Stuff You Should Know - The Great Finger in the Wendy’s Chili Caper

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

In 2005 a woman named Anna Alaya discovered a length of human finger – nail and all – in her Wendy’s chili. Her cries of disgust would set off a media firestorm, a criminal investigation and a prison sentence for her and her husband.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. And this is the Stuff You Should Know chili caper edition, corporate investigations, Las Vegas, San Jose, chili. Yeah, and that means we get to use our special investigator nicknames, Seattle Clark, Portland Bryant, and San Francisco, Jerry Rowland. That's not bad. I would have chosen Tawny Cataean for me. Yeah, that was a very ham-fisted way to set up an in-show mention of our three shows

next week. Oh, yeah. That was actually lost on me, Chuck. Next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's apparently lost on the Pacific Northwest, because no one's coming. Next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we'll be in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco on January 15th, 16th, and 17th at the Moore Theater Revolution Hall and the Castro for Sketch Fest.

And you have a End of the World Live Friday night in San Francisco, and I have a movie crush live on Saturday afternoon in San Francisco. I also have a Brooklyn End of the World 1-2 on the 24th, just FYI. Hey, let's not get carried away here. Okay. All right. But those are the shows we have coming up, everyone, so come on out. There's still great tickets left at all three of these venues, and all five, probably.

I'm not sold out for movie crush. No, I'm not either. No. And especially those End of the World of Movie Crush shows, your best chance to hang out and talk to us personally, because they're more intimate venues. Like I wear a negligee. Well, Busy Phillips is there, so I'm going to have on my dinner jacket. Oh, very nice.

Trying to impress her with my tuxedo look, which is not impressive. Tuxedo and jeans is a look. So get all the information at SYSKLive.com, or for the Sketch Fest shows, just go to the SF Sketch Fest site, and come out and support us, everyone, and shake our hand, pat us on the back, or spit on our shoes. Don't do that. Don't do that. Spit between our shoes.

Just make it close, you know? Yeah, if you really hate us, spit between our shoes. That's going to end up on a t-shirt, I have a feeling. All right, let's talk about chili fingers. All right, so back in 2005, actually, let's get in the way back machine. Go watch this thing go down. Way back machine, just for this short distance? Yeah.

I mean, it's not like we can walk to 2005. This is actually kind of great though, because when you're 48 almost, to go back 13 years. I want to go back a bit and do it all over. So all of a sudden, I'm 35, which I thought was old, but man, I'd love to be 35 right now. I'm pretty happy with 42, I've got to say. I'm not quite happy with the kind of catcher's mitt that my face is turning into, but everything else I'm pretty glad about.

Yeah, just wait. Just wait. Okay. Just wait until 48 happens. Oh no. You're staring down the barrel of 50 and you're going, jeez, I only got like 15 more good years left. That is so not true.

Don't you know 50 is the new 35? Do you know what's funny is all the people in this Wendy's and San Jose we just showed up at are looking at, it's like, what are these guys talking about? I know, they're like, get your super bar order underway. Yeah. They're like, why don't you guys just be quiet and listen to Chumbawamba, like everybody else's right now? I don't think they had super bar in 2005.

That was more like the 80s and 90s, but still. What was it? Super bar? Yeah. You don't remember that? No. Wendy's in the 80s. Oh yeah.

The super bar, which was this weird combination of tacos and pasta and salad. And baked potatoes. And baked potatoes. Just like whatever you want. I forgot all about that, man. What a good idea. Yeah, the super bar was a weird, weird thing, but I ate it. So there is no super bar anymore, but there is, if you look over there, there's a woman

named Anna or Anna Ayala. And she is sitting with her in-laws, her mother-in-law, her father-in-law, her brother-in-law, maybe a couple other people. And she is about to bite down into a bite of Wendy's chili that she has just ordered at the San Jose Wendy's, downtown San Jose Wendy's, I believe, on March 22, 2005. Yeah. She's in her late 30s. It's cold in San Jose.

She's from Las Vegas, so she's not used to this. She's actually, so she's from San Jose originally, but she's moved to Vegas a couple of years ago from what I understand. Well, sure. She has lived in Las Vegas lately and has been warming in the sun there. Right. And she's like, I don't like this cold, I'm going to order some chili because that Wendy's chili is so, so good.

