March 27, 2025 • 44 mins
On August 5, 2008, a beach goer near the former Silver King Resort, west of Port Angeles, Washington, found a shoe containing a sock and what appeared to be human remains.
It was not the first discovery of its kind—and would not be the last—but today, the person behind the foot has been identified.
Since 2007, at least 20 detached human feet, often in sneakers, have washed ashore along the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington state. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack examine the mystery and go behind the scenes at Othram to explain how forensic experts identified the remains—and how the public can help.
Othram collaborates with forensic scientists, medical examiners, and law enforcement to solve cases when other methods have failed.
Transcript Highlights
00:00.12 Introductin
01:57.78 A shoe with a human foot found on beach
06:48.11 Water meeting the sea, creating odd currents
12:09.99 How do feet wind up on the beach inside shoes
17:02.94 Geography of the area
23:51.44 Investigation starts very broad
28:31.49 Forensic anthropologist needed to ID remains
33:34.69 Why say "human remains" instead of "foot"
37:10.65 Othram Labs solving mysteries
43:12.33 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Dots with Joseph Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
More because many of my friends know I love the beach.
That has not always been the case though. As a
matter of fact, for many years, I did not want
to go to the beach. I couldn't stand it. I'd
prefer always to go to the mountains, particularly the Blue Ridge.
(00:24):
But something changed in me. I took an academic appointment
in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a decade, and you
get up every morning and it's like, yep, there's the
Blue Ridge Mountains. And then you drive in the ice
(00:44):
and the snow. For a while, you get blocked out
in your driveway. You can't get in. It takes forever
to get somewhere, and that's with no traffic. And one
day we decided to as a family that we would
start going to the beach. And now I can't get enough.
I always tell Kimmy and my wife. I always say,
(01:07):
someday I want to be that old guy with a
brown leathered skin, with the long white hair and the
long white beard, riding a three wheel bicycle which I
guess is a tricycle with a basket on the back,
and have people drive by and say, hey guy, I
(01:28):
bet he's got a story. But you know, sometimes when
you go to the beach, you can find peace there.
You can listen to the wind blow and you can
feel like kiss your skin along with the sunshine. I
don't even mind the sand too much anymore. And what
(01:51):
I really enjoy is walking on the beach endlessly because
you never know what you're gonna find. But sometimes, just
sometimes you come across something that you can't quite make
heads or tails of. Something like that happened a few
(02:11):
years back, and as it turns out, has happened several
times since. A person wandering down the beach they see
a shoe with a sock in it, and contained within
that sock or the skeletal remains of a human foot. Today,
(02:32):
we finally have an identification, thanks to our friends at
author on a case that has been dragging out for
years and years. We're going to talk about that case today.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Dave.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
You want to know something I don't know that I've
ever told you this.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Am I going to have to take an oath? And no, no.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's rather benign and sure that people on Earth.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Is such a nice guy that people.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
People in.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The sound of our voice right now are probably going
to giggle about this, This old gray haired man admitting
to this. As many times now as I've been to
the beach and walked up and down that beach with
my precious grandchildren, particularly Harper, my four year old granddaughter,
who just she she can't hurry up along the beach.
(03:28):
She always pauses to look at everything. And I would
have thought that I would have found one by Do
you know that I have never found an intact sand dollar,
And it's one of those goals that I have in life.
I want to find a sand dollar. The ones I
always find are like busted up and fractured and you know,
particulated all over the place. And it's like I came
(03:51):
across one one day that was literally cut into I
swear it's like it's like the fates were laughing at me.
It's like I came across the thing and it was
cracked into like eight pieces, and each piece was pie shaped.
What's what's the odds of that kind of symmetry in nature?
The randomness of that? How are the waves going to
(04:12):
strike it? You know, literally break break into little triangles
like that? It's like the fates were shaking their fist
at me. I've never found one of those. Oh and
another thing I've never found is actually a four leaf clover.
I've always wanted to I don't have the patience for that, though,
sand dollar. I think that that's an achievable feat. Now
hopefully someday I will. That wasn't a joke, by the way.
(04:33):
I didn't mean to say feet there, but well that's
f e a t and not fee t.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, kind of correct spelling for you. But all right.
One thing I do know is I know where you
like to go, Yeah, to the beach, and you're the
chances of you finding a sand dollar on the beach
where you go minimum slim and nun. Yeah, but I
can show you where to go get them in the
Gulf yeah of America now yeah, yeah, you got to
go off Sterre a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
And the thing is they're alive. They'll they'll you'll burn
your fingers or to feel like they're burned when you
and you'll get on as many as you want, no kid, serious, really,
and you bring up back and dry them out. This
was one of those scary stories. If you remember where
there were all the stories about shoes flood on the coast.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, plan on talking about it. Yeah, and listen, I
got to tell you something. This is not this is
not my first time doing this. I actually did when
HLN for those that remember HLN was still a thing. Yeah,
I covered this there. I covered the story two or
(05:39):
three days in a row because there was like a
surge in this. And I'll go ahead. And this is
in the Pacific Northwest. It is surrounding and this is
kind of interesting. It's right on the border of Washington
State and Vancouver, British Columbia. And there's a large island,
(06:06):
Vancouver Island. And forgive me, I don't mean to talk
down to anybody, but some people have never been there.
Some people have never been up in that region.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
And and so yeah, and lives in Seattle and is
begging me to come.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
You need to.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
It's it's it's breathtaking. The beaches are breathtaking. It's it's
it's something otherworldly when you get there. Compare to us
going to the Gulf for all these years, or to
the Atlantic. You get out there, and particularly in the Northwest,
you know, I'm kind of like you go to California,
like southern California.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I'm like, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Whatever, But you get up there in these huge rock formations,
the beautiful forests that run right up to the edge
of the ocean. It is a it's an otherworldly kind
of place. And so just so folks understand, there's a
large island called Vancouver Island, and it is an island, Okay,
(07:01):
it's not connected by land, there's not like a land bridge,
but it is immediately adjacent to Vancouver, BC. And it
is surrounded inland by a body of water called the
Saleless Sea. And so it's kind of shaped like a
fish hook. And there's rivers that feed out of Washington
(07:23):
State and out of out of Canada into this sea
in addition to the Pacific you know, rolling through there,
and so there's gigantic salmon runs that go through there.
I mean, it's it's beautiful. It's breathtaking. These homes that
for people that can afford them, that live on the
edge up there, and these you know, three story tall
(07:46):
mansion log cabin types places and things like it's it'll
take your breath away. But they do have beaches, Dave,
and over the years, I think and I want to
make sure that I get this right, if I'm not mistaken.
From two thousand and seven until the present day, between
(08:09):
British Columbia and Washington State, Dave, there have been twenty
one cases, twenty one cases of human feet floating and found.
Those are just the ones that are found, my friend.
And as you can imagine, it catches somebody's attention, you know,
(08:32):
because you're thinking, and it's that specific element of the
human remain And there's some explanation for this. I think
it's thousands and thousands of miles of shoreline, Okay, So
it's populated by tribal peoples that still live in that area.
(08:53):
It's populated by you know, recent by newcomers that have
settled up there. There's probably some old money you know
type people that are up there as well, that have
been there for several generations. There is a population there,
and so what is it about that population contained in
that one geographic locale that this this feet thing, the
(09:18):
shoe thing has been promulgated. It doesn't hit out of
every story I've covered. And like I said, I did
three three days worth of this on hl N. I'd
never heard of it, and there was like two or
three of these cases that kind of popped on the
radar at the same time, and it was it was
when Susan Hendricks was still there, because it was she
(09:39):
and I that were covering this thing. And I was like,
because in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, from a
forensics perspective in dissecting of human remains, I'm thinking, Okay,
how is this facilitated? How is this facilitated? How is
it that out of all of this area that finding
(10:00):
feet Well, I'll go ahead and kind of lay this
out very quickly. I think that it has something to
do with buoyancy and a particular weak spot in human anatomy.
