The Mystery of the 'Severed' Feet in British Columbia

Above: Map Pinpointing Areas of Feet Discoveries

Since August 20, 2007, 21 detached human feet have been found on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia (B.C.), Canada, and Washington, US. It appears that the discoveries cluster around the summer months, with the most common month to find feet being in August. Although this could be because of tidal patterns, it is more likely that people tend to be on the beach most in the summer to make these discoveries. However, they have still been discovered in the later months of November, December and February.

Below is a detailed list containing all of the discoveries and what is known about them.

1. August 20, 2007, Jedediah Island, B.C.

A young girl visiting from Washington picked up a size 12 white and blue mesh Adidas running shoe and opened the sock to find a man’s right foot inside. This kind of shoe was produced in 2003 and was distributed mainly in India. It is thought that the foot had become disarticulated due to submerged decay, and the remains were identified as those of a missing man who was suffering from depression.

2. August 26, 2007, Gabriola Island, B.C.

A man’s right foot was discovered by a couple. It was waterlogged and appeared to have been taken ashore by an animal, with it also being thought to have been disarticulated due to decay. It is thought to have floated ashore from the south. The shoe was identified as a size 12 white Reebok, which was produced in 2004 and sold worldwide, but primarily in North America. The type has since been discontinued.

3. February 8, 2008, Valdes Island, B.C.

A right foot in a size 11 Nike was found. The remains were identified as a 21-year-old Surrey man who was reported missing four year prior to the discovery, and whose death is considered “not suspicious”, indicating either misadventure or suicide. This type of shoe was sold in Canada and the United States between February 1, 2003, and June 30, 2003.

It has also been confirmed that the right foot found on February 8 on Valdes Island and the left foot found on June 16 on Westham Island belonged to the same man.

4. May 22, 2008, Kirkland Island, B.C.

A woman’s right foot was found in a blue and white New Balance sneaker which was manufactured in 1999. This was the fourth foot to be discovered and it was on an island in the Fraser Delta, between Richmond and Delta, British Columbia. It is thought that the foot had washed down the Fraser River, and had nothing to do with the ones found in the Gulf Islands.

In 2011, the fourth shoe found on Kirkland Island was identified as being part of a pair of blue and white New Balance sneakers that belonged to a woman who jumped from the Pattullo Bridge in New Westminster in April 2004.

5. June 16, 2008, Westham Island, B.C.

A man’s left foot was found by two hikers floating in the water in Delta.

It has been confirmed that the left foot found on Westham Island and the right foot found on February 8 on Valdes Island belonged to the same man.

6. August 1, 2008, Near Pyshit, Washington

A right foot inside a man’s black size 11 shoe was discovered in seaweed by a camper on a beach. The site of the discovery was less than 16 km away from the international border in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Testing confirmed that the foot was human, with police stating that the shoe contained ‘bones and flesh’.

This was the first foot of the series to be found outside of British Columbia, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Clallam County Sheriff’s Department agreeing on August 5 that the foot could have been carried south from Canadian waters.

7. November 11, 2008, Richmond, B.C.

A woman’s left foot was found in a small New Balance running show and was described as a possible woman’s shoe.

A forensic DNA profiling analysis indicated that it was a genetic match to the foot discovered on May 22 on Kirkland Island.

8. October 27, 2009, Richmond, B.C.

A right foot in a size 8½ Nike running show was discovered on a beach in Richmond. The remains were identified as a Vancouver-area man who was reported missing in January 2008.

9. August 27, 2010, Whidbey Island, Washington

What has been described as a woman or child’s right foot was discovered without a shoe or a sock. This foot was determined to have been in the water for two months before discovery.

Detective Ed Wallace of the Island County Sheriff’s Office released a statement saying that the foot would be tested for DNA. However, there was no match found in the national DNA database, and so the identity of this foot is still unknown.

