One Diagnosis From Murder

Richard J Schmidt In the early 1980s in Lafayette, Louisiana, Janice Trahan had just finished nursing school and began training at Lafayette General Hospital. She was 21 years old and married with young son, Justin. She was introduced to Dr. Richard J. Schmidt, a 36-year-old gastroenterologist who was well liked and popular with his patients. He was also married with 3 kids. The coworkers soon became friends. Janice began seeing Richard as a patient. Then in 1984 the relationship turned into an affair. Both claimed their love for one another and the desire to be together and start their own family. Richard promised that as soon as he was able, he would divorce his wife, Barbara. So Janice divorced her husband and moved herself and her son into an apartment. But rather than leave Barbara, Richard just continued as a part of both families. Janice was the youngest of 4 children and the Trahan family would gather for Sunday night dinners. Richard often joined them. He told Janice’s family about how much he loved her and wanted a family with her. But there was always an excuse as to why now wasn’t a good time to leave his wife and kids. Months stretched to years. Janice became pregnant but Richard convinced her to get an abortion. By 1989 she had gotten pregnant 2 more times and each time Richard convinced her to get an abortion. In 1990 Janice became pregnant once again, but this time she had the baby. In March 1991 she gave birth a boy they named Jeffery. He paid Janice child support but wouldn’t let her put his name as the father on the baby’s birth certificate. But even having a child together wasn’t enough for Richard to finally divorce his wife. Janice had had enough. She told Richard she wanted to see other people. He went ballistic and Janice said he became “obsessed, jealous, controlling, volatile.” He still didn’t leave his wife. Janice tried to end the relationship several more times. One time threatened to put sexually explicit photos he had of her up on the hospital bulletin board. Another time he threatened to tell the dean of her nursing school that she had plagiarized some of her assignments. Jancie told her sister, Becky, that he threatened to kill her and possibly himself if she left him. Finally in 1988, while still having a relationship with Richard, Janice started dating other men. Richard would follow her and then threaten the men she started seeing. A salesman she dated said Richard called him and “in a threatening tone made the suggestion that I not see Janice anymore. It was like he was telling me she was his possession.” Another man said Richard came to his home and threatened to kill him if he continued seeing Janice. Richard started to tell Janice, if you leave me, I’ll fix it so no man will ever want you. Finally in 1994, after 10 years of being his side chick, Janice had had enough. She gave Richard an ultimatum. Either leave your wife and marry me, or we are over. Nothing changed so Janice ended things with Richard for good. And she even stopped using him as her doctor. But, he still came to her house twice a week to give her B-12 shots for her lethargy. Janice started dating someone new. When Richard realized Janice was really done with him this time, he moved out of his family home, into his own apartment, but it didn’t last. By July 1994, he moved back in with his family. On August 4th sometime between 10 and 11 pm, Janice was woken up by a phone call from Richard saying he was on his way over to give her a B-12 shot. She protested and went back to sleep, their son Jeffrey, now 3 years old was asleep next to her. A few minutes later she woke up to Richard standing over her and then she felt a needle prick in her arm. Unlike her usual vitamin shots, this one was extremely painful, with the pain radiating down her arm. Richard didn’t say much, he seemed nervous and irritated, and he quickly left her house. After that it seemed as though Richard had accepted that Janice was done with him. She began to make plans to move on with her life. But as the months passed Janice began not to feel well. It started with a pain in her eyes. She saw her doctor who thought it was swollen sinuses. But she continued to just not feel well. She went to the doctor again, but left without answers. Then in January of 1995, Jancie visited her gynecologist for her yearly checkup. Her doctor noticed Janice had swollen lymph nodes. The doctor suspected Janice had some type of virus and ordered a full battery of blood tests. A few days later Janice was shocked to find out that 1, she was pregnant. And 2, she was HIV positive. As a nurse in a hospital, Janice sometimes cared for HIV positive patients. Richard, who was still listed as her primary care physician told colleagues at the hospital that Janice was a slut who regularly picked up guys in bars and took them home. She knew that her unborn baby would likely be infected with HIV, once again she had an abortion. And while it was possible that she could have contracted the virus from a patient or previous lover, Janice couldn’t shake the thought that Richard had made good on his promise to kill her or make it so no other man would want her. Janice contacted all her previous sexual partners and asked them to get for HIV, none tested positive. 