A Utah woman’s chilling jailhouse phone call has been revealed, more than two years after she was paroled for trying to poison her best friend with antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a twisted scheme to gain custody of her son.
Janie Lynn Ridd, now 55, was arrested in December 2019 for drugging her roommate, identified only as Rachel, with sedatives including Xanax and ketamine, then injecting her with harmful doses of insulin or E. coli that caused serious infections.
She pleaded guilty in June 2020 to attempted possession or use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted aggravated assault, and was sentenced to one to 20 years behind bars.
But Ridd, whose story is now featured in the second season of Netflix’s Worst Roommate Ever, was released from prison in January 2022, after serving just 25 months.
It has since been revealed that he once threatened to take Rachel’s child away from her if she was ever released.
Janie Lynn Ridd was arrested in December 2019 for drugging her roommate, identified only as Rachel, with sedatives including Xanax and ketamine, then injecting her with harmful doses of insulin or E. coli that caused serious infections.
“I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to end up out of here,” Ridd said in the undated recording from the Salt Lake County Jail, which was featured in the Netflix documentary series.
“I’ll find a way to get him away from her,” he continued.
“He needs to come back to me.”
Rachel had previously said that Ridd was obsessed with her son, Ryder, whom they raised together while living together.
Ridd would take over parental responsibilities after Rachel fell ill and was forced to leave her job as a paramedic.
Rachel trusted her friend and roommate so much that she even named Ridd as Ryder’s (who is non-verbal autistic) legal guardian in her will.
“I really find it hard to believe that the person I’ve known for 25 years, my best friend and roommate, could do what she did,” Rachel said at the beginning of the documentary series.
“But it was diabolical, it was evil. It was planned and conspired to perfection.”
Rachel and Ridd, left, met in 1995, when Rachel was 22 and Janie was 26.
Rachel and Ridd met in 1995, when Rachel was 22 and Janie was 26.
At first it seemed like their meeting was fate: Rachel had just gone through a divorce and moved back in with her parents, while Ridd was living in an apartment that had recently been broken into and said she didn’t feel safe living alone.
For a while, Rachel said she felt “very safe” living with Ridd.
But things started to change when Rachel started making new friends and Ridd began displaying controlling and jealous behavior, Rachel said.
The situation worsened in 2010, when Rachel suffered a herniated disc and was no longer able to work.
Around the same time, she also discovered she was pregnant, which she said only increased Ridd’s control over her.
“For the first time in our friendship, Janie had 100 percent control over me because I was out of work, pregnant, had a back injury and was in a lot of pain, and I needed her,” Rachel said.
Later that year she gave birth to her son, Ryder, and decided to take out a $500,000 life insurance policy, naming Ridd as beneficiary.
Ridd would also be listed as Ryder’s legal guardian in Rachel’s will.
Rachel has said that Ridd became obsessed with her son, Ryder, whom they raised together while living together.
Friends described Ridd as a second mother to Ryder, saying that when Rachel suffered another herniated disk in 2015 and doctors told her she would need surgery to avoid becoming permanently disabled, Ridd took the boy under her wing.
She enrolled, along with the boy, in a program where she would be paid to care for Ryder, which Rachel said consumed “a significant portion of her income.”
But the mother claims Ridd let people at Ryder’s school believe she was his mother, leading to a fight between the two friends.
Then, on June 20, 2018, Rachel received a letter informing her that Ridd was suing her for custody of the child.
She immediately called authorities, who informed her that Ridd had filed a protective order.
It would take 10 days and a Child Protective Services investigation to return Ryder to his mother.
Despite the incident, Ridd and Rachel made peace and moved back in together.
Rachel said their friendship began to deteriorate when she started making new friends and Ridd began to display controlling and jealous behaviour.
But Ridd’s plan to get the boy back only seemed to intensify.
In March 2019, Rachel described how Ridd helped take care of her while she was recovering from neck surgery, tending to her post-operative incisions and rubbing her neck.
However, a “suspicious MRSA infection” was found in the wound shortly afterward, the indictment said. obtained for today.
Rachel ended up in the hospital and had two more mysterious health problems.
The first occurred just three months after her neck surgery, when Rachel said she had two separate incidents where her blood sugar levels reached critical levels and she had to be hospitalized, despite not having diabetes or using insulin.
She would later recall a conversation she and Ridd had while watching a true crime documentary, in which Ridd told her that the best way to kill someone is to inject them with insulin.
Then, when Rachel had another surgery in October, she “inexplicably developed three golf ball-sized infections in the wound,” according to the indictment.
One of those wounds was examined and determined to be E. coli.
Rachel’s surgeon would later tell investigators that the infection “was not a result of surgery and must have been injected.”
Ridd was arrested after the FBI discovered she was trying to purchase a deadly bacteria known as vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus on the dark web.
Meanwhile, the FBI was investigating someone trying to buy a deadly bacteria known as vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus on the dark web, which led them to Ridd.
She claimed to be a high school biology teacher and said she needed the bacteria for a science experiment.
But when the seller explained that VRSA could be obtained through more legitimate means for scientific research, he offered to pay for next-day shipping to receive the cultures more quickly.
Ridd eventually paid $300 worth of bacteria in Bitcoin.
She was eventually caught after investigators intercepted the virus order and replaced it with a fake package.
FBI agents spent two days watching the UPS store, until they saw Ridd walk in and grab the package.
They followed her to Salt Lake City and arrested her at her workplace.
At first, court documents say, Ridd lied about the package’s contents, claiming it was just coffee beans.
He later changed his story, claiming that the package contained a “biological product that he had ordered online on the dark web to make beer at home in his basement.”
Ridd later offered another version of events, saying he ordered a strain of staph for “experimental purposes to satisfy a personal curiosity he had stemming from his roommate’s recent exposure to MRSA,” according to court documents.
Still, he said it never occurred to him to use the virus on Rachel.
“No, she’s my best friend and whether we argue or not, she’s been my best friend for 25 years and I love her like a sister,” Ridd said in a tape of the FBI interview that appears in the Netflix series.
He added that he “wouldn’t even know how” to inject the virus.
Ridd’s defense attorney had claimed that Rachel had become verbally abusive, which affected Ridd’s mental health.
But her story came to light after investigators found a used insulin pen with Rachel’s DNA on it outside Ridd’s home, along with a copy of her living will, which Rachel said had gone missing from her safe.
FBI agents then determined that Ridd used the dark web to purchase sedatives such as ketamine, Xanax and insulin injection pens.
At the 2020 sentencing, Rachel told the judge that Ridd stole her life by causing her severe medical problems and constant stress. She said that as she looked at the defendant, she detected no signs of remorse in his eyes, she reported. Deseret News.
“She saw me suffering and she became more serious and made it worse. Instead of one injection of E. coli that made me scream and writhe in pain, she gave me three, but that didn’t kill me,” he said after the hearing.
However, Ridd’s defense attorney, Scott Williams, argued that Rachel had become increasingly verbally abusive, affecting Ridd’s mental health and leading her to believe that her roommate posed a threat to the well-being of her own child.
She said Ridd tried to incapacitate Rachel so she could gain legal guardianship of the special needs child.
“The saddest irony is that she ultimately did what she did out of a twisted sense of desperate concern for the welfare of the child she had come to love and protect,” Williams wrote in the sentencing memo.
“She became furious. She lost control of her thoughts. She went crazy.”
