:20]
• Advice for newcomers (detachment, self-care): [13:20–14:18]
• 9/11 Ground Zero experience: [14:21–16:31]
• Day-to-day on the job, old vs new: [16:57–19:16]
• Salary details, overtime: [20:19–20:56]
• Case stories—unsolved insulin overdose: [23:25–25:19]
• Case solved 30 years later: [25:37–27:59]
• Technology, VR in forensics: [29:15–31:52]
• Life lessons from the dead: [32:08–33:34]
• Book and media spin-off: [33:34–37:27]
• Barbara's late-life reinvention: [38:01–39:09]
• On legacy: [38:43–39:03]
• Final advice (“never too late…”): [40:22–40:29]

---

Tone & Style

• Barbara: Wry, direct, compassionate, unflinchingly honest, unexpectedly humorous
• Mirav: Warm, curious, empathetic, conversational

---

Takeaways

• Death investigation can be rewarding, lucrative, and endlessly fascinating—but it demands both scientific rigor and emotional fortitude.
• Trauma and beauty coexist in the job; the dead (and their deaths) have plenty to teach the living.
• The field is evolving with technology (VR, digital forensics) and offers viable career paths, including late in life.
• Barbara Butcher’s journey is a masterclass in resilience, self-discovery, and service—even when you start a new chapter well into adulthood.

---

For further insight, read Barbara’s memoir What the Dead Know, and catch her shows on Netflix, Oxygen, and (potentially) NBC.
“You see things that no one else has ever seen—some of them are absolutely horrible, but other things are like the way people live.” (A, 20:49)

Transcript

[A]

A very wealthy man died at home. In his bed, there was insulin, a syringe, and he was a diabetic. So it was okay that he had insulin, but there was a little scrap of paper next to him on the bed that just said, sorry.

[B]

Hi. Welcome back to How Much Can I Make the Podcast about jobs and careers? I'm your host, Mira Vuzeri. Before we get into today's episode, I want to mention that next week's show will be about music sync, how songs get placed in movies, TV shows, commercials, streaming. So if you're thinking about a career in music or wondering how people actually make money in the industry, definitely check that one out. But today, we're talking death, literally. My guest, Barbara Butcher spent 23 years investigating over 5,500 death scenes in New York City. She worked ground zero after 911 and wrote a memoir about it all. She is a death investigator author with TV shows on Netflix, Oxygen, and soon, hopefully NBC. And honestly, that was the most fascinating conversation I've had on this show. So let's hear it from Barbara. What is it like being a death investigator? Thank you very much for coming on the show.

[A]

Oh, it's my pleasure.

[B]

Let's start by telling us what is a death investigator. Then we'll get to all the other stuff. What do you do when you come to a death scene?

[A]

I work for the New York City medical examiner's office. Anytime someone died alone or traumatically, like a gunshot wound, stab wound, a homicide, suicide, accident, I go to investigate. I go to the scene. And my job there was to figure out the cause and manner of death. But actually, the medical examiner, the forensic pathologist, they're the ones who determine the cause of death. So for instance, if they see on their table in the morning, ready for autopsy, a young man with a gunshot wound to his head, that's fine. That's a cause of death. But was it a homicide, a suicide, or an accident? I have seen people accidentally shoot themselves right between the eyes. Young man out on east East Houston street had bought his first gun, a cheap revolver, Saturday night special. He was spinning it on his finger like a cowboy to show off for his friends, and it flew off his hands and the hammer hit on the pavement and shot him straight between the eyes and killed him and killed him. So what I do is I go to the scene and I figure out, was this a homicide, an accident, or suicide even? And so I examine the body and the body. In any scene, the body belongs to me, the scene belongs to the police. But of course, we Work cooperatively, but it's an independent investigation. I'll examine the body. I'll look for trauma, head wounds, bullet wounds, stab wounds, signs of poisoning of anything like that. And I'll do my photographs. I'll determine the time of death by checking for livor mortis, rigor mortis, and algo mortis, the temperature of the body, the stiffness of it, all these things. And then I look around the scene with the police. So when I'm doing my examination, I pull them over the crime scene unit. Here, guys, look. Look what I'm seeing. Look at the angle of the abrasion around this bullet ring. This came from below. And I'll show them everything. Then we go around the apartment. They'll show me blood spatter or drugs they found in the refrigerator, and we work together. I document it all. I write a report, and I send my report and the photographs to the forensic pathologist who's going to autopsy the case. So now they have an informed investigation. They have the context for the death. And it's so interesting.

