Feet without their owners attached seem to be turning up all over the place.
On November 16, a person looking for returnable bottles found a foot clad in a gray Nike running shoe in a dumpster at a boat ramp at Rogers Landing Park, located on the Willamette River, about 20 miles southwest of downtown Portland, Oregon, the Yamhill County Sheriff鈥檚 Office wrote听in a听.听
The foot was found in a large, clear plastic trash bag with other flotsam, which has led investigators to think the sneaker was perhaps tossed there by a Good Samaritan who had cleaned up one of the islands in the river, says detective Todd Steele. It鈥檚 possible the person picked up the shoe without even knowing a foot was inside, he says.听
The shoe and sock visually match those found on the shore of a nearby riverside park last July, he says. DNA work on the foot is now being done at a听crime lab.
鈥淚t鈥檚 fairly clear at this point that we have a body somewhere, and that body is probably in the water,鈥 Steele says. But the Willamette passes through several cities. 鈥淲e have no idea where these feet went into the river,鈥 he says,听so the location the shoe was first picked up could be useful to police. (If you have any leads, contact Steele at 503-434-7349 or steelet@co.yamhill.or.us.)
Once you start looking for them, though, severed feet really do seem to be everywhere. Consider a few headlines from just the last year or so around North America:
- In May 2017, in South Carolina, a shoe containing听 was found on a dock at the Charleston City Marina.听
- In September 2017, hikers in a Missouri park听 in a red sneaker along the banks of the Mississippi River. (It was later matched up with a man whose wrecked car was found on the riverbank, about 40 miles from where the shoe was found.)
- In November 2017, a plumber who was closing up a cottage on Georgian Bay, a large bay of Lake Huron in Ontario, Canada,听 in a Reebok sneaker, about a yard from the shore.
Greater Vancouver, British Columbia, though, remains the epicenter of foot-finding. At last count,听 have been uncovered since 2007, the most recently last May, when a foot in a hiking boot was听 on an island west of the city. That foot, and most of the others, have been identified.
Is there anything nefarious, ahem, afoot?听
Not likely. As a forensic pathologist explained to 国产吃瓜黑料 nine years ago听in our听definitive look at the foot-loose phenomenon, our hands and feet are like kites, attached only by a few tendons. Underwater, they flap around and come off pretty easily when body tissues break down. 鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 mean someone is running around with an ax, chopping feet off,鈥 says听Steele.
If there鈥檚 a trend, experts say, it鈥檚 the way sneakers are now made: light, foamy, buoyant. 鈥淚t really didn鈥檛 come up until we had running shoes that floated so well,鈥 coroner Barb McLintock听听in 2016. 鈥淏efore, they just stayed down there at the bottom of the ocean.鈥 Experts working on the Vancouver-area foot cases have found no signs of any foul play. 鈥淚n every case, there is an alternate, very reasonable explanation,鈥 McLintock says.听
But as 国产吃瓜黑料 pointed out years ago, we humans crave patterns. It鈥檚 how we make sense of the world. So forget Occam鈥檚 razor鈥攖he principle that the simple explanation is the most likely one. We鈥檒l choose the unlikely and the macabre if it explains our experience. Even a killer on the loose is somehow more assuring than the fact that sometimes people die. And we find them.