Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
So recently a story broke about this guy named Jensen Karp who found a piece of shrimp, like a shrimp tail, several of them in his Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Guys, it looks really nasty and it clearly looks like shrimp. Jensen Karp is a comedian and a writer and he went to Twitter to tweet about his Shrimp Toast Crunch and he reached out to Cinnamon Toast Crunch and told them that there was shrimp in his box.
And they got back to him and said, after further investigation with our team that closely examined image, it appears to be an accumulation of the cinnamon sugar. That sometimes can occur when ingredients aren't thoroughly blended, which is a truly unbelievable statement because it's clear that these are shrimp tails. These are clearly not pieces of cinnamon sugar that has built up from not being thoroughly blended. But it turns out this guy, Jensen Karp, has a sketchy history and a bunch of people have come
forward saying that he is not someone that you would want to trust necessarily, that maybe he's making the whole thing up. And I don't know if he is, I don't know if he put the shrimp in the cinnamon toast crunch or if it actually was in his box. It looked like it had gone through the little cinnamon sugar machine and everything, but who knows? And it reminded me of this story that I heard when I was God, how old was I? This was in 2005. So I was in middle school. And I remember hearing about this story of a woman who found
a finger in her Wendy's chili. Absolutely disgusting, right? And I'm sure many of you have heard this story. Some of you probably haven't. It has been a long time. But now I get to truly live my middle school dreams by looking into this as part of my job. And I found out that the woman who had been served the finger chili was named Anna Ayala.
She was 39 years old and she actually went to Wendy's on March 22nd, 2005 with her in-laws and a few other family members. They lived in San Jose. So they went to location on Monterey road, which I believe is still there. If you live by there, let me know in the comments. And she had actually lived in San Jose for a while, but at the time she was just visiting there. She actually lived in Nevada and her husband was back in Nevada at the time.
So that night, they decide to all go to Wendy's and they decide to do a dine-in. And they get there at about 7 p.m. And Anna goes up to the counter, orders herself a nice bowl of chili, which honestly, I have learned more about the Wendy's chili and I'm scared. But that's a conversation for another day. As she is sitting there mowing down on her chili, she suddenly gets...
an interesting bite. Specifically, she said she bit into something long and crunchy. She spits it out into her bowl and when she looks down, she realizes that it is a human finger and she has just bit into the fingernail. Apparently it was about an inch and a half long, still had the nail on there and it was just
stew it in the chili. She said she immediately felt sick, felt like she was going to throw up, as I can imagine. And she runs over to the counter and tells them that there's this finger in her chili. And at the same time, she's shouting out to everyone in the restaurant to stop eating the chili, stop eating everything. This place is contaminated. There was a finger in my food.
All the workers gathered up at the front to take a look at what she found and they were horrified when it really was a human finger. They thought maybe it was something else like a vegetable, but once I saw that fingernail, they knew what it was. The employees that are working there don't know what to do. I mean, they've never had this situation and there is no protocol. So they decide to dump the chili and then they call the police. And when the police get there, they are like, uh, what?
what? This isn't even a job for us. We don't know how to handle this. This is a job for the health department instead. So the workers contacted the company that owns Wendy's, which is JEM management. And they were instructed that they should put the finger in the freezer and not touch it anymore. And they said they would be there first thing in the morning to deal with it. As I imagine, this was a top priority, but by 10 PM that night, the local news had already picked
up the story and it started blowing up. And obviously this is a PR nightmare for Wendy's. Wendy's was really known for their chili because not many other fast food restaurants, or I think any of them have chili. So they felt kind of special and having this on the news was not good for them at all. And it wasn't long until it spread out of California and was national news all across the country. Everyone was talking about the Wendy's chili finger.
And of course, people started avoiding Wendy's like the plague because who wants to go to a place that may have had fingers in their food? But the San Jose police still were not involved in it and did not want to get involved in it. So Wendy's kind of had to take this investigation into their own hands. The morning after Anna found the finger in her chili, the two owners of the franchise and health inspector come to the location to inspect the finger. And they determined that it really is a human finger.