[B]

Wow. I have a million more questions now because first of all, how did you learn to analyze everything and to see for little things and little signs? How did you learn that on the job, or is it. Did you go to school or what?

[A]

It's a lot of both. In order to be a death investigator, when I started out in 92, you had to have a medical background, a physician assistant, and then they gave us on the job training for three months. I went out on every case with senior investigators, and I went to NYPD homicide school, criminal investigation school, and then I went to the FBI academy to do their scene course for a week. And so I kept learning all the time because I loved my job and I wanted to be good at it, of course.

[B]

So then you just went and applied to the medical examinator office or.

[A]

No, what happened is it's kind of odd how I got the job. I had been working in surgery, and then I was made a hospital director, and I was very bored. I like action surgery, death, homicide, whatever. I went to a career counseling service, and they gave me all those tests. Minnesota multiphasic, Briggs, Myers personality preference, whatever. And at the end of the test, my counselor said, you should actually be a poultry veterinarian or a coroner. I said, why poultry? He said, with your patients, if they don't get better, you get really. It affects you very deeply. So if you work with puppies and kittens, your heart would break if they didn't get better. But chickens, they have beady little eyes. No one cares about them. And so you wouldn't get upset if they died. And it's like, wait a minute, I'll take the dead people.

[B]

I don't care about chicken.

[A]

So I, I, I said to say coroner, medical examiner's investigator. And I said they're already dead. It won't upset me too much. But I forgot they have families and we have to interact with them. And that's heartbreaking. And a lot of times we identify with victims very much a woman my age, stabbed, raped, murdered, any of those things, it affects me very much. So that's the downside of what is one of the most interesting jobs in the world.

[B]

It must have affected you. You've done it for 23 years, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you were on. I've read 5,500 cases and 680 homicides in New York. What I wanted to know when you started to describe what you see when you first come in, what you looking for. That will surprise people that people wouldn't think that you do.

[A]

In order to figure out how a person died, first I know, have to know how they lived. Oh. So when I walk into a scene, I stand at the doorway and I take my hands off my ears and put them over my mouth. No questions, no talking. I just take in the whole zeitgeist of the scene. If I see white powder on a table and little scales and packets and lots of tattoos on the deceased person, I'm starting the same drug dealer. So that bespeaks a certain kind of death, right?

[B]

A possibility at least.

[A]

Yeah, it's either a homicide or an overdose. But if I go into a nice Upper west side apartment with PBS Channel 13 tote bags and Birkenstocks and lots of books on his shelves, that's a whole nother kind of life. And that life tells me not much chance of being a homicide victim. So I'll look for other things. And I look for everything. I look at the food, the medication, their clothes. I get a sense of how people live. Then it helps me to figure out how they died.

[B]

Do you walk in together with the police, or you walk in first and then the police comes?

[A]

The police call me, the police call me. They notify the dispatcher that they've got a homicide in the 23 precinct and they're there already, They've blocked off the scene and they're taking names of everybody who comes in. They're interviewing witnesses. And then when I get there, I do my examination because they're not supposed to mess up the scene at all.

[B]

Until I get that brings me to another question, because you there pretty much at the beginning, but then grieving families or friends or lovers or wives, husbands come in. How do you deal with the details of whether a crime or suicide or whatever, and the families, how do you combine?

