The mystery of severed feet on beaches

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Petone Beach in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington is not the most beautiful beach. Not too long. Not pure. It’s not even famous for surfing. Its only strong point is the quiet walks at sunset over the bridge into the sea, something only locals usually enjoy, as tourists prefer other, more attractive arenas for mobile optics. Petone Beach was, in general, a very boring beach with nothing going on. Until a few days ago a sneaker with a rotting human foot turned up there.

In Wellington they speak of nothing else. Locals who walk along the beach every afternoon are terrified. And the police lost. Agents don’t know where the leg came from. Coastal patrol boats are still prowling the nearby waters if they find other parts of the body, or at least dismembered parts.

Some say that Cal belongs to a woman who practices kayaking in the area And the one who disappeared at sea a few months ago. Others think it may be from a carcass that was thrown into the water and destroyed by marine predators who always love the soft parts of the human body.

In the absence of answers, the collective imagination, now freely unleashed on social networks, always finds better theories. It’s well-known by Australia’s neighbors, who used that imagination a few months ago to try to uncover what was behind another severed leg that appeared on one of their beaches.

In August last year, The amputated leg of famous artist Melissa Gadrick was found in an Asics sneaker On the coast 400 kilometers south of Sydney. Melissa has been missing since November 2020, after authorities issued a search warrant for her Dover Heights mansion. He defrauded more than $20 million in investment funds from more than 60 clients, including family and friends.

Once a DNA test indicated that the foot was Melissa’s, the theory quickly spread through social networks and TV shows that the impostor was the imposter. She may have amputated her leg to mislead the police.

An investigation is underway

In New Zealand, investigations continue into legs found on Petone Beach. The main hypothesis is that it was a corpse that had been in the water for a long time and the limb came out during decomposition. A mystery new to this small island state in the Pacific, but well-known in Canada and the United States. Since 2007, 21 deformed feet have appeared on sneakers On the coasts or beaches on both sides of the border between these two countries in the Salish Sea.

The last shoe with a rotten inside surprise appeared in 2019, more than a decade after the first case: In the summer of 2007, a woman wore blue and white Adidas shoes on the beach of Jedidiah Island, off the mainland of British Columbia. and Vancouver Island. Looking inside, he was surprised to find an aged right leg inside. Six days later, on another nearby island, a size 12 black and white Reebok with another man’s right foot appeared. The following year, five more amputated feet appeared. So year after year. A moment came It has become fashionable among pranksters to leave sandals with animal bones on the beaches to scare bathers..

There was talk in the press about a serial killer or mafia settling scores. Even in some forums, there was an undercurrent that pointed to the absolute surrealism of saying they were alien abductions, leaving only a trace of their prey.

Ultimately, analyzes of the legs disproved all of these theories: most of the results corroborated them. People who were reported missing or crashed at sea and their bodies were never found. For example, a leg returned in November 2011 belonged to a fisherman who disappeared in 1987, while a pair returned to a new reserve in 2004 belonged to a depressed woman who jumped from a bridge.

Like the public and the media, scientists formulated their own theories: besides decomposing in water, when bodies sink, they are torn up by scavengers from the depths, who prefer body parts with surrounding soft tissue. But this includes the ankles.

An investigation by Simon Fraser University (Canada) showed that the bodies decomposed in the same water where many legs were found, and that they were deep-dwelling fish, shrimp and crustaceans. A corpse can be reduced to a skeleton within four days. When the rest of the body is at the bottom of the ocean, the rounded feet float to the surface, at least if they float with sneakers, usually with foam and air pockets on the soles.