00:00:05
a young nurse develops a fatal illness
00:00:08
and her doctors wonder if she was
00:00:10
infected by one of her patients
00:00:14
forensic scientists genetic researchers
00:00:17
and even the police joined together to
00:00:20
solve the mystery
00:00:22
and they discovered
00:00:23
this was no accident
00:00:28
[Music]
00:00:33
so
00:00:35
[Music]
00:00:39
[Applause]
00:00:41
[Music]
00:00:55
in 1994
00:00:57
janice trojan was a single mother of two
00:00:59
young children working as a nurse in the
00:01:01
small town of lafayette louisiana
00:01:05
a few years back she started to develop
00:01:07
some unusual symptoms
00:01:10
and she did what most health
00:01:12
professionals do sought the advice of
00:01:14
her doctor
00:01:15
started with a
00:01:17
pain in my eyes ocular pain
00:01:20
movement of my eyes did seek some
00:01:23
medical attention for that
00:01:25
and was told it was probably my sinuses
00:01:27
um not to worry too much about it
00:01:31
janice visited several doctors before
00:01:33
she finally saw her gynecologist for a
00:01:35
checkup
00:01:37
and then the lymph nodes started to
00:01:39
appear swollen
00:01:41
lymph nodes
00:01:43
suspecting she had a virus her
00:01:45
gynecologist ordered a full battery of
00:01:47
tests
00:01:49
when she got the results
00:01:51
janice was both thrilled
00:01:53
and devastated
00:01:55
at this checkup not only did she find
00:01:57
out she was pregnant but she found out
00:01:59
that she was hiv positive
00:02:02
there were several possible explanations
00:02:05
for how janice had been infected with
00:02:07
hiv
00:02:09
janice worked as a hospital nurse
00:02:12
she may have been infected from one of
00:02:14
the aids patients there
00:02:17
another possibility was that janice
00:02:19
became infected from a previous lover
00:02:23
janice's primary care physician at the
00:02:25
time dr richard schmidt
00:02:27
told colleagues his theory as to how
00:02:30
janus became infected
00:02:32
he said janice is a [ __ ] she sleeps
00:02:35
around she's in the bars at night
00:02:38
she goes to bars during the day she goes
00:02:40
home with strange men
00:02:42
and she's most likely contracted the
00:02:45
disease from sleeping around
00:02:48
knowing her unborn child could be
00:02:50
infected with hiv as well
00:02:52
janice decided to end her pregnancy
00:02:56
and she faced the realization of her own
00:02:59
personal agony
00:03:02
my prognosis is i know it's uncertain i
00:03:05
know that hiv is a terminal disease and
00:03:07
there is no cure
00:03:10
all of janice's lovers of the last 10
00:03:12
years were asked to undergo hiv testing
00:03:15
surprisingly
00:03:17
none tested positive for hiv
00:03:21
but janice had her own theory as to how
00:03:23
she became infected
00:03:25
it was a theory so unbelievable and so
00:03:29
fantastic
00:03:30
few believed her
00:03:32
including the lafayette police
00:03:34
department
00:03:37
[Music]
00:03:39
a small town nurse janice trojan learned
00:03:42
she had been diagnosed hiv positive in
00:03:45
january 1995.
