'Boy in the Box' Was Found Slain, Severely Beaten and Nude: Who Was He, and Who Put Him There?

Two years after finally being identified, the “Boy in the Box” case continues to haunt Philadelphia.

The slain body of Joseph Augustus Zarelli, 4, was discovered in February 1957 in Philadelphia’s Fox Chase neighborhood. He was naked, severely beaten and stuffed into a cardboard box.

The case received substantial publicity, but for 65 years the boy’s identity remained a mystery — leading to the moniker “America’s Unknown Child,” which was inscribed on his tombstone.

In 2022, Philadelphia police announced they had finally cracked the case of the boy’s identity following new breakthroughs in DNA testing. But the larger mystery remains: Who killed the boy, and what were the circumstances that led to his death?

The Discovery and the Doldrums

The young boy’s body was discovered in a wooded area off Susquehanna Road in Philadelphia on Feb. 25, 1957. He was nude, wrapped in a blanket, and had been placed in a large box that had held a bassinet purchased at JCPenney.

He was severely malnourished and had apparently been beaten to death. He also bore the signs of having recently been given a haircut and a nail trimming.

Police plastered posters of the boy’s face all over the city, and newspapers across America printed his picture, hoping to identify him and find his killer.

Authorities pursued hundreds of leads: One theory held that he came from the nearby foster home; another proposed he was a refugee from communist Hungary whose family had fled the recent revolution. One woman would claim her mother had purchased the child from human traffickers and kept him in their basement, ultimately beating him to death and disposing of the body.

But all the leads amounted to nothing, and “America’s Unknown Child” remained unidentified.

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The Breakthrough

In December 2022, nearly 66 years after his discovery, Philadelphia police announced they had finally identified the boy in the box: His name was Joseph Augustus Zarelli, and he was 4 at the time of his death.

The identification was the result of major breakthroughs in the science of DNA profiling. Police exhumed the boy’s body in 2019, but efforts to extract usable DNA took about two-and-a-half years, said Colleen Fitzpatrick, president of Identifinders International, at a 2022 press conference.

When they finally recovered a snippet of genetic data, they were able to match it to a distant cousin who had uploaded a profile to Ancestry.com using an at-home kit, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

From there, investigators were able to ascertain the child’s family — and after obtaining a court order for vital records related to the child’s suspected mother, they found Joseph’s birth certificate, the Associated Press reported.

In January 2023, a new headstone was dedicated at Joseph’s grave site featuring his name and his picture, restoring the identity of the long-unknown boy on what would have been his 70th birthday.

The Enduring Mystery

Identifying Joseph was just one piece of the puzzle in solving the Boy in the Box mystery. Authorities still don’t know how he died, or who killed him.

The passage of time makes the job only harder: Joseph’s parents are both dead, and having evaded capture for nearly seven decades, there’s a good chance the perpetrator is dead, too.

But the case remains open and investigators are hopeful they can finally give closure to Joseph’s living siblings and the city of Philadelphia.

Captain Jason Smith, leader of the Philadelphia Police Department’s homicide unit, said in 2022 that authorities were hoping for an “avalanche of tips” after the boy’s identification.

“I’m hopeful that there’s somebody who is in their mid-to-late 70s, possibly 80s, who remembers that child,” said Smith. “There would have been somebody out there that would’ve seen this child. Perhaps another family member that hasn’t stepped forward, possibly a neighbor that remembers seeing that child, remembers whatever occurring at that particular household. That’s what I’m hoping comes out of this.”