5 months after her diagnosis, Janice spoke to District Attorney Mike Harson and Captain Jim Craft of the Lafayette Police Department and told them Dr. Richard Schmidt had purposing injected her with a contaminated needle. They were skeptical, and suspected Janice was the scorned former lover of a well-known & highly respected doctor who was looking to either ruin his reputation and/or get money out of him. Capt. Jim Craft decided the first thing to do was find out if Janice’s story was credible. A few months before the night Richard showed up and injected her, she had donated blood. Records at the blood bank showed that at that time her blood tested negative for HIV. Next they checked Richard’s telephone records and found a from Richard to Janice at 10:26pm on the night of August 4, the night she said he injected her. Like Janice, Dr. Schmidt also occasionally worked with patients who were HIV positive. Detectives went to the hospital. There they learned that the virus could only survive outside the human body for 12 hours. So if Richard had obtained HIV positive blood from one of his patients, he would have had do to sometime earlier on August 4th. Hospitals keep meticulous records. And Lafayette General kept notebooks of all the blood draws for the day with the coordinating sticker from the vial with the lab tracking number. But the notebook for August 1994 was missing. Detectives searched the doctor’s desk and found the sexually explicit photos he had threated to embarrass Janice with. They found records for everything except the August 94 notebook. Just before they left they noticed a locked storage room. Inside there were stacks and stacks of boxes of medical records. The stopped and looked through each one. At the very bottom of a stack was a box labeled “1982 records.” In the bottom of the box, beneath the folders of records was a notebook that was only ½ used. The last used page in the notebook was dated August 4th. It was the missing blood draw records. One entry on that date, didn’t have a matching sticker. It just said Don McClelland and in place of the sticker it said “lavender stopper for Dr. S.” Police tracked down Don McClelland and asked him if he was HIV positive. He replied, “Hell I’ve got full blown AIDS!” They asked him about the day of that blood draw and Don said that he didn’t even have an appointment on August 4th. Dr. Schmidt had called him and asked him to come in for a blood test. D.A. Mike Harson was convinced Dr. Richard Schmidt purposely injected Janice Trahan, but he needed more to get a conviction. He wanted to be able to prove that the virus Janice had contracted had come from Don McClelland. They went to genetic researcher Dr. Michael Metzker from the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. Turned out you can’t match the DNA of a virus they way you can human DNA, because viruses mutate as soon as they enter a human body. Janice’s virus’s DNA was similar to Don’s, but it wasn’t exactly a match. But Dr. Metzker thought up an experiment to see if it could still be proven that the virus in Janice came from Don. The experiment he compared 30 samples of HIV from individuals in Lafayette, including Janice and Don. Only 2 of those samples mutated in a nearly identical way. The other 28 were very different. Mathematically there was a 1 in a million chance that Janice and Don’s viruses were not related. In July 1996, Dr. Richard J. Schmidt was arrested and charged with attempted second degree murder. And Janice married her new boyfriend, Jerry Allen, an oil field manager – NOT a doctor. But the prosecution was thrown a curve ball. Turned out Janice Trahan had also been infected with Hepatitis C, which is contracting by coming into contact with infected blood. Janice’s blood donation would have been tested for Hepatitis C as well. Both Hepatitis C and HIV have no cure, both cause long term, terminal illnesses. Richard must have been dotting his I’s and crossing his T’s by injecting her with both and seeing which one killed her faster. But Don McClelland did not have Hepatitis C. Investigators went back through the hospital medical records. They discovered that on August 2nd, there was a blood draw entry for a patient named Leslie Louviere without a matching lab tracking sticker. Her blood was never sent to the lab. Medical records showed that Leslie was positive for Hepatitis C. It’s seemed that instead of B-12, Richard injected the blood of his 2 patients into Janice’s arm. Dr. Richard J. Schmidt’s trial began in October 1998. He pled innocent. His wife Barbara was at his side. She testified at the trial that she and Richard were home together on the night of August 4th. However, she did take a bath which lasted about 20 minutes that night. Detectives testified that a police officer drove from the Schmidt’s home to Janice’s and back in 17 minutes, included pausing there long a few minutes to account for Richard going into the home and injecting her. It took the jury 4 hours to come back with a guilty verdict. He was sentenced to 50 years hard labor, the maximum sentence. (States including Louisiana, Mississippi, Maine Texas, Pennsylvania and New Jersey still use hard labor as punishment) Richard Schmidt appealed his case on the basis that the virus matching evidence was flawed. In In 2000 the Louisiana Court of Appeals denied his request, finding that the circumstantial evidence was enough to eliminate reasonable doubt even without the science. He appealed several more times after that, all have been denied. He would have been eligible for early release this year, but instead he died while still in custody at a Baton Rouge hospital on February 12, 2023. He was 74 years old. Janice is still married, has retired from nursing and is now a grandmother. Sources: Forensic Files S8E9 “shot of vengeance.” People Magazine article “Act of Revenge” from May 24, 1999 Wired .com CDC .gov Ancient faces .com Wikipedia