Chili mystery thickens

last updated 8 January 2015

Las Vegas

A Las Vegas woman who said she’d bitten into a human fingertip in a bowl of Wendy’s beef chili was arrested last week. A coroner said the finger, complete with a well-manicured nail, “was not consistent with an object that had been cooked in chili at 170 degrees for three hours.” The woman, Anna Ayala, 39, had a history of suing big companies, and police concluded she’d planted the finger herself. Ayala was charged with grand larceny; the Northern California restaurant where she dined has lost half of its business since the March 22 incident. Police said they still didn’t know where the finger came from. Ayala called the charges against her “ridiculous.”