At that point, they're freaking out. Things are not looking good. And this became their main strategy. Find out whose finger this is, find out where it came from, and figure out if and how it ended up in their chili. Wendy's released several PR statements that they were taking this very seriously and looking into it further, trying to figure out what had truly happened. And like I said, the police...
did not consider this to be a criminal issue, so they were not involved at all. It was completely up to Wendy's to figure out what had really gone down. And it turns out that everyone did have all 10 fingers. They couldn't find a single employee who was missing one. And the person who had made the chili had been working at Wendy's for a long time. It was a trusted employee, so they were very confused. They also checked at
all the other facilities that handles their food and made sure that no one had lost any fingers in the process. But it was clear after investigating that no one had lost a finger. So they thought maybe an employee like brought it in and put it in there. So all the employees had to take polygraph tests, including the person who made the chili.
And they all passed easily. We have talked to our employees. They have taken lie detector tests and they have passed them. We have done a complete analysis of our supply chain and we have tracked the product that was the ingredients of the chili. We have tracked it all the way back to the suppliers, all the way back to the day it was manufactured. Yeah, buddy.
Meanwhile, Anna is very upset and just disgusted by her experience. And the Santa Clara County Health Officer recommended that she get some tests done to make sure she didn't pick anything up from biting into this random finger. And it wasn't long until Anna started, you know, talking to the media and of course filed a lawsuit against Wendy's. She even went on to Good Morning America to talk about her traumatic experience biting into this finger. - Well, as I was eating my chili
And I usually crack all my crackers and just put them in there, mix it all around, and started eating, eating and eating the way usually people eat. And suddenly I chew something that's kind of hard, crunchy, spit it out. At first I wasn't sure what it was. Obviously something slipped through.
to put it lightly. - And the whole time Wendy's was trying to be as cooperative as they could, work with health officials, try to figure this out. But Anna said that she was not satisfied with their response. Her attorney ended up making a comment saying that they were satisfied with the start of things, but this was a serious liability issue and there was more that needed to be done. And this lawyer was also representing five other people that had eaten at the Wendy's that day that were also filing lawsuits.
He kept telling the media that there was documentary proof that Anna really had a finger in her chili and that this was in no way any type of hoax. And of course, with the story going nationwide, people had many questions. Whose finger was it? How did it end up in the chili? Can we eat at Wendy's safely anymore? That was the big buzz and Wendy's lost a lot of money over this. Wendy's for a while was literally a joke.
on all the late night shows, everyone was talking about this mystery finger. So Wendy's decided to do their own forensic investigation on the finger itself. And it was all led by this woman named Dr. Lynn Bates, who apparently is a pioneer in the forensic food microscopy world.
So her and her team get the finger and they test it and they figure out that the tissue is not consistent with human flesh that had been cooked at 170 degrees for three hours, which is how Wendy's cooks their chili. And what was even more suspicious to them is that they found no saliva of Anna's on the finger. And she had sworn up and down that she had bit down on that finger. So once Wendy's heard this, they were confident that they were being defrauded.
So they called the police again and they let them know that they do need to get involved, that this possibly could be criminal. But first they had to figure out more about Anna. They did have to be very careful though, because people at the time and the media were very sensitive to Anna. I mean, she had bitten into a finger. That's pretty disgusting. People felt bad for her that she had experienced this. Wendy's definitely could not, you know,
publicly question her in any way or defend themselves. They definitely could not accuse her of any type of fraud. They needed evidence. So they hired a private investigator. And once they looked into her past,
things started to make a lot more sense because it turns out that she's filed lawsuits against several corporations. She actually had 13 lawsuits against different companies in California and Nevada. Some of these lawsuits involved just her, but some of them also brought her kids into it.
And some of them were just dismissed, but others, she had received cash settlements. In one case, she had tried to sue the company Goodyear, which is a tire company, because one of the wheels had fallen off of her car. The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning that she could never refile.
