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Severed Leg (And Feet) Mysteries

The mystery feet keep coming. Welsh beach foot discovered.

Human remains found on a Gwynedd beach were the right foot of what is believed to be a male, police have said.

Officers were called to Y Felinheli, near Bangor, on Wednesday morning and North Wales Police initially treated the death as unexplained.

A post mortem examination has since revealed there was nothing to suggest the death is suspicious.

Officers said the age of the remains is unknown but it was likely to have been in the water for less than seven days.

Det Insp Gerwyn Thomas said the focus was on identifying the remains.

He added: "DNA has been obtained and we will now prioritise a check on the national database and of missing people, initially locally but if needs be wider still.
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Swifty said:
"A post mortem examination has since revealed there was nothing to suggest the death is suspicious."

.. because people's feet just fall off all the time ? .. an undertaker went for a swim and forgot he had a foot in his pocket ? ..
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Yes, I wondered about that too! How could they possibly know it wasn't suspicious?!
 
Well it looks like this particular foot mystery may be solved, at least partially.

Two bodies found on beach in Anglesey identified.

Death now considered "unexplained"

The bodies of two men found on an Anglesey beach on Friday morning have been identified and are not from the north Wales area, police have said.

Officers were called to the beach at Malltraeth at about 11:45 GMT and North Wales Police are now in the process of contacting their next of kin.

Police think it may be linked to the discovery of a human foot on a beach near Bangor on Wednesday.

Officers are currently treating the deaths as "unexplained".
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The foot most recently discovered in British Columbia (December 2017; cf. post #129) has been identified.

Foot found on Vancouver Island beach belonged to Kitsap County man
A severed foot in a running shoe found on a Vancouver Island beach in December belonged to a Kitsap County man, according to the News Mirror of Sooke, British Columbia.

Stanley Okumoto, 79, was reported missing on Sept. 19 by Kitsap County authorities. His partial remains were found in November along a beach near Neah Bay, about a mile from where his car was found by authorities a day after he disappeared. ...
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SOIURCE: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattl...r-island-beach-belonged-to-kitsap-county-man/
 
Frasier Buddolph said:
It would never have occurred to me that you could RENT cadavers and body parts. I guess it's an attractive option if you're not sure you're ready to buy . . .
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I was at a friend's garden party ages ago in Burton On Trent and they'd hired a bouncy castle (for the kids). I'll never forget one of his friends cracking me because he'd learned I was working in the local hospital so suggested we should steal a corpse to see how much we could make it bounce. :)

(He was from Arizona, we had to go to his flat one day and teach him how to switch his gas fire on because he'd never seen one before btw)
 
Need a hand?

https://gizmodo.com/gruesome-scene-as-bag-containing-54-severed-hands-found-1823623988
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Well here’s something you don’t see everyday: a bag containing 27 pairs of human hands. The grisly discovery was made on a river island near the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, and local police are now investigating.

At first, a single hand was discovered. But then, nearby, the motherlode was found—a bag containing no less than 54 severed hands, as reported in the Siberian Times. Photos of the scene show the hands spilled out into a single pile, and then organized into 27 matching pairs and placed in rows.
 
Some of my random reading brought me near the subject of severed feet, as I explained on my blog:

THE LONG WALK

Once a decade or so, I try to purge a few magazines. I have thousands of books already; I don’t need magazines stacking up too. So I looked over my oldest science magazines, figuring that their articles would be the most dated and most easily culled.

One of the oldest issues I have is Scientific American from November 1992. There are actually several items here that are interesting, enough to make this issue a “keeper”, such as an article on the “Cambrian explosion” of life-forms about 600 million years ago, and another examining the relationships between Native American languages.

But I want to look at one tiny sidebar story that, again, is a randomly found item that curves toward the “Missing 411” series.

Actually, the subject is sort of peripheral to the 411 stories, but many discussions of the subject mention it: the shoes, with severed human feet in them, washing ashore in British Columbia and Washington state:

Severed Feet Mystery

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ific-northwest-shores/?utm_term=.070b064dd3e1

The article in Scientific American is not quite so grotesque: It appears that, on May 27, 1990, a freighter was caught in a powerful gale in the northeastern Pacific, and five shipping containers of Nike shoes, containing 80,000 tennis shoes altogether, were lost overboard.

And in early 1991, a decade and a half before the severed feet phenomenon began, the sneakers started washing ashore in British Columbia and Washington state.

