Petone Beach is not the prettiest beach in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Not the longest either. Not the cleanest. It’s not even famous for surfing. Its only strong point are the silent walks at sunset on a footbridge that enters the sea, something that only locals usually enjoy because tourists prefer other more attractive arenas for mobile optics. Petone Beach, in general, was a very boring beach where nothing ever happened. Until a few days ago a sneaker with a rotten human foot inside appeared there.
In Wellington they don’t talk about anything else. The locals who walked every afternoon on that beach are scared. And the police lost. The agents have no idea where that foot came from. There are still coastal patrol boats circling the nearby waters in case they spot the rest of the body, or at least more mutilated parts of it.
Some say that the foot surely belonged to a woman who was kayaking in the area and who disappeared at sea a few months ago. Others think that it may be from a corpse thrown into the water and destroyed by marine predators, who always prefer the softest parts of the human body.
In the absence of answers, the collective imagination, which now freely vents on social networks, always finds the best theories. This is well known by the Australian neighbors, who a few months ago had to use that imagination to try to reveal what was behind another amputated foot that appeared on one of their beaches.
In August last year, the severed foot of a notorious con artist named Melissa Caddrick was found inside an Asics running shoe on a beach 400 kilometers south of Sydney. Melissa had been missing since November 2020, just after authorities issued a warrant to search her Dover Heights mansion. She had defrauded more than $20 million in investment funds from more than 60 clients, including family and friends.
As soon as the DNA tests indicated that the foot was Melissa’s, the theory quickly spread through social networks and television programs that the scammer could have cut her own foot to mislead the police and to be left for dead.
In New Zealand, investigations continue around the foot found on Petone Beach. The main hypothesis is that it is a corpse that had been in the water for a long time and that the limb came off during decomposition. A mystery that is new to this small Pacific island state, but one that is well known in Canada and the United States. Up to 21 disembodied feet in sneakers have washed up since 2007 on beaches or shorelines on both sides of the border between these two countries in the Salish Sea.
The last shoe with a rotten surprise inside appeared in 2019, more than a decade after the first case: in the summer of 2007, a girl was found wearing blue and white Adidas shoes off the coast of Jedediah Island, between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. Looking inside, she was surprised to discover that it contained an adult right foot. Just six days later, on another nearby island, a size 12 black and white Reebok with another male right foot turned up. The following year, another five amputated feet appeared. And so year after year. There came a time when it even became fashionable among the most pranksters to leave slippers with animal bones on the beaches to scare bathers.
In the press there was talk of a serial killer or mafia settling of scores. Even in some forums there was a current that pointed to the most absolute surrealism when saying that they were alien abductions, which only left one foot of their prey.
In the end, the analyzes that were carried out at the feet demolished all these theories: most of the results linked them to people whose disappearance had been reported or who had had an accident at sea and their body had never been found. found. For example, a foot that turned up in November 2011 belonged to a fisherman who disappeared in 1987, while another that turned up inside a pair of New Balances in 2004 belonged to a depressed woman who had jumped off a bridge.
Like the public and the media, scientists also formulated their own theories: In addition to decomposing in the water, when bodies sink, they are torn apart by scavengers of the deep, who prefer parts of the body with softer tissues around them. of the orifices, but also include the ankles.
Research conducted by Simon Fraser University (Canada) into the decomposition of bodies in the same waters where many of the feet would be found, showed that deep-dwelling fish, shrimp and crustaceans could reduce a corpse to a skeleton in less of four days. While what remains of the body remains at the bottom of the sea, the gnawed feet float to the surface, at least if kept afloat by sneakers, which typically contain foam and air pockets in the soles.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
