It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out this mystery.

The Springfield News-Leader reported on the most ridiculous example of attempted insurance fraud I’ve ever read or heard about. In addition to being spectacularly dishonest, it was also incompetent. Hold on to your heads for this one, and tell anyone in the room to move away to avoid flying pieces of skull…

The Howell County (Missouri) Sheriff’s last November sent out a release about a case of insurance fraud involving a man falsely claiming that an accident involving “a brush hog” had robbed him of both feet. A brush hog is a rotary mower often attached to a tractor; I never heard the term before. See? There are side benefits to even the most ridiculous ethics tales!

The perpetrator of the fraud was a 60-year-old paraplegic who had the brilliant idea of paying someone to cut off his feet so he could claim the insurance money. After all, he couldn’t walk anyway, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. The first problem with the plan was that the responding medics and law enforcement officers couldn’t find his severed feet anywhere. (Usually when someone says they have lost limbs, the limbs aren’t literally lost.) Authorities’ suspicions were also aroused by the tourniquets on the supposed brush hog victim’s legs. Who put them there? Then there were the wounds where the feet used to be. They were far too clean for foot manglings that result from farm equipment mishaps. “If it was done by a brush hog, it would have been a bloody, gory mess,” Torey Thompson, a lieutenant with the Howell County Sheriff’s Office, told the Springfield News Leader. “It was a poorly executed plan.”

Ya think?

The investigation revealed that the would-be insurance fraudster had paid a man to travel from Florida to chop off the man’s feet with a hatchet. (Would it be fair to call him an insurance fraud hack?) Because the scheme was so stupid—“Now where did I put those dang feet? I know they’re around here somewhere!”—the footless man never was able to file a false claim. (After all, he didn’t have a leg to stand on…) Howell County prosecutors did not press charges, though they were sorely tempted to go after him for filing a false police report and wasting county resources. However, caring for the man in jail, since he had no feet and useless legs, seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth.

His feet eventually turned up, you’ll be relieved to know.

“A couple days after, we got a call that a relative found them in a bucket obscured by tires, so we went and got them,” Thompson said.

Why is it that lost feet are always in the last place you look?