The Boy in the Box

Unknown for 65 years, then a cousin uploaded their DNA

On 25 February 1957 the body of a small boy was found in the woods off Susquehanna Road in the Fox Chase neighbourhood of Philadelphia, at an illegal dumping ground near Verree Road. He was naked, wrapped in a plaid blanket and placed in a cardboard box that had held a bassinet of the kind J. C. Penney sold. He was severely malnourished and covered in bruises, with surgical scars on his ankle and groin and an L-shaped scar under his chin, yet he had been cleaned and groomed, his fingernails trimmed and his hair recently and roughly cropped, perhaps after death. The cause of death was blunt force trauma.

A young man checking rabbit traps found him first and said nothing, for fear the police would take his traps; a college student found him a few days later and reported it the next day. Police opened the case on 26 February and at first expected to identify him soon. The Philadelphia Inquirer printed 400,000 flyers of the boy's likeness, which went out with every gas bill in the city, and 270 police academy recruits combed the scene and turned up a man's corduroy cap, a child's scarf and a handkerchief marked G. None of it led anywhere, and nobody came forward.

For 65 years he was the Boy in the Box, America's Unknown Child. Remington Bristow of the medical examiner's office pursued the case until his death in 1993, chasing a foster home near the site that investigators finally ruled out. In 2002 a woman known as M claimed her parents had bought a boy and beaten him to death, a story police could not verify. The forensic artist Frank Bender thought the boy might have been raised as a girl. The body was exhumed for DNA in 1998, which came from a tooth, and again in 2019. First buried in a potter's field, he was reburied in 1998 at Ivy Hill Cemetery under a headstone reading America's Unknown Child, and people still leave flowers and toys there.

On 8 December 2022 police named him as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born on 13 January 1953. Investigators traced him through a cousin's DNA upload to a public database and a first cousin's profile on GEDmatch, and a court-ordered birth certificate confirmed his name and his parents'. Both parents are dead; he has living half-siblings. On what would have been his 70th birthday a new memorial bearing his name and image was unveiled. Police still call his death an active homicide investigation and still ask for the public's help.