00:03:47
[Music]
00:03:49
five months later she walked into
00:03:50
district attorney mike harson's office
00:03:52
and told an improbable story about her
00:03:55
own doctor richard schmidt
00:03:58
she began relating a story to me how she
00:04:01
had had this relationship with dr
00:04:03
schmidt for a number of years
00:04:05
and that she had recently found out that
00:04:07
she had
00:04:09
aids
00:04:10
or hiv and she felt that he was
00:04:12
responsible for it
00:04:14
while harsen was skeptical he told
00:04:17
lafayette police detective jim kraft to
00:04:20
check out her story was she said that
00:04:22
s.o.b
00:04:24
injected me
00:04:27
the story was hard to believe he wasn't
00:04:30
running some kind of fat farm or
00:04:32
something he was a real live doctor with
00:04:36
credentials and a background richard
00:04:38
schmidt was a
00:04:40
probably one of the best
00:04:42
physicians and most respected physicians
00:04:45
in this community as far as his medical
00:04:47
capabilities
00:04:50
his
00:04:52
patients
00:04:53
adored him
00:04:55
janna said she first met dr schmidt
00:04:57
years earlier when they both worked at
00:04:59
the same hospital
00:05:01
i was a new graduate from licensed
00:05:04
practical school
00:05:05
and i was going through the
00:05:07
orientation phase of
00:05:11
new employment at the hospital
00:05:14
that was the first time that i met him
00:05:18
janice was married at the time and had a
00:05:20
young son
00:05:21
dr schmidt was also married with three
00:05:23
children
00:05:24
the two struck up a friendship
00:05:27
what attracted me to richard was his
00:05:29
intelligence a very brilliant doctor
00:05:32
i viewed him as very very knowledgeable
00:05:36
excellent with his patients
00:05:40
eventually they became romantically
00:05:42
involved and started making plans to be
00:05:45
together
00:05:46
basically his promise to her at that
00:05:49
time was that
00:05:50
as soon as i'm able i'm going to leave
00:05:52
my wife and children and you and i will
00:05:54
be married and we can be together
00:05:58
with that promise
00:05:59
janice got a divorce
00:06:02
janice did leave her husband for the
00:06:04
doctor
00:06:05
assuming that the doctor was going to
00:06:07
leave his wife and family for her
00:06:10
she left hers he never left his
00:06:15
but janice and schmidt continued to see
00:06:17
one another
00:06:19
in 1991
00:06:21
janice became pregnant and gave birth to
00:06:23
their son jeffrey
00:06:25
schmidt paid child support and continued
00:06:28
to promise he'd leave his wife
00:06:30
but he never did
00:06:33
janice told police she tried to end the
00:06:35
relationship many times but said schmidt
00:06:38
made threats against her
00:06:41
several times
00:06:42
he threatened to put sexually revealing
00:06:45
pictures he had taken of her on the
00:06:46
hospital bulletin board where she worked
00:06:50
another time he threatened to tell the
00:06:52
dean of the nursing school that janice
00:06:54
had plagiarized some of her assignments
00:06:57
she tried to start seeing other men
00:06:59
start dating other guys
00:07:01
the problem was that each time she
00:07:03
attempted to establish a relationship
00:07:06
outside of their relationship
00:07:09
richard would intervene in that
00:07:12
he followed her on dates that she had
00:07:14
with other men he even threatened
00:07:17
a couple of the guys that she had dated
00:07:19
one he threatened to kill went to his
00:07:21
home and threatened to kill him
00:07:24
and janice feared for her life
00:07:27
words to the effect if you leave me i'll
00:07:29
fix you i'll fix it so that no man will
00:07:32
want you
00:07:34
or she gave him an ultimatum
00:07:36
she told richard
00:07:39
either leave your wife and marry me or
00:07:41
we're
00:07:42
through when richard failed to respond
00:07:45
janice ended their personal relationship
00:07:47
and she stopped using him as her doctor
00:07:51
schmidt had been treating her with
00:07:53
vitamin b12 shots for her lethargy
00:07:57
according to janice something strange
00:08:00
happened on the evening of august 4th
00:08:05
