Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer

Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer’s partnership took shape around a difficult question: how to reconstruct patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center from incomplete, sometimes uncertain evidence. Rider brought the investigation’s fieldwork and witness contacts; Schafer, a prosecutor, assessed what could be established and what might withstand scrutiny. Their collaboration moved between interviews, physical evidence, medical records, and expert analysis, while the distinction between suspicion and proof remained central.

Building an evidentiary case

The condition of the recovered bodies initially threatened to limit what investigators could learn. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard first told Rider that decomposition after more than a week in the heat made an autopsy seem unhelpful, including because blood samples could not be used to test for lethal drug levels. A volunteer pathologist pointed to other possible sources of evidence, including liver, brain, and muscle tissue and fluid collected in the abdomen. At the attorney general’s request, Minyard agreed to seek autopsies and tissue samples from patients who had died in Orleans Parish facilities after Hurricane Katrina. On September 22, state and federal investigators transported samples from eighteen Memorial Medical Center bodies to National Medical Services, Inc., in Pennsylvania. The laboratory later reported morphine in nine of those cases and midazolam in several others, giving Rider and Schafer a new line of inquiry without, by itself, resolving how the drugs related to each death.

The investigators also sought to test their account against the hospital itself. In early December, Rider, Schafer, and colleagues returned to Memorial Medical Center with LifeCare pharmacist Steven Harris. Harris confirmed that 125 ten-milligram morphine vials, along with dozens of Versed and Ativan injection vials, were missing from the LifeCare pharmacy, while other controlled drugs remained. The selective absence sharpened the investigators’ questions about what had happened, but they still needed to connect physical findings to particular patients, actions, and circumstances. That same visit brought Rider and Anna Pou face to face for the first time: after Harris identified Pou and two Memorial nurses as women he had seen at LifeCare on September 1, Rider and Pou were introduced and shook hands.

From toxicology to testimony

By December, Virginia Rider, Butch Schafer, and their colleagues had assembled medical records, autopsies, and toxicology reports concerning four LifeCare patients who died on the seventh floor. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard recommended forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht to assess the evidence. Wecht found that all four patients had drugs in their bodies that were not prescribed in their medical records, and concluded that the drugs had caused or substantially contributed to their deaths. After comparing tissue concentrations with fatality ranges in a toxicology reference, he reported that each case appeared to involve a lethal amount of morphine. His conclusions gave the investigators a basis to prepare arrest warrants, though they had not gathered enough evidence against a third ICU nurse they were also investigating.

The laboratory findings did not settle every question. Rider and Schafer knew that memories could be altered by later conversations and news coverage, and that LifeCare witnesses had discussed a written timeline after the evacuation. They therefore sought further interviews, taking care to test whether accounts stayed consistent and to gather details that had not surfaced in initial questioning. Trust developed between Schafer and the LifeCare witnesses over time; their lawyers encouraged them to tell the whole story, and investigators asked more specifically about Emmett Everett. LifeCare respiratory therapist Terence Stahelin added that Everett had thanked the volunteers who came to help with evacuation, and that he believed an adjacent flat roof could have offered another way to move him. The account widened the investigators’ picture of the evacuation, but did not itself establish what happened to Everett afterward.

A potentially direct link between Pou’s words and the injections emerged when LifeCare physical medicine director Kristy Johnson contacted Schafer in January with additional recollections. She said that she had accompanied Pou to Everett’s room and recalled Pou appearing unusually nervous and planning to tell him that medication would help his dizziness. Johnson also described accompanying a Memorial nurse into Room 7305, where she saw the nurse inject Rose Savoie. Savoie, a ninety-year-old LifeCare patient, complained that it burned; a nurse had reported that both Savoie and her roommate Alice Hutzler were alert and stable earlier that day. By afternoon, Savoie and the other remaining LifeCare patients were dead. Johnson’s account supplied the eyewitness evidence Rider and Schafer had been missing, although it was a recollection given during a later investigation and remained part of a contested case.

