Nurse Accuses Doctor Of Trying To Kill Her With Aids Injection

LAFAYETTE, La. - It sounds like "General Hospital" crossed with "Law & Order." But it's a real doctor, a real nurse, a real courtroom and really sordid accusations.

The nurse's story: After 10 years, she had told him it was over. Really over. For good. His promises and threats couldn't hold her any longer. Still, he kept coming to see her. One night, he walked into her darkened apartment and shot her up with blood he'd drawn from an AIDS patient.

The doctor's story: She needed someone to blame for the terrible infection and fastened on him. Yes, they'd had a stormy, adulterous 10-year affair. But he didn't give her AIDS and couldn't have given her a shot that night - he was with his wife and daughters.

Jurors must decide whether the shifting strands of DNA in the AIDS virus are enough to tie up Janice Trahan Allen's accusation that Dr. Richard Schmidt, a gastroenterologist, used human blood to try to murder her Aug. 4, 1994.

She was diagnosed with HIV the following January. She could think of no possible source of infection: None of her sexual partners had the virus, and she hadn't pricked herself with any needles used on patients in the intensive-care unit where she worked, she says.

Then she remembered the unusually painful shot she'd received one of the last times she'd seen Schmidt. She called a lawyer and the district attorney.

Schmidt, 52, is charged with attempted second-degree murder, which can be punished by life at hard labor. The trial resumes tomorrow.

Allen, 34, told her story Thursday and Friday to jurors.

When she'd tried to leave him earlier, she testified, Schmidt threatened to post, in the hospital where she worked, photos he'd taken of her during sex. Another time, he'd threatened to tell nursing-school officials she'd cheated so she would not graduate.

She testified she got pregnant five times because he didn't like condoms, and birth-control pills gave her migraines. She said she had four abortions and - when Schmidt promised to marry her - a son, Jeffrey John Trahan, now 7. She also bore an older son to the husband she left early in her affair with Schmidt.

Defense attorney Michael Fawer cautioned jurors in his opening statement Thursday, "You have sworn not to treat this as a morality play. It is far more important than that. The question is solely and exclusively whether Richard injected Janice with the HIV virus from a patient."

For one thing, he said, Schmidt had sprained his back the week in question. On the night of Aug. 4, his wife and daughters can account for all but 20 minutes of his time, too short a span for a man with a bad back to drive five miles each way and give a shot.

In addition, he asserted, the DNA evidence doesn't support Allen's allegation.

Fawer said the prosecution relies on "deeply flawed" tests for its claim that the virus in Allen's blood was closely related to that of Schmidt's patient, and not to that in any of 30 other Lafayette-area AIDS patients used for comparison.

He said that proves nothing - a second, unrelated study found much closer links between the viral DNA in samples of the AIDS virus taken from two unrelated babies born in New Orleans, although neither their mothers nor their mothers' sexual partners had any connections.

The problem, Fawer said, is that viral DNA mutates rapidly - and prosecutors have accepted Allen's statements about which men she had sex with.

What's far more likely than Schmidt taking blood from one of his patients and injecting it into Allen, Fawer suggested, is that Allen had undisclosed partners and one of them shares undiscovered DNA links with Schmidt's patient.