Virginia Rider—Butch Schafer investigative partnership

Virginia Rider and Arthur “Butch” Schafer’s investigative partnership became the working center of the inquiry into allegations of suspicious deaths at Memorial. Rider brought a reputation for diligence and a talent for following evidence; Schafer brought prosecutorial experience and a habit of thinking strategically. As the case expanded, their relationship grew beyond the formal division between prosecutor and investigator: they shared the work, tested ideas together, and became the colleagues who best understood one another’s investment in the investigation.

Complementary Experience

Rider was a ten-year veteran of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, where prosecutor-investigator teams worked cases. Her professional path had led from accounting at a real-estate development firm to investigative work. Within months of starting that first job, she identified an employee who had stolen $400,000 over several years without detection. The discovery showed her an aptitude for tracing financial evidence and helped turn her toward pursuing people who had harmed others. Her current position required police-academy training and involved hazardous investigative work, but her stated purpose remained bringing wrongdoers to justice.

Schafer and Rider met the Memorial allegations in a case unlike the routine work of their unit. Allegations of intentional killings in health-care facilities were extraordinarily rare; at first, the possibility seemed almost outlandish. The pair nevertheless recognized that the claims required investigation. When they interviewed the first of four LifeCare witnesses, they were joined by Artie Delaneuville, a federal investigator who had previously worked in the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit and often worked with Rider. A federal investigation was proceeding concurrently, but Schafer and Rider’s state-level partnership remained a central part of the inquiry.

Building the Case Together

The work demanded that the investigators move from allegations to evidence capable of supporting legal action. After the witness interviews, Rider and Schafer considered whether accounts of events on LifeCare’s seventh floor could be corroborated. Rider compiled a list of records and materials they still needed, including patient medical records, evacuation plans, computer hard drives, employee contact information, pharmacy records, and medical waste that might contain discarded vials or syringes.

They concluded that a search of the hospital was necessary and that a consensual search was unlikely. Schafer discussed possible charges with his supervisors, while Rider examined Louisiana’s murder statute, a legal question outside her usual experience. She prepared an affidavit summarizing witness accounts and submitted it with an application for a warrant to search for evidence of second-degree murder. The judge granted the warrant. On October 1, Rider and Schafer returned to Memorial with a large investigative team that included state and federal agents and crime-scene investigators. The search was the largest in which Rider had participated.

Their method also required caution about what testimony could establish. Once allegations appeared in the media, Schafer and Rider considered how reporting and conversations among witnesses might influence recollection. Research on wrongful convictions underscored the fallibility of eyewitness memory, and several LifeCare witnesses had discussed events after the evacuation and consulted on a written timeline. The investigators therefore sought additional witnesses while taking care not to lead them, and pursued physical and written records created closer to the events. This attention to corroboration reflected the partnership’s obligation not simply to collect accusations, but to examine how they had been formed and what evidence could independently support them.

Shared Intensity and Professional Differences

As the investigation grew, Rider was spending so much time on it that she was removed from other hospital and nursing-home investigations. She said the case occupied her thoughts even at home. Schafer described the two of them as living the work from early morning into the evening: they held discussions in his office around a large notepad, brainstormed in the building’s smoking area, and made frequent trips to New Orleans, where damaged roofs covered by blue tarps kept the disaster in view.

Their collaboration was intimate in the practical sense of a sustained working partnership. They bounced ideas off each other and came to think so similarly that the work no longer felt like separate contributions by a prosecutor and an investigator. Schafer described it as their case and their shared problem to solve. He considered the friendship unusual and recalled enjoying their work together. Their different strengths fit closely: he could not type, while Rider could type exceptionally quickly, and he relished seeing her because it promised an engaging day of work. He likened their rhythm to the fast-moving professional interplay in His Girl Friday, describing Rider as tenacious and idealistic and himself as a strategic plotter who knew he needed her.

The two did not react identically to every investigative challenge. Schafer could admire strong defense lawyering and found that it sharpened his own performance; Rider, by contrast, could see defense efforts as a form of withholding evidence. That difference did not displace their alliance. The account presents disagreement as part of their working dynamic, alongside a shared insistence on pursuing the case. Schafer felt that Rider was the one person with whom he could discuss everything about it. He did not discuss its details with his wife or people outside the unit, both to protect confidentiality and to keep secrets from circulating beyond the investigation.

Emotional Distance and Mutual Reliance

Schafer warned Rider not to become emotionally involved, a caution he understood might also have been directed at himself. Only weeks earlier, his daughter had died after taking multiple medications prescribed for pain; toxicology suggested an accidental overdose in which the drugs had magnified one another’s effects. His grief and anger at the pharmacy’s failure to cross-check prescriptions formed part of the circumstances surrounding his warning, though the account does not reduce the advice to that loss alone. The instruction marked a tension in their work: they felt sympathy for people involved, yet needed to keep the investigation disciplined and responsive to evidence.

That discipline did not make their involvement impersonal. Schafer felt sympathy for many of the family members and medical workers he encountered, and Rider’s commitment to the case consumed her attention. He knew his wife worried that he was working too hard and might damage his health. At the same time, he described Rider as the only person with whom he could share the full burden of the case. Their partnership thus joined procedural rigor to mutual reliance: each could bring the other into the details, arguments, and daily pressure of an investigation that had become too large for either to experience as ordinary work.