A Shot in the Dark

Janice Trahan was a nurse in Lafayette, Louisiana. For about ten years she was involved with Dr. Richard J. Schmidt, a married gastroenterologist who kept telling her he would leave his wife. They had a child together. In the summer of 1994 she ended the relationship for good.

Late on August 4, 1994, Schmidt came to her house and gave her what he called a vitamin B-12 shot. She said the pain travelled down her arm in a way no injection ever had. Months later she was diagnosed with HIV and hepatitis C. Investigators found a logbook hidden in a box of old files at Schmidt’s office showing that he had taken blood from a hepatitis C patient days earlier and from a patient with AIDS on the day of the visit, and that neither sample was ever sent for testing. Scientists then compared the genetic sequence of the virus in Janice with the virus in that patient and in dozens of unrelated local patients. It was the first time this kind of viral analysis was used as evidence in an American criminal trial.

A jury convicted Schmidt of attempted second-degree murder on October 23, 1998, and in February 1999 he was sentenced to fifty years at hard labor. Parole was denied in 2015. He died in custody on February 12, 2023, at seventy-four.