With over 5,500 death investigations and 700 homicide scenes behind her, Barbara is one of the most experienced death investigators in the country — a woman who has stood in the middle of humanity’s darkest moments and brought order to chaos.
She served as a top investigator for New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner, responded to the 9/11 attacks, helped identify victims of the Thailand tsunami, and now brings her unmatched insight to Oxygen’s new true-crime series, The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher, airing Saturdays at 9 p.m.
In this episode, Barbara sits down with Rachel to break down what a death investigator really does — from how she reads a crime scene the moment she walks in, to the mistakes cops make before she even gets there, to how she determines cause and manner of death when the evidence is almost gone.
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What You’ll Learn:
• What separates a death investigator from a medical examiner or detective
• The critical first clues she looks for when entering a crime scene
• The subtle signs — smell, temperature, position — that reveal time and cause of death
• How she handled mass-fatality cases like 9/11 and the Thailand tsunami
• Why her new Oxygen series shows the real side of forensic investigation — not the TV version
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About Barbara Butcher:
Barbara is a retired death investigator for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner, author of What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator, and host of The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher on Oxygen.
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🎧 Tune in now to go behind the tape — and hear from the woman who’s been at the scene of the truth more times than anyone else.
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