In 1957, the body of a young boy was found discarded in the woods in Philadelphia in a cardboard box. After 65 years of investigation, the real name of the boy in the box has finally been identified. But this murder mystery is far from solved.
The Boy in the Box – Joseph Augustus Zarelli
By this point, my general bloodlust and decidedly pro-murder stance have been thoroughly established. I’m pretty sure this wasn’t always the case, but it’s hard for me to argue against it now thanks to three little letters: DNA. Long gone are the days when a woman would be sent to the gallows as a witch with little more evidence than her ability to masterfully perform basic arithmetic. These days, thanks to DNA evidence, we can often be 100% certain of a person’s guilt.
Obviously there are cases where the presence of DNA does not rule out other possible explanations for what occurred, but a lot of times it does. If we can be absolutely positive of a serial killer’s guilt, then I say why not let their head roll? I know they say “an eye for an eye makes the world go blind,” but in this case that’s only true if half the population are murderers which seems unlikely.
But DNA can do a lot more than provide a foundation with which to sate my desire for capital vengeance. It can be used to discover unknown ancestors, identify long lost twins who were separated at birth, and provide entertainment for 24 seasons of Maury Povich giving people paternity tests. Most importantly for today’s discussion, it can also be used to aid in solving cold cases.
Today we’ll be looking at one of the oldest and most famous unsolved crimes out of Philadelphia. For the past 65 years, there had been virtually no evidence to go off of. But as of December 2022, advances in DNA testing have finally provided a name to “America’s unknown child,” better known as “the boy in the box.”
The Discovery
Fox Chase was a neighborhood in Philadelphia. The woods off of Susquehanna Road were a popular area for two main reasons. First, it was often used as a dumping ground for trash, because apparently common decency hadn’t been invented yet. The area was also used as a training ground for would-be hunters.
People would litter the woods with traps to catch muskrats, a semiaquatic rodent that can be up to 4 pounds and a little over a foot long. These animals are allegedly tasty, but given their small size, how little their pelts sell for, and how much a muskrat trap costs, it seems to me like it would make more sense to just buy food. I’m not opposed to hunting so long as you use whatever you kill, but laying out some traps then checking days later to see if you caught anything doesn’t seem like it would include a lot of skill so this particular endeavor just seems pointless.
Anyway, it was a cold night in late February, 1957, when one of these wannabe hunters went out to check his traps and stumbled upon a cardboard box. The box was right by a pair of trees, not far off the road. When the hunter looked inside the box and saw the body of a deceased child, he immediately knew what he had to do: absolutely nothing. After all, if he led police to the location they may have confiscated his illegal hunting traps.
A few days later, a student from La Salle College stumbled upon the box. In one version of events, he was passing the road and saw a rabbit hop into the underbrush. Knowing about how common it was for people to place animal traps in this area, he went to check on the rabbit to make sure it was okay. The various reports are unclear, but it’s likely that this story was a lie he told to make himself seem like a sweet and caring guy rather than a disgusting pervert.
The more salacious version of events is that the student was on his way to go spy on the nearby residents of the Sisters of Good Shepherd, a Catholic residence for “wayward girls,” the 1950s term for single moms. Regardless of why the student was in the area, he saw the cardboard box and the head sticking out of it, but he too chose not to contact the police. He at least had a better reason: since this was a known dumping ground, he thought the box just contained a discarded doll as he didn’t bother to investigate further.
The next day, news broke of the disappearance of a 4 year old girl named Mary Jane Barker. Fearing that what he originally thought was a doll may have been the missing girl, the student went back to the woods to check the box. Inside was not the missing girl, but was instead the body of a young boy. Now that he knew there was a dead body, he immediately contacted the police.
Initial Investigation
Because of how cold it had been, it was difficult to determine how long the body had been in the woods. It’s known that it was there at least a couple days based on the two people finding it, but from the state of the body it could have been anywhere from a couple days to a couple months.
Initial findings were that the boy was between 4-6 years old, but his age was difficult to determine both because of the condition of the body and because he seemed extremely malnourished. The boy was three and a half feet tall but weighed only 30 pounds, significantly underweight for his height. There were also indications that he had been beaten severely, and blunt force trauma was ultimately ruled the most likely cause of his death.
