The first thing that struck Barbara Butcher when she stepped through the doorway into the loft-style apartment above Manhattan’s famous Carnegie Deli was the stench.

‘I remember the smells. I smelled marijuana. I smelled that metallic scent of blood. I smelled the very rich red wine that was sitting on a radiator at the entrance to the door. The smells of the wine, marijuana, and blood hit me all at once,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘For some reason, that’s what still sticks in my head.’

The death investigator and chief of staff in the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office had been sent to the grisly scene where five friends had been shot - three of them fatally - on May 10, 2001.

When she arrived, the bodies of Charles Helliwell III, 36, and Stephen King, 32, were still lying face down on the floor in the lounge, their hands bound behind their backs with duct tape, pools of blood pouring from their heads.

Two others - Anthony Veader, 37 and Rosemond Dane, 36 - had miraculously survived gunshot wounds to the head and had been taken to a local hospital.

Jennifer Stahl, a 39-year-old actor who starred in the movie Dirty Dancing and lived alone in the apartment, had been found in a different room from the others, inside her little recording studio. Suffering a gunshot wound to the head but clinging to life, she was also rushed to hospital where she died hours later.

Standing inside the bloody scene, Butcher began working to piece together what exactly had unfolded that evening in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district.

As a death investigator, her job was to uncover the full story of how the victims died by analyzing the scene, the forensics and the victims’ bodies, and interviewing witnesses.

It’s working out what she describes as the ‘choreography of murder.’

‘When you're in a scene, you take in everything like the blood spatter patterns and the position of the body,’ she said.

‘As it comes together, you can see how it all played out. It's the intersection of forensics, the body and the scene to solve a case.’

The role involves working very closely with the police, forensics teams and medical examiners - but with different objectives.

‘Medical examiners do the autopsy, which determines the cause of death which, in this case, was a gunshot wound to the head. But then what was the manner of death? My job is to go to the scene and examine the body within the context of that scene and then relate the two to build the story,’ she said.

‘So if I see a gun by the victim's side, a smudge of gunshot residue on their hand, a little note on the table, and the place is locked, we are likely looking at a suicide. But if there's no gun in the room and I learn that this person was in a jealous, aggressive relationship, it starts to tell a different story.

‘I’m also looking for something different from the police. They're looking to solve the crime by finding out who did it. I'm looking for how it happened. We each do our own independent investigations.

‘The two of course intersect and it is very cooperative and collaborative, but we interpret things in our own ways. And that's how together we figure out the manner of death and catch and prosecute the killer.’

After investigating more than 5,500 death scenes including around 680 homicides, to Butcher, being a death investigator was the ‘most interesting job in the entire world.’

‘It’s on the edge of everyday life. You not only figure out how a person died but how a person lived because so often how you live informs how you die,’ she said. ‘You learn a lot about the way people live from the way they die.’

Inside the apartment above the iconic eatery in 2001, Butcher was able to quickly learn a lot about the lives of some of the victims of the so-called Carnegie Deli Massacre.

Aspiring actor Stahl was best known for a bit part dancing behind Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing. But, by 2001, her career was struggling and she had taken to selling high-end marijuana - mainly to friends and others in the entertainment industry.

Around her apartment, there were jars of marijuana buds and posters displaying different types of weed on the walls.

A bottle of red wine and half-drunk glasses painted a picture of the group of friends hanging out moments before the attack.

Working with the crime scene unit, Butcher documented, photographed and analyzed the blood-spatter patterns, the angle of the gunshot wounds and the location of the bodies to determine the position of the victims and the killers when the shots were fired.

For instance, the location of blood spatter on the wall can reveal whether a victim fell to the floor after being shot or if they were already lying down. Gunpowder smudging, known as fouling, and red dot impressions on the skin, known as stippling, can also reveal the proximity of the gun to the body and where exactly the killer and victim were when the trigger was pulled.

Butcher was also able to get a rough idea of the order in which the victims were shot based on the temperatures of the bodies and rigor mortis.

‘The order of death matters as it informs what happened before. Were people running or were they obedient to the person holding the gun to their heads and telling them to get down on the floor? That was the case here,’ she said. ‘So we build a picture which we can later compare to the stories of the perpetrators to see if they are lying.’

There was also evidence that the killers had ransacked the place, with money and marijuana missing, suggesting some sort of robbery gone wrong.

And at least one of the perpetrators had clearly been there before - and even seemed to know the victims - based on the lack of forced entry and an apparent awareness of where the cash and drugs were stored.

When Veader and Dane were well enough, they were also interviewed about what they remembered about the attack.

Piecing all of this together, a story began to emerge.

