Matt Richtel and Alexei Barrionuevo
The New York Times
April 22, 2005
The Wendy's in California where a diner said she found part of a finger in her chili.
SAN JOSE, Calif., April 20 - Denny Lynch sat at a booth at a Wendy's restaurant,
finishing bites of a chicken sandwich between cellphone calls. Mr. Lynch, a Wendy's
executive, was one of only a few lunchtime patrons at the normally buzzing
restaurant, where lately business is off by half.
That's because, in the same booth where Mr. Lynch sat, a patron claimed on March 22
that she dipped into her cup of beef chili and found part of a human finger.
Since then, Mr. Lynch, Wendy's senior vice president for communications, and the
rest of Wendy's executive team have been on a ceaseless treadmill trying to manage a
public relations crisis that has consumed and frustrated the company.
Mr. Lynch still does not know whose finger it was or where it came from. But some of
the many questions surrounding the incident may be resolved once the police receive
the results of lab tests, possibly as early as Friday.
Unless investigators solve the mystery, the case threatens to put Wendy's in the
same unenviable category as Tylenol and Jack in the Box, two other brand names that
were tainted by gruesome discoveries that set off a national panic.
The troubles began for Mr. Lynch when the phone rang just after 11:30 p.m. on March
22. He had been sleeping at home in Dublin, Ohio, where Wendy's has its
headquarters. The caller was Bob Bertini, the chain's media relations manager,
explaining that Anna Ayala, a Las Vegas resident visiting family in San Jose, had
bitten down on the finger in a spoonful of Wendy's chili.
For the 52-year-old Mr. Lynch, there was no time to prepare a sophisticated plan of
action. The news media, he was informed, knew about the gruesome discovery, and
wanted a statement. He did not wake John T. Schuessler, Wendy's chairman and chief
executive, that night, but sent him e-mail messages explaining the news and the
steps he had taken.
Over the next month, Mr. Lynch's job became part "CSI: Wendy's," part public
relations nightmare.
A management team from Sacramento, Wendy's regional base, converted the office of
the Wendy's franchisee, JEM Management, based in Fresno, into a makeshift crisis
control room. The local police department was already involved; the coroner's office
was brought in six days later.
Most of all, Mr. Lynch spent countless hours briefing the news media. "It went
nonstop the next two or three days," Mr. Lynch said, "even through the weekend. Even
when the pope passed away, it still got coverage."
He managed to squeeze in an early-April golf trip, but he said he spent most of it
on the phone with the crisis team in San Jose.
So far, Wendy's restaurants in Northern California have lost 20 percent to 50
percent of their business. With every passing day that the mystery of the finger
goes unsolved, Mr. Lynch and Wendy's executives face eroding confidence in their
business. "We need closure," Mr. Lynch said. "Until then, there is lingering doubt."
Investigations so far have failed to turn up much about the finger. What is known is
that the tissue is most of a fingertip and is now in two pieces. Put together, the
total length is one and a half inches, and the finger is preserved enough to draw a
sample of DNA and fingerprints. It is suspected to be from a woman because of its
long, manicured nail.
But investigators still do not know whether the finger came from a dead or live
person. They do not know if the finger's DNA has a match in any existing database. A
search for the fingerprint in the F.B.I.'s database of about 50 million prints came
up negative.More important for Wendy's, it is still not known whether the finger was
cooked, and if so, for how long. A thoroughly cooked finger might indicate that it
came through Wendy's food supply chain. If the tissue is uncooked, that might
indicate that it was added to the chili after the fact.
Questions have also been raised about Ms. Ayala. The Associated Press has reported
that Ms. Ayala has had a litigious history that included a settlement for medical
expenses for her daughter, who claimed she became sick at an El Pollo Loco
restaurant in Las Vegas.
The uncertainty has meant that the company, which has 6,600 locations in the United
States, must cope with a damaged reputation worsened by the breadth and speed of
media coverage around the world.
The fingertip has not just set off a scare, but has also become the butt of
late-night television jokes. It is discussed in California with the familiarity and
interest of the breakup of the actors Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt.
Wendy's has offered a $100,000 reward and has a team of private investigators
running a tip line 10 hours a day. Still nothing.
The Wendy's story has included everything from a patron with a suspicious history of
suing companies to an animal trainer who sought national attention to talk about the
finger she partly lost training a leopard.
That has made the case seem more like a circus sideshow than the deadly food threats
of the past, like the one in 1993 when four people died and hundreds of others
became sick from eating Jack in the Box hamburgers tainted by E. coli bacteria. Nor
is the case as threatening as the situation Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol brand faced
in 1982 when seven people died in the Chicago area from cyanide-laced capsules.
Wendy's patrons are more repulsed than afraid of dying. "It's nasty," said Victoria
Reyes, 17, a senior at a nearby high school who was walking near the Wendy's on
Wednesday. She said she ate regularly at Wendy's, but had moved the chain off her
diet plan.
This is not the first time Mr. Lynch has managed a crisis in his 25 years at
Wendy's. He was on the front lines in May 2000 when robbers shot and killed five
workers at a Wendy's in Queens.
That experience still did not prepare him for the uncertainty from the mystery
finger. Aside from a decline in business, Wendy's has had to weather some 20
copycats around the country who claimed to have found everything from fingernails to
a chicken bone in their Wendy's food.
