SEATTLE — A shoe with flesh and bones inside and found on a beach 30 miles west of Port Angeles had a human foot inside, the King County medical examiner’s office in Seattle said this afternoon.
The medical examiner determined the foot came off naturally after floating in the water, and investigators don’t suspect foul play, Clallam County Undersheriff Ron Peregrin told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
The Clallam County prosecutor who acts as coroner, Deb Kelly, said earlier Monday she was waiting to hear whether the flesh and bones are human — to rule out a hoax.
The next step is DNA testing to see if it matches feet found washed ashore in nearby waters in British Columbia. Five severed feet in shoes have been found in the past year, and a sixth found in June was a hoax with an animal paw.
The latest shoe was found Friday by a woman walking on a Strait of Juan de Fuca beach near the mouth of Jim Creek, about 30 miles west of Port Angeles.
Peregrin says his investigators will meet later this week with Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
A complete report will appear in Tuesday’s editions of the Peninsula Daily News.
EARLIER REPORT
By Paige Dickerson, Peninsula Daily News
PYSHT — A dog trained to sniff out cadavers scoured the area around Pysht on Sunday where an athletic shoe containing decaying bone and flesh was found two days earlier.
But Daisy the cadaver dog found nothing.
Daisy — along with owner Norma Snelling of Port Angeles — was brought in by Clallam County sheriff’s investigators to examine the area where the shoe was found tangled in seaweed and debris on the beach near the mouth of Jim Creek about 30 miles west of Port Angeles.
It was unclear if the flesh and bone inside the size 11 or 12 black sneaker — now in cold storage at the Sheriff’s Department in Port Angeles — was human, Sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Lyman Moores said.
So the law officers brought in the dog to check the beach and nearby woods just in case.
“You never know,” Undersheriff Ron Peregrin said.
“We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a body out there somewhere.”
“We didn’t find anything,” Moores said Sunday.
“We’re here specifically because of what we found yesterday.”
