DNA matches two of B.C.’s “mystery feet”

Call it a small step forward.  Investigators have used DNA to match two of six feet that have washed ashore along the coastal waters of British Columbia.

According to a December 6 story published by the Associated Press:

The British Columbia coroner matched a female right foot discovered on Canada’s West coast in November with a left foot discovered in May. Both were encased in New Balance running shoes. (AP)

The woman’s identify has yet to be determined.

Here’s an excerpt from a December 5 story published on the CBC’s Web site:

The left foot was discovered on Nov. 11 in Finn Slough in the south arm of the Fraser in Richmond, a suburb of Vancouver. The right foot was located May 22 on Kirkland Island, also in the Fraser River. (CBC)

Both feet were found in size 7 New Balance running shoes.

A December 6 globeandmail.com story also quotes a name familiar to this blog, Gail Anderson:

“It’s definitely good,” Gail Anderson, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University who studies the decomposition of remains, said last night. “It means there’s not an extra person that’s dead that we did not know about. It means we have been able to link one body together.”

Investigators say there is currently no evidence to suggest that foul play is linked to any of the mystery feet.  Investigators strongly suspect that all of the feet separated (“disarticulated”) from bodies while decomposing in water.  In August, a Beyond90Seconds.com report featured videos of a pig carcass decomposing under water to support the disarticulation theory.

A seventh human foot was found last August along the northern tip of Washington state, just south of British Columbia.

Read all of the Beyond90Seconds.com archives about this case here.