[waves rolling]
[gentle classical music plays]
[man] In 2016, we were at Botanical Beach.
We came on to the beach,
and we were just gonna walk the beach and do some beachcombing.
You never know what you're gonna find when you're out beachcombing.
So usually the first thing that I do
is hop up on the logs and look in between the logs for artifacts.
And, um, just not more than a couple of minutes into our walk,
just happened to notice a shoe.
And found a stick and just picked the shoe up
and put it onto the beach and looked, and noticed
that it actually had human remains in it.
[menacing pulsing music plays]
I mean, you go beachcombing, you find shoes or gloves or jackets.
You're not really anticipating
finding something with someone's foot in it.
So, I found a lid to a tote,
and I just put it on that, and took it up to the truck,
and drove to the pub, where there's phone service.
And then, uh, we called the police.
Authorities asked us where we were--
- Where it was found. - Um, where it was found.
And then asked us to wait. We waited for them to show up.
And then they took the shoe and asked me a bunch of questions.
About two weeks later,
they sort of gave me an update that they had found another shoe.
Yeah, I think we were the eleventh shoe.
And then you never heard anything else about it until the next one was found.
We heard about these feet, these shoes,
washing up on the beach in the news.
A bizarre, long-running mystery has deepened a bit more
with the discovery of another human foot washed up on Canada's Pacific Coast.
Police say in most of the cases foul play, though, is not suspected.
Nothin' to see here, nothin' to worry about.
I'm not sure I feel so good about that theory.
[theme music plays]
[narrator] The Salish Sea runs along the western coast
of Washington state and British Columbia.
It is a popular destination for tourists and beachcombers,
those who search along shorelines for driftwood, seashells,
and lost treasures.
But in 2007,
beachcombers began finding more than they bargained for.
And news agencies started reporting on grisly discoveries,
leaving experts stumped,
and questioning what could be causing this curious phenomenon.
[ethereal music plays]
[man] Ladies and gentlemen, the Salish Sea,
the site of the severed-feet mystery.
You can see the Gulf Islands, which are off in the distance there.
And then the Fraser River over there
is running right up into the interior of British Columbia.
You're also looking across there towards Vancouver Island,
and then if you just move on down here,
you'll move into the San Juans, which are in Washington state,
and those are also the islands where feet came ashore.
And then if you f-- move further on down there,
you'll come to Puget Sound where Seattle is,
and then we're into the American part of this mystery.
I'm a Canadian criminal trial lawyer.
[tense classical music plays]
But-- And then I wrote a novel,
and the success of that novel
allowed me to retire from the practice of law.
When the feet came on the shores,
it paralleled my book Death's Door.
In Death's Door, disarticulated bodies are found
on the shores of the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea.
Is fiction stranger than reality
or reality stranger than fiction?
The first foot came ashore on August the 20th, 2007,
and it was a man's right foot, size-12 runner.
The second one came ashore just six days later,
and it was a man's right foot, 12-size runner.
When the third came ashore in February the 8th, 2008,
it was a man's right foot, size-11.
And then when the fourth one came May the 22nd of 2008,
it was a woman's left foot in a runner,
and then on June the 16th, 2008, a man's left foot in a runner.
So, the five feet all within a year
is what blew the story into, uh, international proportions.
And over the years,
21 feet have come ashore,
15 of them in Canada, six in the United States.
And then there hasn't been anything since 2019 going on.
[man] On the Salish Sea,
the winds are going to eventually blow whatever is floating towards a beach.
[moody classical music plays]
I'm a professor in the School of Oceanography
at the University of Washington in Seattle.
There have been a surprisingly large number
of feet in sneakers that have been found
on the beaches in this area
in the last, uh, decade or more.
Was it never happening in the past?
I don't know.
Certainly the design of sneakers has changed in recent decades.
Sneakers these days tend to be bulkier,
with more and more foam, and they float really well.
Because the feet were enclosed within those running shoes,
they're not staying at the bottom of the ocean.
[narrator] While evidence may suggest how these human remains washed ashore,
it doesn't explain why those feet were in the water to begin with.
[Michael] Forensic analysts were DNA testing on all of the feet.