In contrast to the malnourishment and beatings, it seemed like he may have been generally well cared for. The boy had several scars which would have made the body more identifiable, however many of these appeared to be surgical scars. Three scars on his chest, groin area, and ankle all seemed to be the result of professional, medical care.
Of course, it’s possible that any medical procedures occurred when the boy was even younger, as there’s no telling how long he was in whatever situation ultimately led to his death. There weren’t any marks indicating that he had received any vaccinations, which meant that he was not in public school. If he was indeed only four years old he would have been too young for school and wouldn’t have needed to get his shots for a few more months, but it was still noteworthy.
The autopsy also showed that the boy’s feet and one of his palms were wrinkled. This meant that he had been submerged in water either immediately before or immediately after he died. His hair and nails were also freshly cut. The hair was so freshly cut that pieces of it could still be found on his body and on the blanket in which he had been wrapped. Unsurprisingly, it was a very poorly done haircut, almost certainly having been hastily performed after the boy died.
This unusual detail led one investigator to consider the possibility that the boy was being raised as a girl and that the haircut was an attempt to hide this fact from the police. In addition to the other images of the boy that were circulated, a police sketch of the boy with long hair and dressed as a girl was also distributed in case this investigator’s hunch was correct. As you’ll soon see, the police were taking this case extremely seriously.
One of the first orders of business for police was to take a footprint from the child in the hopes that they could match it to hospital records. Babies aren’t fingerprinted at birth because they are generally uncooperative little shits, but getting a footprint from a newborn is pretty easy. Although police were optimistic that they would quickly find a match, it unfortunately did not yield any results. Taking footprints at birth didn’t become the nationwide standard until the 1960s, and with the boy likely having been born between 1951 and 1953, he may have just missed out.
Beyond the condition of the boy himself, police searched the area for any evidence they could find. At least 270 police academy recruits were used to repeatedly comb the area, but only three pieces of potential evidence were found. The first two were a child’s scarf and a man’s white handkerchief with the letter “G” in the corner, but neither of those clues went anywhere. The other piece of evidence was a man’s blue corduroy hat with a leather strap on it.
Then of course there was the box itself and the blanket that the child had been wrapped in. The box still had a label on it, indicating it had originally contained a bassinet sold from a local J.C. Penney. Unfortunately they were unable to lift any fingerprints off of the box, but at least there was the chance it wouldn’t be a complete dead end.
The J.C. Penney from which the bassinet box originated was able to tell police that it was one of only 12 of that specific model that had been sold. Unfortunately, there were no records of who had purchased the bassinets. That’s not terribly surprising.
The first modern credit card had only been created in 1950, and Visa and Mastercard didn’t exist yet. Stores also didn’t really begin collecting and selling customer data until the 1980s, so of course all 12 purchases would have been made in cash with no real record of the sale other than the inventory numbers.
Once details of the bassinet were made public, eight of the twelve owners came forward to either show that they still had the box or to inform the police that they had long since thrown it out.
As for the blanket, it was a cheap, imitation blanket designed to look like it was made by Native Americans. Authorities took it to The Philadelphia Textile Institute who were able to narrow it down as having been made at a factory in either North Carolina or Quebec. This didn’t prove terribly helpful as the factories manufactured and sold these cheap blankets by the thousands. That just brings us back to the hat.
The hat had a label inside that read “Eagle Hat and Cap Company.” This was a small, local store in Philadelphia, and the owner immediately recognized the hat. She had made about a dozen identical hats at some point the previous year, but they did not include a leather strap. The original buyer had come back to have the strap custom added to his hat.
She remembered the owner as being a blond man in his late 20s, and said that he resembled the picture of the boy in the box. But once again, there was no name or address associated with the sale, only the store owner’s memory. Despite their best efforts, police were unable to track down who this hat had once belonged to.
With the leads from the hard evidence exhausted, all that was left to do was to rely on help from the public. In a move that was deemed rather unusual, hundreds of thousands of flyers were made using photos of the boy as he had been found. Normally authorities would prefer to use a photo from when the victim was alive or at least a sketch when that wasn’t possible, but they opted for images of the bruised and deceased child instead.
These flyers were sent to other police stations, grocery stores, and insurance agents to be posted. Police even had the Philadelphia Gas Works and Philadelphia Electric Company include the flyers in everyone’s bills.