It's meaty and warm as Ed puts it. That's right. And so she sits down, she's eating this thing, and then all of a sudden, look at her. She's just, she's, she's upset, Josh. She's gone berserk. Everybody at the table's got their hands up like, whoa, settle down. And she's like just pointed at her chili, her chili cup, which she's reached the bottom of, and she's saying that there's a finger in her chili that she just bit into a finger.

Yeah. She looks like she's about to puke. I didn't see her vomit. I didn't either. But in court later, she would say she did, so maybe we can be key witnesses. Right. She's going up to the counter demanding, I think she just said to one of the cashiers, who did you kill to get this finger?

Which is a weird thing to say. Yeah, she's yelling at everyone else in the restaurant with chili saying, don't eat that. Yep. There's fingers. That's finger chili. That's right. Finger chili no one wants. Cha, cha, cha.

She's starting to try to start a chant, I believe. And there's only one guy that's still eating, and he said, yeah, I ordered the finger chili. Right. He said, I think you got mine. So she's freaking out. Things are starting to go down. There's a hubbub in the restaurant. Everyone's got every, she has everyone's attention.

She's saying that she just found a finger in her chili. The people at the counter are incredulous. They're kind of poking at it a little bit. They're saying, I think it's a vegetable or whatever. Yeah, it looks like a carrot to me, lady. Right. A very pale carrot with a fingernail on it. And it's the fingernail really that does the trick.

After this point, it becomes clear to everyone in the Wendy's that there is a finger that this woman just found in her chili. There's a fingernail on it. It's about an inch and a half of a finger from the tip to well about an inch and a half down. And she just bit down on it and she found it in her chili. So the Wendy's employees reacts swiftly. They dump out all the chili.

They call the police, the police come by and they say, well, this is a health department kind of thing really. And the police leave and the Wendy's employees call the owners of the franchise, J-E-M management. And they say, don't do anything to that finger. Put it in the freezer and we'll be there in the morning. And at this point, Anna Aleya leaves or Anna Ayala, this is going to be very difficult because I want to say Aleya. She leaves, her family members are taking pictures of the location and a huge national

story has just begun. By 10 o'clock that night, this happened about seven, by 10 o'clock on the local news, there's an unconfirmed report of a woman who found a finger in her chili at Wendy's. And Dave Thomas gets indigestion immediately. Well he'd been dead a few years, so that'd be phenomenal. I thought he was alive then. He died in 2002. Okay.

Well, he's rolling over in his grave. But by this time, he'd really kind of made Wendy's like a really loved and respected restaurant because everybody thought Dave Thomas was so great. Well, yeah. And are we out of the way back machine? Are we done play acting? I was serious, but yes we are. Well you were seriously play acting.

You were Lawrence Olivier maybe. I was delusional, I thought we were in that way. So almost immediately word starts to spread on the news obviously and as you might well imagine the Wendy's restaurant chain, especially in the Bay area near San Jose, it really starts to take a business hit. As you would imagine, people are not like, oh, they found a finger in some Wendy's chili. That really reminds me how much I love Wendy's chili. Let's go out and get a hot cup.

Right. Because they are sort of famous for their chili. Oh yeah, I mean like if you want chili at a fast food restaurant, you're going to Wendy's because you're not going to find it anywhere else. They really planted their flag in the chili market. Yeah, the old A&Ws had pretty good chili. Oh yeah, but you wanted that on a dog. Sure, and of course the Midwest, still very famous for their Skyline chili, which is delicious.

I guess that'd be fast food, huh? Yeah, I think they actually have Skyline chili restaurants. Yeah, which is good. It's quite good. It is. But if you're going to go just about anywhere in the US and you have a hankering for chili, you're going to go to Wendy's. But like you said, sales started to plummet and not just like chili sales, all Wendy's

sales started to take a hit, especially in the Bay Area, like you said, especially in the Western United States. People were just kind of grossed out by this whole idea. But like I said, the cops had shown up and decided it was a health inspectors or a health department's jam. They didn't really have anything to do with it. So the next morning, the owners of the franchise, the county health inspector, they showed up. I think they contacted Wendy's communications department and the gears were starting to

move. There was something that they had to deal with and that was basically threefold. It was really twofold as far as Wendy's was concerned at first, but the third one crept in pretty quickly. Whose finger was this? Sure. How did the finger get into the chili? And then after that, who was this woman who found the finger in her chili?

