RICHMOND, B.C. — A couple walking their dogs along the banks of British Columbia’s Fraser River made the latest in what’s become a series of gruesome discoveries of a running shoe with a severed foot encased inside.
It’s the seventh such find inside a shoe along the West Coast from Georgia Strait to the northwestern tip of Washington State since August 2007.
RCMP Constable Annie Linteau confirmed today that remains were inside a left-foot New Balance runner spotted the previous day, but said it would be some time before the B.C. Coroner’s office can confirm if the remains are human.
Ken Johnson and his wife spotted the shoe while walking their dogs yesterday along the Fraser River in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond.
“I flipped it over and it looked suspicious to me, in terms of it seemed to have a sock and New Balance sort of stuck in our head,” he said, recalling previous stories about feet found in running shoes on the B.C. shoreline.
“My first reaction was this was a small size, maybe a woman’s shoe,” said Johnston, who fished the runner out of the river.
“It’s kind of blurry now, but my first reaction, my gut reaction, was it looks like a woman’s shoe, a left shoe.”
One right New Balance runner — the only one belonging to a woman — has been found since the first foot was located on Jedidiah Island in Georgia Strait on Aug. 20, 2007.
The right-foot New Balance runner was located May 22, on Kirkland Island in the Fraser River, not far from the site of yesterday’s discovery.
RCMP said they will try to determine if the two New Balance shoes are linked.
Linteau said police are reluctant to say the remains are human without DNA confirmation because of a previous hoax.
“We want to proceed cautiously until we know what exactly we are dealing with,” Linteau said in a news release.
All the other feet were located at several sites around Georgia Strait between 2007 and Aug. 4, 2008.
That’s also when human remains were found in a runner washed up on the U.S. San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State.
Police have determined that two of the runners — found Feb. 8 on Valdez Island and June 16 off Richmond — are a match.
DNA testing linked one foot to a depressed man who disappeared in 2007 but the other remains have not been identified.
Officials believe none of the feet were cut off.
They say it appears all the remains were “naturally disarticulated” from their bodies, fitting with expert theories that when a human body is submerged in the ocean, main parts like arms, legs, hands, feet and the head usually separate naturally.
The discovery of dismembered feet, all in buoyant sneakers, has been headline-grabbing world news for the last year.
The sixth foot was discovered on a beach on Juan de Fuca Strait, about 50 kilometres west of Port Angeles.
U.S. authorities said the black, size-11 shoe was an Everest brand. The sock found inside the shoe was described as a Levi’s brand tube sock.
The RCMP earlier had set up a task force to investigate their origins and any potential connections.
The first right foot was found on Jedidiah Island in the Strait of Georgia. Another right foot was found inside a man’s size 12 Reebok sneaker on nearby Gabriola Island.
A third was found in the same area, on the east side of Valdez Island, on Feb. 8.
The fourth foot was found May 22 on Kirkland Island in the Fraser River, only a kilometre away from the site in Ladner where the fifth foot was discovered, in a size 10 left shoe.
Dr. John Butt, a forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner in Alberta and Nova Scotia, said earlier this year that finding the feet in the same area is difficult to explain, although that’s not the case with the condition of the feet.
Butt said the foot and leg will separate naturally, in water or in the ground, given enough time.
“When tissue softens to the point that ligaments have no strength, the leg will detach from the foot,” he said.
“There is no other clothing applied to the body as tightly as a shoe, except maybe a belt. A shoe is tight and stays on the foot and the shoe is buoyant.”