08x09 - Shot of Vengeance

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Narrator: a young nurse develops a fatal illness,

And her doctors wonder if she was infected

By one of her patients.

Forensic scientists, genetic researchers, and even the police

Join together to solve the mystery.

And they discovered this was no accident.

In , janice trahan

Was a single mother of two young children

Working as a nurse in the small town of lafayette, louisiana.

A few years back,

She started to develop some unusual symptoms,

And she did what most health professionals do --

Sought the advice of her doctor.

Trahan: started with a pain in my eyes --

Ocular pain, movement of my eyes.

Did seek some medical attention for that

And was told it was probably my sinuses,

Not to worry too much about it.

Narrator: janice visited several doctors

Before she finally saw her gynecologist for a checkup.

Trahan: and then the lymph nodes started to appear,

Swollen lymph nodes.

Narrator: suspecting she had a virus,

Her gynecologist ordered a full battery of tests.

When she got the results,

Janice was both thrilled and devastated.

Craft: at this checkup,

Not only did she find out she was pregnant,

But she found out that she was hiv positive.

Narrator: there were several possible explanations

For how janice had been infected with hiv.

Janice worked as a hospital nurse.

She may have been infected from one of the aids patients there.

Another possibility was that janice became infected

From a previous lover.

Janice's primary care physician at the time,

Dr. Richard schmidt, told colleagues his theory

As to how janice became infected.

He said janice is a slut. She sleeps around.

She's in the bars at night. She goes to bars during the day.

She goes home with strange men,

And she's most likely contracted the disease

From sleeping around.

Narrator: knowing her unborn child

Could be infected with hiv as well,

Janice decided to end her pregnancy.

And she faced the realization of her own personal agony.

Trahan: my prognosis is -- I know it's uncertain.

I know that hiv is a terminal disease,

And there is no cure.

Narrator: all of janice's lovers of the last years

Were asked to undergo hiv testing.

Surprisingly, none tested positive for hiv.

But janice had her own theory as to how she became infected.

It was a theory so unbelievable and so fantastic

Few believed her,

Including the lafayette police department.

Narrator: a small-town nurse, janice trahan,

Learned she had been diagnosed hiv positive in january .

Five months later,

She walked into district attorney mike harson's office

And told an improbable story about her own doctor,

Richard schmidt.

Harson: she began relating a story to me,

How she had had this relationship with dr. Schmidt

For a number of years,

And that she had recently found out that she had aids, or hiv,

And she felt that he was responsible for it.

Narrator: while harson was skeptical,

He told lafayette police detective jim craft

To check out her story.

Craft: she said, "that s.o.b. Injected me."

Narrator: the story was hard to believe.

Michaud: he wasn't running some kind of fat farm or something.

He was a real live doctor with credentials and a background.

Richard schmidt was probably one of the best physicians

And most-respected physicians in this community

As far as his medical capabilities.

His patients adored him.

Narrator: janice said she first met dr. Schmidt years earlier

When they both worked at the same hospital.

Trahan: I was a new graduate

From a licensed practical school.

And I was going through the orientation phase

Of new employment at that hospital.

That was the first time that I met him.

Narrator: janice was married at the time and had a young son.

Dr. Schmidt was also married with three children.

The two struck up a friendship.

Trahan: what attracted me to richard was his intelligence,

A very brilliant doctor.

I viewed him as very, very knowledgeable,

Excellent with his patients.

Narrator: eventually, they became romantically involved

And started making plans to be together.

Craft: basically, his promise to her at that time

Was that, "as soon as I'm able,

"I'm gonna leave my wife and children,

And you and I will married, and we can be together."

Narrator: with that promise, janice got a divorce.

Michaud: janice did leave her husband for the doctor,

Assuming that the doctor

Was going to leave his wife and family for her.

She left hers. He never left his.

Narrator: but janice and schmidt continued to see one another.

In , janice became pregnant

And gave birth to their son, jeffery.

Schmidt paid child support

And continued to promise he'd leave his wife,

But he never did.

Janice told police she tried to end the relationship many times,

But said schmidt made threats against her.

Several times,

He threatened to put sexually revealing pictures

He had taken of her

On the hospital bulletin board where she worked.

Another time he threatened to tell

The dean of the nursing school

That janice had plagiarized some of her assignments.

Craft: she tried to start seeing other men,

Start dating other guys.

The problem was that each time she attempted to establish

A relationship outside of their relationship,

Richard would intervene in that.

He followed her on dates that she had with other men.

He even threatened a couple of the guys that she had dated.

One he threatened to k*ll,

Went to his home and threatened to k*ll him.