So Wendy's really started to focus on the first two because one thing, the way that this whole thing played out, the cops were very hands off at first. They felt this was a health department issue, a public health issue and not a police issue. And basically said, you need to go figure this out yourself, Wendy's. And so Wendy's had to do a lot of extra legwork that they probably wouldn't have had to do had the cops decided immediately that it was a criminal issue. And the cops defense, it didn't appear immediately to be a criminal issue. It appeared to be like a woman found a finger in her chili at Wendy's and that's gross.

So go figure it out, Wendy's. Yeah. I also bet there was like one guy who literally ate, went to that specific Wendy's to get chili the next day and was like, dude, that's the last place you're going to find a finger in your chili now. Right. Yeah. Like there's no way it would happen again.

What are the chances? Yeah. Like flying on an airline right after they have a crash. He's like, you go to Burger King, you're going to get a finger. They're going to purposely give you a finger, man. Don't be naive. All right. So did you introduce police chief Rob Davis yet?

Not yet. All right. So this is the guy, San Jose police chief that would ultimately lead this investigation. Later on though, after Wendy's did a lot of the initial legwork for him. Yes. He would lead the investigation. And he basically was like, I got to find out who this lady is because Wendy's, they're operating on the down low here.

And this is a sort of a, and apparently this case is taught in classes now about like how to handle a crisis as a corporation. Yeah. I've seen, I've seen it criticized. I've also seen it held up as a, as an example of what to do too. Well, I mean, here's what Wendy's can and can't do. What they can do is quietly throw a lot of money at this investigation on their own. And then publicly what they can't do is start to go after this lady and be too sort of dismissive

of this finger. Like there's no way lady, this lady's not, she's whatever, she's after money. Like you can't do that as a public facing company. You have to be doing all your due diligence sort of quietly and they really were. They really were. So how about this dude? Let's take a break and then we'll come back and we'll talk about the investigation that Wendy started.

How about that? All right. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb be her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the

nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright Chuck, so like you said, Wendy's can't just be like, that lady's a liar, there's no way that's our finger. They had to basically operate in the background.

They couldn't appear like they were obstructing the police investigation. They couldn't appear like they were smearing Anna Ayala, especially because the early reports were very sympathetic to this woman too. Everybody was very grossed out by this. But at the same time, they had a deal with this issue and they had to get to the bottom of whose finger this was and where the finger came from. Yeah, and so the obvious first place to start is the restaurant itself. The employees there, the very obvious first place to start is to see if anyone was missing

a finger. Sure. And that's what they did. They said, show us your hands. Yeah. Everyone's fingers, they were all there and they went, alright, so far so good. They would eventually put everyone on staff through a polygraph test, which they all passed. They would, obviously then they would go up the supply chain to see if this thing might

have, because you know, these things happened. Yeah, rarely they do though. Well, I found five other cases of fingers in fast food that were, that were legitimate. Oh yeah. Oh wow. So it happens up the supply chain, you know, there can be an industrial accident that leaves a finger in a bag of lettuce greens or something. And that might eventually find its way to a Wendy's super bar.

Oh my God. You know, doesn't happen much. I wouldn't be too freaked out. I'm still freaked out. We'll go over those at the end, but they're going up the supply chain. They're really doing their due diligence. They can't find, they offer a reward at first of 50 grand, later 100 grand. Well, they set up, yeah, a hotline for tips.

But they're basically, as time is going on, becoming more and more confident that they did not have a finger in that chili by their own fault. They traced the chili ingredients to seven different suppliers and they got documentation from all seven suppliers that nobody at their companies had suffered any kind of finger injury at any, any recent time. And also like you said, no one at the store, no one at any of the nearby stores had suffered any finger injury, let alone an amputation. And so Wendy's was like, this didn't come from us.