The DNA testing would then go to determine who the victims were,
but you can never get away from the fact
that it's only happening here
at this particular time.
[intriguing music plays]
The unexplained mystery put the hook through the media's cheek.
They were trying to monitor
to see whether there's something which they could feed off of themselves.
As you can imagine, everybody is speculating
about, "Why are these feet washing ashore at this particular time,
in such a tight area, in such a tight timeframe?"
[narrator] And on the Internet, people wildly share their theories,
with speculation ranging from the supernatural
to more tangible dangers.
[man] I mean, there's lots of different scenarios.
I commercial fished here lots,
and we don't have too many big sharks, enough to do that, that I know of.
And I've never heard anybody really getting attacked by a killer whale,
but I'm sure it's possible.
[narrator] In 2015, 59 shark attacks were reported in the United States,
the highest year on record.
However, shark attacks near Canada are extremely rare.
And despite making global headlines in 2023 for sinking boats,
orcas in the Salish Sea have only been seen attacking other marine life.
But could there be another predator
lurking beneath the surface?
[gentle melancholy music plays]
[Sylvie] I've been coming to this beach for 50 years.
It was in December, so it was a kind of a cloudy day.
I thought it was a little more quiet than usual.
After walking along the ocean for about half an hour or so,
I decided to sit here and have a rest with my three dogs.
I tried to throw something in the water for my big dog,
who loves to jump in,
and she didn't wanna go.
Um, in fact, they kind of came behind me here.
[musical arrangement turns suspenseful]
Then I-- I saw something coming out, like a head.
I still kind of believe it was a... Like, the head of a huge sea lion.
But the rest of the body was too narrow to be a sea lion or a seal.
The best way I can describe it, it was, like, snake-like.
So, there'd be a bump and then the water, and then another bump,
and then the water, and another bump.
It kind of started moving,
the head went sideways, one way and the other,
and it kind of looked toward me here.
And I started having a little bit of shivers,
and thought, "What the heck is this?"
[narrator] Regional lore contains similar sightings
which have baffled seafarers and locals for centuries.
According to Indigenous peoples,
sea serpents once lived in the Salish Sea,
surpassing orcas in strength and speed.
And some believe they still exist today,
with 235 alleged sightings reported
between 1880 and 2010.
I'm John Kirk.
I'm the chairman of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club.
[gentle music plays]
And a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
with about 19 years' service.
So, I have investigations in my blood.
If you don't think that there are strange things in the ocean,
then you don't know what you're talking about.
If we've only explored about 6% of the oceans,
there's another 94% that needs to be investigated.
The BC Scientific Cryptozoology Club
was founded by, uh, Jim Clark and Paul LeBlond.
[Sylvie] Paul LeBlond is, uh-- was a friend of mine and a neighbor.
I've known Paul for many years, and he's also a cryptozoologist.
I don't believe in sea monsters, I don't believe in sea snakes.
But then I thought, "Mmm! Do I ever have a story for Paul today,
to tell him when I get home."
"Crypto" actually means "hidden" in the Greek language,
and so this is hidden zoology.
Animals that are hidden from the catalog, from identification.
And in recent years,
it's been looped in there with the paranormal.
It's been looped in there with "monster hunters."
We wanted to investigate animals that were as yet uncatalogued
and unidentified by science,
particularly in the Salish Sea.
Prior to the modern era,
there is a rich vein of knowledge in regard to sea serpents
among our First Nations.
[narrator] The First Nations people who lived along the coastline
relied on the sea for their livelihood,
and have described seeing a sea creature
that wriggled from side to side.
[John] It actually had a name.
She was called Haietlik.
It is rich in their tradition,
and plenty of First Nations people have seen a physical animal.
There are depictions of it all over the place in BC art.
And there are carvings of this animal on the prows of canoes, on drums.
Some of them were being seen there not only by the natives,
but also by the European settlers who had encroached into that area.
[narrator] But more recent sea-serpent sightings
have been associated with the name cadborosaurus.
[John] The whole cadborosaurus story begins around the 1800s
off the coast of BC.
There were a number of-- of reports from ships traveling through the area
of having seen sea serpents and what have you.
