In the early 1960s, insurance companies sent investigators to Vernon, Florida, to determine why nearly 10 percent of the town's residents had filed claims for lost limbs. They uncovered a shocking fraud scheme.
IFC FilmsThree residents of “Nub City,” the Florida town where a disturbing insurance scam was uncovered in the early 1960s.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Vernon, Florida, became infamous among insurance companies after dozens of residents filed claims for accidental limb loss. Soon, the small Panhandle town earned the macabre nickname “Nub City.”
At one point, Vernon and the surrounding area reportedly accounted for two-thirds of accidental amputation claims in the entire nation. Investigators were eventually sent to the area to figure out what was happening — and they uncovered a grisly scam.
Residents of Vernon were seemingly cutting or shooting off their own limbs for a payout. In a town with fewer than 800 people, 50 of them had lost hands, feet, or other appendages in just a few short years.
The phenomenon came to a rapid end when insurance companies stopped writing policies for the region, but it’s still remembered today as one of the most bizarre fraud schemes in modern history.
What Happened In ‘Nub City’?
In the 1950s, Vernon, Florida, was in a severe economic decline. With the rise of car travel and the expansion of highways in the first half of the 20th century, the steamboats and railroads that had once passed through the area had become obsolete. To make matters worse, a sawmill that had provided jobs for many residents closed down, leading to high rates of unemployment.
People were desperate for money — and they resorted to self-mutilation to get it. Nobody is quite sure how the insurance fraud scheme began, but it’s believed that at one point, someone in the town lost a limb in a true accident and received a large payout from an insurance policy.
Seeing this newfound opportunity for wealth, another resident decided to “accidentally” lose a limb of his own.
IFC FilmsErrol Morris’ 1981 documentary about Vernon, Florida captured scenes from the lives of some of town’s oddest residents.
Word quickly spread around the small town, and soon others were purchasing policies and filing claims for limb loss shortly after. As reported by the Tampa Bay Times in 2007, one man reportedly shot off his foot while protecting his chickens from a predator, while another suffered an eerily similar fate while shooting at a squirrel less than 12 hours after buying a policy.
Some people in “Nub City” hacked and sawed their own limbs to pieces, but most took the relatively easier method of blowing them off with a shotgun. These claims generally received payouts of $5,000 to $10,000, but as the scam went on, they increased in value as the residents became more bold.
Once payouts started exceeding $100,000, the insurance company Continental National American sent John Joseph Healy to investigate.
Uncovering The Gruesome Insurance Scam
In 1972, Healy spoke about his time in “Nub City” in an interview for The New York Times. “We got in on the thing with a claim at the $100,000 level,” he recalled. “I solved it pretty quickly.”
“Everyone already knew about the town,” Healy said, “and the witness to the injury was a guy who had ‘witnessed’ another phony accident. There were a lot of holes in his story.”
Murray Armstrong, who worked for Liberty National Life Insurance Co. at the time the scam was taking place, told the Tampa Bay Times about one suspicious incident:
“There was another man who took out insurance with 28 or 38 companies. He was a farmer and ordinarily drove around the farm in his stick shift pickup. This day — the day of the accident — he drove his wife’s automatic transmission car and he lost his left foot. If he’d been driving his pickup, he’d have had to use that foot for the clutch. He also had a tourniquet in his pocket. We asked why he had it and he said, ‘Snakes. In case of snake bite.'”
By the dawn of the 1960s, around 50 of Vernon’s residents had experienced some sort of limb loss. With a population of less than 800, that was nearly 10 percent of the town. Despite the obvious fraud, however, nobody was ever convicted of a crime. “It was hard to make a jury believe a man would shoot off his foot,” said Armstrong.
Royalbroil/Wikimedia CommonsVernon, Florida in 2017. Today, most “Nub Club” members have died, and the town has started to financially recover from its past struggles.
Insurance did find one way to put an end to the scheme, though: They stopped selling policies in “Nub City.” “[W]e pretty well stopped this thing,” Healy told The New York Times in 1972. “After the first few times, nobody could collect anything more than nuisance value, and then nothing at all… And don’t think those people down there can get accident insurance anymore. I haven’t heard anything from there for at least two years.”
But while people stopped shooting off their hands and feet, word of what had happened in Vernon, Florida, continued to spread. And in the early 1980s, filmmaker Errol Morris headed to the town to make a documentary about the extraordinary incidents.
Vernon, Florida: Inside Errol Morris’ Documentary About Nub City
Morris initially arrived in Vernon eager to speak with residents about the outrageous insurance scam that had taken place there. But he quickly realized that nobody was willing to talk about it.
“I ended up living there for a good part of the year,” Morris told an audience in 2012. “I used to say that when people came knocking at the door, they wanted only one of two things: Either to convert you to Jesus or to kill you.”
Morris reportedly received death threats during his time in Vernon, and he was even physically assaulted on one occasion. “A moment of reflection would tell you that you don’t want to go… knocking on people’s doors and pointing to a stump and saying, ‘Uh, tell me about how that happened,'” Morris said. “I was beaten up outside of Nub City by the son-in-law of [a] double amputee, a Marine who kind of hurt me.”
IFC FilmsA farmer from Vernon, Florida, who was featured in Errol Morris’ documentary about the town.
So, instead of focusing on the limb loss scheme, Morris created a documentary about life in Vernon, interviewing a wide variety of eccentric characters who call Nub City home. Vernon, Florida was released in 1981, and while the film wasn’t able to delve into the most fascinating part of the town’s history, it certainly captured what makes Vernon unique.
After reading the bizarre story of Nub City, go inside the lives of nine of history’s biggest con artists. Then, learn about the history of the term “snake oil.”
