Strange things are afoot in the Pacific Northwest.
Actually, nine feet.
With the discovery last week of a human foot on a beach in Washington state — the ninth found on the Pacific Northwest coast in three years — the mystery of the missing feet has deepened.
"The main question is: Where do they come from?" said Dr. John Butt, a forensic pathologist who led the team that identified all 229 victims of the 1998 Swissair Flight 111 crash off Nova Scotia.
"And I don’t mean [do they] come from humans," Butt said. "I mean, where do they come from?"
To that question, there are no answers, only theories. Lots of them.
Could they be victims of a major air disaster or sunken freighter? No; sonar and satellite would account for that. Could they be stowaways who didn’t survive the voyage, tossed or jumped overboard? Suicides, or victims of foul play, maybe a serial killer? Hapless boaters who hit bad weather, or were possibly booze-cruising and fell overboard?
"The theories that were related to high-profile crashes or boats or missing kayakers — we quickly ruled those out," said Jeff Dolan, director of provincial operations at the British Columbia Coroner’s Office. "We were reasonably confident that, at the outset, at least one foot would be ID’d that way. But they all turned out to be negative."
The first foot washed up on Aug. 20, 2007, off Canada’s Jedediah Island. It was a right male foot in a size-12 white-and-blue-mesh running shoe.
Six days later, up bobbed another size-12 right male foot, this one sporting a white Reebok, found 40 miles away on a small island off Canada’s Strait of Georgia. In February 2008, another right male foot surfaced, this one in a size-11 Nike, on a neighboring island.
In May, a size-7 female foot, wearing a blue-and-white New Balance sneaker, was discovered on Canada’s Kirkland Island, on the other side of the Strait of Georgia; her left one popped up six months later in nearby Richmond. Another male foot, discovered that June, would also be matched — this one to February’s size-11 Nike.
"The first few were so close together, even the investigators were in disbelief," Dolan said.
None of the bodies, or matching body parts, have been found; once dead in the water, the body begins decomposing, sped along by hungry marine life. The hands and feet naturally begin to separate from the joints. Once the body is stripped of flesh and muscle, the bones sink. It’s the sneakers — lightweight, buoyant, airtight — that preserved these feet and allow for DNA testing.
"This brings up a myriad of questions," Dr. Butt said. "Like, are there bodies around? The answer is yes. There have to be."
Nine feet, all except the most recently discovered in sneakers and naturally detached, all washing up in a small area over a short time — it makes for the creepiest happenings in the Pacific Northwest since "The X-Files."
Dr. Butt told The Post that, despite the many high-profile cases he’s familiar with, this one is uniquely macabre. "This is very rare," said coroner Dolan. "We have nothing to suggest these cases are suspicious, but we don’t want to discount that they could be related."
The foot that just washed up two weeks ago is thought to belong to a female or a juvenile but was not encased in protective footwear and was so decomposed that DNA tests — which can establish only gender, not age or ethnicity — may be inconclusive. In the case of the other eight, authorities have traced each sneaker’s make back to its production date, which can at least provide a cutoff date for how long the body may have been in the water.
"We have very few pieces to tell us why this has occurred," said Sheriff Bill Cumming of Canada’s San Juan County, home of one of the missing feet. (The best piece of evidence so far: The foot was wearing an argyle sock probably made in England.) "We have people who fall off boats — fishermen, people who go drunken boating, people who go off in bad weather, people who jump off Deception Pass" — a popular Canadian suicide spot — "three or four times a year."
So far, the owners of three of the nine feet have been identified, though the names have not been released to the press: the young woman who formerly owned the matching pair, and the young man to whom the first foot belonged. He was identified through the shoe.
"His pair was from India, which was fairly unique," Dolan said. "We did a media fan-out, and the mother remembered buying that shoe with her son in India." It was determined that he committed suicide; of the other identified body, authorities will say only that her demise was not suspicious.
That the identities of the other victims remains unknown is, to investigators, saddening. Both Canada and the United States have national missing-persons databases, and once a name is entered, authorities obtain the missing person’s DNA from a toothbrush or other personal item. That none of these feet has been a match leads investigators to conclude that no one in the United States or Canada has reported them missing. That they are wearing expensive athletic shoes also discounts the theory that they’re vagrants.
"There’s only so much you can do," said Detective Sgt. Lyman Moores of Port Angeles, Wash., home of foot No. 6. "We developed a DNA profile and put it in the system."
He, like everyone familiar with this case, has his theories: The bodies could be Asian, carried by the Japanese current, which feeds into the mouth of the Pacific Northwest. "We get Japanese glass balls that have been out there for 60 years," he said. "They could be victims of the [2004] tsunami. There’s a lot of human smuggling and drug smuggling that goes on at the Canadian border. There’s boating accidents, plane accidents. Or are they the victims of crimes?"
"The water is always a good place to dispose of bodies; there’s no question about that," said pathologist Butt, who theorizes that all victims met their own specific ends, probably accidental.
"I don’t think there’s any indication that the feet have a common footing, so to speak," he said.
- Maureen Callahan, New York Post
Source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/sea_full_of_lost_soles_pfnvS46RwY6CkG6MG9FaSO/0
