On February 25, 1957, a college student from La Salle University pulled his car off Susquehanna Road in the Fox Chase section of Northeast Philadelphia. He had been checking rabbit traps, the papers would later report, though the truth was more specific: he was looking in on a muskrat trap he had set, hoping to earn a few dollars from the pelt.
What he found instead was a large cardboard carton — the kind a J.C. Penney bassinet had once shipped in. Inside, wrapped in a cheap plaid blanket, was the body of a boy.
He was four or five years old. Malnourished. Beaten. Wrapped with care by someone who had also, somehow, left him in a box by the side of a road.
The Philadelphia Police Department would work the case for the next six and a half decades. They fingerprinted the boy. They circulated his death photo on 400,000 gas bill inserts. They exhumed and reburied him twice. They followed every tip — a carnival worker, a foster family, a woman who said she had sold him, a pair of siblings who said their father had killed him.
Nothing stuck. The boy remained unnamed. The case remained open.
The Box
The box itself was a clue, and a dead end.
J.C. Penney had sold the bassinet it originally held at only twelve stores in the eastern United States. Investigators tracked down every buyer they could identify. None of them matched.
The blanket was cheap and common. The boy’s hair had been cut recently, badly, possibly after death — loose hairs were still clinging to his body. Someone had clipped his nails.
He had surgical scars. An old one under his chin. A more recent one on his ankle. Neither was enough to identify him. His dental records did not match any missing child.
He had bruises over most of his body. Cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma to the head. Whoever had killed him had also, in the time between his death and his disposal, bathed him. The water had left his skin softened. His body was clean when it was found.
This is the detail that haunted the investigators: the care and the cruelty, together.
Sixty-Five Years
The Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based group of forensic experts who take on cold cases, adopted the case in the late 1990s. They gave the boy a headstone. They commissioned forensic reconstructions. They ran down tips that had sat in the file for decades.
DNA was finally extracted from the boy’s remains in 1998 and again, with better technology, in later exhumations. But DNA is only useful if you have something to compare it to.
For most of the case’s history, you didn’t. Genetic genealogy — the investigative technique that identified the Golden State Killer in 2018 — requires public DNA databases and civilian relatives who have uploaded their profiles to them. In 1957, and 1987, and 1997, those databases didn’t exist.
By 2019, they did.
The Identification
In November 2022, the Philadelphia Police Department held a press conference to announce that after 65 years, the Boy in the Box had a name.
He was Joseph Augustus Zarelli. He had been born in Philadelphia in January 1953, which made him four years old when he died. His identification had come through investigative genetic genealogy, working from a DNA sample and matching it against relatives in consumer DNA databases.
His mother had died in 1999. His father had died in 2010.
The police did not, at that press conference, name a suspect in his killing. They said only that the investigation remained active. They said, carefully, that naming Joseph had made it possible to ask new questions — of surviving relatives, of neighbors, of anyone who might have known the family in 1957.
What Remains Open
Joseph has a name now. He has a grave that bears it. He is no longer, strictly speaking, the Boy in the Box — though that is the name under which most of America came to know him, and the name under which the case lived for most of its existence.
But the case is not closed. No one has been charged. No one, publicly, has been named as the person who killed a four-year-old boy and left him in a cardboard box by the side of a road.
Philadelphia Police have said only that the investigation continues.
The investigators who first worked the case are almost all dead. The people who might have seen something in 1957, who might have known the Zarelli family, who might have answered a knocked door on Susquehanna Road that February — most of them are dead too.
Whoever killed Joseph Zarelli may be dead as well.
Or they may be alive, and know their name has not yet been spoken.
Cold File Report works from public records and journalism. If you have information about this case, contact the Philadelphia Police Department homicide unit, or reach out to us directly.