Virginia Rider—Butch Schafer

Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer’s partnership in the Memorial investigation was both practical and deeply unequal in temperament: they worked together to build a case, but Rider’s faith that evidence should lead to justice collided with Schafer’s more guarded understanding of politics, prosecution, and disappointment. Their relationship is traced through shared investigative work, arguments over how to interpret obstacles, a decisive trip to New Orleans, and a parting that Schafer understood more as a career move than as the emotional cost the case had exacted from Rider.

Colleagues Building a Case

As the investigation developed, Rider and Schafer faced a basic problem: their early interviews had been unfocused, and they had not yet settled on what information they needed. Media reports added a further risk. They could prompt witnesses to remember relevant events, but also potentially contaminate recollections; several LifeCare witnesses had discussed their experiences after the evacuation and consulted on a shared written timeline. The investigators therefore needed more interviews conducted without leading questions, alongside physical evidence and records made closer to the time of the events. This was not just a procedural concern for the pair: the reliability of the eventual case depended on distinguishing independent memories from recollections shaped by later discussion.

Their work required different kinds of evidence to be brought together. Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer could draw on witness accounts, while hospital records and observations made soon after the evacuation offered another route to establishing when deaths occurred. Memorial pathologist John Skinner and laboratory director David Heikamp had recorded the names and locations of the dead as they walked through the hospital on Thursday afternoon. Their notes and recollections could help establish timing, giving the investigators material beyond memories formed after the event. The partnership thus involved assembling a chronology from sources with different vantage points and vulnerabilities.

The two colleagues did not react to every investigative complication in the same way. Schafer understood the legal strategies used by attorneys representing defense witnesses and admired their lawyering; the challenge sharpened his own performance. Rider, by contrast, could see those tactics as a form of evidence being withheld. The difference did not prevent them from working together, but it exposed a tension in their partnership: Schafer treated opposition as part of the contest, while Rider was more likely to experience it as an obstacle to finding and establishing the truth.

A Shared Trip, Different Stakes

Their partnership was visible in a brief, decisive exchange after Frank Minyard’s public ruling. When the newspaper reported that the coroner found no evidence of homicide, Rider heard the news on the radio, bought the paper, and brought the article to Schafer, shaking. He told her to get her purse; they would go to New Orleans. At Minyard’s desk, Rider confronted him in tears. The trip shows Schafer responding to her distress not by dismissing it, but by going with her to challenge a ruling she believed contradicted what Minyard had told her.

For Rider, the ruling threatened the basis on which the prosecution might proceed. She understood that the district attorney’s office had said it would not pursue the case without a coroner’s homicide determination. The setback also cut across her conviction that the families deserved justice. She had spoken with relatives and did not believe their claims were chiefly about compensation. When officials raised the possibility that a homicide finding could affect survivors’ civil claims against corporate defendants, Rider offered to bring a family member into the meeting. The officials refused. To Rider, that refusal made the victims easier to keep at a distance; her sense of the case was personal because she had listened to the people whose losses it concerned.

Schafer recognized the intensity of her response and tried to give it context. He told her that this was not a straightforward investigation in which an arrest ended the work: the case involved a flooded city, political interests, corporate money, and the medical profession. His warning that the picture could be more complicated than a simple equation did not mean he thought her work was weak. He greatly respected her investigative ability and saw that she had collected evidence she believed supported homicide. In his view, she had earned the right to feel devastated by the ruling. His caution and his respect coexisted: he wanted to protect her from the case’s emotional force without denying the quality of her work.

The Cost of Disappointment

Rider knew she was taking the case personally, and its disappointments unsettled a longstanding faith in the justice system. She had believed that good would prevail over evil, and she found herself asking whether justice for patients should count more than politics. Schafer saw a danger in that investment. In a conversation outside the office, he called her a “naïve little girl” and contrasted the familiar pattern of Medicaid fraud investigations with this case’s overlapping pressures and interests. The rebuke was harsh, but the account also makes clear that it came from a colleague who respected her and had warned that the case could break her heart.

After the ruling, Rider applied for a dozen jobs in a week. A promising meeting on Valentine’s Day led to an offer. Schafer interpreted the change primarily as a sound career opportunity, including the possibility of becoming a CPA, and thought she should not remain confined to state government. He did not fully see the emotion behind her departure. Although he knew she still loved the work, he let her go rather than trying to persuade her to stay. Their separation therefore marked more than a change of employment: it revealed a limit to their mutual understanding, as Schafer read the move as ambition while Rider was also leaving under the weight of the case.

What the Partnership Preserved

Rider and Schafer did not consider the grand jury’s action the end of the matter. They believed that justice did not ultimately require a conviction and could also be served by retelling what had happened through the court process. That position gave their investigative partnership a purpose beyond a verdict: collecting and communicating the account mattered, even when the legal outcome failed to match Rider’s expectations. Rider’s absence from the grand jury, despite her detailed knowledge of the investigation, sharpened the distance between the evidence she had helped gather and the process that considered it.

Their responses to that distance remained distinct. Schafer was more sanguine about an acquittal or a case that did not end in conviction; he believed the underresourced Medicaid fraud team had done the best it could and took pride that its members had not cheated and had nothing to be ashamed of. Rider’s concern extended to what the public and families could learn from the case. She later set out her end-of-life preferences in an advance directive, specifying safeguards for removing life support and limits on pain medication, and believed people deserved the story so they could make informed choices. Their shared work thus left different marks: Schafer retained confidence in the investigators’ conduct, while Rider carried the case into her understanding of justice, medical decisions, and personal planning. Together, their partnership is presented not as a resolution of their differences but as a sustained effort to investigate carefully and keep the deaths from becoming only a closed file.