(10:21):
And what that adds up to is not only an
ongoing mystery, but it also ends up leading to an
identification of a young man that has been missing since
two thousand and seven. Look y'all, I'm not trying to
(10:54):
make light, okay, of these tragedies, because there's a tragedy
associated with every one of these feet, all right, but
it does give you pause. You would think that there
has to be connective tissue in these stories. And I
(11:18):
got to tell you, Dave, it's actually the connective tissue
that comes into play here in the literal anatomic sense,
I think super bizarre.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Are we going to go out on Vancouver Island and
find some ancient tribe out there that has people that
don't have feet they just walk around on stumps all
day long? Because I'm still trying to figure out we've
got feet inside shoes? Okay, And I'm a beach guy.
If I'm walking and I see a pair of nikes,
(11:48):
I'm going to look at them. Until I started reading
these stories and I'm thinking, I'm not going to grab
that because I know there's a foot inside of it
and I don't know who what happened to the rest
of the person. Why is there only a foot in
a shoe?
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Joe?
Speaker 2 (12:00):
You know what's really you know what's really creepy about this, brother,
is it's not I know there's a lot that's creepy. However,
the creepiest element to this is not the foot, and
it's not the shoe. I think to me, one of
the creepier elements is the sock that's hanging out, because
(12:23):
you know it's.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Not that creepy element.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yea, it is, no, No, no, it is, it's it's no.
It's just what I'm saying is it's kind of foreboding,
all right, because look, how many times in my career
as a death investigator have I driven in some of
the worst parts of Atlanta in New Orleans and I've
looked up on power line and I've seen tennis shoes
(12:47):
thrown up over a power line, which is indicative of
many different things, all right, generally drug dealing in this word,
and gang activity, all of that. You see shoes laying
on the ground randomly, you know, it's nothing to see
a pair of shoes just laying on the side of
the road, Okay, But when most of the time when
you see a shoe, you do not see a sock
(13:08):
hanging out of it. And so when you think about that,
you think, Okay, I understand the shoe, maybe somebody it
just slipped off the foot, whatever the case might be.
But how did the sock stay with the shoe? Well,
there's got to be something waiting or anchoring that sock
inside of the shoe. And as it turns out, in
(13:30):
most of these cases, just like with Jeff Sertel, the
seventeen year old kid, I gotta be honest with you, Dave,
it was the skeletal remains of his feet. Now I
think more broadly when we think about the Salish Sea,
there's so much let's see, how can I it's a
(13:52):
very hydro dynamic environment because you've got rivers that are
flowing in, you've got tides that are rising and falling,
and of course that area up there, and you had
said that you've never been up there. Some of the
most brutal storms that roll in off of sea, Like
you know, we think about brutal storms that happen in
(14:13):
the Gulf, most of those are associated with hurricanes. They
really brutal ones. You can have these storms that kind
of sweep in off of the Atlantic, but most of
the time the winds are blowing out to the east
off of there, So generally if the Atlantic gets slammed,
it's going to be something like a tropical depression. Up there.
(14:35):
You can have these huge storms that just come out
of nowhere and there's really no circulation to them. They're
not cyclonic, I guess, but they push so much water.
And one of the things that happens is that if
there are human remains that either fall overboard or fall
(14:56):
into a river, come off of a bridge, or I
guess maybe you could say if they're a homicide victim,
or they committed suicide. I thought a lot of these
might have been suicides. As the body begins to break
down and they have shoes on. Those shoes, particularly athletic shoes,
(15:24):
have a certain level of buoyancy to them that you know,
causes them to float, and so as they're floating along,
you know they'll wash up on shore and they can
support that weight of those skeletal remains because you know,
the the softer tissues have been greatly diminished. I heard
(15:46):
one report and one I think it was from a
forensic anthropologist, and they wrote this article several years ago,
and they they talked about lazy eaters, and that is
in reference to marine mammal or marine animals, not just
(16:10):
mammals but also fish that eat very lazily, and they
will get down to the shaft of a bone and
they can't get past the shoe, and they will feast
on that part and all of a sudden, the structural
integrity of the body begins to break down. Then you
have decomposition that's gone along with it. The shoe detaches
(16:33):
containing the skelet remains, and it starts this journey where
it's kind of floating. You know, you think about you know,
one of my favorite police songs from years and years ago,
message in a bottle. You know, you often think about
messages in a bottle where you write a note, somebody
writes a note and they put a cork in it
and throw it out to sea. You never know where
this thing's going to come up. It's the same principle.
(16:54):
It's at the mercy of these prevailing winds that are
driven in by these really powerful storms, the currents, tides
rising and falling. And I think that and I urge
everybody that's listening, if you get a chance, go to
your map and look at this area they refer to
as the Salish Sea. It's also part of the Salish Sea.
(17:15):
Is also what's called the I think it's the Georgian
Strait is on the northern part of it, and so
it is in fact shaped like a fish hook. So
once something gets in there, it's hard for it to
get back out, and so it just kind of bounces around.
There's all these little islands that kind of populate that area.
And if it runs into a beach, which in the
(17:38):
case of Jeff ster Tel it did, it actually landed
on a beach that was adjacent to a town called
Port Angeles, Washington. And it's kind of on the southern
the southern end of this thing of the Salish Sea,
and the beach is very broad down there. It's kind
(17:59):
of your kind of heading down toward the Seattle area.
Well not really, Seattle's much more further inland, but you're
getting down into a more populated area. This beach is
kind of wide in there, and someone was walking along
and they discovered this foot and they had no idea
who it was. The corner service has no idea who
(18:19):
it is. You know, that was one of the big
problems with these Canadian cases. You know, they would have
them come in in Canada and they turned these things
over to their corner service up in BC, and they
had no way of tracking these. But you know, I
got to tell you, Dave, thanks to you know, our
friends at at Athram, this story has got a very
(18:42):
positive outcome. And that's how I found out about this,
because this did not You covered news more than I do,
relative to having daily the grind that you do. It's amazing, folks.
You don't understand what Dave does. Uh, he has to
read everything. What I do is it's chicken feet compared
(19:03):
to what Dave does. This didn't, this case did not
enter into the national discourse. It was actually David Middleman,
the president and CEO of Authorm. He actually sent me
a text Dave and said, Joe, I think that you'd
be really excited about maybe covering this case on body backs.
(19:24):
And he was right, because I knew that it plugged
right back into the great foot shoe mystery.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
That is a big mystery, though, Joe, think about it
for just a minute. Here you've got twenty twenty one
feet not matching pairs, by.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
The way, you know, no no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
And so you've got twenty people dead, give or take,
and all that shows up on the shore is a
foot inside of a shoe. Now, look finding one or two,
maybe even three, I would go with, yeah. I mean
people die out of sea. People die all the time,
it happens, And in that area I could see exactly
(20:04):
what you're explaining for twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Now listen, that's all. That's only the ones that have
shown up.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Right now, you have to think, what if we've got
you know what, there might be a whole new species
of you know, flounder and they got shoes down there.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
It's so it's so bizarre to think about it because
if in this area, say and listen, you know Jeff's
Sirtel is not from America and he's Canadian. This case
he went missing in BC.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
I've got kids. His age, this is what gets me
about him. Okay, yeah, think he goes missing in two
thousand and seven. Just give you the idea and the
reason we're talking about this one guy in particular, Jeff Cirtel,
he goes missing. He's seventeen years old. And for anybody
who's had a teenager of that age, that's like this
really odd age in a young person, because you know
(20:55):
they've already gone past. Sixteen is the year you drive.
