Moms and Mysteries: A True Crime Podcast · Moms and Mysteries Podcast

Absurd Lawsuits: Scams, Frauds, and Greed

·48 min·2 clips

A woman found a human finger in her Wendy's chili—and it destroyed the company.

Mandy kicks things off by saying some crimes are violent, some are tragic, and some are so absurd they make you lose a little faith in humanity. This episode settles right into that last category. She and Melissa seem to have a good time with the setup, because the whole point is to walk through lawsuits that sound made up. They start in March 2005, back when flip phones were the thing, and use that as the entry point into the story. From there, the case only gets stranger. A severed finger ends up in the mix, and the claim tied to it sends everything sideways. The hosts joke through the disbelief, but they keep pulling at the thread until the timeline actually starts to make sense. Investigators send the finger for DNA testing. The results rule out Ana, Jamie, and anyone around the San Jose restaurant. Instead, the match points to a man in Nevada, who says he had worked with Jamie at a construction site weeks earlier and had lost the finger in a work accident. He then says he gave the severed finger to Jamie as repayment for a debt, which is about as strange as it sounds. The story gets worse when it turns out Ana and Jamie had been keeping the finger in their freezer like leftovers. They brought it with them to California, defrosted it, and tried to use it in the scheme. The episode ends where it began: people really will try anything, and sometimes the most absurd part is how carefully they plan it. The tone stays loose, conversational, and self-aware enough to keep the disbelief funny. When the conversation lands on the story of a man wanting to sue himself, the hosts lean into the joke and never let go of how ridiculous that sounds.

As heard by us

Absurd lawsuits and a severed finger in the freezer keep the episode funny, weird, and just unsettling enough.

Moms and Mysteries keeps this episode on the absurd end of true crime. It opens with a 2005 story and then moves into behavior that is almost impossible not to watch in disbelief.

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Why you'd press play

You want true crime, but this one is all lawsuits, audacity, and a freezer full of nonsense.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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