And I'm gonna refer to cadborosaurus
as the animal that was pulled out of the stomach of a sperm whale
at Naden Harbor in July of 1937
by whale flensers.
So, we do have a couple of photographs that are mystifying, to say the least.
They actually sent it down to the whaling company's head office,
I believe it was, in, uh, Bellevue, Washington.
And The Bellevue American newspaper,
uh, was wise enough to send a reporter there.
And he said, "This mystifies me."
"I don't know what the blue blazes this thing is."
This is the creature, with a camel-like head,
the mane on the back of the neck, it's got a long serpentine body.
Here's another one of it, uh, of the creature, in color.
Very similar perspective.
This creature's, uh, body is covered in hair.
It's not green skin as it were here,
but anatomically this is correct.
And so is this one here,
which is a depiction of the flexibility of the body of a cadborosaurus.
'Cause people say they've seen it in loops, coils, and humps.
[intriguing music plays]
Perhaps there is such a thing as a sea snake or sea monster or...
What do they call them? A cado-something. Whatever, I don't know.
I just saw this thing. I describe it.
Could be something real,
could be something my imagination added up with these bumps.
Who knows?
I don't know.
It was just a bit odd.
[John] We live in a pretty freaky place up here.
My first encounter with the subject of, um, missing feet
was in, uh, 2010, thereabouts,
because I worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
There's mass speculation out there.
I've seen stuff there that says, "Well, these feet are washing up
because cadborosaurus attacked and killed people."
There isn't one single case of a cadborosaurus
where they've attacked a human being and ripped them to shreds
in the way that, uh, one would have to do for feet to come floating into the shore.
Oh, I would love there to be these creatures.
I'd love there to be S-- Sasquatch and Yeti, etc.
But, uh, whether or not, uh, they were involved
in the Salish feet case,
I'll stick to human monsters.
[narrator] While some speculation could be the result
of overactive imaginations,
other theories are grounded around real monsters that walk among us.
[haunting music plays]
[Michael] Every time that a new foot comes ashore,
you have to start thinking about,
"Why is this happening?"
How do you explain the fact that it's only happening here?
Crime linkage allows you to look at all the aspects of a case
and find which victims are being killed by the same killer.
You plot those victims, which are all similar, on a map.
We're dealing with feet here.
It narrows down the base from which the killer is moving.
[narrator] And one famous serial killer was identified by online sleuths and media
as being behind the phenomena.
[brooding music plays]
[Michael] There was a serial killer, Robert "Willy" Pickton,
who was hunting for sex workers in Vancouver in the late 1990s.
A psychopathic pig farmer was coming into Vancouver
and hunting victims on the stroll.
And then he was taking them out several miles away to his pig farm,
and there, he was killing them, he was grinding them up,
he was feeding them to his pigs.
News programs were talking about it.
[reporter] Other gruesome details revealed DNA of the murdered women
found in processed meat on his farm.
He was arrested in February of 2002,
and Pickton was ultimately convicted.
A victim count-- Well, he confessed to 49.
He was quite upset
that he couldn't get the round number of 50
before he was, uh, caught.
[narrator] Pickton's farm was located less than two miles from the Pitt River,
which eventually flows into the Salish Sea.
[Michael] It's almost impossible for this number of people to disappear
without there being a serial killer.
So, that's why,
when the feet came along in this particular area,
that had to raise the question
of whether there is a serial killer on the loose.
Both cases have got a statistical anomaly,
so there is the attraction to wondering whether he was the suspect.
[narrator] However, Pickton targeted women,
and the feet that were found belonged to both men and women.
And later victims went missing long after Pickton was imprisoned,
leaving some to speculate
that an unknown serial killer could be to blame.
So, it was a viable theory at the time it was posed,
and I, uh, was called into the radio station
to give my theory on it
because I'm a criminal lawyer,
I can talk about serial killers,
I'm located physically out there,
and I've written a novel which foresaw these particular crimes.
Now, you also have to consider whether or not
this could be a serial killer,
somebody who right now is underneath the radar.
But with every case,
which is beginning to-- to take on the elements of a serial killing,
is that you want to get input from forensic experts
to help you solve it.
[gentle curious music plays]
[woman] I'm co-director of the Center for Forensic Research,
where we are right now.