The boy remained in the morgue while people from as many as ten different states traveled to try to identify the child. Multiple people attempted to claim the body, but all turned out to be false leads.
The most promising identification came from a marine who had just returned from overseas. He believed the child may have been one of his 17 brothers and sisters, and viewing the body confirmed the suspicion in his own mind. Most of the family had moved out west just after he was deployed, but two of his younger siblings stayed behind in Philadelphia with an older brother. It was the closest anyone came to claiming the boy, but authorities eventually found the marine’s brother alive and well in California.
Nothing was yielding any results. The boy didn’t match any descriptions of missing children, the physical evidence had led nowhere, and nobody was able to successfully identify the body. Police even tried dressing the body to make him look more lifelike and taking pictures to circulate on new flyers. They chased down thousands of leads trying to figure out absolutely anything they could about the unidentified boy, but after months of intense investigation they knew no more than when they first began.
One medical examiner, Remington Bristow, went so far as to make a mask of the boy’s face that he would carry in his briefcase as he pursued the case until his death 36 years later. I’m not sure how the mask would be any more useful than the photos, nor do I think I would choose to keep talking to somebody who pulled out such a creepy mask, but Remington desperately wanted answers.
He wasn’t alone, and over the years countless people would try their hand at investigating the case on their own. In 1990, the Vidocq Society would be founded in Philadelphia. It is an invite-only organization full of current and former lawyers, FBI agents, homicide detectives, scientists, and forensic experts that specialize in investigating cold cases. They solved their first case in 1991, one year after being founded, and they have been heavily involved in helping Philadelphia police search for answers in the case of the boy in the box.
However, those answers wouldn’t come in 1957. Five months after the boy was found and after exhausting every lead, it was finally time to give him a proper burial. The detectives working the case took it extremely personally, and were thought to have seen the boy as their collective adopted son. He was buried in Potter’s Field, the city’s burial place for unclaimed bodies.
Though there were hundreds of bodies buried in the field, seeing as they were unclaimed, often unknown, and being buried using public funds, there wasn’t a single headstone. The detectives wanted better for this poor child, so they personally paid for him to have the only headstone in Potter’s Field. The inscription read, “Heavenly father, bless this unknown boy. February 25, 1957.”
The Search for DNA Evidence
Even after the burial, investigators continued to pursue the case relentlessly. We’ve already mentioned Remington and his weird mask, and we’ll get to some of the theories later. But for those first few decades, all they had to go on was tips from the public and good old fashioned police work. Thousands of leads were followed, some better than others, but there didn’t seem to be any answers to be found.
Then, DNA testing came along. This technology obviously didn’t exist in 1957 so authorities hadn’t bothered to preserve any samples from the boy. In 1998, the decision was made to exhume the body in the hopes of extracting a DNA sample that could be compared against any current and future DNA profiles they would collect. Fortunately, the detectives that originally worked the case had been so deeply moved by the tragedy that they knew exactly where to dig in the wasteland of otherwise unmarked graves.
Of course, it had been 41 years since his death. Given the state of decomposition, extracting a usable DNA sample would not be a trivial task. Authorities attempted to obtain DNA from tissue samples, but after a year they finally admitted that their efforts had been unsuccessful. They would try again in 2000, this time attempting to get DNA from a tooth. Their efforts again proved futile, so they tried sending a tooth to a private lab in 2001. This time, the lab was able to build a mitochondrial DNA profile.
After the boy was exhumed in 1998 so that all of these samples could be taken for testing, he was reburied in Ivy Hill Cemetery in Cedarbrook, Philadelphia. This time he was in a real cemetery, and he had been given a new tombstone that read “America’s Unknown Child.” That year his story was also featured on an episode of America’s Most Wanted.
The real break finally came when the boy was exhumed again in 2019 to take more samples. DNA testing had advanced significantly, and it was believed they could build a more complete genetic profile. While they succeeded and finally had the piece they needed to give the boy his identity back, the final chain of events that would make this possible had already occurred two years prior.
In 2017, a second cousin once removed of the boy in the box was trying to figure out what to buy his girlfriend for Christmas. He decided to get her a home DNA kit from an ancestry website, but the couple broke up before Christmas. Not wanting the kit to go to waste, the young man wound up using it himself. By itself, this would not have been enough.