Narrator: and janice feared for her life.

Stutes: words to the effect, "if you leave me, I'll fix you.

I'll fix it so that no man will want you."

She gave him an ultimatum.

She told richard, "either leave your wife and marry me,

Or we're through."

Narrator: when richard failed to respond,

Janice ended their personal relationship,

And she stopped using him as her doctor.

Schmidt had been treating her

With vitamin b- sh*ts for her lethargy.

According to janice,

Something strange happened on the evening of august th.

[ Telephone ringing ]

Janice was fast asleep

When the phone rang between : and :.

It was dr. Schmidt, saying he was coming over right away.

A few minutes later,

He was standing over her with a syringe.

Trahan: the injection was very painful.

I never have had an injection of that type

To cause that much pain in my life.

Narrator: unlike other visits,

Janice said dr. Schmidt didn't stay to talk.

Trahan: he left quickly after the injection.

He was nervous, rushed, just out of the ordinary.

Narrator: janice was convinced that that shot

That schmidt gave her was contaminated with hiv,

But police weren't so sure.

Craft: my mind-set was, "I don't believe this girl."

This is just her attempt to discredit this guy,

To embarrass him, to get some bucks,

To get some money out of him.

Narrator: and even if janice was right,

How could anyone prove it?

Narrator: detective jim craft wanted to find some way to tell

Whether janice trahan's incredible story was true,

That her former lover, dr. Richard schmidt,

Had injected her with deadly hiv.

Janice had donated blood just a few months earlier.

Records showed that blood donation

Was not infected with hiv,

Which meant the infection was recent.

The investigation began

By checking dr. Schmidt's telephone records.

And just as janice had told them,

Dr. Schmidt had called her at : p.m. On august the th.

But investigators needed proof

That the injection dr. Schmidt gave janice contained hiv.

Michaud: investigators would discover early on in this case

That hiv tainted blood

Is not the easiest thing on earth to obtain.

You do not just walk into a blood plasma unit or a clinic

And say, "oh, give me those three vials labeled hiv"

And take them out.

Narrator: nurses in dr. Schmidt's medical practice

Kept meticulous records

Of every patient that had blood drawn for testing.

But if dr. Schmidt took blood from one of his hiv patients,

The virus wouldn't stay potent for very long.

Craft: you have about a -hour window

Before you have to inject it,

Or the virus won't survive outside the body.

Narrator: investigators wanted to see

Dr. Schmidt's office records for august , ,

The day janice said schmidt gave her the injection.

Craft: immediately we look for the book,

But we can't find it. It's missing.

Narrator: in schmidt's desk,

Police found the sexually revealing photos

He had taken of janice that he had threatened to distribute,

But they still couldn't find his office records.

They were about to leave

When they discovered a locked storage room full of boxes.

At the very bottom of a pile was a box marked " records."

In the very bottom of that box was a notebook.

Craft: and I thumbed through it real quickly,

And it's only halfway full.

Got, I don't know, , pages in it,

But only about or of them are full.

And I look at the last date in the book,

And wouldn't you know it? It's august , .

Narrator: next to nearly every patient's name

Who had given blood that day

Was a sticker with a tracking number on it for the lab.

All except one -- a patient named don mcclelland.

Beside his name was a notation that said,

"Lavender stopper for dr. S."

Police went to see don mcclelland,

And they asked him a very important question.

Michaud: "are you hiv positive?"

The guy stares at him. He says, "hiv positive?!

Hell, I've got full-blown aids."

Narrator: and mcclelland said he never called dr. Schmidt

To make an appointment on august th.

He said dr. Schmidt called him to come in for a blood test.

Michaud: it was insidious.

It was beyond diabolical.

It's one of the strangest and cruelest crimes

I've ever heard of.

Narrator: but could forensic scientists match the strain

Of hiv in janice trahan to dr. Schmidt's patient?

Narrator: prosecutors wanted to know whether dr. Richard schmidt

Took hiv-infected blood from one of his patients

And injected it into his former lover, janice trahan.

Stutes: would there be a way through traditional science

Or traditional dna testing to compare those two persons

And those two samples or samples from those two people

To determine whether they are, in fact, the same virus?

Narrator: they turned to genetic researcher dr. Michael metzker

At baylor college of medicine in texas,

One of the world's most renowned centers of human genome studies.

Dr. Metzker told them that dna tests of a virus

Are not the same as comparing dna from individuals.

That's because viruses change, or mutate,

Once they enter the body.

But dr. Metzker was willing to conduct an experiment to see

If the hiv in janice's body was similar

To dr. Schmidt's hiv patient, don mcclelland.

