Mysterious severed thumb had Georgia sheriff puzzled — until he squeezed it

It sure looked like a thumb, lying in a dirt patch on a Putnam County lawn.

Or as the cops put it, a “found body part.”

The county sheriff, who lives nearby, was summoned.

As he and a deputy gazed down at the apparently carved-off curiosity in a couple’s back yard across the road from Lake Oconee, they couldn’t help wondering, “Is it human?”

It looked like a dirty rock. On closer inspection it appeared to be the end of a thumb.

Its fingernail was intact with a bone poking out of the digit’s middle joint, where it seemed to have been torn from someone’s hand. Who that someone might be — and why — was anyone’s guess.

James Ellis, 64, who moved home to Georgia from Oregon a couple of months ago, found the thing Monday.

“Get it out of my yard,” he told the cops.

Enter Sheriff Howard Sills, a seasoned lawman who over the years has helped send some half-dozen killers to death row and cracked run-of-the-mill capers across the countryside, including the theft of a statue of favorite local son Br’er Rabbit.

Sills, who along with his deputy scooped up the thumb and stuck it in a paper sack, said, “It was rather conspicuous, kind of sitting there in the middle of the lawn.”

The deputy asked around if any neighbors had been injured recently. None had.

The next morning, the sheriff took a closer look at the digit.

“Something wasn’t right,” Sills said.

A detective set up a microscope, and Sills took a peek. There were odd pores on the skin “that I had never seen in a thumb,” he said.

The sheriff also spied a telling detail: Tinges of bright red around the digit’s torn-off end, which a layman might mistake for blood. But the thumb looked to have been detached for days. “The red goes away,” Sills said.

That prompted further examination.

“I said, ‘Well, let me squeeze this rascal.’ I reached down and squeezed it and,” Sills said, “it’s hollow on the inside.”

It felt like hard rubber, and was. As for the bone? Plastic.

“It’s a professionally-made thing. It’s like a movie prop. It’s better than dime-store quality,” the sheriff said. “I’m wondering if somebody put it there as a joke.”

Ellis, the guy who found it, thought it could have been left behind by the people who used to live there. He recently found a tiny toy dinosaur in his front yard.

An online search for “severed thumb prop” turns up a trove of novelties similar to the one in Ellis’ yard. They sell for about $10.

The subject line of the police report about the finger-like find has since been changed from “found body part” to “suspicious item.”

Sills plans to keep the thumb.

“I’m sure,” he told The Telegraph on Wednesday, “I’ll come up with a medical use for it when summoned for some root-doctoring in the future.”

This story was originally published May 30, 2018 at 4:29 PM with the headline "Mysterious severed thumb had Georgia sheriff puzzled — until he squeezed it."