If you’ve followed the Golden State Killer case, you already know that the big ancestry websites will do everything in their power to avoid playing ball with the police.
Luckily, the man became really interested in filling out his family tree, so he wound up uploading his information to GEDMatch. GEDMatch is a free website that allows users from different genealogy websites to find one another, and it is also a company that will give the police absolutely anything that they ask for. In theory there are some restrictions in place on what authorities can access, but in practice it hasn’t really played out that way. Anyway, the man found tracing his ancestry back to Italy fascinating, but he also thought that was going to be the end of it.
That’s when the police came calling.
Okay, maybe not the police but a forensic genealogist and cold case liaison called him. She informed the man that his DNA was a match on a cold case, and that she needed more DNA samples from his family in order to confirm the identity of their victim. The man’s mother agreed to provide her DNA, and things quickly began moving forward.
Authorities were able to identify the boy in the box’s birth mother. They pulled the family birth records and found three birth certificates: two for the boy’s siblings and one for a name they hadn’t seen anywhere else. Additional genetic testing was done to confirm that the name of the father listed on the birth certificate was in fact the boy’s real father. In late November of 2022, Philadelphia police announced they had discovered the boy in the box’s real identity.
On December 8th, they held a press conference in which they revealed his name: Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born on January 13, 1953. Because this was an open investigation, the police did not reveal a whole lot of other information. They declined to give the names of the parents as Joseph has at least one sibling that is still alive and they wanted to avoid any undue harassment of those individuals.
Unfortunately, the internet is gonna internet. With the little information available and Zarelli viewed as an uncommon surname, people immediately got to work trying to identify and dox anyone they thought may have been one of Joseph’s relatives. It should hopefully go without saying, but please do not do this. Despite being cagey about releasing any other information, police felt it was important to release Joseph’s name.
Even if the pictures circulated at the time hadn’t helped, they thought that perhaps someone who was alive in the area at the time may have remembered the name and could provide information.
It may have been 65 years ago, but any neighbors that were in their teens or 20s could potentially be alive and may have information. It might seem unlikely that someone would have recognized the name but hadn’t recognized seeing the boy, but it was worth a shot at least. Police alluded to the fact that, had this technology existed twenty years ago, they may have been able to question or charge the person responsible for the murder.
This potentially indicates that they believe one or both of the parents, both of whom are now deceased, were responsible. That’s just speculation based on the wording used at the press conference, but the parents would also be the first suspects in a case like this.
But that brings us to the most important part: only half of this mystery has been solved. Joseph now has a name, but his killer has remained unidentified for the better part of a century. It’s really hard to investigate a murder without knowing the identity of the victim, but now that they have identified him authorities hope they can follow up on or corroborate some of the theories that have come to light over the years.
Theories
First we’ll quickly mention a couple theories that gained a lot of attention but have since been debunked. One was that Joseph was the son of a pair of carnival workers. The carnival workers, Kenneth and Irene Dudley, had been arrested in 1961 because they had a nasty habit of dumping the bodies of their dead children wherever the carnival happened to take them.
The Dudleys had ten children, six of whom had died of malnourishment and neglect. The children had been wrapped in blankets and dumped in various locations across multiple states, including two that were thrown into lakes. It’s good that this couple was arrested, but after a thorough examination it was determined that Joseph had not been one of their children.
The next theory, which is also the most recent, began taking shape in 2013. This one is also only partially debunked. The lead originally came from a Philadelphia man who said that his family once rented a place to a man that sold his son. Two writers, Hoffman and Romano, took an interest in this lead. They presented it to both the Philadelphia police and the Vidocq Society in 2013.
Hoffman and Romano believed that they had identified the family of the man who allegedly sold his son, and they were able to obtain a DNA sample in 2014 that was sent to the Philadelphia police. The police said they would need to look into it more before conducting DNA tests, and for years that was the last anyone had heard. This radio silence was deemed suspicious and seemed to give the story more credibility, but in 2017 authorities confirmed that they had compared the DNA samples and they were not a match.
This confirmed that the writers had not identified the family of the man that sold his son, but it doesn’t mean the original story never happened. It’s odd that a Philadelphia resident would have sat on that potential lead for 55 years without telling anyone and even odder that someone who rented a room would inform the owner they were just there to sell their child, but I guess it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. I’d be much more dismissive of the entire story were it not for one of the other theories.