Metzker: the methods that we use are called phylogenetic methods.

That invokes --

It takes advantage of the virus mutability.

As the virus mutates, it evolves in different individuals.

We can use that evolution using mathematical models

To actually trace back relationships between viruses

If they exist.

Narrator: dr. Metzker looked at blood samples

From individuals infected with hiv

In lafayette, louisiana,

Including the samples

From janice trahan and don mcclelland.

He discovered that of those samples had mutated

In ways vastly different from one another.

But in two of the samples,

The viruses were nearly identical

And were therefore closely related.

The samples were from janice trahan

And don mcclelland.

Metzger: when we looked at the viruses,

The odds that we found were one in a million

Of excluding the patient being the source

Of janice trahan's virus.

That for us was corroboration of our theory

That schmidt had used the virus of one of his patients

To use to infect janice trahan.

Narrator: in july of , dr. Schmidt was charged

With attempted second-degree m*rder.

But prosecutors were faced with another scientific riddle.

Stutes: when ultimately janice was diagnosed,

She was also diagnosed not only hiv positive,

But with hepatitis c.

The patient whose blood had been drawn on august th

Was hiv positive, but did not have hepatitis c.

Narrator: when investigators looked again

At dr. Schmidt's medical records,

They noticed one more patient

Listed with no lab sticker next to her name.

That patient had blood drawn

Two days before janice's nighttime injection,

But her blood was never sent to the lab.

That patient's medical record showed she had hepatitis c.

Michaud: the doctor not only appears to have infected

His lover with hiv,

But combined it with hepatitis c from yet another patient

To create this even more lethal cocktail

That he injected her with that night.

Narrator: dr. Schmidt maintained his innocence.

He said he had an alibi for the night of august .

He said he was home with his wife

Except for minutes when she was taking a bath.

But a police officer drove from dr. Schmidt's home

To janice's and back in about minutes,

Even allowing time for the injection.

And there's another question.

Why did dr. Schmidt keep his medical records from

Rather than throw them away?

Detective craft thinks he knows the answer.

He kept something as a trophy.

He has something from that crime that he can look at,

That he can touch, that he can see,

That reminds him that he got away with this.

Narrator: along with the scientific

And circumstantial evidence,

It was the words of janice trahan

That echoed in the jury's mind during dr. Schmidt's trial.

Trahan: richard made a lot of promises to me

That he did not keep, but he did keep one,

And that would be that he would k*ll me.

And I feel like that's a death sentence that I have.

Narrator: prosecutors believe

That dr. Schmidt fulfilled that promise

When janice ended their relationship.

He did it by injecting the hiv and hepatitis c tainted blood into janice's arm

And did it on the same day he took the hiv sample,

Making sure it maintained its potency.

Despite his medical degree,

Dr. Schmidt never realized that forensic dna testing

Could compare the mutations of the hiv

In his patient don mcclelland,

And match them to the hiv in janice.

Harson: to me, what he did was something

That's really atrocious when you think about it.

Here's a man who took an oath to preserve people's lives

And to do everything he could to preserve people's lives,

And in this fashion,

He basically did everything just the opposite.

Narrator: on october , ,

He was convicted of attempted second-degree m*rder

And sentenced to years hard labor.

Craft: most people carry out these att*cks

With a g*n or a knife or a club,

But here was a guy who had to think

About what he was gonna do, how he was gonna do it,

What means was he gonna use to effect her death.

And it was just so diabolical and so evil.

Juries like to be able to see a smoking g*n, or the knife,

Or the baseball bat,

Or whatever it is that's used to commit the act.

In this case, we didn't have it.

We didn't have that tangible item.

But the scientific evidence gave us that chance

Because what it essentially boiled down to, unfortunately,

Is that these two individuals from whom these samples

Were drawn were our smoking g*ns.

Narrator: janice trahan is remarried

And lives with her two sons in the same house

Where she was infected that august night.

I just try to put things in the past

And just keep moving forward,

And my outlook on life, I think, is very good.

I appreciate life more.

Being able to stop and look at the flowers

And treasure each day that I do have

With my family and my husband.

It's much more meaningful.

Narrator: this case made forensic history.

It was the first time in the united states

That two hiv cases had been linked using dna testing

In a criminal case.

Stutes: the significance of the dna testing

Is that we attempted to use something

That had not been done before,

Attempted to strike out in our jobs as prosecutors

To find a way to prove the elements of a crime.

We used the most advanced tools

For understanding the relationship

Between the dna sequences from hiv,

But they're pretty standard.

The impact and the contribution

Was to bring this new methodology

Into the judicial system

And to use it as a tool for investigation of alleged crimes.