janice was fast asleep when the phone
00:08:07
rang between 10 and 11 o'clock
00:08:10
it was dr schmidt saying he was coming
00:08:12
over right away
00:08:19
a few minutes later
00:08:21
he was standing over her with a syringe
00:08:24
the injection was very painful
00:08:26
radiated down my arm i never
00:08:29
had an injection of
00:08:31
that type or to cause that much pain in
00:08:34
my life
00:08:37
unlike other visits janice said dr
00:08:40
schmidt didn't stay to talk
00:08:42
he left quickly after the injection he
00:08:45
was nervous rushed
00:08:47
just
00:08:48
out of the ordinary
00:08:50
janice was convinced
00:08:52
that that shot that schmidt gave her was
00:08:55
contaminated with hiv
00:08:58
but police weren't so sure
00:09:01
my mindset was
00:09:03
i don't believe this girl this is just
00:09:05
her attempt
00:09:07
to discredit this guy
00:09:09
to embarrass him
00:09:11
to get some bucks
00:09:13
to get some money out of him
00:09:16
and even if janice was right
00:09:19
how could anyone prove it
00:09:26
detective jim kraft wanted to find some
00:09:28
way to tell whether jenna strawhan's
00:09:31
incredible story was true
00:09:33
that her former lover dr richard schmidt
00:09:36
had injected her with deadly hiv
00:09:40
janus had donated blood just a few
00:09:42
months earlier
00:09:43
records showed that blood donation was
00:09:46
not infected with hiv which meant the
00:09:49
infection was recent
00:09:52
the investigation began by checking dr
00:09:54
schmidt's telephone records
00:09:57
and just as janice had told them
00:10:00
dr schmidt had called her at 10 26 p.m
00:10:05
on august the 4th
00:10:08
but investigators needed proof that the
00:10:10
injection dr schmidt gave janus
00:10:13
contained hiv
00:10:16
investigators would discover early on in
00:10:18
this case that hiv tainted blood is not
00:10:21
the easiest thing on earth to obtain
00:10:23
uh you do not just walk into a blood
00:10:26
plasma unit or a clinic and say oh you
00:10:29
know give me those three vials of
00:10:32
labeled hiv and take them out
00:10:35
nurses in dr schmidt's medical practice
00:10:37
kept meticulous records of every patient
00:10:40
that had blood drawn for testing
00:10:43
but if dr schmidt took blood from one of
00:10:46
his hiv patients the virus wouldn't stay
00:10:49
potent for very long
00:10:51
you have about a 12 hour window before
00:10:54
you have to inject it
00:10:57
or
00:10:58
the virus won't survive outside the body
00:11:02
investigators wanted to see dr schmidt's
00:11:05
office records for august 4th 1994.
00:11:10
the day janus said schmidt gave her the
00:11:12
injection
00:11:14
immediately we look for
00:11:16
the 1994 book
00:11:19
but we can't find it it's missing
00:11:22
in schmidt's desk
00:11:24
police found the sexually revealing
00:11:26
photos he had taken of janus that he had
00:11:29
threatened to distribute
00:11:31
but they still couldn't find his 1994
00:11:34
office records
00:11:36
they were about to leave when they
00:11:38
discovered a locked storage room full of
00:11:41
boxes
00:11:43
at the very bottom of a pile was a box
00:11:45
marked
00:11:46
1982 records
00:11:49
in the very bottom of that box
00:11:52
was a notebook
00:11:53
and i thumbed through it real quickly
00:11:55
and it's only halfway full got i don't
00:11:57
know 50 60 pages in it but only about 20
00:12:00
or 30 of them are full
00:12:02
and i look at the last date in the book
00:12:07
and wouldn't you know it it's august 4th
00:12:09
1994
00:12:12
next to nearly every patient's name who
00:12:15
had given blood that day was a sticker
00:12:17
with a tracking number on it for the lab
00:12:21
all except one a patient named don
00:12:26
mcclellan
00:12:27
beside his name was a notation that said
00:12:30
lavender stopper for dress
00:12:34
police went to see don mcclellan and
00:12:37
they asked him a very important question
00:12:41
are you hiv positive the guy stares at
00:12:44
me says hiv positive hell i've got full
00:12:48
blown aids
00:12:50
and mcclellan said he never called dr
00:12:52
schmidt to make an appointment on august
00:12:54
4th he said
00:12:56
