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Does treatment for opioid addiction leave a bad taste? Visit rethinkyourrecovery.com to learn more and find a doctor. You're listening to dnaid brought to you by abjack Entertainment. Be sure to check out some of the other great true crime podcasts from this network, including the Murder in My Family, Missing Persons, Scene of the Crime, Zodiac Speaking Beyond Bizarre True Crime, Citizen Detective and Campus Killings. All of these podcasts are available for you to binge on right now. Wherever you listen to podcasts, subscribe where you're listening to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. Just after Lunchtime on Sunday, October 5, 2003, Fernando Padilla, a maintenance worker at the Country Hills apartment complex in the east county neighborhood of Rancho San Diego, California, was cleaning up after doing renovation work on a vacant apartment. Fernando brought a bag of trash down to the dumpster behind the building the renovated apartment was in. The large blue metal bin was tucked into a small white stucco walled area with a brown wood door designed to improve the aesthetics of the garbage area of the complex. Country Hills was a cluster of two story condo style buildings. The complex was not what you're thinking. This was not the projects or a dreary high rise. The upscale 675 unit complex made for a very nice neighborhood with BMWs parked on the street, several pools, tennis courts, manicured grass, common areas and pruned bushes. When Fernando opened the top of the bin to deposit the trash, he noted a new looking army green canvas duffel bag in the dumpster with something bulky zipped inside. The bag did not look like it belonged in the trash. Fernando couldn't help himself. He looked. In the bag were two nude Severed human legs. Fernando hustled to the apartment management office where two female managers looked at him askance when he came in, asking them to come look. This could be a Halloween prop, he said. After all, it was October. But he didn't think so. The women followed Fernando and then called the police. At 1:25pm the San Diego County Sheriff's Office sent some deputies over to check out the report of finding severed human limbs. The address given to the first responders was 2450 Hilton Head Place in the 1600 block of Hilton Head Court near Jamancha Road in Rancho San Diego. Fire department personnel were dispatched as well. When they all saw what Fernando had seen, they shut down the area. Crime scene tape went up around the dumpster enclosure and surrounding areas. Deputies, CSIS and homicide investigators swarmed the complex. When all was said and done, the legs were the only body parts located. San Diego County Sheriff's Office field evidence technician John Farrell arrived and was briefed by a deputy Shimmin. He then photographed the crime scene and the contents of the dumpster, aside from the legs, was searched and inventoried. So were the contents of every trash receptacle at the complex and surrounding areas. CSI Farrell also dusted the dumpster looking for latent prints, but found none. Video footage from 2003 shows quiet, worried residents of the complex standing back from the crime scene tape, trying to learn whether there was a threat to the public. Children were kept inside. As one neighbor told NBC San Diego, this is a nice neighborhood, but I guess crime happens everywhere. Although they were by far the most impactful evidence, the severed legs were not the only pieces of evidence collected at the crime scene. CSI Farrell also collected swabs of suspected blood. The green duffel bag, three empty black plastic trash bags that were near the legs in the dumpster, a swab of a red stain on a white trash bag under the legs, a clump of hair on the north side of the dumpster area wall near the door hinge, and latent prints recovered from the hood of a Chevy Suburban parked next to the dumpster. None of these pieces of evidence ended up leading anywhere, although the empty black trash bags would come to detectives minds years later. A splotch of blood on the sidewalk elsewhere in the complex stirred up interest, which was quashed when the blood turned out to have come from an animal. Residents of the complex, completely unused to such violence and gore, were horrified and spooked. Canvases of the residents failed to turn up anyone who noted anything suspicious at all. It seemed likely that the killer was a Non resident who had pulled up outside the dumpster in a vehicle, checked to make sure no one was around, popped out and deposited the bag and driven off. The whole thing would take less than 10 seconds and if done under cover of night, just hours before the legs were found, would easily have been done undetected. At the medical Examiner's office, CSI Farrell observed the pathologist's examination of the legs and illuminated the legs with alternative light sources, searching for any biological evidence, such as bodily fluids or tissues belonging to someone else. But nothing was found. Paper lifts from