RICHMOND, B.C.— A couple walking their dogs along the banks of British Columbia’s Fraser River made what appears to be the latest in a series of gruesome discoveries of a running shoe with a severed foot inside.

It’s the seventh such find inside a shoe along the West Coast from Georgia Strait to the northwestern tip of Washington State since August 2007.

RCMP Const. Annie Linteau confirmed Wednesday that remains were inside a left-foot New Balance runner spotted the previous day, but said it would be some time before the B.C. Coroner’s office could confirm if the remains are human.

Ken Johnson and his wife spotted the shoe while walking their dogs Tuesday along the Fraser River in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond.

“I flipped it over and it looked suspicious to me, in terms of it seemed to have a sock and New Balance sort of stuck in our head,” he said, recalling previous stories about feet found in running shoes on the B.C. shoreline.

“My first reaction was this was a small size, maybe a woman’s shoe,” said Johnston, who fished the runner out of the river.

“It’s kind of blurry now, but my first reaction, my gut reaction, was it looks like a woman’s shoe, a left shoe.”

One right New Balance runner — the only one belonging to a woman — has been found since the first foot was located on Jedidiah Island in Georgia Strait on Aug. 20, 2007.

The right-foot New Balance runner was located May 22, on Kirkland Island in the Fraser River, not far from the site of Tuesday’s discovery.

RCMP said they will try to determine if the two New Balance shoes are linked.

Linteau said the challenge with such a discovery in the Fraser River is that the remains could have come from anywhere along the more than 1,300-kilometre length of the river.

“As far as northern B.C.,” Linteau said. “So we are exploring the possibility that they could be missing fishermen, missing people that may have fallen into the water.”

She said police are reluctant to say the latest discovery of remains are human without DNA confirmation because of two previous hoaxes.

“We want to proceed cautiously until we know what exactly we are dealing with,” Linteau said in a news release.

All the other feet were located at several sites around Georgia Strait between 2007 and Aug. 4, 2008.

That’s also when human remains were found in a runner washed up on the U.S. San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State.

Police have determined that two of the runners — found Feb. 8 on Valdez Island and June 16 off Richmond — are a match.

DNA testing linked one foot to a depressed man who disappeared in 2007 but the other remains have not been identified.

Officials believe none of the feet were cut off and that it appears all the remains were “naturally disarticulated” from their bodies.

That fits with expert theories that when a human body is submerged in the ocean, parts like arms, legs, hands, feet and the head usually separate naturally.

The discovery of dismembered feet, all in buoyant sneakers, has been headline-grabbing world news for the last year.

The sixth foot was discovered on a beach on Juan de Fuca Strait, about 50 kilometres west of Port Angeles.

Authorities in the United States have said the black, size-11 shoe was an Everest brand. The sock found inside the shoe was described as a Levi’s brand tube sock.

Linteau said investigators are revisiting missing persons files and trying to get DNA profiles from family members.

Dr. John Butt, a forensic pathologist and former chief medical examiner in Alberta and Nova Scotia, said earlier this year that finding the feet in the same area is difficult to explain, although that’s not the case with the condition of the feet.

Butt said a foot and leg will separate naturally, in water or in the ground, given enough time.

“When tissue softens to the point that ligaments have no strength, the leg will detach from the foot,” he said.

“There is no other clothing applied to the body as tightly as a shoe, except maybe a belt. A shoe is tight and stays on the foot and the shoe is buoyant.”