And she had also sued the fast food chain El Pollo Loco, claiming that her daughter Genesis contracted salmonella while eating at their restaurant. And so one of their spokespersons had to come forward and say that there was no evidence supporting her claim. There was no evidence that her daughter got sick from their food. But Anna claims that she won the lawsuit anyway, and that she got $30,000 in damages. But the company said they never paid her anything and she did not win. But once they
Once they had more background on her, they told the police and they decided to get involved. They started interviewing her friends and family members as well. And they found out about this guy named Ken Bono. This guy, Ken was 24 years old and he was living with Anna and her husband in Nevada. And he thought that it was possible that the finger belonged to Anna's late aunt. Anna denied this and said all of her aunts were still alive.
but the police were suspicious. So on April 8th, the Las Vegas police department served a warrant to search the home. There were about a dozen officers that conducted the search and afterwards they handcuffed everybody in the household and brought them outside. And according to that guy, Ken, he said the police searched everything in the house, especially all their freezers, different compartments, small areas where they could be
possibly storing body parts. They also looked through a box of things that had belonged to Anna's aunt that had lived there at one point. So the media started buzzing about how it possibly could be this aunt's finger, but the police didn't release any information to the public about what they had found.
and whether or not this mystery aunt was still alive. So Anna went back to the media and she started telling the San Francisco Chronicle this time a very different story than what police were kind of starting to say. She claimed that it was a traumatic experience, that officers had stormed into their house, held guns to their heads, and she claims that one of her daughter's ligaments was torn because the police threw her to the ground. And obviously with her track record, it's hard to prove whether or not these things are true.
But she said it was humiliating that they were forced to lie on the ground on the driveway in front of all her neighbors. But when they actually interviewed the neighbors, they said that it wasn't quite that dramatic at all. And Anna started responding slowly to the accusations that maybe she had planted the finger. During one of her interviews, she actually said, where would I even get a damn finger? But after a little while, the media started to turn on her. Every time more information came out, it was more and more clear that she had lied. And not
Not much longer later, on April 12th, she actually dropped the lawsuit. And of course, a ton of media requested to interview her after this and find out why she had dropped the lawsuit, but she stopped doing all media at that point. She said it was too much for her. On April 22nd, a photographer took this photo of a note that was found on her front door that visibly
She warns people not to knock because she was emotionally disturbed. And all through this, Anna's family stood by her, defended her. Her sister Mary publicly said that Anna would never do anything like that. She said that there was just no reason for her to do that and Anna just wanted to forget this whole thing and move on. But you know who was not gonna forget about this whole thing?
Wendy's because they had lost millions of dollars over this already. They had to clear their name. They had to save their reputation. So Wendy's decides that they're going to set up a tip line and they offered a whopping $50,000 to anyone who could tell them any information about this finger.
who does the finger belong to? No one knew at this point, but they knew if they could figure out who this finger belonged to and how it got in the chili that they could clear their name. At the time, they believed that this finger probably belonged to a woman because the nail was very
manicured looking, but then they got a tip that it possibly could belong to this man that worked on a ranch and Mexican authorities actually sent in the tip because they believed that it could belong to this ranch hand who had lost a finger in an accident. But like I said, at the time they thought it was a woman's finger.
And then another interesting tip came in from a woman who lived in Texas at an animal shelter. She explained that this woman named Sandy Almond had called her and this woman had a ton of exotic pets. Most of them were big cats and it had all gotten really out of control. And she had called to surrender them. The owner of the sanctuary, Sandy decides to help. And she goes to the house and she realizes that this woman has tigers, leopards, Jaguars, and a few other big cats.
cats and she keeps them all outside of her trailer. She lives in a big open area and the animals were all tied up out front. And this is about 60 miles from Las Vegas. So they start trying to round up all these big cats to bring them into the sanctuary. And Sandy, unfortunately gets bit by one of them. And it's so bad that it actually takes off the tip of
her finger. And she thought it was possible that her finger may have been the one that ended up in the chili. So she volunteers to take a DNA test. She just wants to figure out if it's her finger. She said the last time that she had seen it was at the emergency room, but she thought maybe it did somehow end up in the chili. So authorities conducted DNA tests and it turns out that the finger does not belong to either of these people, the ranch hand or Sandy.
And there were several other tips like that, that just didn't pan out, that they just wasted their time on and ended up being dead ends. But eventually another tip came in about Anna being possibly involved in some real estate fraud. This person claimed that this was something that she could be arrested for. And now that the police were more involved, they started looking more into her and her husband, Jamie's past. And when they look into things, they discover quite a bit of illegal activity.