You're still a child, you've learned to drive. Seventeen, you're
you know, getting out of high school. You're thinking about
the future, but you're still not an adult. But if
you feel like you are, so for Jeffstertel to leave
his house on his bike around midnight, which is what
he did, and leaves his stuff at home, he leaves
(21:16):
his belongings at home. It's not like he rolled it
all up, hopped on his bike and yeah, joined the circus. Okay,
he disappears, out of character for him. They look for him,
can't find him anywhere, friends, family, police, they search, can't
find him. But then flash forward, and the reason we're
giving this to you now is that you know that
(21:38):
on April twenty ninth, two thousand and seven, at midnight,
he leaves his house. On August fifth, two thousand and nine,
we have the finder of a foot. Now we've already
kind of buried the lead. You know whose foot he found.
But the key is if you've got twenty or twenty
one feet washing up on shore and that's all you've
got is a foot inside of a sock and a shoe,
(22:00):
how do you identify that foot back to a person?
Because not everybody's DNA is in the system, Not everybody
has any you know, not every fingerprints in the system.
For crying out loud, lord, Now, all you have is
a foot inside a sock, inside of his shoe that
landed on a beach. And hey, what if the finder
is some crazy crackpot you know that's chopping off feet
(22:23):
and doing his thing with them. There are a lot
of things to consider here, Joe. So where do you start.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
There is, Well, when you're you take it, I like
to describe it as the inverted funnel method, and that's
my coin phrase I use with my students, and it's
a simplistic way for a simple man to explain these
things to students. And the idea is is that you
(22:52):
want to gather as much information as you possibly can
on the front end of an investigation, particularly a death
investigation involving in an unidentify body or a human an
element of a human remain in this particular case. And
so you start off veryy broadly inverted funnel, okay, and
then you kind of draw it in and narrow that
(23:13):
up till you know, to the top of the smokestack
of the of the funnel, the opening, and very broadly. Really,
the first person you have to get involved in this
case is going to be an anthropologist. And here's another
thing that they might have working in their favor. The
foot itself. The human foot and the ankle are very complex.
(23:37):
As you well know, you're an athlete, Dave, and so
any injury you know how complex it is, any kind
of injury you have to your foot or your ankle.
Those structures in there. It's so fragile and so delicate,
but there are a lot of skeletal elements that are
contained in the foot, in the ankle. The sock might
(24:00):
be the answer here because it's almost like having it
in a protected sack, if you will, almost literally, and
then contained within the shoe itself, so it's kind of protected.
You would hope that you would be able to hold
on to all of that. The first person you're going
to want to get involved in this investigation, it's going
to be a forensic anthropologist. As a matter of fact,
(24:24):
this is how careful I would be with this. If
this came into my office and I didn't know what
I had. I just had some person, well, I had
an emmy investigator went out to the scene. They said
they looked into the shoe and or looked into the
sock which was in the shoe, and I saw bony
(24:46):
elements in there. I'd look at everybody and I'd say, Okay,
we're storing this away, we're not touching it. We're getting
on the phone to the university, which most of the
time is where forensic anthropologists work. Every now and then
you'll find one that's directly employed by a medical examiner's office.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
But there's.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Most of the time there's not enough work for them
to work full time. Okay, it's not like we have
skeletons every single day, all right, And I know people
think that we do, and so many of them work
out of universities. But the time to developer always tell
people police in particular, the time to develop a relationship
(25:28):
with a forensic anthropologist is not the day that you
need them. You have to develop that relationship years in advance.
Involve them in things that going around the office, so
you can pick up the phone and say, hey, look, Doc,
we've got something here that might be of interest, please
come on down, or do you want one of us
to bring it to your lab? And I've had to
do both. I've had to take human remains, skeletal remains
(25:52):
to you well to LSU in the early days of
my career because we had a great forensic anthropology. By
the way, shout out to Mary Manhunt if you get
a chance. She's known as the Bone Lady and has
written a series of books. He's one of my oldest
and dearest friends, and she founder of the Faces Lab
at LSU that were the first group of people to
(26:14):
digitize a human skull at any rate. I would go
to her lab many times and take specimens there, and
we've been on digs together. But the reason this is
so important is that they have a method to examination
that is different than what a forensic anthropologist does. Okay,
(26:36):
they can look at bones in a way that you
and I cannot even begin to consider them. They're going
to look at them from the perspective of where. And
when I say where, there's two types of where. We've
got where that is post mortem, like weathered bone or
(26:56):
bone that and here's a very specific thing. Bone that
comes out of an aquatic environment looks completely different. If
you had two feet in this case, that one was
floating in a saltwater environment. Let that sink in and
no pun intended, and you have an equally sized you know,
(27:20):
structure of a foot, skeletal remains of a foot, and
you left it on dry land. Okay, those two, those
two collections of skeletal elements are going to look completely different.
You say, Morgan's kind of obvious. You're damn right, it's
obvious because salt water. Saltwater impacts bone differently. So the
(27:43):
big thing about it is when you when you show
up and you have a foot of all things that appears,
you know, just kind of manifest itself out of nowhere.
You're going to want the best set of eyes on
this thing. So you call in a forensic anthropologist and
you carefully, carefully extricate everything from the inside the shoe
(28:05):
as they are witnessing it, or you allow them to
do it. Now you have the forensic pathologists stand by.
But I don't know what a forensic forensic pathologist could
add to the discussion, because even let's just let's just
go go out on a limb here and say that
(28:25):
this is an over the top case of dismemberment. All right, Well,
a forensic pathologist and their knowledge is not going to
trump a forensic anthropologist with saw marks on bone. They
can't do it. There are people, they're forensic anthropologists that
actually specialize I know two of them off the top
(28:47):
of my head, that specialize in nothing but tool marks
on human bones. That's all they've studied for all of
these many years and their esteemed careers, that's all that
they've done.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And they've even.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Used different types of saws on bone, and so to
get the full picture and try to understand what it
takes to take a part of body. So what I'm
the reason I'm saying this is that you want somebody
that is geographically literate to that area in the Northwest.
(29:21):
We've already established that it's a completely different world. That's
why I said otherworldly. It's an aquatic, saltwater environment. You
want somebody that's been around that with human skeleton remains.
You know, as I'm sure that there are fine forensic
anthropologists maybe in Kansas somewhere, I'm not going to reach
(29:41):
out to them as opposed to the person that works
at I don't know, the University of Western Washington or
the University of of you know, at the University of
Washington or you know Vancouver, you know, one of those
universities up there. I'm going to want somebody's familiar with
that area so they can go in and then you know,
the next big part to this is trying to understand
(30:07):
something about the footwear, because after you have looked at
all of the elements of the bone that are contained therein,
you have to be able to determine, well, how old
was this person? Is that possible with a foot well
to a certain degree it is. It's possible. Given let's say,
if a foot belongs to somebody that is just post adolescent,
(30:37):
maybe they have a few areas in their bony structures
in there that are not completely fused to the degree
that you would say with a twenty four year old
as opposed to a seventeen year old. You can age
them that way. You can also age them by where.
(30:58):
And the other thing you can look for is there
been any previous anti mortem trauma, like have they ever
fracture their ankle? So you would lay all these bones
out and x ray every one of them, and the
forensic anthropology is amazing because they'll x ray the shoe
with a bone inside of it, with the feet, the
(31:19):
elements of the skeletal elements of the foot. They'll completely
x ray that contained within the shoe. Then they'll take
it out and x ray each individual bit and they'll
spread it out. They're not going to do an X
ray for each one, and then they will take the
feet the elements and put them all back together and
(31:42):
look at them. And that'll give you an idea of well,
the foot that I have that's in here, does it
approximate the size of the shoe, Like, is this a
person with the size of eight foot that's wearing a
ten and a half shoe, Then you know something's really
a foot.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
At that point, who are they?