The group of five friends had been hanging out at Stahl’s apartment that evening when the doorbell buzzed. A man identified himself as Sean, and King, who helped Stahl with security, let him up.

Sean, later identified as Sean Salley, 29, and Andre Smith, 31, entered the apartment, pulled out guns and announced they were there to rob the victims.

While one of the assailants began tying up four of the victims with duct tape, the other led Stahl into her recording studio.

The survivors recalled hearing Stahl beg the gunmen to take everything but to not hurt anyone. They then heard a gunshot as she was shot in the head.

The four other victims were all lined up in the lounge, bound with duct tape and shot one by one, execution-style in the back of the head.

When the bullet entered the back of Veader’s head, it curved around his skull, avoiding fatality. He was able to play dead until the killers left before crawling to a phone to call 911.

Police found surveillance video from the building's hallway capturing the two killers casually walking into the apartment just before 7.30pm - before running from the scene minutes later with a backpack. A witness also spotted the two men fleeing in a car.

The suspects were quickly identified and Smith surrendered to law enforcement weeks later. Salley was arrested in Miami after several months when the case was broadcast on America’s Most Wanted.

While the footage and survivors’ accounts prompted the major break in identifying the suspects, Butcher’s death investigation was crucial to piecing together what exactly had unfolded inside the apartment.

When the case went to trial in the spring of 2002, Salley and Smith both turned on one another.

Smith claimed he was not even at the apartment that night. Salley admitted they were but claimed he had simply gone to buy marijuana and Smith forced him to join in the robbery by threatening him with his gun.

According to Salley’s version of events, he accidentally killed Stahl when the trigger went off because his hand was shaking so much. Smith then shot the other four victims to cover up the crime.

But, Butcher’s death investigation poured cold water on his tale.

‘He claimed that his hand was shaking because he was so nervous and the gun accidentally fired. That is not true. From just looking at the gunshot wound and the bullet stippling, we could see that he had a nice steady hand and that he held the gun against her forehead. He shot her without any hesitation,’ Butcher said.

‘The forensics don't lie. We could tell exactly what he did and we had documented those things.’

Proving information like that is why documentation is ‘probably the most important thing to do at a scene,’ she said.

‘You lose a scene quickly. You have just one chance to investigate it thoroughly, one chance to see that body in that setting, one chance at an autopsy. So you just gather every single bit of information you can. You have to observe and document it to get a full picture.

‘It’s not just about catching the killers. But it is also about documenting everything to back it up in court.’

Both Smith and Salley were convicted of three counts of second-degree murder for the killings of Stahl, Helliwell and King and given three sentences of 25 years to life, to run consecutively.

Speaking about the case almost 25 years later, Butcher still remembers the smells, sounds and sights inside the apartment that day.

‘It was a lot of horror. It hit me pretty hard so I had to detach from it and just focus on doing the job,’ she said.

‘It’s funny, I'm getting a little anxious right now thinking about it - seeing that scene again. I just can't imagine being one of the victims lying there, hearing my friends being shot and knowing I'm next.’

She is particularly struck by the senselessness of the crime.

‘There's such a senselessness sometimes to murder. This was completely and utterly unnecessary. They could have just robbed everything - money, drugs, jewelry - and walked away. Why kill them?

‘These are the mysteries that I will never understand, and that is the nature of pure evil.’

Despite working on thousands of deaths, Butcher is not immune to the impact of seeing such violence and tragedy day after day.

One other case that stays with her is the 1995 triple homicide of the Cherry family, where two men shot and killed a couple and their 13-year-old son in front of three younger children, aged 2, 5 and 7. ‘I’m still absolutely flabbergasted by how much evil is packed into that one case. That bothers me a lot,’ she said.

There was also her work on the September 11 terrorist attacks, trying to identify victims among the thousands of body parts and human remains at Ground Zero.

As a lifelong New Yorker, it took a personal toll. ‘The most difficult part of that was working with the families who were in such grief and shock and horror. And 40 percent of the victims still have never been identified so families are still in pain waiting for the proof.’

And there is also the deaths that are not determined to be crimes such as suicides and tragic ‘crazy accidents where someone steps into an elevator, something breaks and the person is squashed.’

Admittedly, her experience of death has left her ‘a catastrophic thinker.’

‘There is a complexity to being a living person among the dead,’ Butcher said.

‘It changed how I approached life. When I walk anywhere, I look around for danger. But I am also mindful of every single moment of joy and life. I pay a lot of attention to the good things in life. I have learned about life, about death, about emotions. It was probably the biggest and best education I ever could have gotten.’

Barbara Butcher is speaking at the Hamptons Whodunit festival, the mystery and true crime event taking place in East Hampton from April 16-19, 2026. The Daily Mail is the media partner of the festival