Severed foot number 16 has washed ashore this week on the border of Washington State and Canada, but officials still don't suspect foul play is the answer to this grisly and recurring mystery.
As has been happening for the past several years, the latest piece of freaky flotsam to arrive in British Columbia via the Salish seaway is also a detached foot in a sneaker.
U.S. and Canadian coroners have previously determined that nearly all the drown victims these rotting appendages belonged to deliberately drowned themselves, either because they were "depressed" or suffered from "mental illness."
However, in 2007, when startled beachcombers discovered two separate severed feet in the same area and time-frame, Corporal Garry Cox of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police offered his own expert opinion:
“Two being found in such a short period of time is quite suspicious,” he told reporters for the Vancouver Sun. “Finding one foot is like a million to one odds,” he assured them.
Five more sneaker shoes filled with decomposing feet or foot bones appeared the following year, and now they just keep on coming.
Submerged corpses will disintegrate fairly quickly, especially when repeatedly subjected "to the push and pull" of a body of water as turbulent as the Pacific Ocean.
As well, these could easily become dismembered soon after going underwater by hungry marine animals.
Either of those possibilities might explain why only detached feet clad in buoyant rubber-soled footwear would eventually resurface and drift to shore again...
But not why they aren't showing up anywhere else in the world, or why there's always only one severed foot per victim.
Theories about this strange case range from organized crime and drug cartel assassinations to human traffickers or an actual serial killer using the northwest ocean waters as a body dump.
What do you think is really going on?
