What the Sea Returns

Richard Jonathan O. Taduran, Ph.D.  |  19 February 2026

They arrived quietly, one by one. A foot in a running shoe. Another inside a hiking boot. Sometimes left, sometimes right. Since 2007, beaches along the Pacific Northwest—particularly around the Salish Sea—have yielded a strange and unsettling pattern: detached human feet washing ashore, intact, preserved, and oddly ordinary, still in their footwear.

Each discovery triggered the same reaction. Headlines leaned toward menace. Online forums filled with speculation. The question surfaced again and again, dressed in true-crime cadence: Is there a serial killer at sea?

It is tempting to frame these discoveries as something sinister, the kind of carefully staged pattern familiar from crime films and television—evidence of a hidden hand operating beneath the surface. And yet, from a forensic perspective, what appears uncanny is often the product of very ordinary biological and environmental processes. The question is not why the feet appear, but how shared conditions produce similar outcomes.

Shoes That Float

The single most important factor in these cases is not violence, intent, or concealment. It is footwear.

Modern athletic shoes and boots are engineered to be light, cushioned, and buoyant. Air pockets, foam midsoles, and synthetic materials allow shoes—and whatever remains inside them—to float. At the same time, footwear protects soft tissue from scavengers and slows decomposition. A bare foot in seawater is quickly dismantled; a foot enclosed in a sock and sneaker, however, becomes a small, protected vessel—a biological time capsule—capable of surviving long enough to resurface. This shielding often preserves viable DNA, allowing investigators to eventually return a name to a fragment that the sea would have otherwise erased.

Forensic anthropologists can still extract limited biological information from a recovered foot. Certain sex-linked traits may be suggested. Age can sometimes be approximated using degenerative changes or epiphyseal fusion if present. There are methods for estimating stature from foot remains. Importantly, the bones themselves can also reveal how separation occurred. Clean joint disarticulation, the absence of cut marks, and characteristic surface changes point toward natural postmortem processes rather than deliberate and violent removal.

What cannot reliably be determined from an isolated foot is cause or manner of death. Without context, the foot is not evidence of violence—it is evidence of survival. It is the remnant that endured long enough to be found.

How Water Unmakes

Bodies decompose differently in water. Aquatic taphonomy follows its own rules—shaped by temperature, salinity, depth, currents, and scavenging activity. Unlike land environments, where gravity anchors remains, water disperses them. Time becomes the dominant variable.

As decomposition progresses, soft tissues break down and joints naturally separate. The human foot consists of numerous small bones held together primarily by ligaments rather than heavy muscle mass, making it particularly susceptible to disarticulation in water. The ankle—a synovial hinge joint with relatively little soft-tissue anchoring compared to larger joints such as the hip or knee—serves as a predictable early “release point” in the taphonomic sequence. In aquatic environments, natural decomposition weakens connective tissues, allowing joints to separate cleanly over time without any cutting, trauma, or external force. Detached feet or lower limbs are therefore not anomalies; they are expected outcomes given sufficient submersion time.

Scavenging further accelerates this process. Marine organisms preferentially consume exposed tissue, leaving behind what is shielded. Extremities enclosed in footwear are often spared long enough to detach cleanly rather than fragment.

The geography of the Salish Sea amplifies this effect. As a semi-enclosed inland sea, it behaves less like open ocean and more like a circulating system. Currents loop rather than disperse. Floating objects—whether debris or human remains—can travel unpredictably, resurfacing years later and far from their point of origin. Wind-driven drift and seasonal current changes create shoreline “collection zones,” areas where floating material accumulates repeatedly.

This explains why discoveries cluster geographically while remaining temporally disconnected. These are not synchronized events. They are asynchronous outcomes—separate deaths linked only by shared environmental conditions.

Patterns, in this case, do not point to a perpetrator. They help investigators arrive at the most probable explanation consistent with the evidence.

Not a Message, But a Reminder

As of this writing, there is no credible forensic evidence that the Salish Sea discoveries represent a serial crime. Forensic experts and coroners involved in these cases have repeatedly emphasized that the findings are consistent with drowning, misadventure, and suicide rather than dismemberment or targeted violence. Many recovered feet have been identified and matched to missing persons, further reinforcing that these are unrelated deaths converging only through time and tide.

What remains are individual tragedies, unified not by intent, but by environment and time.

The cold logic of currents often masks the quiet reality of the victims. In my own casework, I have seen how the sea receives those who seek it—not with a struggle, but with a deliberate, silent walk into the surf. Forensics does not just find a foot; it eventually finds a name, closing a narrative that the water tried to disperse.

The sea does not kill selectively. It does not conspire. It follows physics, biology, and time. What it returns is not a message, but a reminder: sometimes the most unsettling mysteries are not crimes at all—just the visible edges of human loss, resurfacing when conditions allow.