- Rachel trusted her best friend Janie as her son’s guardian — unaware Janie was obsessed with control and money
- After Rachel’s surgeries, she suffered mysterious life-threatening infections and insulin crashes later linked to Janie
- FBI discovered Janie buying lethal bacteria on the dark web, plotting to kill Rachel and gain custody of her autistic son
Janie Lynn Ridd was like a breath of fresh air to Rachel.
It was 1995, and 22-year-old Rachel was recently divorced and living back with her parents.
Janie, 26, was living in an apartment that had been broken into and didn’t want to live on her own. It made sense that the two women, who’d recently met and become friends, share a place, so Rachel moved in.
Janie was good with finances, helping Rachel to organise her bills – and Rachel was bright, fun and social, helping Janie to make friends.
But Janie grew possessive, acting jealously when Rachel spent time with other friends or went on dates.
Then, in 2010, Rachel suffered a herniated disc in her back and could no longer work as a paramedic. Around that time, she also found out she was pregnant.
After giving birth to her son, Ryder, who’d later be diagnosed as autistic and non-verbal, the single mum took out a life insurance policy worth more than $700,000, listing Janie as the beneficiary.
She appreciated how good Janie was with her son, who needed special care, and wanted Janie to have money for Ryder’s care should anything happen to her.
Janie grew possessive, acting jealously when Rachel spent time with other friends
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She also listed Janie as Ryder’s legal guardian in her will.
In 2015, after another herniated disk, Rachel needed surgery to prevent her becoming permanently disabled. To help their finances, Janie signed up to a program allowing her to be paid for looking after Ryder, which became a large part of her income.
While Rachel needed the help, she became concerned about the role Janie was playing in her son’s life after she learned Janie had let teachers at Ryder’s school believe she was his mum.
It led to fights between the besties.
Then in June 2018, Rachel received a letter. It said Janie had filed for legal custody of Ryder. She’d also filed a protective order, meaning Rachel was forced to leave Janie’s home without her son.
It took 10 days for him to be returned once Child Protective Services found out Janie had lied about his life at home.
For a while the friends lived separately, with Rachel and her boy briefly living in a women’s shelter. But then they made up and moved back in together.
Rachel now required neck surgery and would need help with her recovery – and Ryder had been missing Janie’s company.
A short while later, after her op in March 2019, Rachel asked Janie to dress the wound on the back of her neck. Instead of healing, though, it seemed to be getting more painful. First, a ‘suspicious’ antibiotic-resistant staph infection called MRSA was discovered. Then large lumps developed near Rachel’s incision.
Horrifyingly, doctors discovered the lumps were severely infected with bacteria commonly found in the human gastrointestinal tract – and it’d come from an external source.
Rachel ended up in hospital, and at one point was close to death.
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Making a full recovery, she was allowed home. But more health scares followed. Rachel’s blood sugar levels dropped dangerously low, landing her back in hospital several times.
Since she didn’t have diabetes or use insulin, doctors couldn’t determine why this kept happening. Then in December 2019, police knocked on the door while Janie was out. The FBI had been investigating the illegal purchase of a lethal bacteria, Vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA), on the Dark Web. It was Janie.
She’d bought the VRSA bacteria, Xanax, sedatives, Ketamine, and insulin injectors.
Detectives told Rachel they’d intervened, replacing one of the orders on Janie’s shopping list with a dummy package. When she went to collect it, they’d met her.
At first, she’d said she bought the chemicals to make beer, then she admitted she’d bought the potentially fatal antibiotic-resistant staph for ‘experimental purposes’.
Discovering that Janie lived with Rachel, who had a history of mysterious health scares, they put two and two together.
Asked by detectives if she had intended to use the bacteria to poison Rachel, Janie said, ‘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.’
But at the house, cops found an injector pen with Rachel’s DNA on it and also found Janie had taken a copy of Rachel’s will from a safe, hiding it in her vehicle.
Rachel ended up in hospital
They believed she’d been trying to kill Rachel to inherit her life insurance, and had an ‘obsessive desire’ to take custody of Ryder.
Janie Lynn Ridd was arrested and charged with aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult, attempted abuse of a vulnerable adult and attempted possession of the biological agent.
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In August 2020, Ridd, 51, struck a plea deal, pleading guilty to attempted possession or use of a weapon of mass destruction, and attempted aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult.
In Salt Lake City’s Third District Court she was sentenced to between one and 15 years in prison.
In a call she made from jail to an unknown person, she said, ‘I’m going to find a way to get [Ryder] away from [Rachel]. He needs to come back to me now.’
Ridd was released on parole in January 2022 after serving just 25 months behind bars.
Rachel is trying to rebuild her life while caring for Ryder who is ‘her world.’
‘I really have a hard time believing that the person that I’ve known for 25 years, my best friend and roommate, could do what she did,’ she said.
‘It was diabolical, it was evil. She plotted and planned so perfectly,’ she said on Netflix doco Worst Roommate Ever.
