Posted on 06/08/2008 12:53:16 PM PDT by Renfield
ANCOUVER — Mike Ladislaus knew something was wrong even before he felt the awful weight of the sneaker in his hand.
At this time of year, the Fraser River is swollen and running fast. Its grey-green waters leave all manner of detritus, collected throughout a 1,400-kilometre journey from the headwaters to the shores of Kirkland Island.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Ladislaus was patrolling the dikes on the island with his dog, Sophie. It's a familiar routine and Sophie is trained to ignore the debris as she sniffs out beavers that might harm the protective banks on this sliver of farmland near the mouth of the Fraser.
“She kept looking at this running shoe which was upside down. She looked at me, then the running shoe, three times. I said, ‘There is something up,'” Mr. Ladislaus recalled.
“So I went over and picked it up and I knew right away – I could feel the weight.” Inside, he found a foot. A woman's size 71/2 or 8, he figures. “It was pretty horrifying.”
It is the fourth time in 10 months that a human foot has been found in a relatively small section of British Columbia's vast coastline. All have been right feet, encased in sneakers.
Mr. Ladislaus, the caretaker of tiny Gunn and Kirkland Islands, has pulled bodies out of the water before – even those of friends who drowned – but this orphaned foot haunts him.
“You know what happened to them. But to find a body part – this is someone's loved one. Their family doesn't know what happened to them. That's the part that bugs me.”
So far police have no explanation. They are searching for DNA matches among the province's more than 2,300 missing persons.
Because there is no evidence that the feet have been severed, the working theory is that the cases involve four people whose bodies have been left in the water long enough to break apart naturally.
The Fraser River empties into the Strait of Georgia near the Gulf Islands, where the other three feet have been discovered. All could have washed down from the Fraser. Or the first three could have drifted on ocean currents – a man who drowned off Alaska's fishing grounds was found 10 months later in Washington State waters.
If the four cases are connected or if they amount to a ghastly coincidence, police are offering no hints.
The first foot was found last August by a girl playing on a remote beach on Jedidiah Island. Curious, she picked up the size 12 white sneaker and undid the laces to inspect the contents.
A week later, a woman hiking on nearby Gabriola Island made a similar find. Another size 12 sneaker, this one was by the trunk of a tree, not far from a tidal cove. It had been ignored by passersby for some time.
Last February, on Valdes Island just south of Gabriola, another shoe was discovered, this one believed to be size 101/2.
Four right feet. What are the odds?
“It's a pretty small chance that would happen randomly,” said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle-based oceanographer who specializes in what floats on the oceans' currents. He is, essentially, a dean of beachcombing.
“It's not unusual to find a foot or an arm or a head washed up on a beach,” he noted. Pulled by currents, assaulted by scavenging sea life, human bodies left in water tend to come apart – to disarticulate – in 10 parts. A head, a torso, arms, legs, hands and feet. A foot encased in a running shoe is well-protected from scavengers and is likely to float. ‘But why just right feet?' he wonders.
“We are likely dealing with something involving human intervention,” he said. “An accident is probably on the remote side. It suggests foul play.”
RCMP investigators are treating the finds as suspicious and aren't saying much. With the Kirkland Island discovery, the cases have all been consolidated by the major crimes division in Vancouver, in conjunction with the coroner's office.
B.C. chief coroner Terry Smith played down the suggestion of foul play.
“Based on what we know right now, this is a rather weird coincidence,” he said. “There is no indication that these are severed feet, no indication they have been forcibly removed.”
The coroner's office is plotting the finds on a map to try to determine what currents and tides might have delivered the feet to the various shores.
Mr. Smith suggests there are plenty of reasonable explanations: people lost in boating or airplane accidents, swimmers who drowned. But in his seven-plus years as chief coroner, he acknowledges, he's never dealt with anything like this.
“It sure is a baffling one,” he said.
With no matches yet on the DNA samples obtained from the first three feet, experts at the Centre for Forensic Research at Simon Fraser University are seeking a breakthrough.
The state-of-the-art lab opened just 18 months ago. Two of the feet have been sent to biological anthropologist Mark Skinner, who is trying to work up a profile on age, height and gender.
If it comes to Dr. Skinner's lab, there's usually not much left to work with. Since it opened, 80 cases have been sent to the lab for identification. The majority are only body parts. One-quarter have been found in or near the water. Most involve homicides.
“We are a home for lost causes,” Dr. Skinner said. He has helped identify people based on as little as an ingrown toenail, and predicts these four cases will be cracked eventually.