[A]

That's the hard part. First, I have to. If the family's at the scene, I have to interview them. And that's really difficult because you have to show compassion and empathy. But at the same time, one of them could be the killer.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So I've interviewed husbands whose wives were killed, strangled. And I say, I'm so sorry, this must be just crushing for you. And I just need to ask you what time you got home from work? So it's very sticky. And then sometimes the family will come to me afterwards to discuss the case or to the medical examiner. And I remember one time, this family, their son had died in a fire, and they asked me, did he suffer? I was like, oh, damn. I was new to the job. I didn't know what to say because most people would say, no, he died instantly. I went to my boss, I said, chief, they want to know the details. He said, give them the truth and nothing but the truth. Once you lie even once about a small thing, your word is no good for anything else. They want to know. So they're imagining a horrible burning to death, and that's not really what happened. Tell them the truth. So I did. I said, look, he had second degree, some little third degree burns on his hands, and no doubt they were painful. However, he died from smoke inhalation, as most people do in a fire, and that would be choking, but he would. That smoke is awful. But he would pass out relatively quickly and just die from smoke inhalation and not feel any pain. They were like, oh, thank God. Oh, thank God. We thought he was trapped and burning. Whatever they imagine is so much worse than the truth. So that was an important lesson.

[B]

Yeah, of course. Did it happen that you had to go to court to testify? What is that? What that. Because you hear the families again, right?

[A]

Yes. And the families are sitting there in the. In the spectator section and the. And I have to say things that I don't want them to know. I had a case of a little girl. There was a serial killer in East Harlem killing teenage girls and adolescent girls. Rape them, strangle them. This girl was raped, strangled, set on fire.

[B]

Ooh.

[A]

Yeah. It was awful. And when they finally arrested him after his 13th murder, whatever it was, I had to testify in court. Now her mother, the girl's mother was there with her father and sisters and brothers. And I had to describe how I found her.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

She was in cinders. It was. It was absolutely horrifying what I had to say. And I just saw the mother's face, and I was thinking, oh, God, what can I. I have to tell this the truth about this. But this is so painful for that woman. And I just. I told as best I could, without any goriness. I explained the death before I continue

[B]

with all the other questions. When you go home at the end of a day like that, either at court or what you saw in Harlem with a girl or when you get home, I know you don't drink, what do you do when you get home?

[A]

Sometimes I cry. The truth is, here's what we do. In all those years of seeing horror, tragedy, destruction, and death, I learned to drop a shield. I close off my emotions. If I walk in and I see something horrifying, it comes right down like a Plexiglas shield. I don't feel it. I don't think about the victims as what they suffered. I. I turn myself into a forensic investigating robot.

[B]

The only way to do it.

[A]

Yeah. And I tell myself the only way I can be of use to this victim is to get them justice. Do the best exam I can, gather the best evidence I can. So that's what I do. Unfortunately, when you close your heart down for 20 something years, it's kind of. Kind of hard to go home and reopen it.

[B]

Well, you'll work on it.

[A]

Yeah. I went through numerous relationships where it just didn't work because I couldn't be vulnerable and speak. There's a downside to every job. Every job, I think, is one of the most interesting in the world, and I loved every second of it. But there is a price, and that price is part of your humanity. I mentor some young people who are going into the business, and I always tell them, take care of yourself first.

[B]

So what would you say is the most important skill for somebody who wants that job?

[A]

The ability to detach. But on my first autopsy, it was a little girl, eight years old, strangled, raped.

[B]

Eight years old?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

I asked the forensic pathologist, I said, jackie, how do you stand this every single day, seeing this kind of horror and tragedy? She said, barbara, if you want to make it here, when you leave here every day, go home and surround yourself with things of beauty, nature, art, music, food, love, all those things. And I thought, oh, that's so hippie, trippy. I didn't listen. But then after a while, I got a little house upstate, a little shack.

[B]

Oh, and that helped a little.

[A]

Oh, it helped so much. I hugged trees, I had beautiful trees. I got a dog, two cats, and it helped me a lot.

[B]

I can imagine.

[A]

But 9 11, kind of this was.

[B]

I was just going to ask you about 911 because you were first on the cinder and there are mass casualty. How do you deal with that?

