Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Human Foot Found on Beach in Shoe IDENTIFIED

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

On August 5, 2008, a beachgoer walking near the former Silver King Resort, west of Port Angeles, Washington, discovered a shoe containing a sock and what appeared to be human remains. It wasn't the first and won't be the last, but today, the person behind the foot is identified! Since 2007, at least 20 detached human feet, often found in sneakers, have been discovered on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington, US. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take a look at the mystery as well as go behind the lab coats at Orthram to explain how they are able to identify the person behind the foot, and how you can help. Othram works with forensic scientists, medical examiners, and law enforcement agencies to achieve results when other approaches 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 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. As 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 prefer always to go to the mountains, particularly the Blue Ridge. 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 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 as a family that we would start going to the beach, and now I can't get enough. I always tell Kimmy, my wife, I always say,

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, that guy, I 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 it kiss your skin along with the sunshine. I don't even mind the sand too much anymore. And what I really enjoy is walking on the beach. Endlessly.

Because you never know what you're going to 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 years back. And as it turns out, it's happened several times since. A person wandering down the beach, they see a shoe with a sock in it and contained within that sock are the skeletal remains of a human foot. Today, we finally have an identification, thanks to our friends at Authram, 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 Bobby Bax. Dave, you want to know something? I don't know that I've ever told you this. Am I going to have to like take an oath? No, no, it's it's rather benign. And I'm sure that people are such a nice guy. Am I going to have to like take an oath? No, no. It's rather benign.

And I'm sure that people. He was such a nice guy. People in 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 can't hurry up along the beach. She always pauses to look at everything. And I would have thought that I would have found one by now. 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 across one one day that was literally cut into, I swear, it's like the fates were laughing at me. It's like I came across this thing and it was cracked into like eight pieces and each piece was pie shaped. What's the odds of that kind of symmetry in nature, the randomness of that? How are the waves going to strike it? Literally 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. I didn't mean to say feat there, but that's F-E-A-T and not F-E-E-T. Yeah. I'm going to correct the spelling for you. But all right. One thing I do know is I know where you like to go to the beach. And the chances of you finding a sand dollar on the beach where you go, slim and none.

Yeah. But I can show you where to go get them in the Gulf of America now. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to go offshore a little bit. Yeah. You got to go offshore a little bit. Yeah. 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, you know, and you'll get as many as you want.

No kidding. Serious. Really? Yeah. And you bring them back and dry them out. This was one of those scary stories. If you remember where there were all the stories about shoes floating up on the coast. Yeah.

And I 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 H 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, 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. And so. You're not talking down to me. My sister lives in Seattle and is begging me to come. You need to. It's breathtaking.

The beaches are breathtaking. It's something otherworldly when you get there. Compared 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. I'm like, you know, whatever. But you get up there and these huge rock formations, the beautiful forest that run right up to the edge of the ocean. It is a it's an otherworldly kind of place. And so just so the folks understand, there's a large island called Vancouver Island. And it it is an island. OK, okay? 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 Salish Sea. And so it's kind of shaped like a fish hook. And there's rivers that feed out of Washington State and out of Canada into the 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 beautiful. It's breathtaking. These homes that for people that can afford them that live on the edge up there in these, you know, three story tall 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 2007 until the present day, between British Columbia and Washington State, Dave, there have been 21 cases.

21 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, because you're thinking, okay, 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.

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 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 HLN.

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 and I that were covering this thing. And I was like, because in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, from a forensics perspective and 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 we're finding defeat? 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. 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 2007.

Look, y'all, I'm not trying to 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 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. 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.'m we've got feet inside shoes okay and yeah i'm a beach guy if i'm walking and i see a pair of nikes i'm gonna look at them until i started reading these stories and i'm thinking i'm not gonna 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 joe you know what's really you know what's really creepy about this brother is it's a lot all of it is creepy joe 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, one of the creepier elements is the sock that's hanging out. Because, you know, it's not... That's the creepy element?

It's not... Yeah, it is. No, no, no. It is. Where's the rest of this person? 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 and New Orleans?

