In late February of 1957, in the woods near Fox Chase, Philadelphia, a young man out checking his illegal muskrat traps came across a horrific find stuffed inside a large cardboard box. Not wanting to alert the police to his own unlawful behavior, however, he decided to leave well enough alone.
A few days later, a college student named Frederick Benosis was out in the same woods, in the process of spying on some girls at a nearby school. He too came across the fateful box, and he too was reluctant to report his find because of his sketchy activities, but at last his conscience got the better of him, and he went to the authorities on February 26th.
When investigators entered the woods, they found the naked body of a little blue-eyed, fair-complected boy between the ages of four and six years old. He was wrapped in a rust-and-green plaid blanket, and had been placed inside a cardboard box that had once contained a child’s bassinet which had been purchased at the J.C. Penney department store.
The child was extremely malnourished and severely bruised, and it appeared that he had been killed by several blows to the head. He had three old scars etched into his flesh: one beneath his chin, and two from apparent surgeries on his ankle and his groin.
Though his fingernails were trimmed and neat, his hair had been crudely chopped into a sort of bowl cut either after he was dead or shortly before, as there were still tufts of cut hair clinging to his skin and wrapped up with him inside the blanket. Investigators also noted that his fingers and toes were wrinkled, as though he had been submerged in water for some time just prior to death or immediately afterwards.
Pathologists began a more thorough examination of the child’s body, during which they discovered that he had likely vomited shortly before death, and that he may have suffered from some sort of disease of the eyes. Because of the freezing weather conditions in the area during the previous month, it was not clear how long the boy had been dead, and the medical examiner claimed that the child could have been in the box for anywhere from two days to three weeks.
A further search of the woods surrounding the dump site yielded a few pieces of child’s clothing that were presumed to belong to the boy. Among these were a scarf, a handkerchief, and a distinctive corduroy cap with a leather strap and buckle at the back.
Police were able to obtain a perfect set of fingerprints from the boy’s body, and distributed these to every precinct in the lower forty-eight. They also printed 400,000 flyers with the boy’s photograph and description, and sent these out in a mass mailing around the state, inserting them into residents‘ gas bills.
Though the authorities were initially confident that the boy would be identified immediately and the murderer brought to justice, they were soon forced to deal with the grim reality that not a single person came forward with any information that would help them to find out who the boy was.
Undaunted, investigators continued to pursue the few leads they had. They were able, for example, to track the J.C. Penney store that had sold the particular bassinet which had been in the box that contained the body, but this line of inquiry hit a dead end, as the four unaccounted-for bassinets sold from that particular store had been paid for in cash, hence there was no record of their purchasers.
Likewise, the woman who had made the child’s blue corduroy cap could only tell police that the hat had been purchased several months earlier by a man in his late twenties wearing work clothes.
The case languished for quite a long time with no leads, despite the dogged efforts of Philadelphia police. A few theories about the crime eventually surfaced, but none were found to be particularly compelling after closer scrutiny.
One focus of the investigation was a family who fostered several children in their home less than two miles away from where the boy’s body had been found. In 1960, a man named Remington Bristow, who had worked in the medical examiner’s office, looked into the foster family after receiving a tip from a psychic. Upon attending an estate sale at the family’s home, he claimed he had seen blankets drying on a clothesline that were similar in appearance to the blanket found with the Boy in the Box, and he further stated that the family owned a white bassinet like the one that had been sold in the cardboard box in which the child’s body had been found.
From these clues, he developed a theory that the boy was actually the child of one of the foster father’s unwed step-daughters, that the child had died accidentally, and was then disposed of to avoid a scandal. However, later evidence, including DNA tests carried out in 1998, confirmed that the child was not related to the step-daughter or the foster father, and this avenue of inquiry was subsequently dropped.
In much later years, a woman known only as M came forward and claimed that the child had been named Jonathan, and that her abusive mother had purchased him in 1954. Apparently, the child underwent extensive physical and emotional abuse until 1957, when he was murdered by the mother in a rage after he vomited baked beans into the bathtub. M claimed that she had helped her mother dispose of the body in the woods of Fox Chase.
Police have been keeping an open mind in regards to M’s story, claiming that it is plausible and fits some other known facts, but they have been reluctant to give the theory too much credit due to M’s reported history of mental illness, and the lack of solid evidence corroborating her claims.
After the boy was exhumed in 1998 to extract DNA, he was re-interred in Philadelphia’s Ivy Hill Cemetery under a tombstone reading, “America’s Unknown Child.”
On December 1st of 2022, Philadelphia police announced that they had identified the boy through genealogy, and that he was the son of a prominent family in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. At a press conference held a week later, they formally named the victim as four-year-old Joseph Augustus Zarelli. His murder, however, is still unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 