How Detectives Solve Death Investigations Barbara Butcher Explains.

0:00I started or not in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non-technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end, and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle. It's the thing that you do the thing on. We run the business on Shopify. Start your free trial on Shopify.com. This is Belie, one network, every topic, everywhere. You know, Barbara, even 9-11, which I know you were a huge hero at 9-11 and all three of us here responded to the towers. When they had to get rid of the debris, or offload the debris from the towers onto trucks, they had not all the trucks belong to organized crimes. So they had to undo and stop hiring them

1:01because you had to do everything fast because everything needed to be done yesterday. And then apparently also, some of the debris was still burning. So they put it on these trucks and the trucks would catch on fire. So that's where it came, the idea, put them on barges and slowed them down river to the fresh kills dump in Staten Island. And if it catches fire on that, they have access to water right there. They put it out as the barges moving toward Staten Island. So you can't make up any of this stuff up. They always say truth is much stranger than fiction that it certainly is. Who would think, oh yes, this is the family's trucks picking up the debris from the what heroes they are, you know? Yeah. I mean, God knows we have all seen, the three of us have seen things that no one else will ever see and should never see. Just the oddities of life, weird things that happen.

2:02And I mean, probably my biggest loss of innocence in this job was when, went to the home of a guy who's dead, who's sitting in the desk chair, looking at his computer and he was, you know, undressed from the waist down. And on that computer, when they hit it, it was showing images of children in sexual situations. And they were real children. And I was like, what? I never heard of that. And there were boxes and boxes of films and photographs. And I looked at the photograph and it was actual children. I had always thought it was either very short and very young adults or, or, I don't know, teenagers. These were actually kids. I couldn't believe it. And now, it's not films. I mean, I can't believe that this is back. So life is very strange.

3:03Well, you know, Barber, it's like, when you say stuff like that. And I would think certain members, or most members of the audience would be shocked, but we just sort of, it's like a duck getting water on its back. And we just sort of shuffle it away. And we acknowledge the horror of it. But yet you can't take much time to acknowledge the horror of it while you're doing police work or doing what you do, which is the investigation of a dead body. You can't give it that much of your thoughts. You can't sit there and grieve over it. You have to move on. You have a job to do. But, as you said before, those images forever stay implanted in your brain. And one day they will come back. And you'll just see them again. Tell me. Without even asking your brain to show them to you again. Yeah, they do. And that's called PTSD, right? You know, as long as you don't let them lodge in your heart, but of course, some cases with kids and things,

4:04we know it stays in your heart. But yeah, those images just pop up whenever they please. And you know, Bob, I just want to mention one thing. I know when you talk about mass fatality, you also responded to a tsunami once, right? Yeah. Wasn't there a couple hundred thousand dead people at that? I believe it was 400,000, but the number has been, and it was the Southeast Asian tsunami just after Christmas, 2004. And there were hundreds of thousands of bodies. And the United Nations, the medical branch, and health, excuse me, asked Dr. Hirsch and myself and another colleague to go over there and help with identification of the bodies, which seems like a ridiculous thing, because every country there were digging ditches and trenches and placing the bodies in them reverently.

5:07But they were completely unrecognizable. He, the, the, the heat, the decomposition, it just was nothing to be seen. But we were sent to Thailand. And Thailand had many, many foreign tourists there. I think there were 840 who disappeared. And the European nation said, no, we want our bodies back. We're not going to leave them in trenches. So what is the Thai government to do? They have DNA labs, but they can't rapidly process 840 people. So we went over there and we helped out with DNA technology and sent some scientists and, you know, used various methods and they identified about 830 of those tourists, which is a miracle in an atmosphere. Wow, that's amazing. So mass fatality management, I mean, it's from plane crashes, from, you know, the Staten Island

6:08ferry crash. That was a mass fatality incident. The main thing is recovering a body. The next big thing is identifying that body so they can be returned to their loved ones. And of course, the great tragedy of 9-11 at the World Trade Center was that people were so engulfed in the forces of an air, being hit by an airplane and the fires fed by fuels thousands of degrees that many were actually vaporized and nothing will ever be found. You know, the medical examiner will never stop trying to identify everyone. Sometimes it happens. Well, that's Barbara. I can't, I mean, bless you for having seen all those horrible things. And, you know, the number 400,000, it's incomprehensible. It really is when you think of how many people that is. Yeah, it might have been 250,000. And I can't, now I can't remember.

