SALT LAKE CITY — Her doctors were puzzled over a series of strange infections she developed as she healed from back surgery, but a Salt Lake City woman says she didn’t link the medical issues to her longtime roommate until the FBI showed up at her door last year.
“They had to show me evidence before I would fully believe that she had done it,” Rachel, who asked her last name be withheld, said in an interview.
Her former roommate, Janie Lynn Ridd, was sentenced this week to at least one and up to 20 years in the Utah State Prison.
Ridd, 51, pleaded guilty in June to buying bacteria that causes staph infections on the darknet to use on Rachel.
Police said their relationship started out strong, with Rachel taking out a $500,000 life insurance policy and naming Ridd, who helped care for her, as the beneficiary. But it soured about three years ago, decades after they first began living together.
Police said Ridd would knock Rachel out with sedatives so she could inject harmful doses of insulin or even E. coli. into Rachel’s system.
Rachel believes Ridd started with Xanax, but would eventually use more powerful medications like ketamine to render her unconscious. While she slept, Rachel said her roommate would then inject the chemicals.
Federal investigators intercepted a shipment of Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as VRSA, that Ridd had purchased off the dark web, court documents say. The bacteria can cause serious skin infections, pneumonia or even death, especially in an immunocompromised person like Rachel.
But the darknet vendor was actually an undercover FBI agent working in another state.
Prosecutors said Ridd claimed to be a biology teacher at a college preparatory school and needed the cultures for a science experiment, but they believe the bacteria was meant for Rachel.
“She watched me suffer, and she doubled down and did it worse. Instead of one injection of E. coli where I’d scream and writhe in pain, she did three when that didn’t kill me,” Rachel said after the sentencing.
Rachel said Ridd was her only friend for a long time, and even took care of her son and helped her get better after a series of surgeries on her spine.
But three years ago, they began fighting constantly. Ridd appeared resentful when others would ask if they were a romantic couple and Rachel said “no,” Rachel said. Even so, Ridd remained adamant Rachel take her medications for her back problems, even if Rachel didn’t feel she needed them.
But the injections nearly cost Rachel her life, prosecutors in the Utah Attorney General’s Office wrote in a sentencing memorandum. The insulin caused her blood sugar level to plummet to a deadly low, baffling her doctors: She doesn’t have diabetes.
Rachel is now on the road to recovery and has felt much better since Ridd’s arrest. During the Monday sentencing hearing in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court, Rachel told the judge Ridd robbed her of a life because of the constant stress and intense medical problems.
Rachel said she looked for signs of remorse from Ridd during the sentencing but saw none.
Ridd’s defense attorney, Scott Williams, called the case “an utter aberration from 50 years of a life lived by Ms. Ridd that was exemplary in her care for others and her role in our society.”
Ridd was the child’s main caretaker, a role that was complicated and consuming due to his autism and other special needs, Williams wrote in court documents filed ahead of the sentencing.
Williams alleged Rachel became more and more verbally abusive, to a point where Ridd’s mental health deteriorated and she feared for the child’s well-being. So Ridd made an attempt to debilitate Rachel so she could obtain legal guardianship and properly care for the child.
“The saddest irony is that she ultimately did what she did out of a twisted sense of desperate caring for the well-being of the child she had grown to love and protect,” Williams wrote in the sentencing memorandum. “She snapped. She lost control of her thoughts. She essentially went mad.”
But that doesn’t justify her behavior, Williams continued.
“Such actions with such a motive truly are and were atrocious,” Williams said. “It was serious and harmful criminal activity, and Ms. Ridd has accepted criminal responsibility, and even accepted imposition of the harshest sentence that can be meted out against her — prison.”
Ridd pleaded guilty in June to attempted possession or use of a weapon of mass destruction, a second-degree felony; and attempted aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult, a third-degree felony.
As part of a plea bargain with prosecutors and in exchange for her guilty pleas, a charge of aggravated abuse of a disabled or elderly person, a third-degree felony, was dropped.
Third District Judge Kara Pettit ordered Ridd to serve consecutive sentences of at least one and up to 15 years for attempted possession or use of a weapon of mass destruction and up to five years for attempted aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult.
It’s now up to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to determine the exact length of her sentence.