[A]

Oh, that was a tough one. The fear of every single American, especially New Yorkers, especially those of us who were down there. We're thinking about attacks. There's jets going overhead and there's soldiers everywhere carrying machine guns and all kinds of stuff. There was a terror of all in all of us.

[B]

Yes, I remember. Yes.

[A]

So that was predominant. But then when I started seeing what happened to the people, we didn't rec. I was in charge of recovery at that time. Recovering human remains.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And that was not good. Fortunately, we get therapy for free for the rest of my life.

[B]

Oh, that's good. And how long the investigation of 9 11, the collecting and all of that,

[A]

how long did it take initially, a year and a half before we were able to clear everything out, all the body parts, all the rubble, columns and things. But then I think it was almost two years later, we found tiny little bits of bone on the roof of the Deutsche bank. And then we found some in the electric manholes and where the gas and electric and cable is. Somebody found some other human remains. So now we went back and dug up the entire west side Highway. What, for two weeks we had it alternately closed. We dug up this, the original scene. Again, we went through the dirt, the bedrock, everything. And we went through every manhole for a half mile around the area. And we found more things, more human remains, mostly small bones.

[B]

And then you match them with the DNA to the deceased.

[A]

Yeah, sure. You can actually get DNA advanced so wildly in that time, the techniques and the technology. And we were able to get DNA from tiny little bones or from teeth, things like that. So it was really.

[B]

So you were involved in that for a year and a half. That's a long time to deal with such masks, with whatever we went through on 9 11. Wow.

[A]

It was. And of course, my relationship broke up. Can you imagine? I see these horrible things, just heartbreaking. And then I come home and my partner says, I can't stand this. To paint color in this kitchen anymore. You're gonna have to paint this. And I'm like, do you have any idea what I did to that? And that's not fair. They don't sign up. I do.

[B]

I wanna know, is there a typical day in your work? What's your typical day at the job like back then?

[A]

Let's see, in the early 90s, we were getting, what was it, 2,430 something homicides a year. Now we're lucky if we get 315. Back then, everybody was getting killed because of drugs.

[B]

It went down during the 2000s.

[A]

Yeah. Oh, it's way down now. New York is a very safe city.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

So the day was I might pick up a hospital case. A doctor would call in and they'd say they brought in a guy with stab wounds. I couldn't save him. And I'd get all the medical information from them and then work with the police to get the rest. But the best days is when I was out, I was on tour. Tour, meaning I'd be out in the streets all day.

[B]

Not any particular case, Just touring the neighborhood.

[A]

No, just when it. I'd be out and they'd call me for a case on the radio. We didn't have cell phones, so really this is way back. And they'd call me with a case and I'd go to that case, investigate it. And I'd be writing up my reports in the car when we get another call. There's an elderly woman, her apartment's been ransacked. She's laying in the bed, but she doesn't look right. And I'd go over there and do that one. And then I'd start to head out to lunch and I'd get my Kentucky Fried Chicken or my McDonald's. And they'd say, barbara, you've got a homicide in the Lower east side. You got to go right now, they're waiting for you. And I'd put down the chicken and go out. So it was a very. Back then, it was a very strenuous job. Nowadays, everything is so much better. They have a fleet of vehicles ready for the investigators to run out. No more looking for a driver. Although I did have a driver back then, which I enjoyed now. But I could do my paperwork in the car, right? But I do a bunch of cases and I come back to the office and try to write my reports and time to go home. But we always worked overtime. In fact, the New York Post used to put out a list, the top 10 overtime earners in New York City every year. And twice I was number three.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Imagine I was working 80 hours a week and loving every second of it.

[B]

This is what I want to know because it's how much can you make? Is our show. And people tune in to learn how much money they can earn. If somebody starts at that job, what can they make at the beginning and the middle and end?

[A]

If someone wants to be a death investigator, they will have studied some forensic science. You no longer have to be a physician or a physician assistant, but you have to have experience in trauma. Of course, a lot of forensic anthropologists with master's degrees, they are now investigators. And things are very technical now. So they no longer write reports in the car. They do everything on iPhone, take the pictures, get the family to sign the identification, put all their notes down, get the names of all the. They do everything on a phone. And that's amazing to me. And it goes right back to the office. So they don't have to write a report necessarily. It's much easier now.

