In 2007, a girl vacationing in Canada found a tennis shoe lying on the beach–with the remains of a foot in it. The next year, someone discovered another. Then another, then another. Soon, the Pacific Northwest began buzzing over the severed feet mystery, and rumors abounded including many involving a serial killer with a particularly gruesome trademark.
Since that initial grisly discovery, 15 more severed feet have been found in the region. Though scientists tried to calm people’s fears saying detachment of body parts was a natural act of bodily decomposition, it hasn’t stuck since so many haunting questions hover over the mysterious case of the severed feet. Why is it suddenly now that people are discovering these feet? And why are they all in tennis shoes? Experts claim these severed feet come from all different kinds of deaths including suicides, accidents, and yes, murder, but then, where are the bodies?
Researchers studying oxygen’s role in bodily decomposition believe they can finally put the matter to rest, as well as everyone’s fear of a crazed serial killer chopping off peoples’ feet and throwing them into the water. Scientists placed the bodies of three pig corpses in the Saanich Inlet, one of the largest inlets on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, to study how the bodies decomposed. The inlet is deep, reaching 230 meters at certain points which means very little oxygen reaches below the surface as the water gets deeper. In addition, because of a sill that sits at the inlet’s mouth, unless there’s severe weather, the water remains mostly stagnant. So, it’s literally the perfect place to study oxygenation’s role in bodily decomposition.
Over the course of three years, the team placed one pig each year in summer/early fall at the same depth of 100 meters. The scientists used the Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (VENUS), an underwater lab that allowed researchers to remotely study the carcasses several times a day via internet. VENUS also recorded oxygen levels, temperature, pressure, salinity, density and a host of other data the scientists were able to use later in comparing the three results.
Researches found that decreased levels of oxygen dramatically change the speed in which bodies decompose. The first two pigs decomposed within a month while the third took months longer. Criminologist Gail Anderson, who co-authored the study, says this has to do with the lower levels of oxygen in the water in the inlet that year. In higher oxygenized areas, creatures like shrimp and Dungeness crab were able to attack the carcasses, which accounts for speedier decomposition. When the oxygen was too low, only squat lobsters—unable to even break the bodies’ skin—could get at the pigs, so decomposition became much slower.
What does this all mean? Anderson says people can stop freaking out about a mad serial killer. The reason the feet are rising to the surface is because the tennis shoes act as disturbing buoys which lift the feet to the surface while the rest of the bodies remain in their underwater grave. The low oxygenation levels in the water means body decomposition can take longer for feet to eventually detach. “So the so-called mystery of the ‘floating feet’ washing up on shores along the West Coast was not a mystery, but a natural occurrence in the marine environment,” Anderson said. Perhaps Anderson is a little too laissez-faire about the macabre?
Hopefully residents of the Pacific Northwest can rest a little easier knowing someone’s not out to get them when they go outside in tennis shoes, but it still doesn’t quite explain why so many bodies are being tossed into bodies of water in the first place.
