Forensic Files - Season 8, Episode 9 - Shot of Vengeance - Full Episode | Forensic Files

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 joined together to solve the mystery
and they discovered this was no accident [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] in 1994
janice trojan 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 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 um not to worry too much about it janice visited several doctors before
she finally saw her gynecologist for a checkup and then the lymph nodes started to
appear swollen lymph nodes suspecting she had a virus her gynecologist ordered a full battery of
tests when she got the results janice was both thrilled and devastated at this checkup not only did she find
out she was pregnant but she found out that she was hiv positive 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
janus became infected he said janice is a [ __ ] 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 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
my prognosis is i know it's uncertain i know that hiv is a terminal disease and there is no cure
all of janice's lovers of the last 10 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 [Music] a small town nurse janice trojan learned she had been diagnosed hiv positive in
january 1995. [Music] five months later she walked into district attorney mike harson's office
and told an improbable story about her own doctor richard schmidt 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 while harsen was skeptical he told
lafayette police detective jim kraft to check out her story was she said that s.o.b
injected me the story was hard to believe 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 a
probably one of the best physicians and most respected physicians in this community as far as his medical
capabilities his patients adored him janna said she first met dr schmidt years earlier when they both worked at
the same hospital i was a new graduate from licensed practical school and i was going through the
orientation phase of new employment at the hospital that was the first time that i met him
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 what attracted me to richard was his intelligence a very brilliant doctor
i viewed him as very very knowledgeable excellent with his patients eventually they became romantically
involved and started making plans to be together basically his promise to her at that
time was that as soon as i'm able i'm going to leave my wife and children and you and i will
be married and we can be together with that promise janice got a divorce 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
but janice and schmidt continued to see one another in 1991 janice became pregnant and gave birth to
their son jeffrey 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 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 kill went to his home and threatened to kill him
and janice feared for her life words to the effect if you leave me i'll fix you i'll fix it so that no man will
want you or she gave him an ultimatum she told richard either leave your wife and marry me or
we're through 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 b12 shots for her lethargy
according to janice something strange happened on the evening of august 4th janice was fast asleep when the phone
rang between 10 and 11 o'clock it was dr schmidt saying he was coming over right away
a few minutes later he was standing over her with a syringe the injection was very painful
radiated down my arm i never had an injection of that type or to cause that much pain in
my life unlike other visits janice said dr schmidt didn't stay to talk he left quickly after the injection he
was nervous rushed just out of the ordinary janice was convinced that that shot that schmidt gave her was
contaminated with hiv but police weren't so sure my mindset 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
and even if janice was right how could anyone prove it detective jim kraft wanted to find some
way to tell whether jenna strawhan's incredible story was true that her former lover dr richard schmidt
had injected her with deadly hiv janus 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 10 26 p.m on august the 4th but investigators needed proof that the
injection dr schmidt gave janus contained hiv investigators would discover early on in
this case that hiv tainted blood is not the easiest thing on earth to obtain uh you do not just walk into a blood
plasma unit or a clinic and say oh you know give me those three vials of labeled hiv and take them out
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 you have about a 12 hour window before you have to inject it
or the virus won't survive outside the body investigators wanted to see dr schmidt's
office records for august 4th 1994. the day janus said schmidt gave her the injection
immediately we look for the 1994 book but we can't find it it's missing in schmidt's desk
police found the sexually revealing photos he had taken of janus that he had threatened to distribute
but they still couldn't find his 1994 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 1982 records in the very bottom of that box was a notebook and i thumbed through it real quickly
and it's only halfway full got i don't know 50 60 pages in it but only about 20 or 30 of them are full
and i look at the last date in the book and wouldn't you know it it's august 4th
1994 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 mcclellan
beside his name was a notation that said lavender stopper for dress police went to see don mcclellan and
they asked him a very important question are you hiv positive the guy stares at me says hiv positive hell i've got full
blown aids and mcclellan said he never called dr schmidt to make an appointment on august
4th he said dr schmidt called him to come in for a blood test it was insidious it was beyond
