Anna Pou and Virginia Rider

Anna Pou and Virginia Rider’s relationship took shape across an investigation: Pou was the physician whose conduct investigators sought to understand, and Rider was the agent who ultimately arrested her. Their first meeting came inside the evacuated Memorial Medical Center, where Pou retraced the hospital’s spaces with her lawyer and colleagues while Rider and the investigative team searched for evidence. Seven months later, Rider arrived at Pou’s home with an arrest warrant. The relationship was neither personal acquaintance nor settled judgment; it was an encounter between a target and an investigator, mediated by contested recollections, physical evidence, and the demands of criminal procedure.

First Encounter at Memorial

The two women met while touring Memorial with Butch Schafer present. They looked at one another, were introduced, and shook hands. For Rider, the meeting brought into view the person she and Schafer had spent months trying to understand. Pou spoke openly with her lawyer, Rick Simmons, while investigators remained alert to any detail that might clarify the events under investigation.

Pou led Rick Simmons, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo through the hospital, using its rooms and equipment to anchor her memories. On the LifeCare floor, she took them to Room 7312, where she had responded to a patient emergency early in the disaster. The room still held a crash cart stocked for resuscitation, a ventilator, and a monitor. At the nearby nursing station, a laryngoscope Pou had used to help place a breathing tube remained among the evidence. These objects supported an aspect of Pou’s account that mattered to the investigation: she had also attempted to save a patient’s life. The tour did not resolve the allegations, but it set her recollection beside a physical scene that investigators could inspect.

Building a Case Amid Uncertain Memories

Rider’s work depended in substantial part on witness accounts, including statements from LifeCare employees about what was said and done on the seventh floor. The investigative team also had to reckon with how those accounts had formed. After the evacuation, some witnesses had discussed their experiences and consulted on a written timeline; once allegations reached the news, later reporting could prompt memories but might also affect them. Rider and Schafer therefore recognized the need to interview additional witnesses without leading them and to gather contemporaneous written and physical records. The uncertainty was not incidental: it shaped what the investigators could responsibly claim and what further evidence they needed.

The case also accumulated material independent of Pou’s tour. A pharmacist reported that 125 morphine vials, each containing 10 milligrams, were missing from the LifeCare pharmacy, along with injection vials of Versed and Ativan, while other controlled drugs remained. Kristy Johnson later provided an eyewitness account of a patient receiving an injection; pathologists’ work and toxicology findings added another evidentiary strand. Investigators also relied on the notes and recollections of pathologist John Skinner and lab director David Heikamp, who had recorded the names and locations of the dead as they checked the hospital after the evacuation. Those records mattered because the timing of deaths formed part of the inquiry. Rider’s developing case thus drew on testimony, drug records, toxicology, and observations made inside the hospital rather than on the meeting with Pou alone.

From Interview Target to Arrest

In July, Rider’s chief told her that arrests of Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo could take place the following week. Rider had already drafted an arrest warrant and was preparing to travel to Dallas and then Las Vegas for a forensic-accounting examination. She offered to bring the warrant to the courthouse before leaving so another agent could carry out the arrests. Instead, she was instructed that Attorney General Charles Foti wanted her to execute it herself. The assignment made the investigation personal in the procedural sense: Rider would be responsible for the arrest of the woman she had met during the hospital tour.

Rider drove to New Orleans with affidavits and arrest warrants. Her affidavit assembled the allegations from four initial LifeCare witnesses, pharmacy evidence, and toxicology results then available for four patients. It asserted that Pou and the two nurses had intentionally killed those patients, an accusation reflected in the warrants—not a finding established by the arrest itself. Rider delivered the warrants for Landry and Budo to other arrest teams, then joined agents near Pou’s Baton Rouge home to coordinate the remaining arrest.

The Arrest and Its Limits

Rider arrived at Pou’s home around nine in the evening with a male colleague. Seven months had elapsed since the hospital tour. Pou answered the door in surgical scrubs, and the agents told her she was under arrest. Rider accompanied her while she changed and allowed her to telephone a physician who covered her patients. Pou asked that her scheduled surgeries be canceled and raised an outstanding laboratory result. The scene placed her professional obligations beside the state’s effort to take her into custody: even at the moment of arrest, the care of patients remained among the matters she was trying to address.

Rider read Pou her rights. Pou signed the form under the name Anna Maria Pou and declined to answer questions without her lawyer. Rider handcuffed her, escorted her to the car, and took care that she was secured for the journey to prison. Later, while Pou was booked, Rider helped her pull up her scrub pants after Pou asked for assistance. These procedural details show the relationship at its closest physical range, but they do not erase its basic structure: Rider acted as an arresting agent, while Pou was a defendant who had chosen not to speak without counsel.

The book presents this relationship through an investigation built from interviews, contemporaneous materials, and records rather than from a single eyewitness narrator. Its author states that the account draws on more than five hundred interviews and that he was not present at the hospital. He also explains that quoted dialogue comes from recalled interviews or primary sources, and that memories sometimes differed. That method matters especially here: the hospital tour gave Rider and Schafer access to Pou’s own recollection in the place where events occurred, while the later arrest formalized allegations assembled from other sources. Their encounters therefore mark two distinct stages of knowledge—first, an investigator listening and looking for clues; later, an agent carrying out a warrant whose claims remained allegations to be tested.