In an Answerless Canadian Inquiry, 3 Bodyless Feet
A beach on Gabriola Island, one of three British Columbia spots where severed right feet have washed ashore in recent months.
Published: March 4, 2008
GABRIOLA ISLAND, British Columbia — Should a fourth human foot float ashore here in the evergreen Gulf Islands off the west coast of Canada, the person who finds it would no doubt want to know the answers to three questions.
Gabriola Island has become a popular vacation destination.
Is it a right foot?
Is it wearing a running shoe?
Is the shoe a size 12?
After all, for the first three feet that surfaced on the rocky coastlines of three separate islands in the Strait of Georgia over the last six months, the answer has been yes in nearly every case. The only uncertainty is what size shoe No. 3 was wearing when it was spotted by a boater on the beach of remote Valdez Island on Feb. 8. The coroner’s office, facing a bit of a news media blitz, has yet to say.
“This is the first incident in recent memory where we’ve had three such similar sets of remains come to our attention in a certain time frame and a certain geographic area,” said Jeff Dolan, assistant deputy chief coroner for the British Columbia Coroner’s Office.
Even with DNA samples obtained from Nos. 1 and 2, and with constant calls from residents suggesting whom the feet might have helped propel in the past, no identifications have been made and no causes of death determined. Nor has anyone reported finding any left feet.
“They might be aggregated somewhere else,” said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a former professor of oceanography at the University of Washington who has made a career of tracking the routes of floating objects, including (empty) sneakers spilled from cargo ships. Mr. Ebbesmeyer said the opposite shapes of left and right shoes could make them respond differently to currents.
What is not surprising, he said, is that the feet made it ashore.
“Running shoes are quite buoyant,” said Mr. Ebbesmeyer, who is completing a book, “The Floating World,” to be published by HarperCollins. “They would tend to encase a foot and keep it floating. A body comes apart naturally; it’s called disarticulation. The head usually comes off first. The parts of the body that are protected will last the longest. The shoe usually floats soles up, so that might prevent the seabirds from pecking at it.”
The first foot was found Aug. 20 on Jedediah Island by a 12-year-old girl from Washington State who was boating with her family. The second turned up Aug. 26, here on Gabriola. The successive findings made for strange news, but the tides yielded nothing more, and attention eventually waned. Then No. 3 appeared on Valdez.
Coroners and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which had already been investigating, ratcheted things up at that point. Still, they have no strong leads, officials say, and many details about No. 3 are being kept quiet “to preserve the integrity of the investigation,” said Constable Annie Linteau.
That has not stopped people here on Gabriola Island from drawing their own conclusions.
“The left feet are probably encased in concrete at the bottom of the strait,” said Frank Bond, an island resident for 28 years who was doing landscaping recently just a few hundred feet from the sandstone coastline where foot No. 2 was found. “And if it is a gang thing, I bet they’re going to start taking those sneakers off before they do it again.”
Murder? Not likely, said Digby Jones, 80, who learned to walk on Gabriola back when it attracted mostly fishermen, farmers and summer visitors from Victoria, Vancouver and elsewhere in British Columbia. Now the island is filling up with bed-and-breakfasts, second homes and retirees.
“The whole thing is a scam, as far as I’m concerned, all part of a big joke,” Mr. Jones said. “If they go to the mortuaries on the mainland, you’ll find some guy laughing his head off.”
Others, less skeptical, cite various small-plane crashes in which victims were never found, like the four men missing since a float plane went down in the strait awhile back. Fishermen, boaters and kayakers disappear fairly often, too. And then there are the suspicious riffraff over in Nanaimo, the rusty town on Vancouver Island that is the closest urban area to the islands by ferry. Hells Angels, gangs — nothing but trouble, islanders say. The theories seem endless.
“Oh yeah, it was a foot fetishist who was somewhere in a cave and capturing people and cutting off their right feet,” said Michele Geris, 51, a wine importer from Vancouver who visits Gabriola each summer. “Come on, give me a break.”
Ms. Geris has heard more rumors than most people. Last August, at the end of a long afternoon hike on the island with her husband, George Baugh, she spotted a shoe near the trunk of a tree, just a few yards from a tidal cove, and she knew instantly that the shoe was not empty.
“It was such a hell of a big foot,” said Ms. Geris, 51, a native of France. “My theory is that it washed onto the beach and then an animal picked it up.”
It was foot No. 2, sheathed in a white leather Reebok. Size 12.
The couple used their walking sticks to set the foot on its sole. Flies flew out. They saw the frayed threads of a sock, then bone, yellowed by time and water, like quartz. They tried to call the police but there was no cellphone reception. They decided to hike out in search of a phone signal, leaving the foot.
Ms. Geris suggested that they first knock on the door of one of the houses nearby, but her husband objected.
“He said, ‘Don’t you dare; they could be the killers,’ ” she recalled. “I said: ‘Oh yes, they’re cutting people up and then just leaving them casually in the back of the garden. Don’t be ridiculous.’’”
It all makes for an amusing mystery, but a solemn one, too.
“You have to have respect,” Ms. Geris said of the foot she found. “This belonged to somebody.”
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