Curtis B. Ebbesmeyer, who worked at a marine instruments company, and W. James Ingraham, Jr., of the National Maritime Fisheries Service, thought this made a great opportunity to study currents. However, said Ebbesmeyer, “I tried to find the scientists who were tracking down the shoes, but nobody was.” So Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham, with the help of a “network of beachcombers,” did it themselves.

About 1300 of the waterlogged shoes were recovered. Using computers to backtrack the drift, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham found out something interesting: That the shoes washed ashore in British Columbia and Washington was itself something of an anomaly.

It seems that in most years the waters of the tropical Pacific would have been warmer, and the currents flowing north through the Salish Sea (the waterways around British Columbia) would have been faster and more powerful. Under normal circumstances the shoes should have drifted to Alaska before coming ashore.

Perhaps, being weighed down with flesh and bone, the mystery shoes of recent years were heavy enough to beach farther south. Or perhaps beachcombers in Alaska should be on the lookout for the grisly artifacts.


Powell, Corey S., “Flotsam Footwear,” Scientific American Vol.267 no. 5 (Nov. 1992), p. 26.
 
Initial official comments claim there's no big mystery - this is a matter of poor forensic evidence disposal ....

Russian Gov't Says Not to Worry About These 54 Severed Human Hands Found in Siberia
... A fisherman in Siberia made a grim discovery yesterday (March 8) while walking near the icy Amur River: 27 pairs of human hands, severed at the wrist and stuffed into a bag. Russian authorities said the hands were likely disposed of by a local forensics lab, bucking proper protocol. ...

While many social media spectators (naturally) suspect foul play, officials from the Investigative Committee of The Russian Federation — a government agency responsible for criminal investigations — have said that the hands appear to have been improperly disposed of by a forensics lab in Khabarovsk.

"The biological objects (hands) found are not of a criminal origin," the Investigative Committee wrote in a post (as translated) on the messaging app Telegram, "but were disposed of in a manner not provided for by law." ...
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SOURCE: https://www.livescience.com/61972-bag-of-severed-hands-siberia.html
 
Could they be used as those monkey hand candles?
 
EnolaGaia said:
Initial official comments claim there's no big mystery - this is a matter of poor forensic evidence disposal ....



SOURCE: https://www.livescience.com/61972-bag-of-severed-hands-siberia.html
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That is very poor evidence disposal. They wouldn't be impressed on Silent Witness or Waking the Dead, or even Diagnosis Murder come to that. I suppose they'll point the finger at the guilty parties before handing the case over to somebody else, or maybe they'll just palm everybody off with poor excuses and then they'll get nailed. Well, it's thumbs up from me, a man who never knowingly misses a poor pun, even in this digital (sorry, I can't resist) age. I'll put my hands up to that. (Really sorry, it's my birthday today so I'm allowing myself a surfeit of dodgy humour...)
 
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I've got to hand it to you...
 
Another disarticulated foot has been discovered in British Columbia. It's claimed to be the 14th such discovery since 2007.

Police investigating 14th foot to wash up on Canadian shore
A human foot was found washed up on the shores of British Columbia beach, the 14th such discovery in Canada in more than a decade, police said Wednesday.

A man found the disarticulated foot in a hiking boot lodged in a batch of logson Gabriola Island on Sunday, Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.

The foot was a latest in a series of similar discoveries in the Canadian province dating back to 2007. ...
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SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-...?utm_source=sec&utm_campaign=sl&utm_medium=19
 
The mystery has haunted Canadians for more than a decade: One by one, human feet clad in running shoes have floated ashore on British Columbia’s southern coast with gruesome regularity.

Last weekend, foot No. 14 was discovered by a man strolling on a beach on Gabriola Island, a sleepy and picturesque enclave, population 4,000, that is known for its captivating sandstone and close-knit artistic community.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/12/world/canada/canada-human-feet.html
 
A leg found in Salford but they seem to know who it belonged to. They find a leg but don't think there are any suspicious circumstances?

A human leg found in a river has been confirmed to be the limb of a woman who went missing a year ago.

Police were called to a report that suspected human remains had been seen in the River Irwell near Salford shortly before 9am on Wednesday November 28. DNA testing confirmed the leg belonged to Marie Scott, who was reported missing from her home in Hale on December 18 last year, Greater Manchester Police said. The force said there are not believed to be any suspicious circumstances and no one else is thought to be involved in her disappearance.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/break...er-confirmed-to-be-missing-womans-890823.html
 
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