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Well, that's the big thing, isn't it? When it comes
to just or tell, I can't even begin to fathom
the depth of sorrow and the stages of sorrow and
grief that his parents have gone through all of these years,
since two thousand and seven. I can't even seventeen years, man,
(32:42):
I mean, I can't even begin to think about the grief.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
He's gone, and he's been gone since then. He was
seventeen when he left, he'll be forever seventeen. But yes,
his foot is there, But how I mean identifying the foot? No, Look,
I think I understand now. I made a note on
this because the King County Medical Examiner, when the foot
was found, the human foot, they said that the uh,
(33:12):
they say that there the shoe, the black athletic shoe
found on the county beach contained human remains. Why don't
they say foot? And the second part of that is
he actually said that we found a shoe on the
beach that still had a foot with a sock on it,
and it detached from the body naturally. Yeah, how can
(33:35):
you say that to him? First of all, that it
did naturally, that it wasn't chopped off, right, And I
think you broke that down pretty good with the explaining
that one. I had a big question about that. But
the other part is we still don't know how he's dead.
I've identified it, but we don't know anything else.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Really, and here's a cold cup of coffee for you
and everybody else.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
We never will know.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Oh, come on, Joe, I really didn't think you had
something sleep.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
No, I have no magic that that lee heads to
a cause of death. And that's the tragedy with this.
I mean, it's all very tragic.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
It's truly identifying knowing that your child is, you know, gone.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, well we know they can know, not we I
don't have a mouse in my pocket. They the parents,
who's who are the two most important people in this
entire investigation. Okay, they know that he he is deceased,
because you know, it's not like this is some kind
(34:32):
of traumatic event where his foot was traumatically amputated and
he could be out there somewhere. They're talking about this
as a for lack of a better term a natural occurrence.
It's it's a it's a natural biological outcome, okay, relative
to decomposition. And what they're saying by this is that
(34:53):
they saw no trauma like either fractures or tool marks
on the bone, so as his body would have been
out there in the Salish sea. That tissue it's really
hard to kind of describe to anybody what it is
(35:16):
like or what the tissue is like. I'll try to
give it to you as best I can, if you like,
if you touch any element of your body, your limbs,
one of your limbs, okay, near your elbow, or you know,
your knee or even your ankle, there's a certain tension
that you have in skin. And as we get older,
(35:37):
you know, our skin becomes less tense. You know, you
don't have as much collagen in there, but you can
feel kind of those muscular structures that are beneath the
skin there. It has a tension to it. I have
been around decomposing bodies to the point where and these
(35:57):
happen for me when I pull bodies out of bodies
of water, and particularly people that had died in bathtubs,
that had decomposed in bathtubs, I've had a number of
those over my career. I have literally gone to remove
a body out of that environment and their skin just
literally pulls off on you know, just it de gloves.
(36:21):
There's a degloving that takes place. But you can also
tear the skin to the point where you can see
the bony structures because it's so soft. And to say
that it's spongy is not accurate, because sponges bounce back.
This does not bounce back. It just whatever trauma. And
(36:44):
I don't mean that like in a negative way, but
just the pressure of you touching it traumatizes those remains
to the point where you compromise them, and they will,
after a period of time just kind of pull apart
at the weak is at the weakest spot, okay, and
the weakest spot is generally going to be the joint.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I think that's one of the reasons his you know,
not just his, but these feet come disarticulated, you know,
at those points, and so the fact that it comes
apart like that. The saving grace here is that he
still had an athletic shoe on and it's described as
black and there's a buoyancy two shoes, you know, I've
(37:32):
got I don't know, a whole closet full of athletic shoes.
I never throw them away. I use them to work
in the yard and those sorts of things that I have.
Some that I just absolutely love to go on my
boat with, you know, I just slip them on and go.
The one thing about it is, and I have done this,
I can lose my shoe off the side of my
boat for whatever reason. My grandson actually threw one in
one time and it actually floats on top of the water.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Well.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
It has that buoyancy to them, and they're so lightweight
now too. Okay, it's not like an old canvas pair
of you know of Converse tennis shoes or kids tennis
shoes we had to wear when we were kids. You
know that are going to go right to the bottom.
It's like a slab of rubber with canvas. They're not
like that anymore. And so that lends itself to the buoyancy.
(38:15):
So you would want to check the size of the shoe.
You know, what size is the shoe, the brand if
you can still make that out, you know, maybe a
shoe that has a logo, the Nike swoosh, or the
fact hibidis.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
If you used all that, Joe, we started off the
top of this with authrom because you're talking about a foot, yeah,
inside of a sock, inside of a shoe washed on
shore at a beach. And you can't even say it's
a rare occurrence. It's happened twenty times at least that
we know of. Yes, that means there are people who
(38:56):
are waiting for an answer to a loved one and
this is the closest you're going to to get. And
to be honest with you, if it's the size eleven
you know foot, how many of us have a size
eleven eleven and a half foot? I mean, where are
you going to start? How does author identify it? How
do you get it down to the point where they
can pick up the phone and say, with one hundred
percent of certainty, we have identified your son and he's gone,
(39:21):
here's we You know, I don't know that call, but
you know what I mean? How does that know?
Speaker 2 (39:26):
No, you're no, No, you're absolutely right. What has to
have Well, first off, you know the King the King
County Medical Examiner would have to request assistance in a
case like this. And it gives me pause too when
I think about this, I think about all these other
feet are we are we right on the cusp of
(39:49):
getting some of these people identified. You know, we talked
about twenty one, right or twenty twenty one? How many?
How many other of these feet are intact to the
point where you can have bony elements that you can
still go into into the core of that bone and
(40:14):
extract DNA from it, viable DNA where you can take
it and run it against open source DNA files that
are out there, which of course is what authorm did
in the.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Case of Jeff. That to me is.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Really I think as sad as Jeff's case is. That's
one of the things here that is very exciting when
you begin to think about that they can create an
entire DNA profile from those elements of Jeff's remains that
are still there. And of course, you know with this caseicular,
(41:02):
like so many others at authorm, the when the remains
were discovered, they really didn't know what to do with them.
There's you know, what, what are you going to hang
your hat on here? Well, it all comes down to crowdfunding,
(41:23):
because you know, authorm uses techniques that I cannot even
sit here and begin to explain to you in the
unlimited amount of time that I have for one episode.
It's stuff that would make Captain Kirk blush.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
All right.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
They are on the cutting edge, but that requires money.
It requires money, and for and I'll say this, now,
say it again, I'll say it and until I don't
say it anymore. You say out there that you're citizen detectives.
You say that you want to contribute in some way.
(42:00):
This requires nothing more than you going to visit dnasolves
dot com and you can contribute. You can find a
case that's on there. There are a plethora of these
cases that are listed. You select one. Maybe it's based
on geography, maybe you know it's your state that has
(42:24):
a case, or maybe it's somebody that reminds you of
maybe one of your loved ones. Maybe they're the same
age or approximate approximately the same age, and you want
to try to help solve this, this tragic mystery that exists.
And they're not asking for tons and tons of money,
just a couple of bucks. Just a couple of bucks,
(42:44):
it's all it would take. And you can contribute to this.
And they have ceiling that they have a minimum that
they have to hit which I think is like seven
thousand or seven hundred seventy five hundred bucks. And that
way they can get the wheels rolling on this thing,
and they can go into open source DNA databases that
(43:04):
are out there and they can begin to build this
thing out along with their forensic genetic genealogists that are
there on staff that they hire. I've met these people,
I've been to the lab, I've seen the work that
they do. And you never know, you you might be.