I was contacted by the BC Coroners Service
and was asked to, uh, investigate several of the cases.
I was doing experiments here off the coast,
putting pig carcasses as proxies for humans,
uh, in the water,
and film to see what would happen to the bodies.
When we get a higher level of oxygen,
bodies in those situations could last weeks
or even, in some situations, months.
Then we went into the Salish Sea,
and there you've got normal oxygen levels.
And there we found the-- the carcasses were skeletonized
between three and four days.
Animals came in that skeletonize the bodies.
I'm sure you've all seen a-- an X-ray
of a hand and-- and a wrist, and the feet are very similar.
There's a million little bones in there, tons of little bones.
So, once you get rid of all the-- the skin and the muscle
and the sinews and stuff here, all you're gonna get left with
is a bunch of little bones, and they will separate.
[Michael] So, underneath the water's surface,
the bodies are decomposing, and the feet are coming loose.
[Gail] It's a natural phenomenon.
Whereas "severed" certainly suggests that somebody has actively done that,
but there was no sign of any cut marks.
I think the media loves the idea of severed feet
because it sounds dramatic and-- and scary
that somebody's going round cutting off people's feet.
So the pathologists
in the BC Coroners Service made it very clear,
to try and quell people's fears, I suppose,
that the-- the feet had been naturally disarticulated
and there was no sign of any cut marks.
My understanding from the BC Coroners Service
is that most of the feet that have washed up,
certainly on the Canadian shores, once identified,
were either accidental deaths or suicide deaths.
[narrator] Of the 21 feet that were found,
more than half have been identified.
[Michael] Some were fishermen.
It could be a nautical accident.
And we know that there are some people who were depressed.
And we know at least one person jumped off a bridge here.
So if you jump off a bridge into the water and you're wearing a running shoe,
eventually that will, uh, disarticulate.
[narrator] And according to the media,
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police maintain
there is no foot-severing killer on the loose.
[woman on radio] These were all either accidental
or unfortunate suicide deaths, all of them.
[narrator] Still, it's impossible to rule out foul play
when only the remains of feet have been left behind.
[Gail] We haven't heard that there could be any connection between the people,
but some, of course, are unknown.
If all you've got is the foot and you don't know who it is,
you have no idea.
You can say that the foot was not cut off, but why would it be if it's a homicide?
I mean, that's not exactly a-- a site somebody would have damage at.
I mean, you could easily have any kind of an injury to the rest of the body
that doesn't impact the feet.
You have no idea what happened before they died.
If you keep saying the same thing,
that there is no human intervention here,
you begin to lose credibility with each new foot.
[narrator] So if a lone criminal wasn't involved,
perhaps a group of dangerous criminals were.
In 2007, when the mystery first began,
the National Drug Intelligence Center
reported that drug-related crime had risen 156%
near the US-Canada border,
particularly near the Salish Sea,
prompting many on the Internet and in the media to wonder
if some of the feet belonged to victims of gang violence.
[Michael] There have always been criminal gangs here,
and there are new gangs comin' all the time,
and there are new drugs coming into the market.
And when the drug deal goes wrong and, uh, someone gets killed,
and if you're going to get rid of a body,
what better place to get rid of it than the Salish Sea?
[ominous tone plays]
[bittersweet piano music plays]
[woman] Antonio Neill's my only son.
Tony was 22 years old when he went missing in North Everett,
very close to the Snohomish River.
He was a happy kid, very lively.
He liked to play sports and skateboard and snowboard and play guitar.
He had a solid group of friends
that weren't doin' bad stuff,
but then he had a second group of friends
that got into harder drugs.
He would go day-drinking.
Like, he'd skip school.
They'd go, you know, drink and stuff.
After that, he had got into harder drugs like heroin and meth.
When he was using the harder drugs,
I don't think he knew, really, what he was doing.
So, Antonio, you know, in-- in his struggles,
he went to jail for using drugs.
The day that he got out,
I picked him up from the bus stop and spent all day together.
Got his hair cut.
Then it came, you know, to the evening time,
and we're like, "Where are you gonna go?"
And he was using my phone, um, to Facebook-message friends,
and he got ahold of one of his friends.
