The Mystery of the Floating Feet
CBC News ? The Passionate Eye
Monday, Nov. 2 2009 10 P.M.
Sunday Nov. 8th 8 P.M.
Mystery fans are going to enjoy The Mystery of the Floating Feet, the documentary airing Monday November 2nd at 10 P.M. and Sunday November 8th at 8 P.M. on CBC Newsworld. This Passionate Eye show follows the case of mismatched severed right feet in running shoes that washed up on the BC and Washington state coasts. Put your foot up and enjoy, this is a pretty good but in the end unsatisfying documentary.
The documentary follows the process of analyzing the remains and trying to get as much information as possible from them and the shoes. Sensitive stomachs will want to abstain as some of the scenes are a bit more realistic than what you know is just fake on CSI or Bones. One involves a real corpse and maggots.
The Mystery of the Severed Feet opens with a quick play-by-play of the various roles and duties of a coroner, forensic pathologist, and so on before focusing on the feet themselves. This is the documentary’s weakness at is messes around a bit before getting to the missing feet case itself. I am really not convinced the visit to the Body Farm was necessary. Cool, yes, necessary, no, as the feet were found in water or on beaches.
Also, a lot of this information is stuff any crime TV or mystery novel fan already knows.
More interesting is the look at Venus, the underwater body farm in BC. This facility gives the first possible line of investigation, some 20 minutes into the documentary. Other fields involved in the case that has detectives … stumped … are DNA analysis, oceanography, forensic botany, cadaver dogs, and, believe it or not, cadaver wasps.
This is all quite interesting. Unfortunately, the mystery of the floating feet remains unresolved and this documentary sheds little light on the subject itself.