the legs, designed to recover latent prints on skin, were used, but no prints were found either. This was because, very intriguingly, the legs had been cleaned, most likely with isopropyl alcohol. They were pristine except for the bottoms of the feet, which did have blood on them. This was not believed to have been from the feet standing in blood as much as just collateral blood from the whole messy dismemberment. Farrell also collected into evidence the body sheet that the legs were wrapped in. Two femur bone samples to preserve the tool marks, another femur bone sample for DNA collection, photos of both legs, and a film strip documenting the tool marks on the leg bone. Speaking of the toolmarks, sorry to get a little graphic here, but details matter. From a distance, the legs appeared to have been completely cleanly cut from the body. The wounds were uniform and smooth, as if severed in one fell swoop by something like a machete. But closer inspection revealed that the skin was ragged. It had been cut with a toothed blade. San Diego County Cold Case Detective Troy Dugall, who solved this case, told me he suspects the dismemberment was done by a portable Sawzall blade. I didn't know what that was, since, despite what you may think, I don't hang out at Home Depot, but a quick Google search showed me a small electric saw. This was considered a likely tool since the legs had almost certainly been removed by an electric power blade that moved easily and cleanly the flesh and bone. Rather than being sawed clumsily with a serrated blade like a hacksaw, each leg was whole and nearly complete, meaning that the dismemberment had occurred at the top of the upper thigh. At the groin. They were determined to belong to a white female who had very recently been alive and who wore chipped pink toenail polish. Her time of death was estimated at October 4th or 5th, possibly the very same day on which her still wet legs were found. Unfortunately, an age estimate couldn't really be made based on the legs Alone, the medical examiner settled on a wide range of 15 to 30 years. The woman who had previously been attached to the legs was between 5 foot and 5 foot 3 inches tall, and her death was declared a homicide. Cause of death, of course, could not be determined from the legs alone, but seasoned San Diego county medical examiner Glenn Wagner felt that the totality of the circumstances called for a ruling of homicide. After all, the freshly severed body parts were hidden in a dumpster. A tox screen showed that the leg owner had not died of a drug overdose, and the legs had been carefully cleaned with alcohol, presumably to erase evidence. An STR DNA sample from the legs, which confirmed that the owner was a woman, was entered into both the state and federal unidentified human remains databases. But no one was looking for this woman, so her DNA profile sat in the database for years with no head hits. Investigators did all the typical things that they could do to try to identify the unidentified legs. They checked missing persons bulletins from surrounding agencies. They interviewed residents of the complex, checked to see who had recently moved out, and verified that all residents were accounted for. They worked to determine whether the case was linked to a series of sex worker dismemberments that had been plaguing San Diego for a decade. They checked whether the legs could have belonged to a victim of a serial killer, and so on. The leg finder, Fernando Padilla, was interviewed extensively, although it was pretty apparent that if he had been the one to kill the woman in the dumpster, he would have been unlikely to sound the alarm about finding her legs. A voluntary DNA sample was collected from Fernando in the event they needed it to compare to any DNA that might be located and foreign DNA was found. In 2003, DNA testing was conducted on some of the other evidence collected. A DNA sample that did not match the legs was located on the strap of the green military duffel bag the legs were contained in. Then, in 2006, Connie Milton, a criminalist for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department Regional Crime Lab, swabbed the metal loop and clip and strap of the green military bag. This yielded two separate samples, 301A and 301B. Again, she obtained DNA from these samples. All three consistent samples from the bag, the 2003 sample, and the two 2006 samples were compared to Fernando Padilla's DNA, and he was excluded as the contributor. Meanwhile, after the pathologist had examined the legs and done tox screens and collected blood and tissue samples, the legs were buried in a county cemetery in unceremonious fashion. Over the next few years, A cold case investigator named Pat Gardner, who went on to become a captain at the San Diego County Sheriff's Office, invested hours in the case when a tip came in from a prisoner about a woman who had been killed and dismembered and discarded in various locations around town. A lot of investigative work was done, but nothing came of this. The cases were unrelated.