Philly’s Girl in the Box remains an overlooked mystery

It was late into a warm Thursday afternoon in May, nearly 4 p.m., when Jesse F. Davis spotted a clothesline floating on the Schuylkill.

When he hauled it over, he found it was wrapped around a wooden milk box. He cut the clothesline, and a small, headless, badly decomposed body floated to the surface.

Davis, a 43-year-old barge worker from Paulsboro, N.J., called harbor patrol.

Thus began the public story of the Girl in the Box, a Philadelphia Jane Doe of whom we know as little today as we did when Davis first found her on May 3, 1962.

Only five years earlier, in 1957, Philadelphia had been gripped by the discovery of a boy who came to be known as The Boy in the Box, identified this week as Joseph Augustus Zarelli. From the moment of his discovery, the hunt to determine his identity was massive. Hundreds of thousands of fliers were printed, and a picture of the boy was placed in every Philadelphian’s gas bill.

The story was profiled on America’s Most Wanted, has been the subject of countless true crime podcasts, and has been fictionalized on popular television crime shows. A half century after he was found, the case was the subject of a book by former New York Times journalist David Stout, The Boy in the Box: The Unsolved Case of America’s Unknown Child.

Stout, who died in 2020, wrote in his acknowledgements that the ”story belongs to the small band of investigators who ‘adopted’ the little boy for life, never flagging in their desire to give him an identity...”

The Girl in the Box had no advocate to keep her memory alive. But her story was no less tragic.

The medical examiner determined she was a young Black girl, around four to six years old. She was 40 inches tall and weighed about 45 pounds. Her naked body had been stuffed in the crate and set adrift between five days and two months before she was found.

X-rays revealed her arms had been fractured before her death. Her feet and back had been burned postmortem. The fourth finger on her right hand had been almost amputated, but bandaged with gauze and tape as if someone had cared. She had been decapitated by a sharp knife.

Inside the crate, her body had been covered by a clear blue plastic sheet and a white apron, resembling a machinist workman’s uniform. The crate had been weighed down with bricks.

The little girl was found in the river in the city’s highly polluted petroleum refinery area. The U.S. Coast Guard calculated that for the milk box to wind up on Atlantic Refining Company property, less than a mile south of Passyunk Avenue, someone had to toss it in the water around East River Drive or West River Drive (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive), eight miles upriver.

Pages from the March 11, 1962 Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, at the time the nation’s largest evening newspaper, had been found under her body. This, homicide detective Capt. David E. Brown said at the time, meant the person responsible for the Girl in the Box had been in the Philadelphia area in March.

It was his best lead.

No one in the city ever reported a young Black girl missing during that time period. No crime scene was identified. No head was ever found. No witness ever came forward. No one could clearly determine her cause of death. Brown passed out some flyers but got no response.

Eventually, she was placed in a cheap fiberboard coffin and buried in the city’s last potter’s field. Both she and the Boy in the Box were laid to rest there. He was exhumed in 1998, his DNA was collected, and his body was reburied in a donated plot in Ivy Hill Cemetery after a funeral. His new tombstone read “America’s Unknown Child.”

Two dead children from around the same period of time — one captures the public’s attention for decades until an identification is finally made, and the other is lost and forgotten.

Charles Gallagher, a professor of criminal justice and sociology at La Salle University, said we shouldn’t be surprised; current research shows that missing Black and Latino children do not get the same attention as missing white children.

“There doesn’t have to be any racist intent but typically these were white detectives and, in all likelihood, the Boy in the Box reminded them about someone they knew. It reminds an officer of a son or of family, someone that shared a similar cultural experience, and the case takes on more importance and that is where the traction comes in, where they dig their heels in,” he said.

It was Remington Bristow, an investigator in the Medical Examiner’s office, who kept the Boy in the Box’s memory alive. “He had a special devotion to the case,” Stout wrote in his book. Bristow referred to the child as “my boy,” in a press interview, and spent his entire life trying to solve the mystery of the boy’s identity and fate.

» READ MORE: The ‘Boy in the Box’ haunted one late investigator for decades

“Every cold case needs somebody to keep moving it forward. Someone who cares has to adopt the case — family, friend, clergy, press — otherwise it will fizzle out, " said Thomas C. McAndrews, a retired homicide detective with 25 years experience with the Pennsylvania State Police and Lehigh County District Attorney’s office. Now he is the director of law enforcement relations with Innovative Forensic Investigations, a full-service genetic genealogy and private investigation company. McAndrews said it is a question not of race but of the resources — people and money — to work on cold cases.

“Philadelphia has 500 homicides a year. How much time do homicide detectives have to work a case from 30 years ago? " he said.

DNA proved crucial to discovering the identity of Joseph. There is less hope for a similar breakthrough in the case of the Girl in the Box. McAndrews and Erin Kimmerle, a well-known forensic anthropologist from University of Florida, tried to exhume her remains in 2018 as part of a larger mission to discover clues about eight unidentified victims buried in Philadelphia.

During their trip to the potter’s field, they found seven of the eight bodies.

The Girl in the Box’s plot was empty.

Because the city’s records from 1960s were kept haphazardly, Kimmerle also dug up the plots around where she was supposed to be, but found nothing.

“The little girl from 1962 is as horrible a case as you can imagine. At the very least, she deserves her name back. Until we find her — or find samples that belong to her — there is little that can be done to apply today’s technology,” said McAndrews.

But McAndrews said that he is certain there is somebody, much older now but still alive, who can identify the Girl in the Box.

“She was a little girl. She wasn’t raised in a bubble. Somebody knows. Grandmom. Aunt. Uncle. They knew she was no longer around. They know but the clock is ticking. Theoretically, they could still be alive, but we are running out of time,” McAndrews said.

“It’s time to tell what you know.”