At the ‘Boy in the Box’ gravesite, a decades-old mystery comes full circle

Rita O’Vary bundled herself in a winter hat and patterned fleece Thursday morning before driving her electric-blue Corvette to the gravesite she’s returned to repeatedly over the decades.

A gentle wind swept through the headstones as she stood, looking down at the two granite markers — the first memorials visible when entering Ivy Hill Cemetery in East Mount Airy.

The boy buried at her feet was the subject of national attention that morning, as Philadelphia police held a news conference to announce his name. He had been for 65 years, since his body was discovered naked and abused in a cardboard JC Penney box along a rural road in Fox Chase.

But O’Vary was the only person standing at the grave of Joseph Augustus Zarelli when his name was read aloud for the world to hear.

» READ MORE: At the ‘Boy in the Box’ gravesite, a decades-old mystery comes full circle

“I can’t tell you how many times I came down here,” said O’Vary, a retired school bus driver who grew up in Chester. She paused, tears swelling in her eyes as she pointed to the larger of the two headstones, which reads “America’s Unknown Child.” A Christmas wreath lay in front of it, along with other small items left in his memory.

“One of those ribbons is mine,” O’Vary said.

O’Vary is one of the regular visitors to the final resting place of the “Boy in the Box.” Over the next hours after police released the boy’s name, several people trickled by the site, but for a time, the 76-year-old O’Vary chose to linger.

Joseph’s body was reburied at Ivy Hill in 1998, after investigators exhumed his grave for genetic testing. Previously, he had lain in a potter’s field since his murder in 1957. Dave Drysdale, Ivy Hill’s secretary-treasurer, said law enforcement and members of the Vidocq Society — a local crime-solving club — visit annually. They arrive on the date of the body’s discovery in February and in November, for Veterans Day.

“Every year they come with flowers, say a prayer,” Drysdale said.

O’Vary was 10 years old, a child not much older than Joseph, when she first heard the news. O’Vary remembers watching the TV report from her Chester living room, the brutal details, and most of all, her mother’s emotions spilling over.

“I couldn’t believe what they were saying on the television about this little boy,” O’Vary said. “He was practically naked, and was all beat up. My mother was crying. And then I was too.”

O’Vary’s world has changed dramatically since that evening 65 years ago. In the last decade, her husband and son passed away, the former suffering health complications from exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, she said.

But O’Vary never stopped visiting Joseph’s grave. Balloons, flags, whatever small tokens she could find, she’d put next to the headstones.

Drysdale, who’s worked at Ivy Hill Cemetery for 49 years, remembers the day the child was buried there. The man who oversaw that burial, H. Craig Mann, was surely moved; about 30 feet to the right of Joseph’s headstone, the funeral director was laid to rest in 2014, his last name etched into the black marble in a manner the boy was denied for over half a century.

It was Mann’s wish to be buried near the boy, Drysdale said. H. Craig’s father, Henry S. Mann, oversaw Joseph’s first burial in 1957. In an image published from that July day, Henry Mann looks down on the casket from behind a thick pair of glasses, detectives in black suits hardly struggling to hold the weight of the child’s coffin.

“It would have meant a lot for him to be here today,” said Jerry Smith, superintendent of Ivy Hill Cemetery, looking at the younger Mann’s headstone.

There appear to be few limits on those the “Boy in the Box” story has touched.

As Ivy Hill Cemetery was closing its gates Wednesday — the day before Joseph’s name was revealed — Drysdale saw a man cut through a downpour and toward him.

“I saw him get off the bus, he comes running into the gate,” Drysdale said. “He says, ‘I won’t take your time, I know you’re closed — I just gotta see him.’ We went over, said a little prayer.”