And I've looked up on a power line and I've seen tennis shoes thrown up over a power line, which is indicative of many different things. All right. And generally drug dealing 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. OK, but when you most of the time when you see a shoe, you do not see a sock hanging out of it. And so when you think about that, you think, OK, I understand the shoe. Maybe somebody 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 most of these cases, just like with Jeff Sertel, the 17-year-old kid, I got to 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 very hydrodynamic 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 the sea, like, you know,

we think about brutal storms that happen in the Gulf. Most of those are associated with hurricanes, the 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. 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 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, have a certain level of buoyancy to them that causes them to float. And so as they're floating along, they'll wash up on shore, and they can support that weight of the skeletal remains because, you know, the softer tissues have been greatly diminished. I heard one report and one, I think it was from a forensic anthropologist, and they wrote this article several years ago, and they talked about lazy eaters, and that is in reference to marine animals, not just 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, containing the skeletal remains. And it starts this journey where it's kind of floating. You know, you think about. You think about one of my favorite police songs from years and years ago, Message in a Bottle. 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. 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 if 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 is also what's called the I think it's's the Georgian Strait, is on the northern part of it. And so it is, in fact, shaped like a fishhook. 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 case of Jeff Sertel, 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 end of this thing, of the Salish Sea. And the beach is very broad down there. You're kind of getting 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 coroner service has no idea who 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 turn these things over to their coroner service up in B.C. And they had no way of tracking these. But, you know, I got to tell you, Dave, thanks to, you know, our our friends at at Othram, this this story has got a very positive outcome. And that's how I found out about this, because this did not you cover 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.

He has to read everything. What I do is it's chicken feed compared understand what Dave does. He has to read everything. What I do is it's chicken feed compared to what Dave does. This case did not enter into the national discourse. It was actually David Middleman, the president and CEO of Othram, 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 bags. And he was right, because I knew that it plugged right back in to the great foot shoe mystery of the fatal three. That is a big mystery, though, Joe.

Think about it for just a minute here. You've got 20, 21 feet. Not all matching pairs, by the way. No, no, no, no, no, no. And so you've got 20 21 feet not all matching pairs by the way you know no no no no no and and so you've got 20 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, I mean, people die out at sea. People die all the time. It happens. And in that area, I could see exactly what you're explaining. But 20, 21?

That's only the ones that have shown up. Right. That's what I'm saying. You have to think. You know what? There might be a whole new species of flounder and they got shoes down there. I don't know. It's so it's so bizarre to think about it, because if in this area and listen, you know, Jeff Sertel is not from America. He's Canadian. This case, he went missing in B.C.

I've got kids his age. This is what gets me about him. OK, yeah, he goes missing in 2007. Just give you an idea. And the reason we're talking about this one guy in particular, Jeff Sertel, he goes missing. He's 17 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, they've already gone past. 16 is the year you drive.

You're still a child. You've learned to drive at 17. You're 17, you're getting out of high school. You're thinking about the future, but you're still not an adult. No. But you feel like you are. So for Jeff Sertel to leave his house on his bike around midnight, which is what he did, and leaves his stuff at home. He leaves 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 on april 29 2007 at midnight he leaves his house on august 5th 2009 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 20 or 21 feet washing up on shore and that's all you've got is a foot inside of a sock and a shoe 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 and now all you have is a

foot inside a sock inside of a shoe that landed on a beach. And hey, what is the finder? Is some crazy crackpot, you know, that's chopping off feet and doing his thing with them. There are a lot of things to consider here, Joe. So where do you start? There is. Well, when you're you, you take it. I like to describe it as the inverted funnel method. And that's my coined 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 that you want to gather as much information as you possibly can on the front end of an investigation, particularly a death investigation involving an unidentified body or an element of a human remain in this particular case. And so, you start off very, very broadly, inverted funnel, okay? And then you kind of draw it in and narrow that up to the top of the smokestack 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. 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,

the structures in there, it's so fragile and so delicate. But there are a lot of skeletal elements that are contained in the foot and the ankle. The sock might 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 is going to be a forensic anthropologist. As a matter of fact, 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 ME investigator that went out to the scene. They said they'd looked into the shoe or looked into the sock, which was in the shoe. And I saw bony 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, but most of the time there's not enough work for them to work full time.

It's not like we have skeletons every single day. And I know people think that we do. And so many of them work out of universities. But the time to develop or always tell people, police in particular, the time to develop a relationship 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 go on 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 to, you know, well, to LSU in the early days of my career

because we had a great forensic anthropologist, 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. She's one of my oldest and dearest friends. And she founded the FACES lab at LSU. They were the first group of people to 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. 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 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 structure of a foot, skeletal remains of a foot, and you left it on dry land, okay,

those two collections of skeletal elements are going to look completely different. You say, well, Morgan, it's kind of obvious. You're damn right it's obvious because saltwater impacts bone differently. So, the big thing about it is 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 of the shoe as they are witnessing it, or you allow them to do it. Now, you have the forensic pathologist stand by, but I don't know what a forensic

pathologist could add to the discussion. Because even, let's just go out on a limb here and say that 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 that are forensic anthropologists that actually specialize. I know two of them off the top of my head that specialize in nothing but tool marks on human bones.