dr schmidt called him to come in for a
00:12:59
blood test
00:13:01
it was insidious it was beyond
00:13:03
diabolical it's one of the strangest and
00:13:06
cruelest crimes i've ever heard of
00:13:10
but could forensic scientists match the
00:13:13
strain of hiv and janice trojan
00:13:16
to dr schmidt's patient
00:13:19
[Music]
00:13:23
prosecutors wanted to know whether dr
00:13:25
richard schmidt took hiv-infected blood
00:13:28
from one of his patients and injected it
00:13:30
into his former lover janice trojan
00:13:34
would there be a way through traditional
00:13:37
science or traditional dna testing to
00:13:39
compare
00:13:41
those two persons and those two samples
00:13:44
are samples from those two people to
00:13:46
determine whether they are in fact the
00:13:49
the same virus
00:13:51
they turned to genetic researcher dr
00:13:54
michael metzger at baylor college of
00:13:55
medicine in texas one of the world's
00:13:58
most renowned centers of human genome
00:14:00
studies
00:14:02
dr metzger told them that dna tests of a
00:14:05
virus are not the same as comparing dna
00:14:08
from individuals
00:14:10
that's because
00:14:11
viruses change or mutate once they
00:14:14
entered the body
00:14:16
but dr metzker was willing to conduct an
00:14:19
experiment to see if the hiv in genesis
00:14:22
body was similar to dr schmidt's hiv
00:14:25
patient don mcclellan
00:14:28
the methods that we use are called
00:14:30
phylogenetic methods
00:14:32
that invokes uh it takes advantage of
00:14:35
the virus mutability as the virus
00:14:38
mutates it evolves in different
00:14:40
individuals we can use that evolution
00:14:44
using mathematical models to actually
00:14:47
trace back
00:14:48
relationships between
00:14:50
viruses if they exist
00:14:53
dr metzker looked at blood samples from
00:14:55
30 individuals infected with hiv in
00:14:58
lafayette louisiana including the
00:15:00
samples from janice trojan and don
00:15:03
mcclellan
00:15:06
he discovered that 28 of those samples
00:15:08
had mutated in ways vastly different
00:15:11
from one another
00:15:13
but in two of the samples the viruses
00:15:16
were nearly identical and were therefore
00:15:19
closely related
00:15:21
the samples were from janice trojan
00:15:25
and don mcclellan
00:15:26
when we looked at the viruses the odds
00:15:29
that we found were one in a million of
00:15:31
excluding the patient being the source
00:15:34
of janus trojan's virus
00:15:37
that for
00:15:38
us was corroboration of our theory
00:15:43
that
00:15:44
the book that
00:15:45
schmidt had used the virus of one of his
00:15:47
patients to use to infect jannah
00:15:50
stronghold
00:15:52
in july of 1996
00:15:54
dr schmidt was charged with attempted
00:15:57
second-degree murder
00:15:59
but prosecutors were faced with another
00:16:02
scientific riddle when ultimately janice
00:16:04
was diagnosed she was also diagnosed not
00:16:07
only hiv positive but with hepatitis c
00:16:10
the patient whose blood had been drawn
00:16:11
on august 4th
00:16:13
was hiv positive but
00:16:16
not did not have hepatitis c
00:16:19
when investigators looked again at dr
00:16:21
schmidt's medical records they noticed
00:16:24
one more patient listed with no lab
00:16:27
sticker next to her name
00:16:30
that patient had blood drawn two days
00:16:32
before janice's nighttime injection but
00:16:35
her blood was never sent to the lab
00:16:39
that patient's medical record showed
00:16:42
she had hepatitis c
00:16:45
the doctor not only
00:16:47
appears to have infected his lover
00:16:50
with hiv
00:16:52
but
00:16:53
combined it with hepatitis c from a yet
00:16:56
another patient to create this this even
00:17:00
more lethal cocktail that he injected
00:17:02
with that night
00:17:05
dr schmidt maintained his innocence he
00:17:07
said he had an alibi for the night of
00:17:10
august 4th
00:17:12
he said he was home with his wife except
00:17:14
for 20 minutes when she was taking a
00:17:16
bath
00:17:17
but a police officer drove from dr
00:17:20
schmidt's home to genesis and back in
00:17:22
about 17 minutes even allowing time for
00:17:25
