Fountaindale Public Library

What the dead know, learning about life as a New York City death investigator, Barbara Butcher

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

What the dead know

1395904606

Barbara Butcher

Thorndike Press large print biography and memoir

learning about life as a New York City death investigator

"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"--, Provided by publisher

The angry hanging man -- Luck joy -- How to roll a body -- Partners in crime -- The Whitehouse hotel -- Don't try this at home -- Timing is everything -- Baby-faced butchers -- The other city -- In case of emergency -- The slain and the slayers -- Fuck Entenmann's -- Homicide: death at the hands of another -- Suicide: murder of the self -- The radios are down -- Whatever it takes -- That's politics -- They locked my ass up

adult