You might be that answer to a prayer that's been
(43:27):
sent up for years and years and years. You know,
just like the questions that you know, Jeff's parents had,
what happened to our baby? What happened to him? Well,
they might not know exactly what happened to him, but
now they do know that he has passed on, and
(43:52):
for whatever that's worth, they can shut the door on
that part of their life and maybe begin to move
on with that peace in mind. And that's what you
Ultimate and Lee would be offering. So again, that's dnasolves
dot com. I urge each and every one of you
to go to their website, review it, see what.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
You can do.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Anything will help. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body backs
Body Dots with Joseph Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
More because many of my friends know I love the beach.
That has not always been the case though. As a
matter of fact, for many years, I did not want
to go to the beach. I couldn't stand it. I'd
prefer always to go to the mountains, particularly the Blue Ridge.
(00:24):
But something changed in me. I took an academic appointment
in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a decade, and you
get up every morning and it's like, yep, there's the
Blue Ridge Mountains. And then you drive in the ice
(00:44):
and the snow. For a while, you get blocked out
in your driveway. You can't get in. It takes forever
to get somewhere, and that's with no traffic. And one
day we decided to as a family that we would
start going to the beach. And now I can't get enough.
I always tell Kimmy and my wife. I always say,
(01:07):
someday I want to be that old guy with a
brown leathered skin, with the long white hair and the
long white beard, riding a three wheel bicycle which I
guess is a tricycle with a basket on the back,
and have people drive by and say, hey guy, I
(01:28):
bet he's got a story. But you know, sometimes when
you go to the beach, you can find peace there.
You can listen to the wind blow and you can
feel like kiss your skin along with the sunshine. I
don't even mind the sand too much anymore. And what
(01:51):
I really enjoy is walking on the beach endlessly because
you never know what you're gonna find. But sometimes, just
sometimes you come across something that you can't quite make
heads or tails of. Something like that happened a few
(02:11):
years back, and as it turns out, has happened several
times since. A person wandering down the beach they see
a shoe with a sock in it, and contained within
that sock or the skeletal remains of a human foot. Today,
(02:32):
we finally have an identification, thanks to our friends at
author on a case that has been dragging out for
years and years. We're going to talk about that case today.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Dave.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
You want to know something I don't know that I've
ever told you this.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Am I going to have to take an oath? And no, no.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's rather benign and sure that people on Earth.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Is such a nice guy that people.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
People in.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The sound of our voice right now are probably going
to giggle about this, This old gray haired man admitting
to this. As many times now as I've been to
the beach and walked up and down that beach with
my precious grandchildren, particularly Harper, my four year old granddaughter,
who just she she can't hurry up along the beach.
(03:28):
She always pauses to look at everything. And I would
have thought that I would have found one by Do
you know that I have never found an intact sand dollar,
And it's one of those goals that I have in life.
I want to find a sand dollar. The ones I
always find are like busted up and fractured and you know,
particulated all over the place. And it's like I came
(03:51):
across one one day that was literally cut into I
swear it's like it's like the fates were laughing at me.
It's like I came across the thing and it was
cracked into like eight pieces, and each piece was pie shaped.
What's what's the odds of that kind of symmetry in nature?
The randomness of that? How are the waves going to
(04:12):
strike it? You know, literally break break into little triangles
like that? It's like the fates were shaking their fist
at me. I've never found one of those. Oh and
another thing I've never found is actually a four leaf clover.
I've always wanted to I don't have the patience for that, though,
sand dollar. I think that that's an achievable feat. Now
hopefully someday I will. That wasn't a joke, by the way.
(04:33):
I didn't mean to say feet there, but well that's
f e a t and not fee t.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, kind of correct spelling for you. But all right.
One thing I do know is I know where you
like to go, Yeah, to the beach, and you're the
chances of you finding a sand dollar on the beach
where you go minimum slim and nun. Yeah, but I
can show you where to go get them in the
Gulf yeah of America now yeah, yeah, you got to
go off Sterre a little bit.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
And the thing is they're alive. They'll they'll you'll burn
your fingers or to feel like they're burned when you
and you'll get on as many as you want, no kid, serious, really,
and you bring up back and dry them out. This
was one of those scary stories. If you remember where
there were all the stories about shoes flood on the coast.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yeah, plan on talking about it. Yeah, and listen, I
got to tell you something. This is not this is
not my first time doing this. I actually did when
HLN for those that remember HLN was still a thing. Yeah,
I covered this there. I covered the story two or
(05:39):
three days in a row because there was like a
surge in this. And I'll go ahead. And this is
in the Pacific Northwest. It is surrounding and this is
kind of interesting. It's right on the border of Washington
State and Vancouver, British Columbia. And there's a large island,
(06:06):
Vancouver Island. And forgive me, I don't mean to talk
down to anybody, but some people have never been there.
Some people have never been up in that region.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
And and so yeah, and lives in Seattle and is
begging me to come.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
You need to.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
It's it's it's breathtaking. The beaches are breathtaking. It's it's
it's something otherworldly when you get there. Compare to us
going to the Gulf for all these years, or to
the Atlantic. You get out there, and particularly in the Northwest,
you know, I'm kind of like you go to California,
like southern California.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I'm like, you know.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Whatever, But you get up there in these huge rock formations,
the beautiful forests that run right up to the edge
of the ocean. It is a it's an otherworldly kind
of place. And so just so folks understand, there's a
large island called Vancouver Island, and it is an island, Okay,
(07:01):
it's not connected by land, there's not like a land bridge,
but it is immediately adjacent to Vancouver, BC. And it
is surrounded inland by a body of water called the
Saleless Sea. And so it's kind of shaped like a
fish hook. And there's rivers that feed out of Washington
(07:23):
State and out of out of Canada into this sea
in addition to the Pacific you know, rolling through there,
and so there's gigantic salmon runs that go through there.
I mean, it's it's beautiful. It's breathtaking. These homes that
for people that can afford them, that live on the
edge up there, and these you know, three story tall
(07:46):
mansion log cabin types places and things like it's it'll
take your breath away. But they do have beaches, Dave,
and over the years, I think and I want to
make sure that I get this right, if I'm not mistaken.
From two thousand and seven until the present day, between
(08:09):
British Columbia and Washington State, Dave, there have been twenty
one cases, twenty one cases of human feet floating and found.
Those are just the ones that are found, my friend.
And as you can imagine, it catches somebody's attention, you know,
(08:32):
because you're thinking, and it's that specific element of the
human remain And there's some explanation for this. I think
it's thousands and thousands of miles of shoreline, Okay, So
it's populated by tribal peoples that still live in that area.
(08:53):
It's populated by you know, recent by newcomers that have
settled up there. There's probably some old money you know
type people that are up there as well, that have
been there for several generations. There is a population there,
and so what is it about that population contained in
that one geographic locale that this this feet thing, the
(09:18):
shoe thing has been promulgated. It doesn't hit out of
every story I've covered. And like I said, I did
three three days worth of this on hl N. I'd
never heard of it, and there was like two or
three of these cases that kind of popped on the
radar at the same time, and it was it was
when Susan Hendricks was still there, because it was she
(09:39):
and I that were covering this thing. And I was like,
because in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, from a
forensics perspective in dissecting of human remains, I'm thinking, Okay,
how is this facilitated? How is this facilitated? How is
it that out of all of this area that finding
(10:00):
feet Well, I'll go ahead and kind of lay this
out very quickly. I think that it has something to
do with buoyancy and a particular weak spot in human anatomy.
