What lengths would you go to to commit insurance fraud? A Missouri man allegedly tried to commit insurance fraud by paying someone to cut off both his legs.
The Howell County Sheriff’s Office investigated an incident that occurred in November 2023 when a 60-year-old man from Willow Springs, Missouri, lost both his legs after allegedly suffering a brush hog accident. This rotary mower is usually attached to tractors and the man claimed that both his legs had been accidentally cut off by one.
While this could pass, the story had a few problems with it. To begin with, the man’s legs were nowhere to be found and the man’s wounds were apparently too clean to be caused by a brush hog.
“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, said. “I’ve seen those types of accidents before. This wasn’t like that.”
As investigators dug deeper into the injured man’s story, they discovered that a Florida man had visited the victim with a hatchet and allegedly chopped off his legs. It was later revealed that the 60-year-old paraplegic had devised a plan to commit insurance fraud. He decided to have his legs chopped off in a staged tractor accident.
“It was a poorly executed plan, I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Thompson said.
In the end, a relative of the injured man reportedly found his legs in a bucket concealed by tires and turned them over to investigators.