diabolical it's one of the strangest and cruelest crimes i've ever heard of but could forensic scientists match the
strain of hiv and janice trojan to dr schmidt's patient [Music] 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 trojan would there be a way through traditional science or traditional dna testing to
compare those two persons and those two samples are samples from those two people to
determine whether they are in fact the the same virus they turned to genetic researcher dr
michael metzger at baylor college of medicine in texas one of the world's most renowned centers of human genome
studies dr metzger 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 entered the body
but dr metzker was willing to conduct an experiment to see if the hiv in genesis
body was similar to dr schmidt's hiv patient don mcclellan the methods that we use are called
phylogenetic methods that invokes uh 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 dr metzker looked at blood samples from
30 individuals infected with hiv in lafayette louisiana including the samples from janice trojan and don
mcclellan he discovered that 28 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 trojan and don mcclellan when we looked at the viruses the odds
that we found were one in a million of excluding the patient being the source of janus trojan's virus
that for us was corroboration of our theory that the book that schmidt had used the virus of one of his
patients to use to infect jannah stronghold in july of 1996 dr schmidt was charged with attempted
second-degree murder but prosecutors were faced with another scientific riddle 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 4th was hiv positive but not did not have hepatitis c 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 the doctor not only appears to have infected his lover
with hiv but combined it with hepatitis c from a yet another patient to create this this even
more lethal cocktail that he injected with that night dr schmidt maintained his innocence he
said he had an alibi for the night of august 4th he said he was home with his wife except
for 20 minutes when she was taking a bath but a police officer drove from dr schmidt's home to genesis and back in
about 17 minutes even allowing time for the injection and there's another question
why did dr schmidt keep his medical records from 1994 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 along with the scientific and circumstantial evidence it was the words of janus trohan that
echoed in the jury's mind during dr schmidt's trial 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 kill me and i feel like that's a death sentence
that i have prosecutors believe that dr schmidt fulfilled that promise when janus ended
their relationship [Music] did it by injecting the hiv and hepatitis c tainted blood into janus'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 and his patient don mcclellan and match them to the hiv in janus to me what he did was something that's
really atrocious when you think about it i mean here's a man who took an oath to
preserve people's lives and to do everything he could to to preserve people's lives
and in this fashion he basically did everything just the opposite on october 23 1998 he was convicted of
attempted second-degree murder and sentenced to 50 years hard labor most people carry out
these attacks with a gun or a knife or a club but here was a guy who had to think about what he was going to do
how he was going to do it what means was he going to use to affect her death and
it was just so diabolical and so evil jurors like to see be able to see a smoking gun or the
knife or the baseball bat or whatever it is that that's used to commit the act and in this case we
really didn't have it we didn't have that tangible item but the scientific evidence gave us that chance because
what essentially boils down to it unfortunately is that these two individuals from whom these samples were
drawn were out smoking guns janice trojan 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 is very good i appreciate life more you know 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 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 the significance of the dna testing is
that we we attempted to use something that had not been done before and attempted to
strike out in our jobs as prosecutors to find a way to prove the elements of a crime
we use 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 an investigation of alleged crimes
[Music] so [Music] [Music] you

A 34-year-old nurse experiences a variety of flu-like symptoms. None of her doctors are able to discover the cause, until she visits the gynecologist for a routine check-up. Then she learns it's something far worse than the flu.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

#truecrime #forensicfiles #fullepisodes Click here to watch full episodes from Forensic Files - Season 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gAB0hcY3Z0&list=PLC4mqmKvz1IbdnLKfCt8--pOV0xEpMIP5 Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Janice Trojan was infected with HIV by her doctor, Richard Schmidt, who was later convicted of attempted murder.

Key points

A Nurse's Tragic Diagnosis. Janice Trojan, a nurse, discovers she is HIV positive while pregnant, leading to a devastating decision.
The Unbelievable Accusation. Janice accuses her former lover, Dr. Schmidt, of injecting her with HIV, leading to a police investigation.
Forensic Breakthrough. Forensic scientists link Janice's HIV strain to Dr. Schmidt's patient, marking a historic case in DNA testing.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

My prognosis is I know it's uncertain.

Janice reflects on her uncertain future after being diagnosed with HIV.

3:02WatchDec 16, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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