The story told by the new documentary Finders Keepers is almost too weird to be true. In 2004, a North Carolina man named John Wood was copiloting a small plane with his father when the engine cut out. The plane went down, his father died, and Wood sustained injuries that forced doctors to amputate his left leg below the shin.

With the notion that he might incorporate it into a memorial for his dad, Wood, who now walks with a prosthesis, requested that the hospital return his disembodied limb to him. They (oddly) agreed, and Wood, after attempting to store it in the refrigerator at a nearby Hardee’s, employed some makeshift preserving techniques to, as he said, “mummify it.”

At the time of the crash, Wood seemed to be turning a corner in his long struggle with drug addiction. Sent home with a big bottle of Oxycontin, he relapsed. His life quickly spiraled out of control; by the summer of 2005, he was forced to move all his possessions into a storage facility, and soon thereafter, he stopped paying rent on the unit. Eventually, his things were auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Enter Shannon Whisnant. Whisnant bought Wood’s barbecue smoker, took it home, opened it up, and discovered inside the mummified limb. He called 911 and the police came to confiscate the leg.

At this point, it would be reasonable to assume that Whisnant would want nothing more to do with Wood’s leg. If a fictional movie were to be made of Shannon Whisnant’s life, I imagine that he’d be played by O Brother, Where Art Thou?–era John Goodman. Whisnant’s a sort of backwoods-dwelling, spotlight-seeking, silver-tongued wheeler and dealer. When the local media began covering the story of the leg’s strange odyssey, Whisnant woke up to the unique opportunity it presented, both to make some money and to seize the sort of fame he’d always imagined for himself.

Whisnant rebranded himself as the Foot Man, had T-shirts made up, and began selling tours of the grill that once housed the leg. He also began petitioning the police to return the leg to him. In the meantime, Wood caught wind that his body part had resurfaced, and sought to reclaim it. Did the leg rightfully belong to its original owner, or to the man who had inadvertently paid good money for it? Thus began a bitter, drawn-out custody battle, one that landed Wood and Whisnant in the tabloids, on cable news shows, and on reality TV. Eventually, they decided to appear on the show Judge Mathis, to once and for all decide the leg’s fate. I won’t spoil the final verdict, but as a happy side effect, Mathis took note of Wood’s strung-out appearance and helped him get into a well-regarded rehab program on the West Coast. The painful quest to win back his leg, and Whisnant’s dogged insistence on keeping it for himself, helped Wood get and stay sober.