What appears to be the sixth human foot in a running shoe to wash ashore on B.C.‘s south coast in 15 months was found Tuesday by Diane Johnston, the wife of former Richmond MLA Ken Johnston.
Johnston was out walking the couple’s three dogs when she first spotted the shoe.
The running shoe - a left-foot New Balance sneaker - raises the possibility that it might be a match to a right-foot New Balance shoe that was found on nearby Kirkland Island on May 22 by the island’s caretaker.
DNA testing revealed that the foot in that shoe belonged to a female.
Diane Johnston said she hopes the find will help determine the identity of the victim so that her family might find some solace from having even just a fragment of the body recovered.
“I feel a great deal of empathy for a family in that situation,” she said.
In the summer of 1989, the couple’s six-year-old son, Adam, drowned at Crescent Beach while with his grandparents and two older siblings.
The boy had vanished during the outing and it took the police more than a day to recover his body, which was spotted from a helicopter a kilometre from shore.
She doesn’t need to describe the agony the family endured waiting for him to be found.
“My son would be 26 now so, yes, it did occur to both of us how important it is to find something, even just a small part of someone’s loved one,” she said.
The running shoe was found in the south arm of the Fraser River at the foot of Garden City Road, jammed between two logs close to the beach.
“Investigators will be determining whether the shoes are linked,” RCMP media officer Const. Annie Linteau said Wednesday in reference to the Kirkland Island shoe.
All the other feet washed ashore inside sneakers were found to be from males.
Despite attempts at DNA matching, only one of the feet has so far been identified as belonging to any missing person or accident victim by the RCMP or the BC Coroners Service. It belonged to a depressed man who went missing in 2007, RCMP said in July. They did not identify which of the five feet found to that point it was.
However, the RCMP reacted cautiously to the new find because two hoaxes have been perpetrated since the fifth foot was discovered June 16 when a couple walking on Westham Island in Delta saw a size 11 Nike shoe floating in the Fraser River.
DNA testing confirmed that the foot inside that shoe belonged to the same man as a right Nike shoe found Feb. 2 on Valdes Island, across Georgia Strait.
Linteau said the RCMP major crimes section, which has investigated the previous five finds, will be involved in this one, too.
“Obviously due to the fact a hoax was perpetrated previously, and then extensively reported, we want to proceed cautiously until we know exactly what we are dealing with,” she said.
The number of disarticulated feet being found on B.C. beaches resulted in widespread media interest with many news outlets around the world reporting the story.
All the publicity and public speculation led to the first hoax June 18, when someone stuffed an animal paw into a sock and placed it inside a running shoe and left it on a beach near Campbell River. Then in September, someone placed a plastic foot in a runner on an east Vancouver beach.
None of the five previous feet showed signs that foul play was involved, said Linteau. All appeared to have separated from a body by natural processes.
Since the feet began turning up, experts such as U.S. oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, whose expertise is floating objects, said it was to be expected that running shoes - given their buoyancy - would float with the remains of feet still in them once the feet had become detached from bodies during the decomposition process.
The running shoe found Tuesday was first spotted by Diane Johnston while she was walking the couple’s three dogs at about 11 a.m.
“She could see it was a running shoe and it was sitting on a rock about 10 feet from the beach, but the tide was in and she had the dogs with her and was unable to reach it,” her husband said.
Johnston said the pair were walking the dogs in the same spot at about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday.
“She said, ‘Let’s go and see if the shoe is still there.’ Now it was between two logs, so she went down the bank and threw it up to me. I flipped it over and could see a sock and other material inside I couldn’t identify,” said Johnston, a former Richmond council member who is again seeking a council seat in Saturday’s municipal election.
From previous media coverage, the pair knew that one of the shoes that had been found was made by New Balance.
“It was one of the things that caused us to look closely at it,” Johnston said.
As neither had a cell phone to call the police, Johnston said his first idea was to place the shoe in a plastic bag and take it to the Richmond detachment, but he decided to leave it where it was.
While Diane stayed with the running shoe, Johnston went looking for someone in the area with a cellphone so he could call 911.
Richmond RCMP officers arrived and removed the shoe.
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