And Antonio, um, asked, "Hey," you know, "Can I stay with you?"
And he's like, "Oh, yeah, sure."
So, he came to our house,
and he was driving, like, a black Jeep Cherokee.
I was like, "Well, this shouldn't be that bad of a situation."
So, you know, I hugged and kissed my son goodbye.
The next morning, I got a call from my best friend, Jessica.
Antonio's friend would reach out to her because he used to date her daughter,
and so they had a relationship already.
So he reached out to her and told her that Antonio had assaulted him,
and now he's in the hospital getting treatment.
I'm freakin' out.
I thought, you know, perhaps Antonio relapsed
and took some really bad drugs
and didn't know what he was doing.
But he had been clean for the whole month in jail,
and so he didn't have an opportunity
to be on-- up for days on methamphetamines and, you know...
So it was really weird to me.
But Antonio's friend did go into the hospital with a wound.
So, I am searching, driving around.
I'm looking for my son.
I didn't know where he was,
and he hadn't talked to me.
He knows my number, he knows where we live.
He would've came home,
he would've messaged me,
so I'm freakin' out.
A week goes by, I'm still freakin' out. I'm thinkin',
"Well, maybe he's hiding out, maybe he really did do this,
maybe he's afraid to contact me."
So I called the police, and I reported him missing.
[siren wails]
[mellow music plays]
[man] The drug issue right now in Everett,
it's a huge problem.
Drugs have always been around, obviously,
but it's gone from like meth, cocaine, heroin, and right now fentanyl.
I was the acting supervisor of the Major Crimes Unit,
and I read a report about a missing person that was handled by our patrol units
on the 28th of December of 2016.
They were contacted by a mother of a missing individual,
Jenny Neill.
And the missing person was Antonio Neill.
There wasn't a whole lot of information, except the last time that she saw her son,
uh, was on December 12th of 2016.
Antonio was with his friend, who resided at a house in Everett
and went to a local hospital to be treated for some stab wounds.
And so, as I dug into that,
found out that he had accused Antonio of stabbing him,
but he was uncooperative with law enforcement.
That was interesting to me
in the sense that, well,
it was the day before that Jenny last saw her son,
and I've learned that house had individuals that lived there
that were involved in the drug world.
And you can speculate on what was goin' on.
It was very clear that Antonio associated himself with people
that maybe weren't good people to be around.
So, obviously that caused us some concern,
and we really needed to look into it.
[Jenny] I actually talked to Antonio's friend, and he's like,
"Don't worry, Jenny." You know, "I'll find him."
But he refused to talk to police.
And he started giving away Antonio's things and stuff,
instead of giving 'em back to me.
So, Detective Walvatne went into starting to question people.
But throughout that time when Antonio was missing,
we've had people say, "Oh, we-- we think we've seen Antonio."
And then, probably, a few more weeks, in mid-January,
I got a Facebook message by one of the roommates at that house
saying that they had kicked Antonio's friend outta the house,
and while they were cleaning his room,
they saw that there was blood all over the room.
[Brad] That same roommate told me
that Antonio's friend had made a comment to him,
saying, "Well, Antonio stabbed you, go kick his ass."
[menacing music plays]
You know, "Go beat him up."
And according to the roommate,
Antonio's friend's response was, "I took care of it."
With that information,
Everett Police Department went out to the residence.
Uh, they were able to confirm
that they observed what they believed to be blood
inside the residence,
and there was some blood located on a mattress,
but nothing came back or matched Antonio's DNA.
[somber music plays]
[narrator] Without conclusive evidence,
the Everett Police Department closed the homicide investigation,
and the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office continued investigating
Antonio's missing-person case.
We were workin' on this case for a good two and a half years,
and we always had a belief
that somethin' suspicious happened to Antonio.
[Jenny] You feel when your son's not with you anymore, honestly.
So, it-- it-- it was a-- a vibe I couldn't kick.
It was a, um-- It was a real feeling in my stomach.
[Brad] On January 1st of 2019,
a gentleman was out on, uh, Jetty Island,
which is a location here in Everett.
Um, it's very popular in the summer time.
Uh, people go out and enjoy, um, the water, uh, the beach.
