Barbara Butcher has identified the “complete absence of human connection” as the defining trait of evil after investigating roughly 5,500 deaths during her career with the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
Butcher, who examined 680 homicides across a decade with additional cases following, spoke about her encounters with serial killers on the outlet’s Minutes With series. She believes her hands-on experience with perpetrators of horrific crimes gave her a clear-eyed view of what evil actually looks like in practice.
“I certainly believe in evil, and I’ve seen it and probably most, blatantly is in working with serial killers,” she said.
One case that stayed with Butcher involved a man who had murdered young girls. She was tasked with collecting his blood and hair samples for DNA testing after a hair turned up on one of his victims. The suspect’s appearance caught her off guard immediately.
“He was rather nice looking,” she recalled. “He was charming. He was well-spoken, intelligent, decent looking and charming.”
The way he looked at her drove home how he had lured his victims. “He looked up at me with Princess Diana eyes, you know, looking down and then looking up. That’s how he looked. I thought, no wonder these little girls were not afraid of him. He was charming.”
But the deeper revelation came from understanding his view of the victims themselves. “That’s the basis of evil for me, is the complete absence of human connection,” she explained. “These girls weren’t people to him. They were toys. Something for his amusement.”
Butcher also investigated two serial killers who operated as partners. The pair, who were in a sexual relationship, would enter people’s homes pretending to assess valuables like jewelry and pianos before murdering the occupants. Their method of killing was particularly brutal.
“A stab wound is personal enough, but slashing a throat is violent. Brutal. Hard to see,” she said. “And it indicates such an absolute contempt for the victim.”
When the duo came in for DNA sampling, their contrasting demeanors made an equally strong impression on Butcher. One was handsome but possessed what she described as a feral, objectifying stare.
“His eyes were feral. He wasn’t looking at me as a person. He looked at me as an object. How can I use this object?” she said. The encounter left her with “a cold, metallic taste” in her mouth.
His accomplice presented almost as a social opposite. He joked about his thinning hair and politely requested that she collect samples around his head to avoid a patchy look afterward.
“I thought, well, this guy is charming. If I had met him at a cocktail party, I would have liked him. I would have thought he was funny,” Butcher recalled.
The juxtaposition led her to a stark conclusion about how evil actually moves through the world. “It tells you the banality of evil. Evil walks the streets. And it could be anyone charming or like a wolf,” she said.
Despite the darkness she encountered, Butcher emphasized that her work served a purpose beyond cataloging death. She took pride in delivering answers to grieving families who had lost loved ones under violent or unexplained circumstances.
“You know, I couldn’t save lives, but I could do one thing important, and that is give answers to the families,” she said. “I could get justice for the victims, but mostly it was. We were working for the families.”
Butcher’s reflections on serial killers and the nature of evil came during her appearance on the outlet’s Minutes With series, where she discussed how investigating approximately 5,500 deaths shaped her understanding of human behavior at its most extreme.