After nearly 66 years and thanks to DNA advances, Philly’s ‘Boy in the Box’ has a name: Joseph

Haunting images of the child victim appeared in liquor stores, and were slipped into Philadelphia Gas Works bills. They spoke to a front-page crime so odious that it elbowed aside news accounts of the Cold War and the intensifying international tensions.

As many as 25,000 circulars were sent to police departments across the country. Investigators vetted scores of false leads, and at one point pored through more than 11,000 photos of newly arrived refugees in an effort to identify the boy found in a JC Penney bassinet box in the weeds and shrubs of Fox Chase.

Finally, nearly 66 years after the body was discovered on an unusually balmy February morning in 1957, police on Thursday officially lifted the veil of anonymity from the child who had been known only as the “Boy in the Box.”

With the aid of remarkable advances in DNA analysis and a team of international experts, he was identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, who had just turned 4 when he was killed. Police said they were withholding information about surviving family members, citing privacy concerns.

» READ MORE: What we know and don't know about Joseph

“I’m stunned today,” said Jim Hoffman, a California teacher and author of The Boy in the Box: America’s Unknown Child, and who had traveled to Philadelphia in 2007 for the 50th anniversary of the finding of the body.

Veteran forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick, president of the Identifinders International, which worked with Philadelphia investigators, said the case was among the “most challenging” of her career. Fitzpatrick, who has worked on a number of famous cold-case investigations, said it took her and a fellow genealogist 2½ years just to make the boy’s decades-old DNA usable, collaborating with experts from several countries.

Justin Thomas, 40, who lives in Northeast Pennsylvania, unwittingly provided important evidence. Thomas, whose family is related to Joseph’s family, said Thursday he took an at-home DNA test five years ago. Then, last year, he received a call out of the blue from Identifinders International telling him that he was a match to a “cold case in Philadelphia” but that more DNA was needed to crack the case. He persuaded his mother to provide a sample, which helped seal Joseph’s identity.

Thomas, who is married with 3-year-old twin girls, said he was heartbroken upon reading accounts of Joseph’s fatal injuries. “It strikes home,” he said. “I’m really upset about it.” He said he was “glad” to be part of the unraveling of the mystery.

If the DNA technology had been available, say, even 20 years ago, finding the person or persons responsible for the boy’s death “would’ve been a different story,” said Philadelphia Police Homicide Capt. Jason Smith.

It is quite possible, perhaps likely, that whoever killed Joseph has died. Nevertheless, police said that the investigation will proceed.

Police and other experts attending Thursday’s news conference said that the enhanced DNA tools should be invaluable in future homicide investigations. “Every case we saw, we learned something from that pays forward to the next one,” said Fitzpatrick.

The case marks the first identification made “but definitely not the last” in a new partnership between the city Medical Examiner’s Office and police detectives, said Ryan Gallagher, criminalistics manager of the Philadelphia Police Department’s forensic science office.

» READ MORE: A history of the Boy in the Box case

The group meets weekly, he said, to determine which cases may benefit from the technology to identify unknown human remains or suspects in criminal cases. The group is working on testing in “dozens” of cases from 1957 to 2022, he said.

“Our goal for the project is that there will never be another unidentified homicide victim in the city of Philadelphia,” Gallagher said. “The victims of a homicide deserve and their families deserve no less.”

As it happened, the mystery of Joseph’s identity outlived some of the investigators who devoted substantial portions of their careers to trying to solve it. The crime dated to a time when I Love Lucy was the nation’s most popular TV program and a teenage dance program in Philly — called Bandstand — hadn’t yet added the adjective American.

The stories of the box and its horrific contents and that of a missing 4-year-old New Jersey girl — which ultimately led to the discovery of the “Boy in the Box” — dominated front pages.

Two days before police discovered Joseph’s body, a 26-year-old La Salle College student who was known to spy on a local home for girls in Fox Chase noticed a bassinet box that appeared to hold a doll. He later told police that he had hopped out of his car after stopping to avoid hitting a rabbit.

When he heard a report about the missing New Jersey girl, he thought that perhaps it was her body that was in the box, and he notified police, and Officer Elmer Palmer discovered the boy’s badly beaten body.

The man was not a suspect, and police said he agreed to a lie-detector test. William Kelly, a civilian in the Police Department’s identification unit, checked footprints of infants at area hospitals and found no matches. He pored through 11,200 entry photos of refugees; more frustration.

» READ MORE: Identifying Joseph has been a long and often frustrating process

Through the years, the dead-end leads seemed endless. Police believed he might have been a boy who had been kidnapped in New York. They later turned to an itinerant carnival couple who admitted they had disposed of five of their own malnourished children at places across the country — but not in Philly.

The late Remington Bristow, who had retired from the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office, spent decades trying to identify the boy whose name would remain a mystery for 65 years.

The boy ultimately did have a funeral. With detectives as pallbearers, on July 24, 1957, he was buried in a Philadelphia potter’s field. A donated headstone said, “Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy.”

He was reburied in Ivy Hill Cemetery in 1998 after his remains were exhumed, and mitochondrial DNA was extracted from a tooth. The body was exhumed again in 2019.

His new headstone read: “America’s Unknown Child.”

Dave Drysdale, the cemetery’s secretary-treasurer, says the visitors have never stopped, coming with flowers and a prayer. From now on, they’ll know for whom they’re praying.

» READ MORE: At the cemetery, the mystery comes full circle

Fitzpatrick said she and her coworkers worked “day and night to get that boy his identity back.”

“Because after all, what can we hope for in life and death but to be buried under a stone carrying our own name?”

Staff writers Ryan Briggs, Jesse Bunch, and Jason Nark contributed to this article.