This didn't come from inside our store. And they also, they kind of ran a simultaneous forensic investigation as well. They hired a woman named Dr. Lynn Bates, who's the CEO of a company called Alteca out of Manhattan, Kansas. And if you are looking for evidence or study of a body part that was found in food, you go to Dr. Lynn S. Bates and Alteca because they are, they engage in forensic food microscopy. That's what they do. That's their bread and butter is, is, is studying body parts found in food.

And she'd been doing it since 1986. So Wendy's went to her and said, here is a piece of this finger. Was this finger cooked in this chili? Whose finger is it? She's like, I can't tell you whose finger it is, but I can tell you that there is no indication that this finger was cooked for three hours in chili at 170 degrees. It just wasn't. So that was a, that combined with the Wendy's, no Wendy's employer or suppliers employers

missing a finger. I told Wendy's everything they need to know that they were being defrauded. Yeah. And you would think just grab a fingerprint police force. And they weren't able to, they weren't able to, they, they said if they had found a hand that they might could literally look and compare fingerprints, but they, they didn't get a good enough print off it to, to do a legitimate database search. Right.

Right. They just had to sit around and wait for that hand to show up because that thing had been cooking in chili for three hours. It had not been cooked in chili for three hours at any rate. So Wendy's knew what was going on. Now they had to go to the cops and say we're being defrauded. Not only did they have the search for the missing finger investigation internally and they hired Lynn Bates to, to do forensic work on the finger itself.

They also hired a detective to start looking around at Anna Ayala and the detective turned up some very interesting stuff about her. Yeah. He was like, wait a minute. This woman has filed at least 13 civil lawsuits, some against major corporations and they, he probably could have stopped there and Wendy's would have just been like Dave Thomas from the grave would have said, see there. She's no good.

That's a good Dave Thomas. I think he would have said like, she should still get the benefit of the doubt. I don't know, man, when you, when someone is this as a pattern of litigious behaviors like this. Well, maybe he finished with prove me wrong. One there were a couple of notable ones that it's sort of frustratingly hard to find information. She claimed that she won a $30,000 settlement from El Pollo Loco, from medical bills, from her daughter getting sick from Salmonella.

El Pollo Loco has always been on record saying, never happened. We did not give that lady a dime. Right. GM, she sued GM because the front wheel of her, her car came off and there was an accident and that suit was dismissed with prejudice when she fired her lawyer was a no show in court. Oh, is that what that means? No, no, no.

With prejudice means you can't bring it back. Oh, okay. So you can't, she can't say, well, like, well, I didn't show up and my lawyer was bad. So let's do this again. Okay. I got you. I got you. So basically it was dead in the water.

So she sued a former employer for sexual harassment. I'm not even going to comment on that one because I have no idea. That could very well have been legitimate. That one struck me as possibly legitimate, but she dropped it. Right. She loitered up immediately with the chili finger and everything made Chief Rob Davis very suspicious. And then this, this guy that lived with her family named Ken Bono or Bono, what would

you say? Bono? I haven't say Bono. Hasn't even occurred to me. It could be Bono. Ken Bono. Maybe he's related to Bono. Ken Bono, because the cops are starting to ask questions at this point.

They do official investigations. They search her house. She claims that they held a gun to her head, ransacked her home and like abused her daughter, which is quite a charge for a finger chili house investigation. There's a picture of her and her daughter in the driveway talking to a reporter and her daughter's got like her arm in a sling, but like the kind of sling you just go buy at the drugstore. So this was a guy who lived, Bono lived with their family and when he's being investigated

by the cops, uh, he said that this finger came from our aunt or our deceased aunt. It's her finger. Right. Which is a weird thing to say, especially because Anna, I always said all of my aunts are alive. I don't know what this guy's talking about, even though he lives in my house. Yeah. What was it?

Was he trying to get money? I don't know. That's the part I can't figure out. I couldn't find much on that guy. Um, I don't know what the deal was. I also just saw references to a rumor that the media had been reporting on that it was her dead aunt's finger. So, um, I didn't see how it came from him or what he was trying to do with that.

But that's, that was a thing. But that was just kind of like a little side thread that I think also made the cops a little more suspicious too. Like that's just a weird thing to say, even jokingly. Yeah. But they did actually get, while it didn't lead to the, uh, whose finger it was that tip line did yield some stuff at first, right? So yeah.

