The ‘Boy in the Box’ haunted one late investigator for decades

Once a year, or sometimes more, Remington Bristow would drive to the potter’s field with some flowers and toys, and kneel by Grave 191. He’d dust off the snow around the holidays and pull out the weeds in summer. Then he’d pause, in silence, to honor the nameless boy who never left his thoughts.

Bristow, a longtime investigator with the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, and some police investigators pitched in to buy a headstone that read “Heavenly Father, bless this unknown boy.”

“Someday, somebody will claim him,” Bristow told The Inquirer in 1971.

As news spread through Facebook groups last week that investigators may have finally uncovered the identity of the “Boy in the Box,” many thought of Bristow, who died in 1993 without the answers he so desperately sought.

“He was truly haunted by that case,” said Mark Kimelheim, Bristow’s grandson. “Throughout his life, he returned to it again and again.”

When the boy’s body was found in a box, in a weedy lot in the city’s Fox Chase section on Feb. 25, 1957, Bristow was working for the Medical Examiner’s Office and took on the case. Kimelheim said his grandfather worked in the funeral industry like his father before him, at one point owning a funeral home in California. He and his late wife, Jean, moved in 1952 to Philadelphia where he worked at several funeral homes before joining the Medical Examiner’s Office.

“He had a lot of respect for the dead,” Kimelheim said. “The idea of an unmarked grave, that a child could be buried without a name, always bothered him. “

As anniversaries of the gruesome discovery passed, journalists checked in with Bristow, who was eager to keep the case in the news. He pursued leads long after he retired, carrying the boy’s plaster “death mask” with him in a briefcase. He spent thousands of his own dollars and interviewed almost as many people. Bristow told reporters he literally wore the soles out of his shoes knocking on doors.

In most stories, Bristow made a point to say he didn’t think the case was a homicide, that the boy’s parents likely loved him. The death could have been accidental, he told reporters. Kimelheim, who drove Bristow to conduct interviews on the case as he got older, said his grandfather didn’t actually believe that.

“He stuck to that story, consistently,” Kimelheim said, “but he was trying to lull the parents into coming forward.”

Carolyn Booker said she remembers spending hours talking about the case with “Uncle Rem” in Las Vegas, where he lived in later years, up until his death. Booker, who dated Remington’s nephew in the 1980s, said he was always positive the case would be solved.

“He really hoped it would be in his lifetime, but he also thought some future technologies might help,” she said. “We all just wanted it so badly for him.”

In a 1977 United Press International article, Bristow referred to the child as “my boy,” hinting at what seemed to be a deeper connection to the case.

“I’ve had him all those years,” Bristow, who was then retired, told UPI. “His parents only had him for a few.”

Several news reports mentioned that Bristow lost a child at a young age. Her name was Anne Marie, and she died of sudden infant death syndrome at just 3 months old, about 12 years before the boy’s body was found.

“We didn’t talk about that much,” Kimelheim said.

Kimelheim said most of his grandfather’s case files were handed over to investigators and members of the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based group of crime solvers who often dig into cold cases.

“My grandfather had health problems in his later years, but he still thought about it,” Kimelheim said. “I’m sorry he didn’t live to see the resolution.”