I'm making some progress. I made another ik handle from the ankle to pelvis. So there are 2 ik handles at the ankle. One to the hip for accurate knee bending and another for hip movement. I made a locator at the ball of the foot. I made the locator the parent of these ik handles (as well as 2 others relating to the ball and toe of the foot).

The only problem now is that because of the ik handle, the pelvis rotates and the skeleton leans way over. The upper body needs to accomodate.

EDIT: I found that making additional pelvis joints to make the ik handles fixes those problems, because now these duplicate joints are not parents of the upper body.