Wolf Entertainment is staying in the Barbara Butcher business. After the success of The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher, which the Wolf team produces for Oxygen, the company is now adapting her book into a fictional crime series.

Per a report from Deadline, Wolf Entertainment is using Butcher’s memoir What the Dead Know as the basis for a scripted pilot of the same name. The fictional series will also be set in New York City, where Butcher served as a death investigator for decades. Her fictional counterpart is called Dr. Ava Ledger, and “she teams with the NYPD to solve their toughest cases.” Chicago Justice scribe Beth Rinehart is writing the pilot.

Wolf Entertainment has always created projects across both the scripted and unscripted crime arenas, but this is a unique instance of two projects sharing the same source material.

“After writing that book, I got some attention,” Barbara recalled in her interview with TVBrittanyF.com prior to the Death Investigator premiere. “People started talking to me about doing a show, and then Dick Wolf talked to me about doing a show. And you can’t get better than that, right? We talked about what I could possibly do, and came up with [The Death Investigator].”

While The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher has yet to be renewed for Season 2, it proved to be a great addition to Oxygen’s true crime lineup. Originally paired with long-running fan-favorite Cold Justice, which is also a Wolf Entertainment production, it created a Saturday night block of formidable entertainment. Barbara’s series is even more engrossing than her book, so a TV version of What the Dead Know will have a very high bar to clear.

But that means it’s also clear why Wolf Entertainment would want to also do a fictional version of her story. This is still just the first step in getting a TV series on the air, but true crime fans will want to keep an eye on this project as it develops. NBC has also ordered a separate pilot for a series based on the life story of Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, who was the basis for the character of Dr. Wendy Carr in Netflix’s Mindhunter and got her own docuseries Mastermind on Hulu in 2025.

The Death Investigator with Barbara Butcher airs Saturdays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on Oxygen. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Oxygen.

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