Two decades ago, a new form of genetic testing helped send a man to prison. His case shows what happens when juries grapple with perplexing science.
Barbara Schmidt keeps a box of newspaper clippings under her bed. It’s a cheap plastic container with a light-blue lid. She rarely opens it. The photocopies inside, some of them labeled in her tidy script, are cut into rectangles of various sizes, neatly trimmed to frame the only story on the page that she cared about—that of her husband’s arrest, trial, and conviction for attempted murder in Lafayette, Louisiana, more than two decades ago. She isn’t sure why she clipped the articles in the first place, or why she still stores them within arm’s reach. “I just felt compelled to do it,” she says. One thing she’s always been sure about, though, is her husband’s innocence. She is like a mama bird: petite, protective of her family, loyal to her mate. “I chose to stay,” she says.
Just off Barbara’s kitchen is the room that her husband, a gastroenterologist named Richard Schmidt, used as his study before he went to prison. For her, this is where the story begins. On a hot July day in 1995, she came home to find several plainclothes police officers rummaging through Richard’s papers. She asked what they were looking for. “Evidence of B12,” she remembers them saying, with no further explanation. She called her husband at work to find out what was going on. The investigators had showed up there too. “He seemed clueless,” she recalls.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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