WHEN a 12-year-old girl on a boating trip with her family unlaced a discarded training shoe, revealing the remains of a human foot, it was a macabre, yet apparently isolated discovery.
Ten months on, and with the discovery of five more feet, confounded Royal Canadian Mounted Police are lost for answers, leaving the people of British Columbia to conjure up theories grim and grandiose.
On Wednesday, a beachcomber found the six
th foot to have floated ashore around the Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada, and the second in the space of a week.
Despite DNA testing, none of the remains have been identified, nor has a cause of death been determined. Police have refused to speculate, leaving the local media to suggest answers.
Communities around the mouth of Fraser River have heard them all: from the fanciful – the murderous foot fetishist; the victims of a vengeful Hell's Angels gang; the mortician with an overdeveloped sense of humour – to the faintly plausible – Alaskan fishermen who perished at sea; victims of a people-smuggling attempt gone wrong; bodies from the Asian tsunami of 2004; the remains of four men still missing following a plane crash three years ago.
Annie Linteau, a spokeswoman for the RCMP, said: "It could be missing fishermen. It could be the remains of people who may have died in a plane crash. We have to investigate all theories."
Since the first was found last August on Jedediah Island, the feet have all been washed up on the shorelines of the Strait of Georgia, which lies to the south and west of Vancouver. All were encased in trainers, and five out of the six were right feet.
Keen to avert fears of a serial killer, police have stressed the first five feet do not appear to have been severed, ruling out foul play.
But Sandra Malone, owner of a trailer park on Vancouver Island, saw the sixth foot, contained in a size-ten black Adidas trainer. The leg bone, Ms Malone recalled, appeared to have been "cut on a straight line" 3-4in above the ankle. "It looked like foul play. That's the first thing that came into my mind," she added.
Initially, it was thought the feet could have drifted on ocean currents for more than 1,500 miles, but as the number of feet increased, experts took stock.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a Seattle-based oceanographer who specialises in how objects float on the ocean, rejected the notion that feet belonged to the tsunami dead, claiming the distance was simply too great.
And Dr Simon Boxall, an oceanographer from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, said: "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.
"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."
WHAT NEXT?
POLICE may seek the help of Dr Gail Anderson, an expert in forensic taphonomy, in determining how the feet came to be detached.
At present, it is understood the first four feet found showed signs of disarticulation, a process by which a body part has been amputated without cutting bone.
The full article contains 566 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