The final debunked theory and the first major theory to catch the public’s attention came from the medical examiner Remington that we mentioned before. There was a foster home about a mile and a half from where the body was dumped that was an early lead for investigators. The home was owned by Arthur and Catherine Nicoletti who lived there with Anna Marie Nagle, Catherine’s daughter from a previous marriage, and anywhere from five to 25 foster children.
At the time Joseph’s body was discovered, there were eight children living at the foster home. The initial investigation showed that all eight of those children, and in fact all children that had passed through the foster home, were accounted for. But Remington didn’t want to let it go. Even though the police had closed their investigation into the foster home, Remington became fixated on it.
His investigation made little progress, so in 1960 he enlisted the aid of a New Jersey psychic to help him try to find the truth.
The psychic claimed that she could identify a person by holding metal that was connected to them, so Remington brought her a couple of staples from the box the boy had been found in. The psychic described a large house with a wooden railing and a log cabin on the property. Remington searched all over Philadelphia for such a house, but the only one he found that matched the description was the same foster house he had been investigating.
He brought the psychic to the location where Joseph’s body had been found, and she led him directly to the foster home. This impressive bit of clairvoyance convinced Remington that she was the real deal, especially because she claimed she had never been to Philadelphia before and psychics would never lie to make themselves seem more credible.
Despite living in the northeast, I had been completely unaware of this until the first time I drove to Philadelphia, so let me help anyone unfamiliar with the area with a little geography. I had never actually known where in Pennsylvania the city was, but you can take a bridge directly from Philadelphia to New Jersey. Even if the psychic really had never been there before, which seems unlikely because it’s hard to imagine anyone that wouldn’t actively try to escape life in New Jersey, she undoubtedly would have at least researched the case to make sure she could tell Remington what he wanted to hear.
But with this new otherworldly evidence on his side, Remington was sure the foster home was involved in some way. His leading theory was that Joseph was the illegitimate child of Anna Marie who had died accidentally, and that they discarded the body to prevent her from being outed as a “wayward girl.” When the Nicolettis got out of the foster care business and sold the house, Remington went to their estate sale. There, he saw a bassinet that looked like it matched the ones sold by J.C.
Penney as well as blankets that matched the one wrapped around Joseph.
His suspicions only intensified years later when Catherine passed away and Arthur took Anna Marie, his stepdaughter, as his new wife. This, combined with Arthur’s refusal to take a lie detector test, convinced Remington that he was on to something. He passed away in 1993 before learning the truth.
In 1998, the new lead detective on the case, Tom Augustine, visited Arthur and Anna Marie to investigate the theory. Though Anna Marie had given birth four times, all of the children had died. Three were stillborn, and the fourth died in a freak accident. He had been electrocuted to death by one of those coin operated carousel rides you see outside stores. Regardless, Anna Marie had documentation to back up her claims and the trail had once again gone cold.
That brings us to the final theory, one that was brought forward in 2002 when Tom was contacted by a psychiatrist out of Cincinnati. The night before, the psychiatrist had received a phone call from a patient of hers who the police would only refer to as “M.” M wanted her doctor to contact the police and tell them that she had information about what had happened to Joseph. Since M passed away a couple years ago without ever taking her story public, I’ve opted not to use her real name as that’s clearly not what she wanted.
Tom, along with two retired detectives who were close to the case, traveled to Cincinnati where M would tell the story of her life and the life of Joseph over the course of a three hour interview. According to M, in 1955 she had accompanied her mother when they picked up Joseph in exchange for an envelope that she assumed contained money. M was 11 years old at the time, and claimed to be the frequent victim of physical and sexual abuse from her mother. The mother had allegedly purchased Joseph, who they named Jonathan, for the same purpose.
Joseph was allegedly disabled in some way and was unable to speak. He was kept in the basement where he slept in a cardboard box surrounded by coal bins, used a floor drain as a bathroom, was never allowed to be seen by guests, and was the victim of the mother’s neglect and repeated abuse.
M said that Joseph died after an incident when he was being given a bath. He was in the tub and had vomited up some baked beans he had been given for dinner. In a fit of rage, M’s mother slammed him on the floor, killing him. She hastily cut his hair and nails, and then forced M to help her dispose of the body.