Like I said, Wendy set up a tip line, a hotline that you could call in and what they were looking for specifically ostensibly was whose finger it was. That's what they wanted information, the owner of the finger. Um, but they were taking any and all tips that people called in and they started out offering 50 grand. Like you said, they later up to 200 grand, um, and it started to yield some tips like pretty, pretty much off the bat. I think the San Jose police and Wendy's is funneling this information to the cops, um,

as it comes in, like as good tips come in. Um, but two very early on came in from what the San Jose police said. There were two different people who supposedly did not know each other who told very similar stories about how Anna Ayala had told them that she was fleecing Wendy's, that all of this was just a fraud for money to extort money from Wendy's in a lawsuit. So that, that combined with all the evidence that Wendy's had gathered that it, the finger had not come from inside their store, um, all of the, uh, Anna Ayala's background, uh, all of that put together really turned the tide, not just on a police investigation,

but also on the media against Anna Ayala. And she had started this, she had created a huge media circus around this issue. Like she went on, good morning America. And I could not find it. I think good morning America just took the video down. She probably just burned it because she just went on and lied, lied, lied her through her teeth about what had happened. And just pointed at Wendy's and said, like these guys screwed up and this is the most

disgusting thing that could happen to somebody. And I'm torn up inside about it and they should pay on, on national news about a week after the incident. Yeah, so like you said, this is all playing out pretty quickly. It's all over the news. It's all over late night talk show comedy, uh, just bad joke after bad joke coming out of Jay Leno's mouth. I won't even repeat the one that Ed included.

I like the Letterman one. Did you see Lettermans? What was it? I said that she'd been spotted going back at Wendy's and ordering chili again because she was going back to collect all five. That's good. Yeah. You gotta give it up for Letterman.

What was Leno's something about him? They don't, the chili now comes with fingernail clippers beside the fingernail clippers. And that really just encapsulate, encapsulates the difference between those two men. It does. Although they have their joke writers, but still the love of cars, I think is also a big differentiator. Yeah. I don't think Letterman really cares about cars.

Shout out to Brian Kiley and Rob Kutner. Shout out to the mid nineties Letterman book of top 10 lists that helped shape me as a human being. Brian and Rob are Conan O'Brien's monologue joke writers and have been for many, many years. Did I tell you, you mean I went to see Conan O'Brien live with Ron Funches and a couple of other people? Yeah.

Was that good? Do some stand-up. It was so good. And we actually turned out we were sitting next to a member of the SYSK Army throughout the show. Oh, no way. Yeah. He was like, are you Josh and you me?

We were like, yeah. He was a good guy. Good kid. You mean he was like, I'm you me, but that's not Josh. Right. He's like, well, that's weird. Yeah. I'm suspicious now.

All right. Where were we? All right. It's all over the news. This is all playing out very fast, but the, the dragnet is sort of closing in. Thanks to Wendy's investigations. Thanks to the cops getting involved and Miss Ayala is starting to feel the heat and like anyone who, and I think the cat's out of the bag now, right?

I think it was. She put the finger in the chili. Yeah. And when someone does something like that, it seems like two things happen. They brag to their friends because they're dummies to begin with. And then that net starts to close and it all starts to fall apart. Right. So her response, and this is a pretty human response.

She basically said, once the media spotlight went from sympathetic to her to, wait a minute, who are you again? And how do you explain this thing and that thing and all this? She was like. Never mind. Yeah. That's basically what she said. I can't handle this media spotlight or anything anymore, so I'm just going to drop my lawsuit

against Wendy's. And we'll just forget all about this. Yeah. And Wendy's said, no, we're not going to just forget all about this. No. Of course not. Let's take a break, shall we? Yeah.

We're going to take a break. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guesthouse of her childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too.

Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I can't—surely when Ana Ayala was like, okay, I'm just going to drop the lawsuit, and this will go away. There had to only have been maybe one and a quarter percent of her brain that thought that that was actually going to work, that it was actually going to go away.