Well, this, uh, individual was out for a walk, just beachcombing,
and he came across a boot.
The Timberland boot, um, contained a sock.
[shutter clicks]
Bones from a foot, a right foot,
some tissue and toenails.
[Jenny] Detective Walvatne sent me a picture of the boot,
a-- and I knew immediately that was Antonio's boot.
[Brad] When I talked to Jenny, um,
I found out that Antonio was last seen wearing a pair of Timberland boots.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't even speak.
I knew it was my son's boot.
One toenail was sent off to our lab here in Marysville
for DNA testing.
And when they did the DNA examination,
it showed to, uh, belong to Antonio.
- I haven't seen you in a while. - [Jenny] I know.
- Thank you for taking me out here. - How you doing? You're welcome.
[Jenny] Mmm.
[Brad] So we're gonna-- just gonna walk through the trail here,
and we're gonna get over to the northwest corner of Jetty Island.
I'll show you where, uh, the boot was found.
So how you been doing?
[Jenny sighs] It's a struggle every day.
Honestly, I'm like, constantly... lurking on Facebook
at people that I feel that was involved,
and seeing what they're up to,
seeing if there's anything new,
or comments, or someone slipping.
[tender music plays]
[Brad] When you are dealing with any kind of body part that's found in water,
the process of, uh, decomposition makes it very difficult.
You know, there was no evidence on the foot that would support foul play,
but that doesn't mean anything.
We need somebody to come forward.
- We need somebody to say something. - [Jenny] Yeah.
[Brad] Um, you know, it's just-- it's a difficult case.
- I-- - I don't know. [sniffles]
This is hard, dude. It's weird.
I'm so... [sighs]
...stumped on how it got way over here.
[Brad] It just shows you just, kind of, the waters in here.
- [Jenny] The tides. - The tides are strong.
- You know? - [Jenny] Yeah.
It's insane that somebody would actually pick up
just some random item on the beach.
I'm just so grateful... [chuckles]
...that they were curious enough to actually look at that boot.
[Brad] Okay. So, I think it's right-- right in this-- right in this area.
Right in here, actually.
[Jenny] Okay.
And you can see S-- off in the distance there,
that's gonna be near the entrance to the Snohomish River.
[Jenny] Wow.
I can't believe this.
It's so peaceful. [laughs]
- At least. [laughs] - It is.
[Jenny sniffles]
- I mean, it's beautiful out here. - [sighs] Yeah.
Yeah. Poor kid.
- I'm sorry. - Fuck. I know.
[chuckles] What a day.
- I wish I could do more. - I know.
We do what we can when things come up.
Thank you so much for bringing me out here.
- You're welcome. Yeah. - 'Cause I'm-- I'm so grateful.
[Brad] We just need somebody that we can, you know, talk to
that wants to come forward, and give us some information
that we can work with.
[Jenny] I won't stop until we solve this
and somebody, you know, is accountable
for what happened to Antonio.
[Gail] It's incredibly difficult on families.
I can't begin to imagine how terrible it is,
not just to lose somebody, but to not know what happened.
But dealing with, uh, the many cases I've dealt with, I know
even when a body is found,
in some cases, there's a relief there.
I know it's a terribly overused word, but s-- some form of closure.
[melancholy music plays]
[Brad] I think anything's possible. The case will always remain open.
I hope that we can, you know, figure out what happened.
We'll never give up.
[Michael] I can understand why the mother would want to have that investigation.
I would also want to have that looked at
before I would accept that it was just something else,
he had an accident or it was suicide, or-- or etc.
[Parker] I am pretty sure that if people found-- What is it?
...over 20 feet since 2007,
that will probably continue into the future.
I see no reason why that would change.
[Michael] As a defense lawyer,
I come up with all the theories I possibly can
as to why feet are washing up.
In the end, what we're left with is the statistical improbability
of 21 feet being found in this limited area,
in a limited time.
You can't just sweep it under the carpet because it's, uh, inconvenient,
and just pretend this is all natural.
Something is going on here.
[narrator] The mystery as to why dismembered feet wash up
along the Salish Sea endures,
and the families continue to seek answers about their loved ones.
But will the truth ever be found?
[Jenny] I won't stop.
[somber ethereal music plays]