They drove to Susquehanna Road to dispose of the body, and began to remove Joseph from the trunk when a potential Good Samaritan drove up. He saw them moving something from the car and acting strangely, so he pulled over and asked if they needed help. M kept her back to him and was ordered to stand in front of the license plate to block it from view while her mother convinced the man that there wasn’t a problem.
After he drove away, the pair disposed of Joseph’s body in the woods. They had wrapped him in a blanket, but as for the bassinet box? That was just a piece of trash they found that someone else had left at the popular dumping ground.
In addition to giving alleged details of Joseph’s life and death, M provided a lot of details about herself and her family as well. She told police that her mother was a librarian and that her father was a science teacher, told them where she grew up, mentioned spending time at summer camp, and so on. Virtually every single thing she told the detectives about her life and her parents’ lives can be verified as true, except for the potential abuse and the purchase of Joseph.
The psychiatrist corroborated M’s story, at least in so far as the fact that M had first told her all of this information back in 1989. She couldn’t prove whether any of M’s allegations were true, but it meant that this wasn’t some new story she had concocted for attention because the murder had been gaining media traction again.
Unfortunately, the doctor did not have any notes that verified M had brought this all up 13 years earlier. Either they’re both lying or they’re both not, so I’m not sure why evidence that they had talked about it years earlier was so important to the police, but it was. Maybe more information about the case had been released to the public in the time since, but otherwise I’m unclear why the doctor’s notes from 1989 would have mattered.
Regardless, Tom said that it was the best lead they had ever had in the case. Everything M said about the case lined up, and her story contained a lot of details that were not public information at the time. The haircut and fingernails were widely known, but the fact that he had been submerged in water at the time of his death and that the autopsy discovered baked beans in his stomach were not.
As far as I can tell, the witness testimony from the Good Samaritan was also not publicized, and M’s account matched his almost identically. The only difference in his testimony was that he thought it was a mother and her teenage son. M’s back was to him and she was tall, had broad shoulders, and was bundled up in winter clothing; it would have been easy for him to mistakenly believe she was a boy.
Despite Tom believing it was their best lead ever in the case, police quickly dismissed the story when it came to light that M had a history of mental issues. Unfortunately, we have no idea what that actually means. Society’s attitude towards mental health is improving, but 20 years ago it wasn’t great. A “history of mental issues” in 2002 could easily have been something like anxiety, depression, or PTSD.
If her story about being sexually abused for her entire childhood was true, then yes she would of course have PTSD or other psychological trauma for which she would have sought treatment.
While I can’t say for certain what M was suffering from, whatever it was doesn’t seem to have been debilitating. She completed high school, an undergraduate degree, a master’s degree, and a PhD without taking any breaks and had a long and highly successful career. With no records of M being institutionalized and no breaks in her education or employment, it seems most likely that whatever mental issues she was suffering from were most likely the same types of issues that most adults deal with at some point; she was just punished with incredulity for having the sense to seek help at a time when it was less socially acceptable to do so.
That said, we don’t know what happened in the sessions between M and her psychiatrist. It’s possible that everything M said is absolutely true. It’s also possible that the psychiatrist worked with memory regression therapy and inadvertently created false “repressed” memories in an attempt to help M. We have no way to know, but now that new life has been breathed into this case, perhaps police will investigate her story a little more seriously this time.
Conclusion
After 65 years, Joseph Augustus Zarelli has his name again, and perhaps he will finally receive a headstone that reflects his true identity. But this was still only half of the mystery. We now know who Joseph is, but we still don’t know why he died or at whose hands. Philadelphia’s oldest unsolved murder case remains open, but we can remain hopeful that Joseph’s identity was the missing piece in proving what happened to him.
Since it remains the best theory available, maybe investigators will be able to link the Zarellis to M’s family and find evidence that her account, which they already deemed plausible, was in fact accurate. Or maybe it will show that her story was entirely fabricated, and that the guilty party was someone else entirely. Only time will tell.
For now, let us just remain hopeful that modern DNA technology will prevent anyone from needing to be buried without a name. And next time you get dumped remember that there’s no need to be sad, because in a roundabout way you may be helping to bring one of America’s most famous cold cases to a close.