She seems like streetwise and savvy enough to me that she knew it probably wasn't just going to go away, that that was nothing but hope, right? I guess. I'm curious about that. Yeah, I don't know, man, but the more that they poke into her private life, then you learn that she and her husband, James Placencia, had those—and this one's hard to get information on too. From what I can tell is they sold a trailer, a trailer park trailer that did not belong

to them. Yes, for $11,000, she did specifically. I don't know that he was involved. He may have even owned the trailer, but regardless, she did not own the trailer, sold it to a woman for $11,000, and later on, the woman and her children were evicted from the trailer that they thought they owned that they didn't own. Yes, they also learned that her husband, I guess from her previous marriage, owed a lot of money and child support.

Things are starting to fall into place to where they're like, this lady is always making up stories and suing companies. She's always looking for that get-rich angle. Her husband owes a ton of money. $11,000. And so this is all sorting—they're starting to finger her, if you will, for this crime. It's the worst pun ever. I thought we were going to make it through this, but no.

I've even been saying tip-line about the finger and just ignoring it. I know you did, but okay, all right, it's done. It's out there. So they finally, like you said, even though she was like, oh, let's just forget about it, they're like, no, no, no, we can't do that. And then there enters a lady that just kind of—and it didn't end up having the hugest impact on the case itself, but it is worth mentioning this woman named Sandy Allman. This is a little strange.

So this is a woman who owned exotic cats. Big cats. Leopards, jaguars, tigers, I think. Is that how we're saying jaguars now? Jaguar? Yeah. Wow. That's how the Brit says it on the commercial.

Is that a year-end sales event up in here? Yeah, the Jaguar X-12. So this lady owns these big cats. This is not too far from Vegas where she lives in Parump, Nevada, I guess, or is it on the California side, you know? I think it's Nevada. I don't know, actually, not that you mentioned it. And she eventually, I guess, has to get rid of these cats and calls in a rescue group

that does things like this. They're like, we're a wild animal orphanage and you're a dumb, dumb who bought all these animals you shouldn't have had. So now we will deal with it. And during this transfer of animals, she is attacked by a spotted leopard and it bites off her finger. Yes. And she says, she comes forward and says, I think that is my finger.

No, no, I think actually a person who is at the wildlife rescue at the time was the one who called the tip line with that one. Oh, I thought because she wanted to take a DNA test and everything. Oh, I didn't see that, okay, all right, cool. So she's the one who called and said that's my finger? Well, she wanted, I don't know if she literally picked up the phone and called, but she got involved such that she wanted to take a DNA test to find out if that was her finger. Gotcha, okay, cool, cool.

Well, yeah, because she had said that the last time she'd seen it, it was on ice in the emergency room. So I guess she wasn't the sentimental type who's like, I want my finger back. Would you? Oh, yeah. Floated from Maldehyde? Yumi would probably have that thing gilded and wear it around her neck. Yeah, I'd be like, that's my finger on Yumi's neck, check it out.

But so the whole thing was just a red herring though, a blind alley, right? Like it went nowhere. No, it was not her finger. No, there were some other tips that came in about the finger. The Mexican authorities, I guess just over the border got involved because it was rumored that an incident with a ranch hand losing a finger in Mexico had been the source of the finger. Even as Ana Ayala, who by the way, that whole tip about the trailer sale, the trailer scam,

that came in from Wendy's hotline as well. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. By this time, I believe it was day 22, no, I'm sorry, it was day 3032, I believe. About a month after the incident originally happened, Ana Ayala and Jamie Polencia, Plasencia, her husband were both arrested in Las Vegas. Him for the child support payments, failure to pay child support, her for that trailer scam.

And so while they're on ice in Las Vegas, Wendy's is still conducting this investigation. San Jose are still conducting this investigation. And they've got them. They have them on this other stuff, but I guess they just kind of kept them from running and that's why they arrested them. Knowing that they were eventually going to build the case, I'm not sure. But that's exactly what happened because I think about 52 days after she walked into that Wendy's and put the finger in the chili and took that bite, they charged them for

grand theft for basically defrauding Wendy's. Yeah. And at this point, as far as the police were concerned, they're like, we don't even need to know whose finger this is at this point. Right. Like that's really immaterial. But Wendy's, they still have a public relations crisis going on and they're like, we really would like to find out where this finger came from.

Just so like as many facts out there as possible will really help us restore our good name. If we can actually pinpoint whose finger this is and exactly how this happened and let everybody know what went on. Yeah. And they actually, that's when they up the reward from $50,000 to $100,000, right? That's right. And that's when they hit the jackpot, which is ironically, they got two callers on the $100,000 line.

