Vancouver police come to Seattle on mission to ID kayaker who died in 2022
Fern spores and cedar pollen grains have injected new hope into a nearly four-year investigation by police in Vancouver, B.C., to identify a female kayaker who is believed to have visited an urban or suburban area somewhere between Portland and Seattle before her death.
The Vancouver Police Department uploaded a video about the unidentified woman to YouTube on Monday and Tuesday, two sergeants and a detective held a news briefing about the case at Seattle police headquarters. They plan to hold a similar news briefing with Portland police Wednesday, all with hope that news about the case will jog memories and provide tips about the woman's identity.
"We are open to the possibility that she could be from anywhere in the world," Vancouver police Sgt. Adam Donaldson said. "We don't have the ability to go everywhere in the world - but a video can, social media can, so we are encouraging everybody to share that as much as possible."
The unidentified woman was found in English Bay, about a kilometer (0.6 miles) off Spanish Banks Beach, by a tugboat crew around 9 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2022, and was brought to shore, Donaldson said. She was found next to an inflatable kayak and oar, was wearing a sweater and backpack and had insulin and gummy bears on her, he said.
Though medics were able to restore her pulse, she never regained consciousness and died the next morning in a Vancouver hospital, said Det. Rebecca Matson, a member of Vancouver police's missing persons unit. She didn't have any identification on her, and there were no matches to her fingerprints or DNA in Canada or the United States, Matson said. Neither the kayak nor insulin provided any clues to her identity.
Despite efforts to match the woman to a missing-person report, including across North America and through Interpol, Vancouver police have come up empty.
"There is no greater indignity in death than to not even have that death acknowledged," Matson said. "She needs a name, and we just need one person to recognize her, and that's what we are hoping may come from expanding our searches south of the border."
She said a woman who runs a Facebook page about missing and unidentified people in the Vancouver area - and has helped solve two of Matson's earlier cases - was given photos of the kayaker and worked with a graphic artist to create a rendering of what the woman looked like.
The woman was 5-feet-7, in her mid-30s or early 40s, 175 to 200 pounds and of African descent. Vancouver police believe she was likely a tourist or newcomer to Canada.
New hope was breathed into the case when Matson and Sgt. Anton Schamberger attended a conference last year in Las Vegas and learned of a new forensic technique being used at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection lab in Chicago.
"The lab in Chicago can analyze pollen grains found on almost any surface and determine where that pollen is from," Schamberger said, adding the process was first used to analyze drug packaging to determine where in the world narcotics originated from.
"It was kind of, honestly, mind blowing," Schamberger, a former homicide investigator, said of the technique that could, say, help locate an unknown crime scene.
He immediately thought of the unidentified kayaker case and reached out to the lab last summer. Scientists there agreed to run the analysis on the woman's sweater and backpack.
Though there wasn't much found on the backpack - it was likely a newer purchase - fern spores and pollen grains found on the woman's sweater led them to conclude "that sweater had recent exposure to an urban or suburban environment in the Pacific Northwest, most probably between Seattle and Portland," Schamberger said. The cedar pollen was from decorative, nonnative trees more abundant in Seattle and Portland, while another species of cedar is ubiquitous in the Vancouver area.
According to a copy of the 10-page lab report, the scientists determined there was "an unusually high abundance" of the grains and spores, indicating "close or direct physical contact with ornamental Cedrus trees and dense fern growth," rather than passive deposits from the air.
Donaldson said Vancouver police aren't saying the woman was from here, only that she may have spent time here before heading north.
"We're hoping to trigger memories. We're hoping to reach that person who may have served her in a coffee shop or rented out an Airbnb to her," he said.
The video created by Vancouver police, called The Kayaker, can be found on YouTube and on X and Instagram @VancouverPD. Anyone with information is asked to email tips to thekayaker@vpd.ca or call 604-717-0619.
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