10. December 5, 2010, Tacoma, Washington

Police spokesman Mark Fulghum stated that “a right foot, still inside a boy’s size 6 ‘Ozark Trail’ hiking boot, and likely belonging to a juvenile or small adult” was found on the tidal flats of Tacoma, Washington, located about 40 km south of Seattle and 225 km south of Vancouver.

11. August 30, 2011, False Creek, B.C.

The foot was found in a man’s white and blue size 9 running shoe, floating next to the Plaza of Nations marina, and it was still attached to the lower leg bones. The sex of the foot is unknown, however it is thought that it had disarticulated naturally at the knee due to the water.

12. November 4, 2011, Sasamat Lake, B.C.

A man’s right foot inside a size 12 hiking boot was discovered by a group of campers in a pool of freshwater at Sasamat Lake, near Port Moody.

In January 2012, this foot was identified by the B.C. Coroner’s Service as belonging to Stefan Zahorujko, a local fisherman who went missing in 1987. Police believe that the foot separated naturally from the body and they do not suspect foul play.

13. December 10, 2011, Lake Union, Seattle, Washington

A black plastic bag was discovered under the Ship Canal Bridge that contained human leg bone and a foot.

As of January 2, 2012, the medical examiner had not found a cause of death or identified the body inside the bag.

14. January 26, 2012, Vancouver, B.C.

The remains of “what appears to be human bones inside a boot” were found in the sand along the water line at the dog park near the Maritime Museum at the foot of Arbutus Street in Vancouver.

15. May 6, 2014, Seattle, Washington

A human foot in a white New Balance shoe was found along the shoreline of Centennial Park near the Pier 86 grain terminal. The shoe was described as a New Balance model 622 athletic shoe with white and blue trims, and a men's size 10½, with initial news photographs depicting a left foot. This model of show was first available for sale in April 2008.

16. February 7, 2016, Vancouver Island, B.C.

A foot was found in a sock and running shoe by hikers on Botanical Beach, near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island.

17. February 12, 2016, Vancouver Island, B.C.

A foot washed up near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island. B.C. Coroner’s Service stated that it matched one found there five days earlier.

18. December 8, 2017, Vancouver Island, B.C.

Remains of a leg with a shoe attached washed up near the settlement of Jordan River on Vancouver Island.

19. May 6, 2018, Gabriola Island, B.C.

Shortly after noon, a man walking along the shore encountered a hiking boot, with a human foot inside, wedged in a logjam.

20. September 2018, West Vancouver, B.C.

A foot within a light grey Nike Free RN shoe was discovered on the shore near the 20th Street beach access point in West Vancouver. The shoe was described as being a 9½ sized shoe manufactured between 1 February and 17 April 2017, and it was believed to have been worn by a male wearing a blue sock. The victim is believed to have been under the age of 50.

21. January 1, 2019, Jetty Island, Everett, Washington

A foot was found in a boot, and was later tied via DNA to Antonio Neill who was missing since December 12, 2016.


The Science Explained:
The below explanation has been taken from a National Geographic Article titled 'How Science Solved the Mystery of Feet Washing Ashore in the Pacific Northwest'

It must be understood what happens to a dead body, also referred to as a cadaver, once it's in the water. Once in the water, a cadaver’s first move will be either to float or to sink. A floating object will be carried with the winds and by surface currents, and might soon wash ashore. On the other hand, a sinker might remain in place, or be tugged in a different direction by deeper currents. Additionally, a floating body, exposed to air, will decompose differently from one that sinks, with ramifications for the fate of its feet.