Go ahead, caller, you're on the $100,000 chili finger line. Right. And then for the next 30 seconds, they're like, hello, am I on? Can you hear me? Yes, you're on. You're on. Go ahead, caller. Am I live right now?

Two people called one to this day, as far as I can tell, has remained anonymous. The other one was a guy named Mike Casey. And Mike Casey owned a company called Lamb Asphalt out of Las Vegas, Nevada. And he happened to be the employer of Jamie Plasencia. That's right. And he said, it's weird because you arrested one of my employees, one of my longtime employees for the scam. And I also have another employee named Brian Rossiter, who lost a finger not too long ago.

And I think they might be connected. I think that might be Brian Rossiter's finger. And that's how the whole thing finally came crashing down because they got a hold of Brian Rossiter, they gave them a DNA test, they matched it to the DNA taken from the finger, and they said it's Brian Rossiter's finger. And Brian Rossiter worked with Jamie Plasencia, Jamie Plasencia was married to Anna Ayala. Anna Ayala found a finger in her chili. Ipsofacto, something's rotten in Denmark, and that's how it stands.

Yeah. And it's even a little weirder when you find out the details. So Brian is at work, someone slams the tailgate of the truck on his hand, cuts an inch and a half off of his finger. Can you imagine? No, dude. No. He cuts off his finger, and it's funny too, because Ed points out instead of like driving

to the hospital, which is what any normal person would have done, he had owed Plasencia some money, Plasencia, and this is a man, a husband of a woman, and it seems like they're both always looking to scam somebody. They're looking for the angle. He sees this finger, and he goes, hey, you owe me money. Some people say it was 50 bucks, we don't know for sure. I saw 100 almost everywhere. Okay.

So let's say it's 100. Okay. He's like, you give me that finger, and we'll just call it square. And not only that, my friend, but if you ever hear about this finger in the news, keep it quiet, and I will give you a quarter of a million dollars at some point in the future. Yep. That's what they call the carrot and the other carrot. Yeah.

So you drip some blood on this roof shingle, and that will be our contract. Right. Right. It's a sign X with your stub, your bloody stub. This old used roof shingle. I saw, actually, I saw that he did go to the hospital and came back to the work site with his amputated finger, and that's what Jamie Plasencia was like, hey, hey. I'm sure he did.

What are you going to do with that? In any sense at all. Yeah. That he would just be like, wait a minute. So Brian Rossiter gives him his finger, and that's where the whole thing began. Just a couple of months before, right? Yeah. And I think didn't Rossiter himself also call the tip line?

I didn't see that anywhere. Okay. I heard he called the tip line himself because he knew at this point he was getting no money out of the scam. So he thought, let me try and get this 100 grand at least, and Wendy's never would cop to whether or not he got any tip line money. Right. Mike Casey, the guy who from everything that it seems he was innocent of this, he just

happened to put two and two together because he knew the guys. He said originally, hey, you know, my asphalt company maintains the lots of a few Wendy's around here, and they've always been good to me, so I wanted to help out. That was an article in May. An article in September is Mike Casey saying, you know, Wendy's never paid me that money for the hotline. So I don't know if he ever got it, but from what I saw, he was going to have to split it with the one other anonymous caller.

I don't know if that was Brian Rossiter or not. Maybe Brian Rossiter was scared that Jamie Plasencia might do something if he found out that he had been, he had tipped him off or what. But supposedly Mike Casey and this anonymous caller were going to split that 100 grand. So whether Wendy's actually paid that money or not, that remains to be seen. I don't know. I didn't see that anywhere. Well, in the end, Ayala and her husband, she got sentenced to nine years.

He got sentenced to 12 because I think they piled on him for the, probably child support, right? Or was it the trailer scam? Yeah. No, he got three and a third years for the, the child support thing. Okay. I don't know how long he actually served. I think she only served about four of that nine.

She later revealed some more details, including that she did cook the finger. So apparently it wasn't a raw finger, nor though was it cooked in 170 degree chili for three hours, but it was cooked a little bit. I think she just literally probably put it in a pan and was thinking like, oh, wait a minute. I bet, I bet they didn't think I would think of this and cooked up the finger a little bit. One thing that she didn't think of the Chuck was she didn't bite the finger and they found out pretty quickly through forensic investigation that there was no bite in the finger.