[B]

And they make less than what you made at the beginning?

[A]

No, no, they. They make a lot more. Now, when I started out.

[B]

What does a beginner make right now?

[A]

I think it's a hundred thousand, one hundred ten thousand to start before overtime. Yeah.

[B]

And when somebody has ten years experience, how much can they make then?

[A]

I think it goes up to 130, 140 around there.

[B]

And then over time, you can kill it. It's not a bad job at all.

[A]

No, it's not.

[B]

It's solving a puzzle every day.

[A]

If you have the ability to do these kind of things, and very few people do, let's be honest.

[B]

It's a taxing job.

[A]

It's taxing. But if you can do it, you should try it. Because you see things that no one else has ever seen. Some of them are absolutely horrible, but other things are like the way people live. I've been in fifth Avenue duplexes, where the woman is dead in the bed in a beautiful black, beautiful satin jacket. The walls are oval. It's a circular room. And there's art, good art, impressionist art, hung all around her and her son. He said, look, her doctor was not around. She died suddenly. I just want. I hope you check around, see if everything's okay. And it was. It was a natural death. But he saw me looking at the art and said, would you like to take a look? My mother would enjoy it. And I said, oh, no, I can't impose upon you. He said, no, please, she would like to know that you liked it.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And I went, saw this incredible art. Not one hour later, when I finished that case, I was on the Lower east side, crawling in the basement of an abandoned building to pull out some poor drug addict who had overdosed on a pile of trash. You know, it was funny after seeing that part, I noticed the beauty in this pile of trash. There were red plastic cups. There was blue spaghetti boxes, There was white paper. I noticed the colors. It was so interesting to me because I was seeing differently.

[B]

That's a great story. That is a great story. Is there a case that particularly stayed with you all those years?

[A]

There are quite a few that I can't really shake, and they still upset me. But I have a brilliant therapist, and it's dbt, Prolonged exposure, blah, blah, good therapy for ptsd, and it actually works. So now I'm able to think about them. I don't want to, but if they pop up, I'm okay. And mostly that was when children were killed.

[B]

Oh, yes.

[A]

Yeah. Murdered children.

[B]

Murdered children, yeah.

[A]

When the whole family is dead, that's usually drugs. Somebody comes in looking for something and they just start shooting people. That was years and years ago. Years ago. But I can't get it out of my head.

[B]

You've been involved in 5,500 cases. Was there a case that you couldn't solve, you couldn't find out? There were no answers. It was covered up. Really? Tell me one.

[A]

This one still pisses me off. A very wealthy man died at home. In his bed, there was insulin, a syringe. His daughter had come home early from school and found him. And he was a diabetic. And so it was okay that he had insulin, but there was a little scrap of paper next to him on the bed that just said, sorry.

[B]

Ooh.

[A]

And the daughter, she was very young, 14, 15. And she called her mother. Her mother had, I think it was a boutique on Madison Avenue. And the mother walked home. When she got home, she called her husband's psychiatrist, and he walked over. Nobody called 911. They strolled to the house, to this huge loft.

[B]

Was it a cahoots between the wife and the psychiatrist?

[A]

Look, I'll just say that they were sitting in the den of the family room, wherever it was, and the woman was in a Chanel suit. She was exquisite, blonde, perfect, tanned. The psychiatrist was in a bespoke suit, very well tailored. He too, had this blonde streaky hair, very handsome. And the energy between them, the chemistry was palpable. I could feel their chemistry.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Oh, I had a hell of a time questioning them because they were superior being.

[B]

They were rich and. Yeah, rich. So eventually they called the police, and police called you, and you came to

[A]

the scene, and sure enough, he died of an insulin overdose. But did he do it or did somebody else do it? Or they changed the insulin. I don't know and I never will, and that makes me mad.

[B]

So you had to report it as death from insulin. That's all you could have done, right?

