Foot mystery baffles Mounties

[Detomah]

When two unrelated human feet washed up on the beaches of two small islands north of Vancouver in six days last August, a spokesman for the Mounties said the odds of it happening were a million to one. This week the number of feet found rose to six.

What's going on? Police in British Columbia are confounded, saying they have never seen a case like it.

The feet have all been recovered along the shorelines in the Strait of Georgia, which lies to the south and west of Vancouver.

They were all encased in trainers, and five out of the six are right feet. Police say it is not yet clear if a crime had been committed. They said they had found no evidence that the feet had been severed.

DNA has been collected from the first feet, but police say that there has been no match to anyone on their missing persons database.

The unusual nature of the case has prompted much speculation by amateurs about a possible murder mystery, links to organised crime or to the 2004 Asian tsunami.

Local origin

Experts have come up with different theories as to how far the feet could have travelled on ocean currents. There was initial speculation that they could have drifted more than 1,500 miles.

However, as the number of discovered feet goes up, experts have scaled down the distance they believe the feet have drifted.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle-based oceanographer who specialises in how things float on the ocean's currents has dismissed the idea that they could have come from the Asian tsunami, because the distance is just too vast.

He was quoted by AP suggesting that the feet were a result of a possible accident along the Fraser River, and that they could have washed down and spread out along the Strait of Georgia.

Dr Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton in the UK, agrees that the feet are likely to have originated locally.

Why feet?

"The fact that they are being found repeatedly along the same stretch means they have to have come from roughly the same source, and that source is likely to be local," he told the BBC News website.

He added that because of the way objects are dispersed by ocean currents, it is unlikely that six feet that originated hundreds of miles away could have ended up in one relatively small area.

"If, for example, they had travelled from as far away as Hawaii, there would have to have been thousands in the first place for six to turn up in one area," he said.

In his view, it's a coincidence that most of the feet are right feet, as there is no reason why right and left feet should float in different ways.

And why is it that just feet have been found?

Mr Ebbesmeyer was quoted in the Vancouver Sun as saying that when bodies decompose, they break into 10 pieces, two arms, two legs, two feet, two hands, the head and the torso. This raises questions as to what has happened to the rest of the bodies.

Experts say that it's all to do with the running shoes. These would have helped keep the decomposing feet intact, and protect them from fish. The soles would also have helped them float, allowing them to be easily swept away from the body.

Plane crash

Police have said it is possible the feet come from the passengers aboard a small plane which crashed into the water in the region several years ago - their bodies were never recovered.

The Coroners Service of British Columbia has investigated a potential link. To date, it has failed to match DNA samples collected from members of the crash victims' families with DNA obtained from some of the mystery feet.

Dr Joseph Finley, a physical scientist and retired special agent with the FBI, told Canada's National Post newspaper that depending on the race of the victims, the feet might belong to stowaways who hid on commercial ships heading for Alaska.

Dr Boxall acknowledges that forensic scientists working to recover DNA profiles from feet could have an extremely difficult task on their hands.

Even if the remains are identified, scientists may not be able to determine how and when the victims died.

"Seawater can be horrendous," he says. "It can corrode very quickly or, bizarrely, it can preserve things quite well - it depends on how much biological activity there is at the time."

Dr Gail Anderson, a specialist in decomposition at the Simon Fraser University was quoted in the New Scientist as saying that we "know next to nothing about what happens to bodies under water."

She added that feet normally come apart from legs in water, adding that flesh immersed in water turns into adipocere tissue, a soap-like substance, that no microbes or scavengers such as crabs will eat.

It is likely the case will remain a mystery for some time. As one investigator put it this week, this is not CSI - a reference to popular fictional TV show in which challenging forensic cases are solved in no time.

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