Authorities identify ‘Boy in Box’ 66 years after body found in Philly
His name was Joseph Augustus Zarelli.
Nearly 66 years after the battered body of a young boy was found stuffed inside a cardboard box, Philadelphia police say they have finally unlocked a central mystery in the city’s most notorious cold case: The victim’s identity.
Revealing the name to the public Thursday, authorities hope it will bring them a step closer to the boy’s killer and give the victim — known to generations of Philadelphians as the “Boy in the Box” — a measure of dignity.
“When people think about the boy in the box, a profound sadness is felt, not just because a child was murdered, but because his entire identity and his rightful claim to own his existence was taken away,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said at a news conference.
She said the city’s oldest unsolved homicide has “haunted this community, the Philadelphia police department, our nation and the world” for more than six decades.
The homicide investigation remains open, and authorities said they hoped publicizing Joseph’s name would spur a fresh round of leads. But they cautioned the passage of time complicates the task.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle for us to definitively determine who caused this child’s death,” said Capt. Jason Smith, commanding officer of the homicide unit. “We may not make an arrest. We may never make an identification. But we’re going to do our darndest to try.”
Police said both of Joseph’s parents are dead but he has living siblings. They said his family lived in west Philadelphia.
The child’s naked, badly bruised body was found Feb.
25, 1957, in a wooded area of Philadelphia’s Fox Chase neighborhood. The boy, who was 4 years old, had been wrapped in a blanket and placed inside a large JCPenney bassinet box. Police say he was malnourished. He’d been beaten to death.
The boy’s photo was put on a poster and plastered all over the city as police worked to identify him and catch his killer.
Detectives pursued and discarded hundreds of leads — that he was a Hungarian refugee, a boy who’d been kidnapped outside a Long Island supermarket in 1955, a variety of other missing children. They investigated a pair of traveling carnival workers and a family who operated a nearby foster home but ruled them out as suspects.
An Ohio woman claimed her mother bought the boy from his birth parents in 1954, kept him in the basement of their suburban Philadelphia home and killed him in a fit of rage. Authorities found her credible but couldn’t corroborate her story.