Some information in this piece that was new to me: the possibility that the feet were washed down the Fraser River (increasing, I would think, the likelihood of foul play), and the impression from the person who recovered the fourth foot that it was a woman's.
BIZARRE CASE IN B.C.
Mystery feet: Crime or coincidence?
JUSTINE HUNTER
June 7, 2008
VANCOUVER -- 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 7½or 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 10½.
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.
Testing for clues
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."
'Where are they?'
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?"
MISSING IN B.C.
On Feb. 28, 2005, pilot Arnie Feast and his passengers Dave Stevens, Fabian Bedard and brothers Doug and Trevor Decock took off in a DeHavilland Beaver float plane from Campbell River on Vancouver Island.
The plane never arrived at its destinations, two logging camps. It went down off Quadra Island, but only Mr. Stevens's body was recovered. When volunteers brought up the wreckage, the seatbelts were undone.
Four names were added to B.C.'s list of missing persons.
This week, the number of missing-persons cases totals 2,371. Of those, 515 are women.
The cases date back to the mid-1950s and many may be dormant, but each is still classed as "SUI" - still under investigation - until it is definitively concluded.
Increasingly, families are being asked to provide DNA samples to help identify human remains. An unknown number of those missing-persons files now include DNA samples.
Justine Hunter
INSIDE THE LAB
We have passed through five secure doors to reach this autopsy room, including one antechamber designed for donning biohazard suits. When it's complete, this Burnaby lab will be the only one of its kind in Canada.
Even the backs of the light switches are sealed to keep every microbe contained. Welcome to the Centre for Forensic Research's biological containment field, safety level 3. In a biological crisis, this would be the hot zone.
Biological anthropologist Mark Skinner calls it the wet room. He strides over to a steel door and completes an iris scan, the final level of security to open the cooler. Today there is no body inside, only a distressingly small bag containing some remains.
Before that bag will leave the room, it will exit through yet another chamber where it will be bathed in ultraviolet light, ensuring no exotic germs can escape on the outside of the bag.
Dr. Skinner's lab at Simon Fraser University specializes in untangling mysteries in the fragments of human lives. In addition to doing university research, it analyzes human body parts referred by police, often involving homicide.
The facility opened 18 months ago and is still unfinished. Dr. Skinner figures it will take another $5-million to complete.
He's waiting for a special gurney with a built-in vacuum that filters contaminated air. He's also hoping to get a new scanner that will do 3-D images, so remains could be returned to a family, for example, while researchers continue to examine the copy.
But the experts at the lab already are offering services to police that are available in few jurisdictions in North America. There are forensic experts here who can extract usable DNA from material thousands of years old - so they are getting cold cases reaching back to the 1960s for analysis.
One case involves an individual who died in the 1980s. The body wasn't found until the next decade and hasn't been identified. Researchers have recovered DNA from the saliva found on the seal of an envelope that contained a suicide note - they will try to match it to the body they have to see whether they can ID the remains.
"We think there are many cold cases we can help solve," Dr. Skinner said.
Justine Hunter
A mystery in running shoes
Four separate disembodied right feet, inside of running shoes, have washed up on islands off the southwest coast of British Columbia in the past ten months. The RCMP says it does not suspect foul play.
* The first right foot in a sneaker washed ashore Aug. 20, 2007 on Jedediah Island. A size 12.
* The second right foot, in a size 12 sneaker, washed ashore one week after the first, on Gabriola Island. Another size 12.
* The third right foot in a sneaker washed ashore Feb. 8, on the east side of Valdes Island. A size 10½ this time.
* The latest right foot in a sneaker washed ashore May 22 on Kirkland Island near the mouth of the Fraser River in Richmond. Most likely a woman's, size 7½ or 8.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ ... y/National