That's all they've studied for all these many years in their esteemed careers. That's all that they've done. And they've even 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 the reason I'm saying this is that you want somebody that is geographically literate to that area in the Northwest. 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 skeletal remains. You know, as I'm sure that there are fine forensic anthropologists maybe in Kansas somewhere. I'm not going to reach out to them as opposed to the person that works at, I don't know, the University of Western Washington or the University of, you know, University of Washington or, you know, Vancouver. You know, one of those universities up there. I'm going to want somebody that's familiar with that area so that they can go in. And then, you know, the next big part to this is trying to understand 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, 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 24-year-old as opposed to a 17-year-old. You can age them that way. You can also age them by wear. And the other thing you can look for is, has there been any previous antemortem trauma, like have they ever fractured 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 the bone inside of it, with the feet, the 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 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 10 and a half shoe? Then you know something's really afoot at that point. Who are they? Well, that's the big thing, isn't it? When it comes to Jess 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 2007, I can't even. 17 years man i mean i can't even begin to to think about the grief he's gone and he's been gone since then he was 17 when he left he'll be forever 17 but yes his foot is there but how i mean identifying the foot no look i 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 they they say that they're it the uh the black athletic shoe found on the

county beach contained human remains why 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 you say that to first of all, that it did it naturally, that it wasn't chopped off? Right, right. And I think you broke that down pretty good with the explaining of that one. I had a big question about that.

But the other part is we still don't know how he's dead. You've identified him, but we don't know anything else, really. And here's a cold cup of coffee for you and everybody else we never will know. Oh, come on, Joe. I really did think you had something up your sleeve. No, I have no magic that leads to a cause of death. And that's the tragedy with this. I mean, it's all very tragic.

It truly is. But still identifying, knowing that your child is, you know, gone. They didn't. Well, we know they can know, not we. I don't have a mouse in my pocket. They, the parents, who are the two most important people in this entire investigation. Okay. They know that he is deceased because, you know, it's not like this is some kind of traumatic event where his foot was traumatically amputated and he could be out there somewhere.

Right. 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 a natural biological outcome, okay, relative to decomposition. And what they're saying by this is that 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 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, 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 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 degloves. 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 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 weakest spot. Okay. And the weakest spot is generally going to be the joint.

Okay. I think that's one of the reasons, 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 to shoes. I've 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. And I have some that I just absolutely love to go on my boat with. I never throw them away. I use them to work in the yard and those sorts of things. And I have some that I just absolutely love to go on my boat with, you know, 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. Well, it has that buoyancy to them and they 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. 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.

Maybe a shoe that has a logo, the Nike swoosh or the Adidas. After you use all that, Joe, we started off the top of this with Althram, because you're talking about a foot 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 20 times, at least, that we know of. Yes. That means there are people who are waiting for an answer to a loved one.

And this is the closest you're going to get. And to be honest with you, if it's a size 11 foot, how many of us have a size 11, 11 and a half foot? I mean, where are you going to start? How does the author identify it? How do you get it down to the point where they can pick up the phone and say, with 100% certainty, we have identified your son and he's gone. Here's we, you know, I don't know that call, but you know what I mean? How does that? No, no, you're no, no, you're absolutely right.

What has to happen? 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 right on the cusp of getting some of these people identified? You know, we talked about 21, right? Or 2021. How many other of these feet are intact to the point where you can have bony elements that you can still go into the core of that bone and 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 what Othram did. And in the case of Jeff, that to me is is 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 case in particular, like so many others at Othram, when the remains were discovered, they really didn't know what to do with them. There's, you know, what are you going to hang your hat on here? Well, it all comes down to crowdfunding.

Because, you know, Othram 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. All right. They are on the cutting edge, but that requires money. It requires money. And I'll say this now. I'll say it again. I'll say it 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 this requires nothing more than you going to visit DNA solves calm 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 select one. Maybe it's based on geography. Maybe, you know, it's your state that has a case. Or maybe it's somebody that reminds you of maybe one of your loved ones. Maybe they're the same age or approximately the same age, and you want to try to help solve 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 is 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 $7,000 or $7,500. And that way, they can get the wheels rolling on this thing. And they can go into open source DNA databases that 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 might be that answer to a prayer that's been 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 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 ultimately would be offering. So again, that's DNA solves.com. I urge each and every one of you

to go to their website, review it, see what you can do. Anything will help. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Max.