(10:21):
And what that adds up to is not only an
ongoing mystery, but it also ends up leading to an
identification of a young man that has been missing since
two thousand and seven. Look y'all, I'm not trying to
(10:54):
make light, okay, of these tragedies, because there's a tragedy
associated with every one of these feet, all right, but
it does give you pause. You would think that there
has to be connective tissue in these stories. And I
(11:18):
got to tell you, Dave, it's actually the connective tissue
that comes into play here in the literal anatomic sense,
I think super bizarre.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Are we going to go out on Vancouver Island and
find some ancient tribe out there that has people that
don't have feet they just walk around on stumps all
day long? Because I'm still trying to figure out we've
got feet inside shoes? Okay, And I'm a beach guy.
If I'm walking and I see a pair of nikes,
(11:48):
I'm going to look at them. Until I started reading
these stories and I'm thinking, I'm not going to grab
that because I know there's a foot inside of it
and I don't know who what happened to the rest
of the person. Why is there only a foot in
a shoe?
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Joe?
Speaker 2 (12:00):
You know what's really you know what's really creepy about this, brother,
is it's not I know there's a lot that's creepy. However,
the creepiest element to this is not the foot, and
it's not the shoe. I think to me, one of
the creepier elements is the sock that's hanging out, because
(12:23):
you know it's.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Not that creepy element.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yea, it is, no, No, no, it is, it's it's no.
It's just what I'm saying is it's kind of foreboding,
all right, because look, how many times in my career
as a death investigator have I driven in some of
the worst parts of Atlanta in New Orleans and I've
looked up on power line and I've seen tennis shoes
(12:47):
thrown up over a power line, which is indicative of
many different things, all right, generally drug dealing in this word,
and gang activity, all of that. You see shoes laying
on the ground randomly, you know, it's nothing to see
a pair of shoes just laying on the side of
the road, Okay, But when most of the time when
you see a shoe, you do not see a sock
(13:08):
hanging out of it. And so when you think about that,
you think, Okay, I understand the shoe, maybe somebody it
just slipped off the foot, whatever the case might be.
But how did the sock stay with the shoe? Well,
there's got to be something waiting or anchoring that sock
inside of the shoe. And as it turns out, in
(13:30):
most of these cases, just like with Jeff Sertel, the
seventeen year old kid, I gotta be honest with you, Dave,
it was the skeletal remains of his feet. Now I
think more broadly when we think about the Salish Sea,
there's so much let's see, how can I it's a
(13:52):
very hydro dynamic environment because you've got rivers that are
flowing in, you've got tides that are rising and falling,
and of course that area up there, and you had
said that you've never been up there. Some of the
most brutal storms that roll in off of sea, Like
you know, we think about brutal storms that happen in
(14:13):
the Gulf, most of those are associated with hurricanes. They
really brutal ones. You can have these storms that kind
of sweep in off of the Atlantic, but most of
the time the winds are blowing out to the east
off of there, So generally if the Atlantic gets slammed,
it's going to be something like a tropical depression. Up there.
(14:35):
You can have these huge storms that just come out
of nowhere and there's really no circulation to them. They're
not cyclonic, I guess, but they push so much water.
And one of the things that happens is that if
there are human remains that either fall overboard or fall
(14:56):
into a river, come off of a bridge, or I
guess maybe you could say if they're a homicide victim,
or they committed suicide. I thought a lot of these
might have been suicides. As the body begins to break
down and they have shoes on. Those shoes, particularly athletic shoes,
(15:24):
have a certain level of buoyancy to them that you know,
causes them to float, and so as they're floating along,
you know they'll wash up on shore and they can
support that weight of those skeletal remains because you know,
the the softer tissues have been greatly diminished. I heard
(15:46):
one report and one I think it was from a
forensic anthropologist, and they wrote this article several years ago,
and they they talked about lazy eaters, and that is
in reference to marine mammal or marine animals, not just
(16:10):
mammals but also fish that eat very lazily, and they
will get down to the shaft of a bone and
they can't get past the shoe, and they will feast
on that part and all of a sudden, the structural
integrity of the body begins to break down. Then you
have decomposition that's gone along with it. The shoe detaches
(16:33):
containing the skelet remains, and it starts this journey where
it's kind of floating. You know, you think about you know,
one of my favorite police songs from years and years ago,
message in a bottle. You know, you often think about
messages in a bottle where you write a note, somebody
writes a note and they put a cork in it
and throw it out to sea. You never know where
this thing's going to come up. It's the same principle.
(16:54):
It's at the mercy of these prevailing winds that are
driven in by these really powerful storms, the currents, tides
rising and falling. And I think that and I urge
everybody that's listening, if you get a chance, go to
your map and look at this area they refer to
as the Salish Sea. It's also part of the Salish Sea.
(17:15):
Is also what's called the I think it's the Georgian
Strait is on the northern part of it, and so
it is in fact shaped like a fish hook. So
once something gets in there, it's hard for it to
get back out, and so it just kind of bounces around.
There's all these little islands that kind of populate that area.
And if it runs into a beach, which in the
(17:38):
case of Jeff ster Tel it did, it actually landed
on a beach that was adjacent to a town called
Port Angeles, Washington. And it's kind of on the southern
the southern end of this thing of the Salish Sea,
and the beach is very broad down there. It's kind
(17:59):
of your kind of heading down toward the Seattle area.
Well not really, Seattle's much more further inland, but you're
getting down into a more populated area. This beach is
kind of wide in there, and someone was walking along
and they discovered this foot and they had no idea
who it was. The corner service has no idea who
(18:19):
it is. You know, that was one of the big
problems with these Canadian cases. You know, they would have
them come in in Canada and they turned these things
over to their corner service up in BC, and they
had no way of tracking these. But you know, I
got to tell you, Dave, thanks to you know, our
friends at at Athram, this story has got a very
(18:42):
positive outcome. And that's how I found out about this,
because this did not You covered news more than I do,
relative to having daily the grind that you do. It's amazing, folks.
You don't understand what Dave does. Uh, he has to
read everything. What I do is it's chicken feet compared
(19:03):
to what Dave does. This didn't, this case did not
enter into the national discourse. It was actually David Middleman,
the president and CEO of Authorm. He actually sent me
a text Dave and said, Joe, I think that you'd
be really excited about maybe covering this case on body backs.
(19:24):
And he was right, because I knew that it plugged
right back into the great foot shoe mystery.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
That is a big mystery, though, Joe, think about it
for just a minute. Here you've got twenty twenty one
feet not matching pairs, by.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
The way, you know, no no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
And so you've got twenty people dead, give or take,
and all that shows up on the shore is a
foot inside of a shoe. Now, look finding one or two,
maybe even three, I would go with, yeah. I mean
people die out of sea. People die all the time,
it happens, And in that area I could see exactly
(20:04):
what you're explaining for twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Now listen, that's all. That's only the ones that have
shown up.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
Right now, you have to think, what if we've got
you know what, there might be a whole new species
of you know, flounder and they got shoes down there.
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
It's so it's so bizarre to think about it because
if in this area, say and listen, you know Jeff's
Sirtel is not from America and he's Canadian. This case
he went missing in BC.
Speaker 3 (20:34):
I've got kids. His age, this is what gets me
about him. Okay, yeah, think he goes missing in two
thousand and seven. Just give you the idea and the
reason we're talking about this one guy in particular, Jeff Cirtel,
he goes missing. He's seventeen years old. And for anybody
who's had a teenager of that age, that's like this
really odd age in a young person, because you know
(20:55):
they've already gone past. Sixteen is the year you drive.
You're still a child, you've learned to drive. Seventeen, you're
you know, getting out of high school. You're thinking about
the future, but you're still not an adult. But if
you feel like you are, so for Jeffstertel to leave
his house on his bike around midnight, which is what
he did, and leaves his stuff at home, he leaves
(21:16):
his belongings at home. It's not like he rolled it
all up, hopped on his bike and yeah, joined the circus. Okay,
he disappears, out of character for him. They look for him,
can't find him anywhere, friends, family, police, they search, can't
find him. But then flash forward, and the reason we're
giving this to you now is that you know that
(21:38):
on April twenty ninth, two thousand and seven, at midnight,
he leaves his house. On August fifth, two thousand and nine,
we have the finder of a foot. Now we've already
kind of buried the lead. You know whose foot he found.
