America’s ‘worst roommate’s’ chilling jailhouse phone call as she is paroled for poisoning her best friend with antibiotic-resistant bacteria to get custody of her son who she obsessed over

A Utah woman’s chilling phone call from prison has been revealed, more than two years after she was released on parole for plotting to poison her best friend with antibiotic-resistant bacteria in a nefarious attempt to gain custody of her son.

Janie Lynn Ridd, now 55, was arrested in December 2019 for supplying her roommate — identified only as Rachel — with tranquilizers including Xanax and ketamine, and then injecting her with damaging doses of insulin, or E. coli, that caused severe infections.

In June 2020, she pleaded guilty to attempted possession or use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted aggravated assault. She was sentenced to one to 20 years in prison.

But Ridd – whose story can now be heard in season two of the Netflix series Worst Roommate Ever – was released from prison in January 2022, after serving just 25 months.

It later emerged that she once threatened to take Rachel’s child with her if she was ever released.

“I know what’s going to happen. I’m getting out of here,” Ridd said in the undated recording from the Salt Lake County Jail, which was featured in the Netflix docuseries.

“I’m going to find a way to get him away from her,” she continued.

“He must come back to me.”

Rachel previously said that Ridd was obsessed with her son Ryder, who they grew up around when they lived together.

Ridd took over Rachel’s parenting responsibilities after she fell ill and was forced to give up her job as a paramedic.

Rachel trusted her friend and roommate so much that she named Ridd in her will as legal guardian of Ryder, who is non-verbally autistic.

“I honestly can’t believe that someone I’ve known for 25 years, my best friend and roommate, could do what she did,” Rachel said at the beginning of the docuseries.

“But it was diabolical, it was evil. It was so perfectly conceived and planned.”

Rachel and Ridd first met in 1995, when Rachel was 22 and Janie was 26.

At first, their meeting seemed like a coincidence: Rachel had just gone through a divorce and moved back in with her parents, while Ridd lived in an apartment that had recently been burglarized and said she didn’t feel safe living alone.

Rachel said she felt “really safe” with Ridd for a while.

But things began to change when Rachel started making new friends and Ridd began to exhibit controlling and jealous behavior, Rachel said.

The situation worsened in 2010, when Rachel developed a hernia and was unable to work.

Around the same time, she also discovered she was pregnant, which she felt only strengthened Ridd’s hold on her.

“For the first time in our friendship, Janie had 100 percent control over me because I was unemployed, pregnant, had a back injury, and was in so much pain that 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 on herself, naming Ridd as the beneficiary.

Ridd would also be named in Rachel’s will as Ryder’s legal guardian.

Friends described Ridd as a second mother to Ryder. When Rachel suffered another hernia in 2015 and doctors told her she needed surgery to prevent permanent disability, Ridd took the boy under her wing.

She signed herself and the child up for a program where she would be paid to care for Ryder, which Rachel says cost her “a significant portion of her income.”

But the mother claims Ridd led people at Ryder’s school to believe she was his mother, causing a falling out between the two friends.

On June 20, 2018, Rachel received a letter stating that Ridd was suing her for custody of the boy.

She immediately called authorities, who told her that Ridd had filed for a protective order.

It would take 10 days and an investigation by Child Protective Services to return Ryder to his mother.

Despite the incident, Ridd and Rachel made up and moved back in together.

But Ridd’s plan to get the boy back only seemed to escalate.

In March 2019, Rachel described how Ridd helped care for her as she recovered from neck surgery, dressing her post-op wounds and rubbing her neck.

However, a “suspected MRSA infection” was soon found in the wound, according to a criminal complaint obtained by Today.

Rachel ended up in the hospital and faced two more mysterious health problems.

The first time it happened just three months after the neck surgery. Rachel said she had had two serious blood sugar problems that required hospitalization. However, she did not have diabetes and did not use 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 him or her with insulin.

When Rachel underwent surgery again in October, she “inexplicably developed three golf ball-sized infections at the wound site,” the lawsuit says.

One of the wounds was tested and found to be contaminated with E. coli.

Rachel’s surgeon would later tell investigators that the infection “was not a result of surgery, but was introduced through an injection.”

Meanwhile, the FBI was investigating someone who tried to purchase a deadly bacteria known as Vancomycin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus on the dark web, which led them to Ridd.

She claimed she was a high school biology teacher and needed the bacteria for a science experiment.

But when the seller explained that VRSA could be obtained in more legitimate ways for scientific research, she offered to pay the shipping costs so she could receive the cultures sooner.

Ridd eventually paid for $300 worth of bacteria in Bitcoin.

She was eventually caught after detectives intercepted the virus delivery and replaced it with a dummy package.

The FBI agents then conducted surveillance at the UPS store for two days until they saw Ridd go inside and take the package.

They tracked her to Salt Lake City and arrested her at her workplace.

Court documents show that Ridd initially lied about the contents of the package, claiming it was just coffee beans.

She then changed her story, claiming the package contained a “biological agent” she had ordered online on the dark web to brew beer in her basement at home.

Ridd later gave a different version of events. According to court documents, she ordered a strain of “staph bacteria” for “experimental purposes to satisfy her personal curiosity, which arose from her roommate’s recent exposure to MRSA.”

Yet she claimed it never occurred to her to use the virus on Rachel.

“No, she’s my best friend and whether we fight or not, she’s been my best friend for 25 years and I love her like a sister,” Ridd said in a recording of the FBI interview in the Netflix series.

She added that she “wouldn’t even know how” to inject the virus.

Her story came to light after detectives found an empty insulin pen containing Rachel’s DNA outside Ridd’s home, along with a copy of her living will — which Rachel said had been missing from her safe.

FBI agents subsequently determined that Ridd was using the dark web to purchase tranquilizers such as ketamine, Xanax, and insulin injection pens.

At her 2020 sentencing, Rachel told a judge that Ridd had taken her life by causing her severe medical problems and constant stress. She said that when she looked at the defendant, she saw no signs of remorse in her eyes, reported Deseret News.

“She saw me suffering, and she doubled down and did it worse. Instead of one injection of E. coli where I would scream and writhe in pain, she did three and it didn’t kill me,” she said after the hearing.

However, Ridd’s attorney, Scott Williams, argued that Rachel was becoming increasingly aggressive, which was affecting Ridd’s mental health and also convinced Ridd that her roommate was a threat to the well-being of her own child.

He said Ridd tried to eliminate Rachel so she could gain legal custody of the special needs boy.

“The saddest irony is that she ultimately did what she did out of a distorted sense of desperate concern for the welfare of the child she had come to love and protect,” Williams wrote in the sentencing memorandum.

“She snapped. She lost control of her thoughts. She basically went crazy.”