[A]

Probable suicide by insulin. Yeah, apparent suicide. We call it apparent.

[B]

And that haunts you. I can see why.

[A]

Oh, it does. It makes me so mad. I think about the poor guy being so depressed and sad, and maybe his wife is out with another man, his psychiatrist, who he trusted. Wow. What could be more depressing?

[B]

And you had a case that took you a while, and finally you cracked it and you were jumping up and down.

[A]

Yes. It just happened. 32 years ago, a woman and her daughter were found strangled at home and with oxygen tubing. The mother was ill, and they were both strangled, pushed down onto the floor and pushed down onto the bed, and it was brutal. The daughter was developmentally disabled, and they had a home health aide. And the home health aide came in and found them, called the police, and they called me. When I came in, I noticed that on the. By the kitchen sink, they had curl activator. They were doing their hair together. They had, like, lotion was still in their hair. So it's a mother, daughter on a Saturday night. They had dinner. They were doing their hair together. It was a nice evening. Someone came in and killed them. So now the first thing I said to the cops is, does the home health aide have a boyfriend? And they said, yeah. I said, there's your guy.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

She has the keys. He could easily take them. He could come in and rob them, right, and kill them. But who the hell would do that? You know how much he got, by the way? $12. So there was DNA on the oxygen tubing that was used to strangle, but it didn't match anything in codis, the national database, okay, where all the DNA is. Okay. And for all these 30 years, it never hit anything. And then suddenly, two years ago, it hit. And who did it hit to? The boyfriend of the home health agent.

[B]

How did it hit all of a sudden?

[A]

Because he had been arrested now on a minor assault charge. Now his DNA was in the system after 30 years, it hit, and they went and arrested him first. They got what they call a discard sample. They wait till he throws away a cigarette. And they got a swab from him eventually when they arrested him and it matched to him. So they called me and said, you got to come into court and testify on this one. I'm like, wow, this is so long ago, but I remember it. I remember it because it pissed me off that someone would kill a mother and a daughter doing their hair and having a nice evening. So I was very happy to sit up on that witness stand and look at him and talk about the cruelty of it. How hard he pulled that oxygen tubing, how he knelt on her back as he pushed her into the floor. All those things.

[B]

How many years did he get?

[A]

He got two life sentences.

[B]

Oh, good.

[A]

Now he's. I think he's 70 or something, or 60. Whatever. No, he'll never walk free again.

[B]

Is it possible to come into a scene, take with AI Take the whole movie, every little detail, feed it to AI and he will solve the problem.

[A]

No, no, they've thought about it and they've worked. You know, their AI people are working on this. What they were working on was just ways to make the photographs come alive. That. Take the photos of a scene and do a virtual reality on it so that you can. And this started years ago. We used to do it with CAD cam engineering software. Okay. Where you could reconstruct the room, that the people could look at it now on a jury and see where the victim was, say, where the gun, the gunshot residue was, where the bullet holes were. Now, this new show I'm working on, we're going to solve cold cases using a team of experts, including me. And we will use genetic genealogy and DNA and we'll create a virtual crime scene.

[B]

So it won't be a reality tv. It won't be. It's a reality tv, but it won't be a real thing.

[A]

It'll be. Is reality tv. Everything we say is true.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

But you won't see the actual scene, but you will walk through it with us. I have to have these special glasses on and I see everything, and the audience will see with me.

[B]

Oh, my God. I have to see this show when it's coming out.

[A]

Yeah, we're shooting a pilot in July, so we don't know.

[B]

Okay. All right. So you have the scene. Yeah, I'm sorry I stopped you. It's really interesting. So you have a mock scene and they see it through your eyes?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I see it and they see it. Isn't that something? Wow.

[B]

And as you see it, you say, I think that this and this. Because the bullet came this direction or that direction. You actually.