One might assume that a drowned person will sink because their lungs are full of water, and that a cadaver’s air-filled lungs would otherwise act as a flotation device. However, this is not always the case. In 1942, E.R. Donoghue of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology set out to settle the matter in a 1977 article titled “Human Body Buoyancy: A Study of 89 Men”. The 98 men in question were “healthy U.S. Navy men in the 20-to-40-year age group”. Each was suspended underwater and weighed both with his lungs full of air, and after expelling as much air as possible. With their lungs fully inflated with air, all the men floated. However, once they had emptied their lungs (as would be the case with a dead body) most of the men sank in freshwater, with only 7% floating. Despite this,Donoghue estimated that in seawater, people are more buoyant, with 69% of the Navy men floating if they were dead and naked in the ocean. With a little added weight however, such as heavy clothing or water in the lungs, a body could sink. To conclude, this data suggests that cadavers are overall more likely to sink than to float, and people who drown are the most likely to sink.

Once a body sinks, it tends to go straight to the bottom. Sometimes, an underwater cadaver will eventually bloat, just like a body on land, causing it to bob to the surface. This may not always happen though, states Yazedjian, the investigator from the Coroners Service. In a deep lake or ocean, it may never come back up. Not only does the cold inhibit decay in deep waters, but the greater water pressure there also prevents any gases from expanding and causing bodies to float. Instead, other microbial processes take over and convert a sunken body’s tissues to adipocere (a kind of waxy, soap-like tissue). Adipocere can persist for years, even centuries, in a low-oxygen environment.

Yazedjian states that this is exactly what she saw on the feet she examined from the Salish sea. They were covered in adipocere, suggesting that the cadavers sank and remained underwater as they decomposed. This could explain where the remains of the bodies are.

But why didn’t the feet stay down with the bodies?

To understand how the feet emerged and not the bodies, we need to know how a human body might decompose underwater, and whether its feet are prone to pop off and float away. In the summer of 2007, forensic scientist Gail Anderson of Simon Fraser University was conducting a study for the Canadian Police Research Centre to understand how quickly a homicide victim would decompose in the ocean. Due to ethics, she was clearly precluded from using a human body and so she used a dead pig instead because they are roughly comparable in size and are quite similar biologically. Anderson also conducted her study in the Salish Sea, not far from where the third human foot would be found 6 months later. Her team dropped the dead pig into the water, and it promptly sank 308ft to the seafloor. The pig carcass was quickly eaten by a large and unruly mob of shrimp, lobsters, and Dungeness crabs, starting with the “expected areas, the anus region and the facial orifices”, as reported by Anderson. Since then, Anderson has dropped more pigs even deeper in the Strait of Georgia, a main channel of the Salish Sea, and found that in some cases scavengers can skeletonize a carcass in less than four days.

It turns out that underwater scavengers like crustaceans will work around bones and other tough obstacles, preferring to pick apart softer tissues. Unlike the bony ball-and-socket joints that join our legs to our hips, our ankles are made up mostly of soft stuff such as ligaments and other connective tissue. So it follows that a sunken, shoe-wearing cadaver in the Salish Sea is likely to be chewed apart by scavengers, and to have its feet disarticulated from the rest of the body in a short amount of time.

Yazedjian confirms this theory by stating that all of the Salish Sea feet appeared to have been separated from their bodies by natural processes, like scavenging and decomposition. The term ‘severed feet’ has been argued to be an incorrect description of the feet found, due to the connotation that severed means someone cut them off, with the Coroners Service having never found cut marks on any of the bones to suggest this.

Additionally, sneakers made in the last decade or so would almost certainly float. Not only have gas-filled pockets become common in sneaker soles (and they are visible in some sneakers found in the Salish Sea), but around this time, the foams used in sneaker soles started to be noticeably lighter, with more air mixed in. This essentially means that they have become buoyant.

Why aren’t beaches everywhere littered with detached feet?

