True crime aficionados know that medical examiners, like the late great Dr. Donald Mallard (Ducky) on NCIS, talk to the dead and the dead talk back. It is not unusual when watching an episode of NCIS to hear Ducky, or his successor, holding a one-sided conversation with the corpse on the table. These conversations include laments about the deceased’s death as well as questions about what killed them. These conversations serve as a way to advance the plot and also show that the MEs have not forgotten the humanity of the corpse.
Although the conversation with corpses is minimal in What the Dead Know, Butcher does help the living understand what can be learned from corpses and crime scenes. Butcher spent 23 years as a New York City Death Investigator. She was not responsible for autopsying the dead, but was responsible for visiting death scenes around the city to photograph and gather evidence. Her clients included the elderly who died alone in one bedroom apartments, murder victims in alleys, and the desperate who die by suicide.
She opens with the story of a man who died by hanging, but who intended to electrocute whoever cut him down. He had unscrewed all the light bulbs and set it up to look as if the power was out in his apartment. However, he plugged in a power cord and used that to hang himself. If Butcher had not had a torn tendon and been unable to cut him down, she would have been electrocuted. She caught it through reviewing photos and was able to alert the morgue techs who did cut him down. Other stories include stories of men who died in flophouses and women who died in multimillion dollar townhouses.
Butcher was on sick leave on 09/11/2001 and like many of us she turned on her TV after someone called to tell her that something was going on in New York. She watched the tower’s fall from the perspective of a death scene investigator. As she watched, she thought about all the people who might have died, wondered how they would find their bodies, and how they would be identified. She was able to enter the city on 09/12 and she tells the tale of an insider who helped identify the bodies, helped coordinate resources, and was there in the aching aftermath when all that helpers could do was identify bodies and console the living.
Although the title of the book is What the Dead Know, this book is not only about what the dead can teach us about life in general, it is also about what happens to a person when they live in a world of death and destruction, when they spend 8 hours or more every day looking at dead people. Butcher is an alcoholic and she suffered a breakdown that led her to lose her first career and led her to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. She loved her job and did it well for 23 years, but when she was forced out, all the pain and ugliness she had absorbed for 23 years demanded to be let out. Butcher sought help at an in-patient facility and worked to regain her mental health. When she came out, she was more in touch with her feelings and ready for her next career as an author and an actor.
What the Dead Know provides a fascinating look at the world of death investigations and what goes on behind the scenes, but it is also a very human book about the dangers of keeping all our pain bottled up.