Philly police will exhume the bodies of 8 unidentified homicide victims from a potter’s field this week for DNA tests

Philadelphia police and forensic experts this week will exhume the bodies of eight unidentified people who were killed in homicides decades ago in hopes of finally learning their names and stories.

Local and federal investigators began digging up the remains of the victims, buried in a potter’s field off of Dunks Ferry Road in Northeast Philadelphia, on Monday and will work through Friday, said Ryan Gallagher, assistant director of the Office of Forensic Science.

The youngest victim is a child between the ages of 4 and 6, who was killed in 1962, while the oldest is 50 to 60 years old, he said. He declined to share additional details about the victims and cases, all of which are decades old and remain open homicide investigations.

Officials will recover DNA samples from each of the victims for genealogical tests and sequencing in hopes of identifying them, he said.

Police have periodically recovered unidentified remains from the field, including in 2018, and the program ramped up in 2021 as part of a grant-funded effort known as the Remains Identification Project, Gallagher said. Seven people have been identified over the years, police said.

Among those was the famed “Boy in the Box,” the 4-year-old boy whose remains were found abandoned in the woods in the Fox Chase section of the city in 1957. The child’s identity remained unknown for 65 years — until December 2022, when investigators, using new genealogical tests, finally determined the boy’s name was Joseph Augustus Zarelli. The child’s body was buried in the Northeast potter’s field for years before being relocated.

The goal, Gallagher said, is to ultimately “identify all unidentified homicide victims in the city of Philadelphia.”