Other records helped investigators examine the timing. Memorial pathologist John Skinner and laboratory director David Heikamp had walked through the hospital on Thursday to record the dead and where they were found, at the request of Richard Deichmann and René Goux. Their notes and recollections could be compared with witness accounts as investigators reconstructed events on the seventh floor. As the spring passed, however, Rider and Schafer learned little more that would strengthen the case, and they were told that arrests could not yet proceed. The investigation had evidence, but turning it into a prosecutable account required both a reliable sequence of events and a defensible interpretation of what the physical findings meant.

Arrest, Defense, and Forensic Dispute

That afternoon, Virginia Rider drove to New Orleans with arrest affidavits for Anna Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo. Her account drew together witness statements, pharmacy evidence, and toxicology findings. It alleged that Susan Mulderick had told LifeCare staff that no living patients would be left behind and that they should speak with Pou; that Pou described a lethal dose and requested sedation for an aware, 380-pound patient; and that Steven Harris supplied drugs and injection equipment. Kristy Johnson’s account placed Pou and two Memorial nurses among the patients’ rooms, and identified Budo as the nurse who injected Rose Savoie. Toxicology findings for four patients, including Savoie and Emmett Everett, were interpreted by Cyril Wecht as indicating lethal amounts of drugs. A judge signed the warrants at about six that evening. The charges focused on four deaths, while investigators had not assembled enough evidence to charge a third ICU nurse they had examined.

The public defense set the allegations against the conditions inside the hospital. Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, characterized the circumstances as potentially amounting to a defense and emphasized that twenty elderly LifeCare patients had been transferred from Chalmette to Memorial before the storm. He argued that repeated relocation could disorient older patients and complicate their medical care, and pointed to the fact that some patients who survived the evacuation later died. That account did not resolve the specific allegations in Rider’s affidavit, but it established the defense’s central frame: the deaths had to be considered amid a disaster, disrupted care, and a population already acutely ill.

The forensic evidence itself remained contested. Robert Middleberg cautioned that drug concentrations measured in postmortem tissue were harder to interpret than blood tests from living patients; prolonged exposure to heat could have altered the results, and a patient’s medical history mattered to any conclusion. Frank Minyard later consulted Steven Karch, who argued that after ten days in extreme heat the causes of death could not reliably be determined and should remain undetermined. Michael Baden countered that, whatever uncertainty remained about precise doses, morphine and Versed had been present shortly before the patients died and no competing cause of death had been established. Wecht argued that some measured levels were exceptionally high and tested whether heat changed drug concentrations in tissue samples. His small, unpublished experiment found no significant difference between heated and refrigerated samples, but it was not definitive.

Rider and Schafer’s partnership therefore operated under pressure from two directions: they had to develop a coherent case from evidence whose meaning experts disputed, while anticipating how witnesses and findings would fare in court. Schafer’s attention to whether witnesses gave consistent accounts reflected that prosecutorial burden; Rider’s investigative work depended on distinguishing physical evidence from conclusions drawn from it. Minyard imagined a trial dominated by dueling forensic experts and feared that reasonable doubt could defeat the case, with consequences he believed might harm the city’s recovery. The disagreement was not simply over whether drugs had been detected, but over what those findings could establish about cause of death and responsibility.

Unresolved Questions and the Work of Reconstruction

The investigation’s delays had consequences beyond the case file. In June, nearly a year after LifeCare patient John Russell died, his wife of forty-two years and their daughter still did not know that Gina Isbell had tried to keep him breathing during the evacuation, stayed with him after he died, and taken him to the chapel, where Father Marse blessed him. They had received a death certificate marked pending investigation, with no date or cause of death, and had no conclusive account of what had happened. A lawyer for the family wrote to Butch Schafer seeking answers. The letter showed how the uncertainty Rider and Schafer were trying to resolve had also left bereaved relatives without a clear explanation—and how suspicion that patients might have been injected could take hold when official records remained inconclusive.

Their work therefore involved more than assembling a prosecutable theory. They had to distinguish what witnesses recalled from what contemporary records established, and what toxicology could show from what remained disputed. The book’s account likewise draws on interviews with hundreds of people and gives particular weight to materials created during the disaster and its immediate aftermath, while acknowledging that recollections can conflict. Within that evidentiary structure, Rider’s investigative persistence and Schafer’s prosecutorial scrutiny form a partnership defined by a shared task rather than a settled conclusion: to reconstruct the sequence as carefully as the evidence allowed, while leaving unresolved claims visibly unresolved.