‘Deadly Recall’ Detective Pat Postiglione Reveals How His Photographic Memory Helped Solve Brutal Murders (Exclusive)

For Det. Pat Postiglione, every crime scene is unforgettable. His unmatched memory, which some call photographic and others call simply “unnervingly specific,” means every one of the hundreds of brutal crime scenes he’s seen over his career with the Nashville Police Department is permanently lodged in his brain. Ahead Deadly Recall‘s Season 2 premiere Wednesday, the seasoned detective opened up to PopCulture.com about how his special abilities have allowed him to seek justice for the victims of violent crime and their families.

Speaking to his outstanding memory, Postiglione explained, “Over the years — I didn’t know this going in, but I learned it eventually — I was able to go into a crime scene, and I was able to make mental notes of literally everything inside the crime scene.” Leaving the scene and writing down his observations for his fellow detectives, Postiglione revealed that even then the crime scene “would be a clear picture in my mind.”

Keeping those images so vibrantly “stacked inside his brain” even to this day, Postiglione knows his memory can be both a blessing and curse, although he chooses to think of it more as the former due to all the cases it’s helped him solve over the years. Still, he admits, “Certain times of the day a particular crime scene may pop up [in his head] and I’ll start thinking of the detail of those crime scenes. …Certain cases affect you more than other cases, and you really can’t explain why, because they’re all equally horrific.”

Sharing some of these stories with the Deadly Recall audience, Postiglione hopes to share the more human side of the victims’ lives and allow their family to talk about them “as someone other than the victim of a homicide.”

“The families, one minute they’re a family, the very next minute a loved one in their family has died, and died tragically as the victim of the homicide,” he explains. “There’s definitely a fascination with true crime, and for me in terms of Deadly Recall, I’m all about telling the story of the victims. They were more than he victim of a homicide, they were people with dreams and aspirations.”

In Wednesday’s premiere, Postiglione tackles the 2009 case of former Tennessee Titan quarterback and public hero Steve McNair, found dead in his condo alongside the body of a young woman in an apparent double homicide. Setting aside the “rumors and conspiracy theories,” the former detective is ready to share the inside details of the investigation that captured Nashville’s imagination. Deadly Recall‘s second season premieres on Wednesday, April 15 at 10 p.m. ET, only on Investigation Discovery.