Janice Trahan had been feeling under the weather through the closing months of 1994. The young nurse consulted a physician to help her figure out the cause of her symptoms — swollen glands, eye pain, and persistent body aches.
The doctor gave her a full battery of tests.
From one test, she learned that she was pregnant.
From another, she learned she was HIV positive.
It was possible that she picked up the virus, along with hepatitis C, on her job in the Lafayette, La., hospital where she worked. But hospital records could confirm only one mishap: an AIDS patient accidentally splashed her with saliva. She had tested negative after that.
As for the men in her life, HIV tests showed they were clear.
How she contracted the viruses was a mystery.
Then Trahan recalled a strange incident concerning the man who had been her lover for a decade — Dr. Richard Schmidt, 48, a highly respected Lafayette gastroenterologist.
Trahan and Schmidt met on the job in the early ‘80s and were soon sleeping together. Both were married to other people. Convinced that she and the doctor were headed for wedded bliss, Trahan divorced her husband and moved into an apartment where Schmidt could visit her whenever he pleased. Then she waited for him to take the next step — leaving his wife and three children to start a new life with her.
Years passed with no change in status. Still, she waited. She continued to hope, even after she became pregnant four times and, Trahan said, Schmidt insisted she have abortions. Trahan ended three pregnancies. But she refused with the fourth and gave birth to a son.
More years passed. Trahan started dating other men and her attempts to break free enraged her dawdling doctor. He said he would fix her so that no one else would want her, Trahan would recall later. Men she dated told of death threats from Schmidt, who warned them never to go near her again.
Finally, she got fed up and sent him packing. Soon, love blossomed with a man she’d later marry.
But Trahan did not cut the doctor out right away. The romance may have fizzled, but Schmidt had also been providing medical care, specifically injections of vitamin B-12.
So she was startled but not terrified when she woke up on the night of Aug. 4, 1994, to see Schmidt standing by her bedside as she was dozing with the couple’s 3-year-old son.
In his hand, he held a syringe filled with a light pink fluid. He said it contained her vitamins.
Trahan felt a searing pain as he jabbed her with the needle, unlike anything she had experienced from the regular pick-me-up shots.
As soon as he emptied the fluid from the syringe, he told her that the hospital needed him, and dashed out of the house.
Months later, plagued by strange health issues, she visited another doctor and learned the horrible truth. Her HIV status led to the hard decision to terminate her pregnancy.
With other possible sources of infection ruled out, Trahan contacted the district attorney and told him of her suspicions. Her theory: Schmidt, furious that she wanted to leave him, tried to murder her with a shot of an incurable deadly virus.
The notion seemed farfetched until detectives started probing. In a search of Schmidt’s office and medical records, they found a log from the day of injection. It described blood drawn from a patient with full-blown AIDS. In the same log there was another entry about blood drawn from a woman with hepatitis C.
According to Schmidt’s records, blood from neither patient had been sent for laboratory analysis.
Circumstantial evidence supported Trahan’s accusation, but none of it was enough to lead to a conviction. Prosecutors had the daunting task of proving her infection came from Schmidt’s patient.
They turned to science. At the time, genetic fingerprinting was becoming an important tool in criminal investigations. In earlier cases, the method was primarily used to exclude or link a person to a violent crime based on human blood or other tissues.
In the case against Schmidt, scientists would have to analyze genetic material from a non-human source — a virus. Making such a connection is exceptionally challenging with HIV, which quickly and easily changes its profile as it moves from host to host and continues to mutate in each new victim.
At Schmidt’s trial, which started in October 1998, scientists presented research based on a new method called phylogenetic analysis, a technique had never been used in a U.S. courtroom before. The researchers were looking for similarities between the two sets of viruses that would suggest that the version in Trahan’s blood had originated in the AIDS patient, who provided a blood sample for the analysis.
A University of Texas molecular biologist told the court that the germs were “as closely related as viruses from two people could be.” There was a one-in-a-million chance that Trahan’s infection could have come from anyone other than Schmidt’s patient, another researcher said.
Along with the circumstantial evidence and Trahan’s accounts of her former flame’s erratic behavior, the genetic tests resulted in a verdict of guilty of second-degree attempted murder. It earned Schmidt a sentence of half a century behind bars. Several appeals in which he challenged the science were unsuccessful. He died in prison in March of this year.
The target of his germ warfare attack outlived him.
JUSTICE STORY has been the Us.Mistertruth’ exclusive take on true crime tales of murder, mystery and mayhem for 100 years. Click here to read more.