Nor did she throw up in the restaurant. Like she said, she did. Cause there were people in the restaurant that were like, no, she didn't vomit that I saw. And employees were like, no, she didn't throw up that I saw. Her father-in-law and mother-in-law both said that they saw her throw up, but yeah, there was no evidence of vomit anywhere in the bathroom or around her table or anything. Yeah.

And they did a pretty bad job. Yeah, they did. I was going to use a nasty word to characterize it, but I just, it's a family show. So well, these are the worst kind of people, man. These litigious like, just like work for your money, man. Going around suing corporations. I know. So mad.

So, Wendy supposedly lost $2.5 million in verifiable lost money. They had to cut people's hours. This is another thing that kind of gets left off a lot. They had to cut the hours of the employees in the Bay Area in particular because there was such little foot traffic coming through their stores. So when they were convicted and sentenced, Jamie Plasencia and Anna Ayala were sentenced to pay back $170,000 plus in lost wages to the Wendy's employees. Oh, and they were also ordered to pay $500,000 to JEM management who owned the Wendy's and

then like another substantial amount to Wendy's if they ever profited from the crime. Man. Bad people. She was banned from Wendy's, which I don't know how you enforce that. Yeah. I was wondering that myself actually. It seems like I don't know if every Wendy's has a picture of her or something like that. I know at sports stadiums they do that when people are banned and that is a little more

enforceable because like you can literally just have everyone be aware of that person that's like checking tickets and things, but you can't. How can you keep someone from coming into any Wendy's anywhere? I don't know. They can try at least. They can send a message by saying, you can't come here any longer. Arby's, two fingers, 2004, 2012. No.

Cole's, frozen custard in Wilmington, North Carolina, finger, 2005, TGI Friday's hamburger had a finger in 2006. Wow. And those are all verified and they found like it was in the supply chain, like someone lost a finger and it got mixed in and it's just very unfortunate. I'm sure there were quiet settlements on those. I'm sure too. That's bizarre.

I had no idea that that happened. I thought it was almost always either a case of mistaken identity or a hoax. I didn't realize that actually really happened. Oh yeah. Well, that's the Wendy's chili finger caper. If you ever wanted to know about it, now you do and we're glad that you do. We're glad we're the ones that told you. If you want to know more about it, go read contemporary articles at the time.

It's awesome just to see something like that unfold. It's so cool. And since I said that, it's time for the listener mail. And hey, shout out to Wendy's. I'm sure, I don't know if they like people still talking about this or not, but they did not put a finger in anyone's chili. Yeah. Good point.

Just want to make that clear. Good point. All right. I'm going to call this Adidas Puma. Hey guys, just finished listening to The Feud between Adi and Rudy Dossler. I wanted to say I really enjoyed it. My dad is actually from Herzogenerach. We were an Adidas family through and through and my godmother Aunt Helga worked for Adidas

as an administrative assistant for years. In addition to this, I almost jumped out of my seat when you mentioned the mayor of Herzog. You spoke of Dr. Garmin Haaker and how he ref to soccer match wearing one Adidas shoe and one Puma. My uncle Hans was the mayor right before Haaker was. How cool. Yeah. I'm referring to him because he wouldn't have been caught dead in even one Puma because

of my aunt's work at the opposing shop. I didn't wear Puma gear myself until I was grown and could buy it myself and my entire German family called me a trader and this was in the early 2000s, so the tension is still real. I'm sure it was lighthearted. At least I hope it was. Okay. In any case, I just want to let you know your research was spot on.

I really love hearing about something I knew a little bit about. By the way, I also use your show in my classroom teaching 12th grade government in civics and the kids love it. Nice. Shout out to Jennifer Wessner, Gajou at Thompson Stations, Tennessee and your senior government class. Well, thank you, Ms. Gajou and class. That's probably not pronounced right.

Gajou. I have no idea. Gajoganov. Yeah. Ganchoganov. That's what it is. If you want to get in touch with us to say hi about an old episode or for whatever reason, you can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com, check out our social media links, and you can also

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