In 2002, it turns out that Anna had sold a mobile home to a woman named Bertha Davila for $52,000 and accepted a down payment of $11,000. But it turned out that this mobile home was actually Jamie's who was her boyfriend at the time. And she didn't even have the rights to sell it. But this woman Bertha moves into the trailer anyway, with her kids. And three weeks later, Jamie defaults on the
loan and they all have to leave. They were under the impression that they owned this home, but they were evicted and they had lost their entire life savings in the scheme. And what makes it even worse is Bertha was now in debt because she had borrowed the money for the down payment from somebody else. And apparently she went to Anna asking for her money back and Anna pretended to have no idea what she was talking about and kicked her out of her house. So
Clearly there's a pattern going on here with Anna. And when they looked more into Jamie, they found out that he owed about $400,000 in child support payments. So they were both arrested on April 21st, 2005, Anna for real estate fraud and Jamie for unpaid child support.
And while they were in custody, the police and Wendy's continued to investigate the severed finger. And the day after their arrest, Wendy's came forward and made a statement to the public, basically begging them to come back and eat at the restaurants. At this point, people across the country were avoiding the fast food chain. They barely had anyone coming through and they reported losing at least a million dollars a day every single day from March 22nd to April 20th.
And the specific location in San Jose had really suffered. Most of their employees had to be laid off. They were barely getting any customers. People were terrified to eat there. They tried to do damage control by offering free Frosties for anyone in the Bay area, but people were still freaked out and they wanted answers. And finally those answers came. On May 13th, they finally announced the owner of the finger.
And right before that information came in, Wendy's had upped the reward to $100,000, hoping that would drive in a few more people, and it did. There were two different tips claiming that Anna had definitely planted the finger herself. The first was from an anonymous caller, but the second was from a man named Mike Casey. He owned a company called Lamb Asphalt in Las Vegas, and Jamie, her husband, was one of his employees. When he heard that Jamie was arrested and about the whole
whole finger saga, he remembered that one of his employees had recently lost his finger. He said that the finger belonged to 36-year-old Brian Rossiter. Turns out Jamie and Brian normally worked with some pretty dangerous equipment. And back in December of 2004, Brian's gloved hand was caught in a trucklet.
and was severed. And then after the holidays in January, 2005, he brings his severed finger to work to show it off to other employees. And at the time he actually owed Jamie a hundred dollars because he had helped him move or something, some small debt. And Jamie says,
Hey, if you give me that finger, we can just call it even. So Brian thinks this is a great idea. I mean, he has his finger, he doesn't need it. So he gives him the finger and it turns out he actually told Brian what he was going to do with his finger. He told him that he was going to be putting it into a bowl of Wendy's chili so that they could sue. And he said, if you stay quiet,
quiet man, I'll give you $250,000. So that's why Brian stayed quiet about the whole thing and never reported that it was his finger in the chili. So I'm not sure if Brian just decided he wanted the reward money or what, but he came forward, the DNA test the finger and it turns out that it does in fact belong to Brian.
So of course they have to hold Anna and Jamie accountable now. So they are both charged with grand theft for the lost Wendy's revenue. Anna pled guilty to three felony charges, including insurance fraud and grand theft in September of 2005. And at this point, Wendy's claims that they had already lost about $2.5 million. And the judge decided that this warranted a property damage enhancement.
This allowed him to give Anna an additional five years in prison for the aggravating circumstances. And during the sentencing, Anna, who was now 40 at the time, begged to the jury to let her have an easier sentence. She said that she was sorry and the whole thing was just a moment of poor judgment, but the court
brought up all these clips of her talking to the media and talking about her trauma and essentially prove that this wasn't just a momentary lapse of judgment. This was a lapse of judgment that had gone on for months. She had lied in every interview that she had done. So how are they supposed to believe her now?
