The Boy in the Box

On a cold day in February 1957, a young man was checking muskrat traps in a weedy, overgrown lot along Susquehanna Road, in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, when he noticed a large cardboard box lying in the brush near the road.

He looked inside. He saw what he thought might be a doll. He didn’t report it right away, afraid, it was said later, that the police would confiscate his traps. A day or two later, a college student who had heard of the box went to see it for himself — and then went to the police.

Inside the box was the body of a little boy, about four years old, naked and wrapped in a cheap flannel blanket. He was badly malnourished. He had bruises all over his body. His hair had been cut roughly, crudely, as if someone had hacked at it shortly before or after he died. He had died of blows to the head.

No one came forward to claim him. No one reported a little boy missing. For sixty-five years, no one even knew his name.

Philadelphia called him “the Boy in the Box,” and “America’s Unknown Child.”

The Investigation

The discovery horrified the city. Police launched one of the largest investigations in Philadelphia history. Hundreds of officers worked the case. They printed hundreds of thousands of flyers with the boy’s picture and sent them all over the country. The flyers were included with gas bills in Philadelphia. The boy’s photograph was put up in post offices and police stations nationwide.

Investigators tracked the box — it had held a baby bassinet sold at a J.C. Penney store in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. They tracked the flannel blanket. They took the boy’s footprints and searched hospital birth records. They checked orphanages, foster homes and adoption agencies. They looked at thousands of missing children reports.

Nothing.

Thousands of tips came in over the decades. Many led to dead ends. Some led to theories that consumed investigators for years.

The Theories

One theory involved a foster home not far from where the boy was found. A psychic told investigators to look there, and a detective later became convinced that the boy might have been connected to the family who ran it. DNA testing years later ruled out that connection.

Another theory came from a woman who, in the early 2000s, told investigators that her abusive mother had bought the boy from his birth parents in 1954, kept him in their basement, abused him, and killed him in 1957 in a fit of rage after he vomited in the bathtub. She described cutting his hair and dumping his body. Investigators found her story compelling in some ways but could never corroborate it, and some of the details didn’t fit.

Over the decades, the boy became a kind of permanent presence in Philadelphia. Detectives who had worked the case paid for a new headstone for him. Retired investigators and volunteers, members of a group called the Vidocq Society, kept working on it long after the official investigation had gone cold. Every year, they held a memorial for him.

His grave read: “America’s Unknown Child.”

His Name

In 2019, the boy’s body was exhumed so that investigators could extract DNA. Working with genetic genealogists, who compared his DNA with that of distant relatives in public databases, investigators slowly traced his family tree.

On December 8, 2022, the Philadelphia Police Department held a press conference. After sixty-five years, they announced, the Boy in the Box had a name.

He was Joseph Augustus Zarelli. He had been born on January 13, 1953. He was four years old when he died.

The police identified his parents through the genetic genealogy work, but because both had died, and because some of his relatives were still alive, they did not publicly name them. Investigators said they had suspicions about who might be responsible for his death, but that, so long after the fact, they might never be able to prove it.

A Name on a Grave

After so many decades as “America’s Unknown Child,” Joseph Zarelli’s grave received a new headstone with his name on it.

The people who gathered at that grave in the years after the announcement included retired detectives who had spent much of their careers trying to find out who he was, and people who had never met him but couldn’t forget him. For them, finally knowing his name was a kind of victory, even though it didn’t bring justice.

It’s a heartbreaking story. A little boy was starved, beaten and killed, and then left in a box by the side of the road like trash. For sixty-five years, no one claimed him. But a city that didn’t know his name never stopped caring about him either. And because they kept caring, he finally got his name back.