To quell the problems and try to rebuild the company's reputation, Wendy's decided
to offer free milkshakes this weekend in 48 Bay Area stores as a sign of customer
appreciation. Mr. Lynch flew to San Jose on Tuesday to help coordinate the effort.
The company has also decided to send coupons to residents in the area around the
restaurant. Next month, Wendy's will introduce a new premium deli sandwich, also in
the Bay Area.
"We need to get customers thinking about Wendy's again," Mr. Lynch said. "They've
been taken out of that mind-set."
That could be difficult, considering the media saturation surrounding the finger
mystery. That first night, when Mr. Lynch was awakened, local television stations
were already running with the report.
The next day, as the finger became fodder for morning talk-radio shows, Wendy's
started an investigation. Workers at the restaurant were interviewed and later
passed lie detector tests. Wendy's began tracing back the ingredients from the chili
to its suppliers. The ingredients all come from a central distribution center, Mr.
Lynch said, that can trace the ingredients' suppliers by product code.
The company concluded it would have been highly unlikely for an employee to overlook
a finger, given the way the chili is made. A worker chops ground beef into small
chunks with a spatula - using the same two- and four-ounce patties used for
hamburgers - adds kidney beans and small beans from cans, seasoning from a packet,
and tomatoes. A 48-serving batch is mixed into a 22-quart pot and cooked for four to
six hours, stirred every 15 minutes.
Mr. Lynch said the process required such close interaction with the food that it was
unlikely that a foreign object, like a finger, would go unnoticed. "Can it happen?
Yeah," he said. "But it's very unlikely."
Similarly, Mr. Lynch said it was highly unlikely that a finger part of more than one
inch made its way through the mechanized process at meatpacking plants to turn raw
meat into ground beef.
Around midmorning that first Wednesday, the Santa Clara County Department of Health
inspected the Wendy's at Monterey Road, giving it a clean bill of health. Then in
the afternoon, Wendy's got its first bad break. Santa Clara health officials said
there was no public health risk. But they released a photo of the finger to the news
media.
"It is a gruesome image," Mr. Lynch said. "And it spread across the country in no
time."
That Thursday, March 24, Wendy's reported the findings of its internal inquiry. No
restaurant employees had suffered a hand injury. Follow-up with suppliers of the
chili ingredients revealed the same. Wendy's insisted it had found nothing to
support allegations that it or its supply chain was the source of the finger.
Mr. Lynch then learned another heartening piece of news: the employee who prepared
the chili is a 10-year veteran of the San Jose restaurant. "That helped a little,"
he said.
That night, however, the "Tonight" show host, Jay Leno, began the first of several
nights of jokes about the incident. Among the most painful: a dig at the beloved
Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas. "I didn't know Wendy's sold finger food," Mr. Leno
quipped. "I guess we know what Wendy's did with their founder, Dave Thomas."
Three days later, on Sunday, Mr. Lynch returned a call from an ABC producer at 6
p.m., who told him that Ms. Ayala would appear on "Good Morning America" the next
morning with a lawyer. "Does Wendy's want to say anything, or send someone to New
York?" the producer asked.
"Can you wait 24 hours?" he replied. The producer said no. Mr. Lynch spent three
hours preparing a statement, which was read almost in its entirety the next morning.
That Monday, Ms. Ayala appeared with her lawyer, who claimed that the chili incident
was a clear case of product liability. Ms. Ayala, visibly emotional, told of her
disgust at nearly swallowing the finger. "Suddenly I chew something that's kind of
hard, crunchy," Ms. Ayala said on "Good Morning America." "I spit it out."
Now the story was everywhere.
Later that day, the Santa Clara County coroner's office began an investigation. The
finger was shipped in a Wendy's container to a lab.
A week later, Wendy's posted a $50,000 reward for information leading to the
identification of the finger. A toll-free number was set up: (800) 821-3348. That
day, police detectives searched the Las Vegas home of Ms. Ayala. They do not say
what they found, if anything.
Then, on April 13, the San Jose police investigated the case of a woman who lost
part of her finger in a leopard attack. The woman, who has several exotic animals,
lives near Las Vegas. Later, after the woman appeared on "Good Morning America,"
police said they could not connect her to the Wendy's case because the fingerprints
did not match. That same day, however, Ms. Ayala told reporters that she was no
longer pursuing a lawsuit against Wendy's, and her lawyer confirmed that he was no
longer representing her.
In an interview on Wednesday, Sgt. Nick Muyo of the San Jose police said that the
police are calling Ms. Ayala a witness, not a suspect. "We've maintained all along
she is not the focus of this case," he said. "It's possible we may not find out
where the finger came from."
That possibility scares Wendy's more than anything. "We can't put this behind us
until we get a third party to exonerate us, if that's possible," Mr. Lynch said.
"And it may never be possible. That is the worst-case scenario. It is worse than if
you made a mistake and own up to it."
Some outside crisis management consultants questioned whether Wendy's reacted with
enough empathy toward Ms. Ayala in the first few days after the finger was reported
found. "Wendy's has not been empathetic enough," said Mike Paul, president of MGP &
Associates PR, a crisis management firm in New York.
Mr. Lynch said that Wendy's officials made attempts to contact Ms. Ayala, "but were
unable to do so." And within days she had retained a lawyer, he said.
Last Friday, Wendy's doubled its reward to $100,000 and began running local ads
announcing the reward. Thomas J. Mueller, Wendy's president, reiterated in a company
statement that there is "no credible evidence that Wendy's is the source of the
foreign object."