7:09But there's something I'll have to look up on this going to drive. No, I knew it was in the hundreds of thousands. And because that tsunami came sort of without warning and people just, you know, it just people drowned. People was washed away. And just absolutely horrific. But when we talk, we get back to this case. And this is where your experience comes in. And somehow look, the person in the lower Raymond R.C. horse, the father, you know, he's probably got a spot in hell right now. You know, he's probably got a seat, a front row seat, the hottest place in hell right now. But his son, right, Eugene, Eugene has a shot. And maybe if we can get the evidence necessary to be charged with murder in these cases. That's the only hope we really have is that they can produce evidence to hold him accountable.

8:14So how do we build a murder case? Well, evidence. That's how we do it. We have to collect evidence, Mike. Yeah, Bill, this is going to be a completely a circumstance case because you're going to look for DNA. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to find a hair, whether it be some blood that you identify a person. And then you're going to have to maybe see if you could find them on a snuff film to show and have someone say, that is the moment of their death. That was it. So we know they're not missing. We know they're not runaways. That we know they're not still acting somewhere. We believe that they are dead. It's all circumstantial. And that may be the best you're going to do. You're going to be, say, look, nobody's seen these people and nobody's heard from these people. They never contacted anybody for years. They've been missing. And Barbara, as you said earlier, some of the people who weren't even reported missing. And so that makes it even worse as a prosecutor

9:15because you don't even have a missing person's report on them. And so the families don't even consider that missing or maybe they haven't spoken in a while. But this is whatever you do, the best you're going to do is a real, one of those fourth quarter, 90-yard touchdown pass, one second left in the clock. That's the kind of case you're going to have to do. It's not going to be a rock-solid case with DNA evidence, photographic evidence. I witnessed evidence, fingerprint evidence, unless it's evidence, or all these other things that we're used to in crime scenes. You're not going to have any of that. It's all going to be a few little pieces. So you might even bring him to trial. But you're going to have to convince 12 people that, yeah, that means that that person's dead, not that they just lived there for a couple of weeks, and then moved on. So even if you can bring them to justice, you might not get justice.

10:15And I'm thinking about this as you're talking, if it's disposing of the bodies and things like that. This is going to be a hell-marry, last second pass, kind of prosecution. And you may not, at the end of the day, that may be the best you can do is maybe you bring this person to trial, maybe get a conviction, but maybe not. Yeah, I to Matt, to me at this point, not knowing anymore than what Barbara said and what we know so far. To me is a flip of a coin. Yeah. You know, Barbara, it was no accident that he targeted much like Rex Juleman, the Gilgobit serial killer. What we would refer to as marginalized people. And the Gilgobit serial killer case, he targeted sex workers. Because first of all, many times, sex workers are off the map as far as their family. They don't deal with their family. Any longer, their family doesn't know where they are. They don't have maybe a lot of close friends.

11:17They have relationships and things. But they're easier because let's put it that way. They're marginalized. In this case, it's reported that he was traveling to Camden, New Jersey and actually going to the stroll, for those that don't know what that is. The stroll is where prostitutes do the walk every night. And that's where they, that's their office. That's where they do their work. And he would target them. And also in Camden, New Jersey, he would target drug addicts. And those are the people he would bring to the house, either getting to come to the house with money or most of the time with drugs. And if it was, heroin was their choice of drugs. You did a start of business just to keep the lights on. You hit a sell more today than yesterday. You're here to weed. Lucky for you, Shopify built the best converting checkout on the planet. Like the just one tapping, ridiculously fast acting,

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14:23on the streets of New York, we tried to treat them with the same dignity and to treat them with the same effort in solving their case as we would do no matter what a person's station and life. And apparently early on in the Gilgobees case, that was not the case. That's true. It was almost like they were not treated as human beings because they were sex workers. And that went from the very top of the Suffolk County Police Department who was reluctant to bring the FBI in to help with the investigation. After all, these were just prostitutes. That's right. They considered sex workers. Who is that? Is that you, Mike? Where's that? What was making that noise? It's a strange noise. Oh, it stopped now. So I moved my glasses.