[A]

Sure. Like a case I'm working on now, I can't figure out where the perpetrator stood and where the victim was because it's such a small, tight Area thinking, how could they both get in there? But yet the blood spatter tells me that they were there. I know where she died. So walking through that, I look at the floor diagrams. It doesn't tell me much. It says 22 inches across. But I want to feel it. I want to walk through it. Then I can really feel that scene, just as I do when it's a fresh scene and I walk in and I understand it. My other show, the Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher, that's on Oxygen.

[B]

Oxygen. Excellent show. I saw it.

[A]

Thank you. And there we don't have virtual reality, but we do show me and the detective going back to the scene the actual happened. And we're showing the audience the photos and we're describing how it was solved and what the evidence means. So you learn a lot about the feelings. Some of these detectives going back to a scene from 10, 15 years ago, they cry. It's really hard to keep your scientific mind focused in the moment and still allow the humanity to come in. Because you need your emotional mind to also think through the possibilities. What would make someone batter an old mother? What would make someone batter her face? Usually the son is a drug addict and she says, no more money and rage in a killing. And that's not something you can see with a microscope or with a DNA. But when you're there, you see it, you feel it, you absorb it, and it leads you on the right path.

[B]

Which brings me to your book. You wrote a book, what the Dead Know, which I read the first week it came out. A total page turner. I remembered a lot of the cases you mentioned there. Really a fantastic book, Bob. What do you think we can learn from the dead?

[A]

I think there's two things I learned. One was a professional thing, and that is that only they know how they really died. So it's up to me to interpret everything that's about them, around them, investigate that everything about the body, and they will somehow let me know, but only they know that. But the main thing I learned is I had worked as a kid when I was in high school with hospice care and elderly people dying, and I'd say, what's the one thing you regret? And they said, always. I worried so much, and it did absolutely nothing to change my work.

[B]

I should say that to myself, yes,

[A]

worry is the most useless emotion there absolutely is. And then they said things like, I wish I didn't yell at my kids to clean up their rooms. What was the difference? Sometimes when I saw people, especially who had died of accidents, I saw a Look in their eyes, startled. Why did I drive drunk? Why did I decide to stick my head in this garbage chute? It's just this feeling I have that most people have a moment of infinite regret right before they died. And I don't ever want to have that. I don't want to have that at all.

[B]

Your book was published by Simon and Schuster. How did this come about?

[A]

Well, it's. Yeah, it is interesting and amazing, isn't it? Because it's such a top notch publisher. But I have a really good agent, Kathy Schneider at ROT Rosen Literary Agency.

[B]

How did you get the agent?

[A]

Well, because my friend Kate White, she writes mysteries and thrillers and she was the editor of cosmo for like 12 years. I used to help her with the. The forensics in her book. So she had a dinner party for me and invited some agents and publicists and people, you know. She said, barbara, go ahead, tell them stories. So I got the agent who got me the publisher. She even had a little bidding war, three publishers bidding for it. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. Absolutely incredible.

[B]

So you have the two series that we mentioned, one on Netflix, both excellent, one on Oxygen. How did it come about you all of a sudden, out of nowhere, all over the tv, every time I open, I see Barbara Butcher.

[A]

It's funny, isn't it? Yeah. After I wrote the book, it came out in 2023, in June.

[B]

Why did you write the book, by the way?

[A]

I wrote it over Covid, mostly.

[B]

Oh, you were just bored? You had nothing to do?

[A]

Yeah, I had no. I had a con. I was retired then. I had a consulting business for doing investigations on homicides and accidents where there was some controversy. Okay. It was a big job. That was a fun, fun job. But, yeah, there was no more. Nobody was suing anybody. There was nothing going on. So I decided it was time to write the book that I had been thinking about for years.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Sat down and wrote it. And when it came out In June of 23, it did well. I was very happy about that. I got a lot of speaking engagements and things, and that was nice. And then a producer from Netflix called me and said, look, we're doing a documentary series, a docu series called Homicide New York about cases. And the detectives that we're working with say that you should be here because these were your cases too. I said, okay, sure. What are you paying? Nothing.

[B]

Oh, they didn't pay?