But the key is if you've got twenty or twenty
one feet washing up on shore and that's all you've
got is a foot inside of a sock and a shoe,
(22:00):
how do you identify that foot back to a person?
Because not everybody's DNA is in the system, Not everybody
has any you know, not every fingerprints in the system.
For crying out loud, lord, Now, all you have is
a foot inside a sock, inside of his shoe that
landed on a beach. And hey, what if the finder
is some crazy crackpot you know that's chopping off feet
(22:23):
and doing his thing with them. There are a lot
of things to consider here, Joe. So where do you start.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
There is, Well, when you're you take it, I like
to describe it as the inverted funnel method, and that's
my coin phrase I use with my students, and it's
a simplistic way for a simple man to explain these
things to students. And the idea is is that you
(22:52):
want to gather as much information as you possibly can
on the front end of an investigation, particularly a death
investigation involving in an unidentify body or a human an
element of a human remain in this particular case. And
so you start off veryy broadly inverted funnel, okay, and
then you kind of draw it in and narrow that
(23:13):
up till you know, to the top of the smokestack
of the of the funnel, the opening, and very broadly. Really,
the first person you have to get involved in this
case is going to be an anthropologist. And here's another
thing that they might have working in their favor. The
foot itself. The human foot and the ankle are very complex.
(23:37):
As you well know, you're an athlete, Dave, and so
any injury you know how complex it is, any kind
of injury you have to your foot or your ankle.
Those structures in there. It's so fragile and so delicate,
but there are a lot of skeletal elements that are
contained in the foot, in the ankle. The sock might
(24:00):
be the answer here because it's almost like having it
in a protected sack, if you will, almost literally, and
then contained within the shoe itself, so it's kind of protected.
You would hope that you would be able to hold
on to all of that. The first person you're going
to want to get involved in this investigation, it's going
to be a forensic anthropologist. As a matter of fact,
(24:24):
this is how careful I would be with this. If
this came into my office and I didn't know what
I had. I just had some person, well, I had
an emmy investigator went out to the scene. They said
they looked into the shoe and or looked into the
sock which was in the shoe, and I saw bony
(24:46):
elements in there. I'd look at everybody and I'd say, Okay,
we're storing this away, we're not touching it. We're getting
on the phone to the university, which most of the
time is where forensic anthropologists work. Every now and then
you'll find one that's directly employed by a medical examiner's office.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
But there's.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Most of the time there's not enough work for them
to work full time. Okay, it's not like we have
skeletons every single day, all right, And I know people
think that we do, and so many of them work
out of universities. But the time to developer always tell
people police in particular, the time to develop a relationship
(25:28):
with a forensic anthropologist is not the day that you
need them. You have to develop that relationship years in advance.
Involve them in things that going around the office, so
you can pick up the phone and say, hey, look, Doc,
we've got something here that might be of interest, please
come on down, or do you want one of us
to bring it to your lab? And I've had to
do both. I've had to take human remains, skeletal remains
(25:52):
to you well to LSU in the early days of
my career because we had a great forensic anthropology. By
the way, shout out to Mary Manhunt if you get
a chance. She's known as the Bone Lady and has
written a series of books. He's one of my oldest
and dearest friends, and she founder of the Faces Lab
at LSU that were the first group of people to
(26:14):
digitize a human skull at any rate. I would go
to her lab many times and take specimens there, and
we've been on digs together. But the reason this is
so important is that they have a method to examination
that is different than what a forensic anthropologist does. Okay,
(26:36):
they can look at bones in a way that you
and I cannot even begin to consider them. They're going
to look at them from the perspective of where. And
when I say where, there's two types of where. We've
got where that is post mortem, like weathered bone or
(26:56):
bone that and here's a very specific thing. Bone that
comes out of an aquatic environment looks completely different. If
you had two feet in this case, that one was
floating in a saltwater environment. Let that sink in and
no pun intended, and you have an equally sized you know,
(27:20):
structure of a foot, skeletal remains of a foot, and
you left it on dry land. Okay, those two, those
two collections of skeletal elements are going to look completely different.
You say, Morgan's kind of obvious. You're damn right, it's
obvious because salt water. Saltwater impacts bone differently. So the
(27:43):
big thing about it is when you when you show
up and you have a foot of all things that appears,
you know, just kind of manifest itself out of nowhere.
You're going to want the best set of eyes on
this thing. So you call in a forensic anthropologist and
you carefully, carefully extricate everything from the inside the shoe
(28:05):
as they are witnessing it, or you allow them to
do it. Now you have the forensic pathologists stand by.
But I don't know what a forensic forensic pathologist could
add to the discussion, because even let's just let's just
go go out on a limb here and say that
(28:25):
this is an over the top case of dismemberment. All right, Well,
a forensic pathologist and their knowledge is not going to
trump a forensic anthropologist with saw marks on bone. They
can't do it. There are people, they're forensic anthropologists that
actually specialize I know two of them off the top
(28:47):
of my head, that specialize in nothing but tool marks
on human bones. That's all they've studied for all of
these many years and their esteemed careers, that's all that
they've done.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And they've even.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Used different types of saws on bone, and so to
get the full picture and try to understand what it
takes to take a part of body. So what I'm
the reason I'm saying this is that you want somebody
that is geographically literate to that area in the Northwest.
(29:21):
We've already established that it's a completely different world. That's
why I said otherworldly. It's an aquatic, saltwater environment. You
want somebody that's been around that with human skeleton remains.
You know, as I'm sure that there are fine forensic
anthropologists maybe in Kansas somewhere, I'm not going to reach
(29:41):
out to them as opposed to the person that works
at I don't know, the University of Western Washington or
the University of of you know, at the University of
Washington or you know Vancouver, you know, one of those
universities up there. I'm going to want somebody's familiar with
that area so they can go in and then you know,
the next big part to this is trying to understand
(30:07):
something about the footwear, because after you have looked at
all of the elements of the bone that are contained therein,
you have to be able to determine, well, how old
was this person? Is that possible with a foot well
to a certain degree it is. It's possible. Given let's say,
if a foot belongs to somebody that is just post adolescent,
(30:37):
maybe they have a few areas in their bony structures
in there that are not completely fused to the degree
that you would say with a twenty four year old
as opposed to a seventeen year old. You can age
them that way. You can also age them by where.
(30:58):
And the other thing you can look for is there
been any previous anti mortem trauma, like have they ever
fracture their ankle? So you would lay all these bones
out and x ray every one of them, and the
forensic anthropology is amazing because they'll x ray the shoe
with a bone inside of it, with the feet, the
(31:19):
elements of the skeletal elements of the foot. They'll completely
x ray that contained within the shoe. Then they'll take
it out and x ray each individual bit and they'll
spread it out. They're not going to do an X
ray for each one, and then they will take the
feet the elements and put them all back together and
(31:42):
look at them. And that'll give you an idea of well,
the foot that I have that's in here, does it
approximate the size of the shoe, Like, is this a
person with the size of eight foot that's wearing a
ten and a half shoe, Then you know something's really
a foot.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
At that point, who are they?