15:27Even that, you must have your own. OK. You'd descolectify to something. I'm sorry. OK. You know, Bill, you're absolutely right. And it is so sad. But sometimes sex workers and drug addicts are considered throwaway killings because they do live on the margins of life very often. And that is a damn shame because everyone has a family that may miss them. They may have friends and relationships that matter to them. You said about NYPD being careful. And I agree with that. There was a lot of care given to make sure that people were treated with equal importance, no matter what their station and life was. Unfortunately, the media does not always do that. So if a white girl was murdered on Park Avenue, it was national news. But when Aaron Key was doing evil deeds, raping and killing adolescent girls in East Harlem was in any of the papers,

16:30even the locals. So I hope things have changed radically. Bob, I agree with you. I was in Manhattan, North Hamasite Squad, probably one of the most premier homicide squads in the world. And it covers the richest area and the poorest areas of Upper Manhattan. And we know that when something happened below 96th Street, call in the National Guard, call in the Marines, call in the Air for, you know, it was all hands on deck. And if it happened above 96th Street, not some, unless it was near Columbia University, and then it all applied. Same thing, anything happens in Central Park in New York City. And it's not the detectives that are doing that. The investigate, it's the powers that be, right, down from the mayor's office to the top echelon of the police department. What's going on with that Central Park case? You see people showing up with stars and their shoulders that haven't been out of one P.P. in their life,

17:33you know? That's right. They're all getting their tickets punched. That's it. I love that expression. You're right. They all got a show up on the screen on the scene to get their ticket punched. You're 100% right. What a great expression that is, right? And only a cop or someone that doesn't kind of work on this. Yeah, he's just here to get his ticket punched, you know? Yeah. There's no partners investigation at all, but he wants the mayor to see him, you know? That's why he's here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a damn shame. The way some people are treated as throwaways and some people are revered for whatever reason. And their homicide becomes national news. Anyway, I'm not going to go on about that. Well, you know, Lula Morocco brought up Chandra Levy case in DC. And that senator, I forgot what his name is even now, but he turned out he was having an affair with him, but he didn't kill her.

18:34And she was actually killed by a homeless guy. Yeah. And that case got unbelievable attention. It probably international attention. Oh, yeah. Sure. Because it involved the politician. And that's the way the nature of homicide. And if it's John Q, nobody, no one cares. But if it's someone, John Q, somebody, or Jane Q, somebody, everyone is involved in it. Yeah. Well, I mean, and that goes to show you here on this, this Philadelphia case. The horses. We don't know how many of these young women were reported missing, or their families just gave them up for loss. The girls may have run away from home. And maybe the families reported them. Maybe that fell into a back file somewhere. We don't know. But it's awfully sad that they just go unremembered and in such a horrific way as part of something so evil.

19:39And Bob, in this picture, you see the thumbnail up on the screen, the girl on the bottom left with the blonde hair. Her name is Blair Tonelli. Yeah. When Eugene Horsh was pulled over in June in Philadelphia by a park police cop, she was in the car. Not her. She wasn't in the car. A woman was in the car with Eugene. And she gave the ID of Blair Tonelli. That's right. So it was missing, and I believe dead. And so she tried to pretend that she was her. And that's how this case really got reignited. And they've recovered guns and drugs and all and the connection to this, what's been known as the horror house, the Horsh horror house. And look, that could be the catalyst that gets some of these cases solved

20:39because they had nothing else. So it's Raymond Dors, the old man, and the son Eugene Horsh, who, if they can come up with the evidence, he's the one that's going to pay the piper for this. Mike. Yeah, Bill, I, the more I'm thinking about this, and you're thinking in reviewing what's been happening and how long this has gone on. I think Barbara's honestly right. They're talking about five right now that we know of that they've named. But that's the tip of the iceberg. And I agree with Barbara, who knows, it might be 45, 50 more. At least double that. So therefore, just think about how many times he did this. And so if every other girl with these snuff bones was killed, that's a huge number. So we probably will never know anywhere near the exact number of girls who he's killed.

21:41We might not know just a few. Hopefully we'll know some more. But at this point, I agree it's the tip of the iceberg. And this has had gone on for so many years. And he got in a way with it for so long, sadly. And thank goodness for that park police officer. And the idiocy of that girl to have the missing girls identification honor, we would not even be here talking about it. But at least there'll be some closure for some families. And the more the better. However it ends, if we could just get some closure to those families to say that you daughter that went missing five years ago or you haven't seen in 10 years, we believe that she passed away there. And it's very least give them some sort of closure, whether it's more painful or not, just give them some closure.