 |
| |
The Case of the Severed Hand
On November 19, 1997, a city worker in Bradenton, FL, discovered a severed human hand along the Manatee River. The hand was given to two fingerprint experts, who were able to lift a useable fingerprint after cutting off one of the digits, then slipping the outer layer of skin over their own fingers, like a glove. Computer analysis matched the print to one Willie Suttle, who had died of natural causes five months earlier.
| |
After Suttle's body (sans hand) was exhumed from a local cemetery, examiners made a bizarre discovery: inside his body were more than a dozen homemade dolls with pins stuck into them (seen right), as well as a note "cursing" several people in the local area (seen below). Police questioned funeral-home owner Paula Green Albritten about the dolls; she broke down and confessed she had sewn them into Suttle's body as part of a voodoo ritual to bring her happiness and destroy her competitors.
| |  | |
| |
The dolls were effigies of other funeral home owners and her ex-husband. Albritten believed that as the dolls decomposed, her enemies would die. As for the severed hand, although Albritten considered it "a helping hand" to guide her, it turned out the only people it guided were the police.
| |
|
|
|
|
|
