© CC BY/D. Sharon Pruitt/Flickr
Little Rock - There's nothing illegal about a little foot fetish, but police in Conway, Arkansas, are looking for a toe-sucking man they said has crossed the line into assault.
Police have received two complaints in the past week about a man who seems desperate to suck women's toes - whether they want him to or not.
"This is on the police department's radar, and they are concerned," said LaTresha Woodruff, police spokeswoman in Conway, about 30 miles from Little Rock. "They are taking information and trying to figure out who is doing it ... we want him off the streets."
Last Saturday, Ruth Harris, an 83-year-old Conway woman, told police that she was sitting in a chair in front of her apartment.
A man approached her and said he liked her feet. According to a police report, the man took off one of her shoes and began sucking on her toe.
"The man then asked if he could kiss her and she had told him no and told him he was crazy," the report stated.
The man left quickly after people walked into the apartment complex's courtyard.
On Tuesday, police received another call from a woman who said that on Saturday she was shopping at a local department store when she noticed a man staring at her.
He approached her and "told her he loved her toes, and they were so long and beautiful," the report said.
The man then told the woman that he had a foot fetish and that "her toes are so long and succulent" and he wanted to suck them. When the woman's cell phone rang, the man retreated.
He then returned and chatted with her for a brief moment. She told police that the man was wearing flip flops, a T-shirt, and blue jeans. She said the man had "messed up toes."
The woman did not report the incident until she read about the first woman's complaint in the local newspaper.
'Toe Suck Fairy'
It is not the first time that Conway has dealt with this sort of complaint. In the 1990s, a man who was known as the "Toe Suck Fairy" kept Arkansans captivated with his foot fondling antics in Conway and in Little Rock.
Some two decades later, police have not ruled out the possibility that it could be the same man, but have not identified a suspect.
The town's run-in with its first toe-sucking man eventually escalated to threatened violence.
The 1990s assailant, Michael Robert Wyatt, pretended to be a podiatrist in order to fondle and suck a Conway woman's toes at a clothing store. He received probation, a fine and court-ordered therapy. But his probation was revoked after he was arrested in another town on similar charges.
In 1991, he was convicted of making threats for telling a convenience store clerk that he wanted to cut off her feet and suck her toes while she bled to death.
Wyatt was sentenced to four years in state prison. He served just more than one year in prison, according to Conway police.
He was arrested again in 1999 in northwest Arkansas. In that instance, a woman reported that a man, claiming to be a massage therapist, complimented her feet in a Wal-Mart store. He then asked if she wanted them amputated and showed her pictures of women with no feet.
Source: Reuters
...of the notorious toenail bandit.
In the 1980s, a guy preyed on female students at UCLA. He would spot a potential target, wearing some kind of open-toed footwear, who was engrossed in studying at a library table. He would crawl under the table and apply polish to her toenails.
He favored shades like sparkly turquoise or goth dark purple -- not normal reds or pinks.
He was so skilled at it that he was never caught in the act. The student wouldn't notice until she got up from the table and glanced down at her feet, by which time the perpetrator would be long gone.
(I could never understand that. Regardless of one's powers of concentration, wouldn't a person notice the acetone smell?)
As I recall, the guy simply stopped doing it. The cops never figured out his identity.