[A]

No, because if it's a documentary or a docu series, you're not supposed to be paid because it's Supposed to be real. And there's no. No buying somebody. I'll give you $10,000 if you say his mother did it. Whatever. I said, all right, I want to do it anyway. It looks like it'll be interesting. And I did, and it was a Dick Wolf production. So Dick Wolf saw me on that show and said, all right, why don't we think about getting her a show of her own? So from the Netflix show, I got the unscripted show, the true crimes that I've done called the Death Investigator.

[B]

You did get paid for that one. It wasn't a documentary. Yeah, okay, I got paid for that. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I'm not rich yet, but, hey, you will be. So they said, all right, let's put together a series based on her cases. And I've been doing that. We have a second season we're filming this summer.

[B]

Oh, really? I didn't know. Now there's a whole new show coming. The one in this group.

[A]

Yeah, the Cold Case Show. We're shooting a pilot in July. We'll see if that goes. And here's the biggest news of all. Dick Wolf is producing. He produced and filmed a pilot for NBC based on me.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

On my life, on my adventures.

[B]

Oh, my God. First of all, Dick Wolf is huge, but I hope they pick it.

[A]

Oh, I hope that goes to series. This will be wonderful. And you know who's playing me? Taylor Schilling.

[B]

What was she?

[A]

Oh, really? Yes. Is the blonde. She starred in that for years. And he is unbelievably good in this. Unbelievably good.

[B]

So you have to be on the set as a consultant. Right.

[A]

I'm a co executive producer, so I have to be there to show them how to do things the correct way and set up the scene. And I can spend a couple of hours with her, showing her how to use the equipment. I taught her how to roll a body over. Even if it's a big, heavy person, we have to use physics.

[B]

But I never thought about that.

[A]

No, it's difficult, sure. But I know how to do it. And I showed Taylor, and she's amazing in this show. She gets all the layers, the interesting stuff, the happy stuff, the exciting stuff, and also the inside stuff.

[B]

I'm sure you didn't imagine that you thought you would release the book and. Fine, but.

[A]

And I want to tell your audience that I'm older, a bit older, and all these things started late in life. The job. I was certainly a grown adult with lots of experience and other things behind me. But this New life. This chapter is extraordinary.

[B]

Amazing. Which brings me to the last question I want to ask you because you spend your life servicing other people that cannot speaks for themselves, actually for the dead. What would you like your legacy to be about?

[A]

Oh, wow. No one's ever asked me that before.

[B]

Here I am, I'm asking.

[A]

Oh, my legacy. I would like it to be that I cared, that I worked hard to get justice and that I reinvented my life over and over. I had no idea whatsoever that I could ever have a TV show that seemed ridiculous.

[B]

And now you're have two and the third coming, right?

[A]

And a podcast coming. My God.

[B]

Do you know the name of the podcast? What will be the title? The name?

[A]

I think it's going to be the Death Investigator also.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

It's going to be. Yeah, it's going to be. We have the TV version and then the podcast version, but it will be different cases.

[B]

Oh, it's very successful. I think podcast, crime, podcast are the number one. I, you know. Wow, Barbara. Unbelievable.

[A]

You know what I miss, though, in all this excitement and wonderful new work? I miss being out on a scene with the cops, with the detectives. I miss those guys and those women. I miss having that immediate effect on justice, on history, on whatever it is. I was very, I felt very relevant in the world and all I could do now is share my experience.

[B]

And I think big part of it is that you worked in service of people, I think, and that's why it comes back to you also to really put yourself in that situation. And day in and day out, the little girl, the little boy that you said, oh, my God, I'm gonna have nightmare just from hearing your stories. I cannot even imagine what it's like for you now.

[A]

It's all good now. And just remember, it's never too late to do what you want to do.

[B]

There you go. All right, listeners, you heard it from the life investigator now, not the death investigator. Thank you so much.

[A]

Thank you, Mara.

[B]

Yeah, that's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, head over to howmuchcanimake.info and check out our unique and unusual careers category. You will hear behind the scenes conversation with people doing some truly fascinating work. And I will see you next week on How Much can I Make?