This podcast details true crime cases. It contains adult themes and may contain descriptions

of violence. It is not intended for children. Listener discretion is advised.

Thank you for joining me for today's episode of Once Upon a Crime. We're in this series, Fast Food Felonies.

And the last two episodes have detailed cases of serial killers

who were connected to fast food restaurants.

Those were two pretty grim stories.

So I thought we'd take a little bit of a break for murder this week

to tell a different kind of story.

This incident happened in my hometown of San Jose, California, and was a truly bizarre case.

It started out as a story of a person who became ill due to, let's say, a contaminated food item,

but quickly turned into something completely different.

How the story unfolded and then how it unraveled became fodder for television news programs,

late-night television talk shows, and even comedians.

This is Chapter 3 of Fast Food Felonies, the Wendy's Chili Finger scam.

On March 22, 2005, Anna Ayala and her husband, Jaime Placencia, were having dinner with his family at a Wendy's fast food restaurant in San Jose, California.

Ayala and her husband lived in Las Vegas, Nevada, but during a trip to visit family,

had decided to make a stop to eat a quick meal. One of Placencia's brothers went to the

counter and ordered the food, while the rest of the family sought out tables in the restaurant's

dining room.

Since there were six of them, they spread out over two tables, with Ayala seated with her mother-in-law

and brother-in-law, and her husband seated with his father and another brother.

Ayala had ordered a cup of Wendy's chili, a hot food item made with beans, ground beef, tomatoes, and

...