Dr. Skinner is told almost nothing when he receives a case – the police don't want to lead him to conclusions by offering their theories. All he gets is a body bag, delivered through an unmarked loading bay into a secure lab. The human remains he usually sees are neither fresh corpses nor skeletons, but something in between.
“The potential for there being evidence beneath that horrible, decomposing soft tissue is strong,” he said.
“We remove the soft tissue so we can look at the bones. It's time-consuming and it's not a pleasant job but it's very useful. I believe, not in every case but in many cases, we are going to see things we thought we were not going to see.”
On the day Dr. Skinner provided a tour of the secure lab, his private lab is off-limits. He is in the process of slowly boiling the flesh off human remains so that he can probe the bones underneath. He'll measure them and look for the fusing of bones that provide age markers. If he's lucky there will be unique characteristics – like that ingrown toenail – that can help make an identification.
Typically, the bones are held together by flesh that's turned to adipocere, also known as grave wax. It's the product of a natural chemical reaction that changes muscle and fat into a hard, white substance that looks like soap.
Its presence doesn't help much with dating the remains; it can form in as little as three weeks or it can take years.
That's where Gail Anderson, of SFU's school of criminology, can help. She's a world leader in the field of forensic entomology, essentially looking for crime-scene clues in the way things eat other things.
In her lab, around the corner from Dr. Skinner, she reaches without hesitation into a cage filled with blow flies she uses for her research. Observing the development of such insects on human cadavers can pinpoint the time of death.
The room smells strongly of beef liver. Her work, like Dr. Skinner's, is not for the squeamish.
She has tested what happens to bodies in the water, sinking pig carcasses at different depths to record what happens. In her first experiment, at 94 metres below the surface, the pig was ripped in half by a sixgill shark, a deep-sea inhabitant of B.C.'s coastal waters, within a day. In a matter of weeks, crab, shrimp and lobster had stripped the pig's remains to a skeleton.
Dr. Anderson's research leads her to conclude that a foot, protected by a sneaker, could easily turn up on its own. But mapping where it came from is far trickier.
“The problem with the ocean is, it's so variable. Depth is going to affect it, temperature, tides,” she said. “It's very difficult to look at something like this and say, ‘It came from here; this is the scenario,' like they do on television. We can't do that.”
The experts involved in the investigation are mindful that this is more than just a curious mystery. For every one of those missing-persons case files, there are families hoping for answers.
Sally Feast is one of them. “It's a strange club you don't want to belong to,” she said.
She's convinced one of the feet might belong to her brother Arnie Feast, the pilot of a float plane carrying four passengers that disappeared in the fog off Quadra Island three years ago. One body was recovered, but when volunteers recovered the plane wreckage, there was no sign of the rest of the men who disappeared.
“Not a day goes by that I don't think about it,” she said. “It's like living with cancer.”
She met with the coroner's office earlier this year, after the third foot turned up, asking them to test for a DNA match. She brought with her eight items she had kept. “I am a packrat. I took all of Arnie's stuff and put it in the attic, thinking, ‘you never know,'” she said. A toothbrush yielded the sample, but she's still waiting to hear back.
She doesn't know how she'll respond if she does get the call that they have identified her brother. But she needs to know.
“All we want is to know, where are they?”
The chances of finding just the right foot four different times is rather remote.
6.25%
“It’s not unusual to find a foot or an arm or a head washed up on a beach,” he noted.
Scratch Beachcombing off my list of vacation activities.
Thanks, interesting story.
I heard a noise and looked behind me at a startling sight.... a ghostly white women hopping towards me on one leg. "Its my ankle and ants!" she quipped.
I blacked out.
>>>>>>>>Mr. Smith suggests there are plenty of reasonable explanations: people lost in boating or airplane accidents, swimmers who drowned.
Yeah, that’s it. All swimmers I know, swim with sneakers on.
Actually it is quite a bit worse than that.
There were 8 feet to begin with.
The possibilities aren’t limited to only a left or a right being found.
Hey! That’s the same percentage of African-American genetic material found in a current Presidential candidate. Isn’t that odd?
Just sayin’.
I remember a story from somewhere that a shipment of shoes was lost overboard from a shipping container. All of the left shoes ended up one place, and the right shoes ended up at another. The slight difference in shoe shape made them ride the currents differently.
Well, they couldn’t be bad dancers, ‘cause they have two LEFT feet.
Actually, the chances of finding four of the same foot are double that, 12.5%.
I hope you become haunted by the ghost of Bennett Cerf....
Ill never get published at this rate.
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