Parker MacCready, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle built a three-dimensional computer simulation of the coastal ocean of the Pacific Northwest, including the Salish Sea. He states that “it’s all realistic, in the sense that it has realistic tides, winds, rivers, and ocean conditions”. The simulation is called LiveOcean, and contains brightly coloured water sloshes around a map according to that day’s weather and tides. MacCready uses the model to predict where an oil spill would travel over the course of three days. Black blobs appeared near Seattle and Tacoma, simulating the hypothetical oil spill, and they immediately started flowing north into Puget Sound, sailing on rainbow-coloured swirls that depict moving waters of various salinities (concentrations of salts). The blobs shortly broke apart into thin streamers and doubts, splitting and sloshing in every direction as tides and currents pushed them around. LiveOcean gave an answer as to why so many feet have washed up in British Columbia the most, with the Salish Sea having the perfect storm of properties.

Firstly, it’s an unusually large and complex body of inland water, which acts as a trap. As MacCready’s model shows, once something goes in the water, it might wash ashore in plenty of places, but it is still within the Salish Sea. Secondly, the prevailing winds are westerlies, meaning they bring stuff in from the ocean, rather than pushing it out to sea. Finally, although MacCready’s model does not show this, he points out that many people wear sneakers at the beach in the Pacific Northwest, with many choosing to hike among the slippery rocks.

Who do the feet belong to?

The first place investigators looked was missing person reports. The Coroners Service has now compared DNA from each foot to a database of more than 500 missing people in British Columbia, plus Canada’s new National Missing Persons DNA Program which was launched in 2018. Using DNA, the team linked nine of the feet to seven missing people, with the Coroners Service in British Columbia reporting that none of the Canadian cases so far have been found to result from homicide. In some cases, it became clear that the person had died by accident or suicide. As for those who vanished without witnesses, it is nearly impossible to glean a cause of death from a foot alone. For the discoveries that have not been able to be identified with DNA, authorities can only guess at the gender and age by looking at the size of the foot and the type of shoe. Since both women and younger men tend to wear men’s running shoes, most feet, unless they have toenail polish on them, are classified as either juvenile or male.


Other Theories:
An early theory posed by some people was that these were the remains of people who had been killed in the tsunami of 2004. However, none of the shoes at the time had been identified as models that had been made after 2004, and the fact that three out of the current nine feet had been identified as local people and not tsunami victims weakened this theory. During the investigations, there were also tipsters contacting the authorities with theories such as containers full of migrants sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

Other people suggested that it could be because of the increasing bulk of athletic shoes. As sneakers are getting bigger and puffer, they become more buoyant and therefore more remains float long enough to wash up on the beaches. However, despite the fact that this can explain the buoyancy, it does not explain why not as many feet were found in the 1990s, with big sneakers existing then too.

Overall, it could be selection bias. People are more likely to look for feet, or report them, now that the feet have been part of a phenomenon. This also refers to the press being more likely to report on the discoveries, therefore inciting a worldwide mystery. It is worth noting that there are plenty of other body parts that wash up on beaches across the world but these are not reported on as much and therefore have not formed part of a larger phenomenon.

Finally, although ruled out by authorities in December 2017 with the B.C. Coroners Service in Canada stating that there had been no foul play, there are many theories of a serial killer being afoot. Criminal lawyer and crime author Michael Slade has announced his thoughts on a possible serial killer, stating that there is the possibility “someone is underneath the radar”. Despite the police stating that there is no foul play, they have also guessed that finding two feet is a “million to one odds”, hinting at the unusualness of this unsolved mystery.


Pop-Culture References:
This global phenomenon has captured the attention of pop-culture, with many sources of media evolving from this mystery.

Below are some examples if you wish to explore more:

• In the Dregs (2011) novel, the Norwegian award-winning author of Jorn Lier Horst gives a fictional explanation for the foot findings.
• The 2020 novel titled ‘Crooked River’ by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child begins with severed feet found on a beach inspired by this event.
• The episode titled ‘The Feet on the Beach’ of the American crime-procedural comedy-drama Bones aired on April 7, 2011, begins with eight pairs of dismembered feet being discovered on the U.S. Canada border.
• A popular podcast titled ‘Stuff You Should Know’ released an episode about the disembodied feet, specifically in British Columbia, on June 14, 2016.