So Anna was sentenced to nine years in prison on January 18th, 2006, and ordered to pay restitution to multiple parties, 21.2 million to Wendy's and almost 500,000 to JEM management. And not only that, they also ordered her to pay $170,000 to 186 Wendy's employees. And to just add on, she was also ordered to pay $19,000 to birth
that woman that she had screwed over in that real estate deal. And to make things even worse for her, she was banned from every Wendy's. Anna appealed her sentence, of course, and she felt like it was way too long for what she had done. And she fought the order to pay restitution to Wendy's employees because they weren't direct victims of her crime. And the appeals court came to the decision that the judge
really shouldn't have tacked on the extra five years. So they took that off, but they upheld the restitution to pay all of the Wendy's employees. There were multiple people that were affected by this that lost hours and wages and the court documents go more into, you know, how this affected individual employees. And it seems like it really affected a lot of people. For example, the cashier who had taken her order was
cut for months because of this. And he ended up having to borrow money for rent and food. And he was humiliated in front of everyone because she screamed at him out loud for serving the finger. And word kind of had gotten out in the public about that. He was especially affected by the fact that she had asked him who he had killed to get the finger.
in front of everybody in the restaurant. And it turns out that the Wendy's employee who had made the chili was actually a boy named Hector. He lost hours and wages over this, but worst of all, he was blamed for this incident by other workers and people in the community. And he claims that he even lost friends over this whole ordeal.
So Jamie, who was 44 at the time, also pled guilty. And he was sentenced to 12 years and four months in prison for his part in the finger hoax and for failing to pay that child support. And he appealed his sentence as well, but it was denied. But the damage definitely had been done to Wendy's and their sales continued to plummet for months. And I guess the whole thing ended up costing them over $20,000.
$21 million in lost revenue. Clearly they have moved past it now. I think Wendy's is doing just fine. And Anna is actually just out living her life. She was released in 2010 after serving only four years. And I'm very surprised about this, but she decided to settle back down in San Jose where it all went down.
She stayed out of the spotlight for about a year after she got out and then eventually talked to the media again. She ended up doing an interview with CBS and she apologized for the whole scam, said that she just wasn't in her right state of mind at the time. And in the interview, she also talked about how hard her prison stay was, that the other women were not kind to her in prison. They kind of made fun of her for the whole finger thing and she just had a bad experience.
She said people started calling her the chili finger lady and it was so hard on her. Even the guards were taunting her. But then it came out in a recorded phone call from jail that she was saying that they all thought she was like famous in there, that they wanted her autographed.
for being the chili finger lady. And that's the thing with Anna, right? It's hard to know when she's telling the truth. But also during her interview, she dropped one really interesting bit of information. And that is that she had actually cooked the finger at home before she brought it to the Wendy's. She was hoping it would look more convincing that it had been cooking in the chili all day.
And at the end of the interview, she said she learned her lesson and she just wanted to move on. But in 2012, she got in trouble again. She ended up filing a police report claiming that two men had attacked her 26-year-old son, Guadalupe Reyes. And this was a serious attack, according to her. She claimed that he was shot in the ankle. The police took the case very seriously and opened an investigation. They found the suspect, brought him in. But then eventually, Jamie ended up confessing that it was all made up.
Turns out he shot himself by accident and Anna came up with the whole plan to cover it up. And they decided to do this because he was a convicted felon and he wasn't allowed to own the gun. So clearly she didn't learn and this was really serious this time because now she was facing a felony. Miss Ayala faces a maximum of four years. Four years.
And Mr. Reyes faces four years, eight months. Those are the maximums. They gave pretty specific information to the point to where we actually thought we had a suspect. We interviewed this person. We conducted various forensic testing as far as gunshot residue goes.
And so we treated it like the real deal. - She was arrested again. And in 2013, she did serve two more additional years in prison. But like I said, she is out now. And through all of this, it seems that her family has stuck by her. Here's a clip of her sister, Mary, defending her. - All I know that she's a good person and that she's my sister and that I love her and I'll support her to the end. - But it's been over 15 years now. And as far as I know, nothing else major has happened with Anna.
I think she's just kind of laying low. But in that community, she's still known as the Chili Finger Lady. That is going to be it for me today, guys. Thank you for joining me for another episode. And make sure you follow the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. It really does help me out. If you want to watch the video version of this show, you can find it on my YouTube channel, which will be linked. Or you can just search Kendall Rae. I will be back with another episode soon. But until then, stay safe out there. ♪