On September 11, 2020, in a Ljubljana courtroom, a 22-year-old woman heard her sentence with her left hand covered by a blanket.
It wasn’t a gesture of modesty. That hand had been separated from her body.
It all began in 2018. Julija Adlesic signed contracts with five different insurance companies. If she became permanently disabled, she could collect more than a million euros: roughly half as a lump sum and the rest in monthly installments.
At the beginning of 2019, at her partner’s house in Slovenia’s capital, she cut off her left hand above the wrist with a circular saw. At the hospital, she said she had injured herself while cutting branches from a tree.
But something was missing. According to the authorities, the hand hadn’t come with her. They had left it at home. Without the hand, no one could reattach it, and the disability would be permanent.
The police found it in time. Surgeons reattached it.
One small detail sealed it. According to the prosecution, days before the accident, her boyfriend had searched online for how artificial hands work. For the prosecutors, that search showed that nothing had been accidental.
She denied it until the end. In court, she said: “Nobody wants to be disabled. My youth has been destroyed. I lost my hand at 20. Only I know how it happened”.
The court sentenced her to two years in prison. Her boyfriend received three.
She tried to lose a hand to make a fortune. She ended up without the fortune, and her hand was back where it belonged.