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Well, that's the big thing, isn't it? When it comes
to just or tell, I can't even begin to fathom
the depth of sorrow and the stages of sorrow and
grief that his parents have gone through all of these years,
since two thousand and seven. I can't even seventeen years, man,
(32:42):
I mean, I can't even begin to think about the grief.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
He's gone, and he's been gone since then. He was
seventeen when he left, he'll be forever seventeen. But yes,
his foot is there, But how I mean identifying the foot? No, Look,
I think I understand now. I made a note on
this because the King County Medical Examiner, when the foot
was found, the human foot, they said that the uh,
(33:12):
they say that there the shoe, the black athletic shoe
found on the county beach contained human remains. Why don't
they say foot? And the second part of that is
he actually said that we found a shoe on the
beach that still had a foot with a sock on it,
and it detached from the body naturally. Yeah, how can
(33:35):
you say that to him? First of all, that it
did naturally, that it wasn't chopped off, right, And I
think you broke that down pretty good with the explaining
that one. I had a big question about that. But
the other part is we still don't know how he's dead.
I've identified it, but we don't know anything else.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Really, and here's a cold cup of coffee for you
and everybody else.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
We never will know.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Oh, come on, Joe, I really didn't think you had
something sleep.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
No, I have no magic that that lee heads to
a cause of death. And that's the tragedy with this.
I mean, it's all very tragic.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
It's truly identifying knowing that your child is, you know, gone.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Well, well we know they can know, not we I
don't have a mouse in my pocket. They the parents,
who's who are the two most important people in this
entire investigation. Okay, they know that he he is deceased,
because you know, it's not like this is some kind
(34:32):
of traumatic event where his foot was traumatically amputated and
he could be out there somewhere. They're talking about this
as a for lack of a better term a natural occurrence.
It's it's a it's a natural biological outcome, okay, relative
to decomposition. And what they're saying by this is that
(34:53):
they saw no trauma like either fractures or tool marks
on the bone, so as his body would have been
out there in the Salish sea. That tissue it's really
hard to kind of describe to anybody what it is
(35:16):
like or what the tissue is like. I'll try to
give it to you as best I can, if you like,
if you touch any element of your body, your limbs,
one of your limbs, okay, near your elbow, or you know,
your knee or even your ankle, there's a certain tension
that you have in skin. And as we get older,
(35:37):
you know, our skin becomes less tense. You know, you
don't have as much collagen in there, but you can
feel kind of those muscular structures that are beneath the
skin there. It has a tension to it. I have
been around decomposing bodies to the point where and these
(35:57):
happen for me when I pull bodies out of bodies
of water, and particularly people that had died in bathtubs,
that had decomposed in bathtubs, I've had a number of
those over my career. I have literally gone to remove
a body out of that environment and their skin just
literally pulls off on you know, just it de gloves.
(36:21):
There's a degloving that takes place. But you can also
tear the skin to the point where you can see
the bony structures because it's so soft. And to say
that it's spongy is not accurate, because sponges bounce back.
This does not bounce back. It just whatever trauma. And
(36:44):
I don't mean that like in a negative way, but
just the pressure of you touching it traumatizes those remains
to the point where you compromise them, and they will,
after a period of time just kind of pull apart
at the weak is at the weakest spot, okay, and
the weakest spot is generally going to be the joint.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
I think that's one of the reasons his you know,
not just his, but these feet come disarticulated, you know,
at those points, and so the fact that it comes
apart like that. The saving grace here is that he
still had an athletic shoe on and it's described as
black and there's a buoyancy two shoes, you know, I've
(37:32):
got I don't know, a whole closet full of athletic shoes.
I never throw them away. I use them to work
in the yard and those sorts of things that I have.
Some that I just absolutely love to go on my
boat with, you know, I just slip them on and go.
The one thing about it is, and I have done this,
I can lose my shoe off the side of my
boat for whatever reason. My grandson actually threw one in
one time and it actually floats on top of the water.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
Well.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
It has that buoyancy to them, and they're so lightweight
now too. Okay, it's not like an old canvas pair
of you know of Converse tennis shoes or kids tennis
shoes we had to wear when we were kids. You
know that are going to go right to the bottom.
It's like a slab of rubber with canvas. They're not
like that anymore. And so that lends itself to the buoyancy.
(38:15):
So you would want to check the size of the shoe.
You know, what size is the shoe, the brand if
you can still make that out, you know, maybe a
shoe that has a logo, the Nike swoosh, or the
fact hibidis.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
If you used all that, Joe, we started off the
top of this with authrom because you're talking about a foot, yeah,
inside of a sock, inside of a shoe washed on
shore at a beach. And you can't even say it's
a rare occurrence. It's happened twenty times at least that
we know of. Yes, that means there are people who
(38:56):
are waiting for an answer to a loved one and
this is the closest you're going to to get. And
to be honest with you, if it's the size eleven
you know foot, how many of us have a size
eleven eleven and a half foot? I mean, where are
you going to start? How does author identify it? How
do you get it down to the point where they
can pick up the phone and say, with one hundred
percent of certainty, we have identified your son and he's gone,
(39:21):
here's we You know, I don't know that call, but
you know what I mean? How does that know?
Speaker 2 (39:26):
No, you're no, No, you're absolutely right. What has to
have Well, first off, you know the King the King
County Medical Examiner would have to request assistance in a
case like this. And it gives me pause too when
I think about this, I think about all these other
feet are we are we right on the cusp of
(39:49):
getting some of these people identified. You know, we talked
about twenty one, right or twenty twenty one? How many?
How many other of these feet are intact to the
point where you can have bony elements that you can
still go into into the core of that bone and
(40:14):
extract DNA from it, viable DNA where you can take
it and run it against open source DNA files that
are out there, which of course is what authorm did
in the.
Speaker 1 (40:27):
Case of Jeff. That to me is.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Really I think as sad as Jeff's case is. That's
one of the things here that is very exciting when
you begin to think about that they can create an
entire DNA profile from those elements of Jeff's remains that
are still there. And of course, you know with this caseicular,
(41:02):
like so many others at authorm, the when the remains
were discovered, they really didn't know what to do with them.
There's you know, what, what are you going to hang
your hat on here? Well, it all comes down to crowdfunding,
(41:23):
because you know, authorm uses techniques that I cannot even
sit here and begin to explain to you in the
unlimited amount of time that I have for one episode.
It's stuff that would make Captain Kirk blush.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
All right.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
They are on the cutting edge, but that requires money.
It requires money, and for and I'll say this, now,
say it again, I'll say it and until I don't
say it anymore. You say out there that you're citizen detectives.
You say that you want to contribute in some way.
(42:00):
This requires nothing more than you going to visit dnasolves
dot com and you can contribute. You can find a
case that's on there. There are a plethora of these
cases that are listed. You select one. Maybe it's based
on geography, maybe you know it's your state that has
(42:24):
a case, or maybe it's somebody that reminds you of
maybe one of your loved ones. Maybe they're the same
age or approximate approximately the same age, and you want
to try to help solve this, this tragic mystery that exists.
And they're not asking for tons and tons of money,
just a couple of bucks. Just a couple of bucks,
(42:44):
it's all it would take. And you can contribute to this.
And they have ceiling that they have a minimum that
they have to hit which I think is like seven
thousand or seven hundred seventy five hundred bucks. And that
way they can get the wheels rolling on this thing,
and they can go into open source DNA databases that
(43:04):
are out there and they can begin to build this
thing out along with their forensic genetic genealogists that are
there on staff that they hire. I've met these people,
I've been to the lab, I've seen the work that
they do. And you never know, you you might be.
You might be that answer to a prayer that's been
(43:27):
sent up for years and years and years. You know,
just like the questions that you know, Jeff's parents had,
what happened to our baby? What happened to him? Well,
they might not know exactly what happened to him, but
now they do know that he has passed on, and
(43:52):
for whatever that's worth, they can shut the door on
that part of their life and maybe begin to move
on with that peace in mind. And that's what you
Ultimate and Lee would be offering. So again, that's dnasolves
dot com. I urge each and every one of you
to go to their website, review it, see what.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
You can do.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
Anything will help. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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