the injection
00:17:28
and there's another question
00:17:30
why did dr schmidt keep his medical
00:17:32
records from 1994 rather than throw them
00:17:35
away
00:17:37
detective craft thinks he knows the
00:17:39
answer
00:17:41
he kept something
00:17:43
as a trophy he has something from that
00:17:45
crime
00:17:47
that he can look at that he can touch
00:17:49
that he can see
00:17:51
that reminds him that he got away with
00:17:53
this
00:17:55
along with the scientific and
00:17:57
circumstantial evidence
00:17:59
it was the words of janus trohan that
00:18:01
echoed in the jury's mind during dr
00:18:04
schmidt's trial richard made a lot of
00:18:07
promises to me that he did not keep but
00:18:09
he did keep one and that would be that
00:18:12
he would kill me and i feel like that's
00:18:15
a death sentence
00:18:17
that i have
00:18:20
prosecutors believe that dr schmidt
00:18:22
fulfilled that promise when janus ended
00:18:24
their relationship
00:18:26
[Music]
00:18:27
did it by injecting the hiv and
00:18:30
hepatitis c tainted blood into janus's
00:18:33
arm
00:18:34
and did it on the same day he took the
00:18:37
hiv sample making sure
00:18:40
it maintained its potency
00:18:43
despite his medical degree
00:18:45
dr schmidt never realized that forensic
00:18:48
dna testing could compare the mutations
00:18:52
of the hiv and his patient don mcclellan
00:18:54
and match them to the hiv in janus
00:18:58
to me what he did was something that's
00:19:01
really atrocious when you think about it
00:19:02
i mean here's a man who took an oath to
00:19:04
preserve people's lives and to do
00:19:05
everything he could to to preserve
00:19:07
people's lives
00:19:08
and
00:19:09
in this fashion he basically did
00:19:11
everything just the opposite
00:19:12
on october 23 1998 he was convicted of
00:19:16
attempted second-degree murder and
00:19:18
sentenced to 50 years hard labor
00:19:22
most people carry out
00:19:24
these attacks with a gun or a knife or a
00:19:27
club
00:19:28
but here was a guy who had to
00:19:31
think about what he was going to do
00:19:34
how he was going to do it
00:19:36
what means was he going to use to affect
00:19:38
her death
00:19:40
and
00:19:42
it was just so diabolical and so evil
00:19:45
jurors like to see
00:19:47
be able to see a smoking gun or the
00:19:49
knife or the
00:19:50
baseball bat or whatever it is that
00:19:52
that's used to
00:19:54
commit the act and in this case we
00:19:55
really didn't have it we didn't have
00:19:57
that tangible item but the scientific
00:19:59
evidence gave us that chance because
00:20:01
what essentially boils down to it
00:20:02
unfortunately is that these two
00:20:04
individuals from whom these samples were
00:20:06
drawn were out smoking guns
00:20:11
janice trojan is remarried and lives
00:20:13
with her two sons in the same house
00:20:16
where she was infected that august night
00:20:19
i just try to put things in the past and
00:20:22
just keep moving forward and
00:20:25
my outlook on life i think is is very
00:20:28
good
00:20:29
i appreciate life more you know stop and
00:20:32
look at the flowers and
00:20:34
treasure each day that i do have with my
00:20:37
family and my husband
00:20:39
it's much more meaningful
00:20:43
this case made forensic history it was
00:20:46
the first time in the united states that
00:20:48
two hiv cases had been linked using dna
00:20:51
testing in a criminal case
00:20:54
the significance of the dna testing is
00:20:56
that we we attempted to use something
00:20:58
that had not been done before and
00:21:00
attempted to
00:21:02
strike out
00:21:04
in our jobs as prosecutors
00:21:07
to find a way to prove
00:21:09
the elements of a crime
00:21:11
we use the most advanced tools for
00:21:13
understanding the relationship between
00:21:15
the dna sequences from hiv
00:21:19
but they're pretty standard the impact
00:21:21
and the contribution was to bring this
00:21:23
new methodology
00:21:25
into the judicial system
00:21:28
and to use it as a tool for an
00:21:30
investigation of alleged crimes
00:21:34
[Music]
00:21:48
so
00:21:50
[Music]
00:21:58
[Music]
00:22:07
you