Key Takeaways
- In 1957, a malnourished young boy’s body was found in a cardboard box in Philadelphia woods, becoming America’s longest-running unidentified child case.
- After 65 years, DNA genealogy identified the victim as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born January 13, 1953, though his killer remains unknown.
- A 2017 home DNA kit purchased for a girlfriend but used by a second cousin once removed ultimately led police to Joseph’s identity through GEDMatch.
- Police suspect Joseph’s deceased parents may have been responsible, noting the technology could have enabled charges if available decades earlier.
- A woman known as ‘M’ provided a detailed 2002 confession implicating her abusive mother, but police dismissed her account due to her mental health history.
Dana Ortiz covers prosecutorial mechanics, evidentiary procedure, and how investigations unwind decades after the original case file went cold.
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was the body of the boy in the box discovered?
In late February 1957, the body of a young boy was found discarded in the woods off of Susquehanna Road in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, inside a cardboard box.
What was the real name of the boy in the box, and when was he born?
The boy in the box was identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born on January 13, 1953.
How was Joseph Augustus Zarelli’s identity finally discovered after 65 years?
Joseph’s identity was discovered through advanced DNA testing. In 2017, a second cousin once removed used a home DNA kit and uploaded the results to GEDMatch. Police later contacted him, obtained DNA from his mother, and were able to identify Joseph’s birth mother through family birth records, which contained three birth certificates including one for a name they hadn’t seen before.
What was the condition of Joseph’s body when it was found?
Joseph was between 4-6 years old, three and a half feet tall but weighed only 30 pounds, significantly underweight for his height. He showed indications of severe beatings, with blunt force trauma ruled the most likely cause of death. He had several surgical scars, freshly cut hair and nails, and wrinkled feet and one palm indicating he had been submerged in water either immediately before or after death.
What evidence was found at the scene besides the body?
Police found three pieces of potential evidence: a child’s scarf, a man’s white handkerchief with the letter ‘G’ in the corner, and a man’s blue corduroy hat with a leather strap. The box itself had a label indicating it originally contained a bassinet sold from a local J.C. Penney, and the boy was wrapped in a cheap imitation Native American blanket.
What was the ‘M’ theory about Joseph’s death?
In 2002, a woman known as ‘M’ told police that in 1955, her mother had purchased Joseph (whom they called Jonathan) for abuse. M claimed Joseph was disabled, unable to speak, kept in a basement in a cardboard box, and died when her mother slammed him on the floor after he vomited baked beans during a bath. M said she helped her mother dispose of the body on Susquehanna Road. Many details matched non-public information from the case.
Why did police dismiss M’s story despite it being their ‘best lead ever’?
Police dismissed M’s story when it came to light that she had a history of mental issues. The article notes that in 2002, this could have meant conditions like anxiety, depression, or PTSD, and that M had actually completed high school, undergraduate, master’s, and PhD degrees without breaks and had a successful career, suggesting her mental health issues may not have been debilitating.
What role did the Vidocq Society play in this case?
The Vidocq Society, founded in 1990 in Philadelphia as an invite-only organization of current and former lawyers, FBI agents, homicide detectives, scientists, and forensic experts specializing in cold cases, has been heavily involved in helping Philadelphia police search for answers in the case of the boy in the box.
What happened to Joseph’s body after the initial investigation?
After five months of investigation with no leads, Joseph was buried in Potter’s Field, the city’s burial place for unclaimed bodies. The detectives personally paid for him to have the only headstone there, inscribed ‘Heavenly father, bless this unknown boy. February 25, 1957.’ He was later exhumed in 1998 for DNA testing and reburied in Ivy Hill Cemetery with a new tombstone reading ‘America’s Unknown Child.‘
What did police allude to about potential suspects at the December 2022 press conference?
Police alluded that had DNA technology existed twenty years earlier, they may have been able to question or charge the person responsible for the murder. This potentially indicates they believe one or both of Joseph’s parents, both of whom are now deceased, may have been responsible. They declined to release the parents’ names to avoid harassment of surviving family members.
Sources
- Original Casual Criminalist video: The Boy in the Box: The Shocking Case of Joseph Augustus Zarelli
- Hero image source by IAEA Imagebank / openverse, by.
