The Boy in the Box: 65 Years of Silence in Philadelphia

A Tuesday Morning in Fox Chase

The call came in on Tuesday, February 26, 1957. Frederick Benonis, a junior at La Salle College, had spotted a cardboard box lying in the scrub off Susquehanna Road in the Fox Chase section of northeast Philadelphia. He had noticed it two days earlier, on Sunday, while walking near the area. He noticed it again on Monday and kept moving. It was only after hearing a radio report about a missing girl from New Jersey that he went back and looked inside.

What he found was a small boy, naked, wrapped in a worn plaid blanket, lying inside a bassinet box manufactured by JCPenney. The child was perhaps four to six years old. He had been dead for two to three days. He bore extensive bruising. He had eaten a recent meal. His hair had been cut recently. His fingernails and toenails had been trimmed. Someone had cared for him, and then someone had left him there.

It would later emerge that a high school student, John Powroznik, had seen the same box a day or two before Benonis. Powroznik, startled and frightened, had gone home without telling anyone. His Polish immigrant parents were able to offer investigators little help. No one else in the neighborhood had reported anything. No missing child matching the boy's description had been filed with any police department in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, or the surrounding states.

The case file opened that morning. It would not close for sixty-five years.

What the Coroner Found

The medical examiner estimated the child's age at approximately four years old, though the range given was three to seven. He was well-nourished, which meant someone had been feeding him consistently. His last meal had included corn, beans, and orange rind. The cause of death was blunt force trauma.

The bruising was extensive and suggested repeated injury over time, not a single incident. There were also scars that had healed before death, consistent with chronic abuse. The fresh cuts on his hair and nails were notable: whoever had handled him last had taken care to prepare him. That detail would trouble investigators for decades. It suggested a complicated relationship between the child and whoever left him there. Not a stranger disposal. Something more intimate, and more difficult to understand.

The boy had no identifying marks, no dental records on file, and no fingerprint match in any database. A plaster death mask was cast from his face. Investigators would carry photographs of it to doorsteps across the city for years.

The Box and the Search

Investigators traced the cardboard box with unusual precision. It had originally packaged a baby's bassinet sold by JCPenney before the previous Christmas at their store on 69th Street in Upper Darby, a township about fifteen miles southwest of Fox Chase. The limited distribution of that specific bassinet model in the Philadelphia region allowed detectives to narrow the geographic origin of whoever had purchased it. It was one of the most concrete leads in the entire investigation, and it led nowhere conclusive.

The search for the boy's identity became one of the largest circularization efforts in the history of Philadelphia policing. Officers distributed 4,000 circulars to area physicians, who might have treated the child. Another 10,000 went to law enforcement agencies across the Eastern states. Then, in a collaboration with the Philadelphia Gas Works and Electric Company, approximately 300,000 flyers bearing the boy's photograph went out tucked inside utility bills across the city. By April 1957, Pennsylvania liquor stores were displaying identification posters, the first time the state's Liquor Control Board had ever participated in such an effort.

Nothing came back. Hundreds of tips arrived and were investigated. None held up. Within weeks the case had reached, in the language of the department files, "a virtual standstill." The boy had no name, no family, no record anywhere in the system. He was given one by the Germantown Avenue Crime Commission: America's Unknown Child. The name stuck.

In July 1957, three Philadelphia detectives served as pallbearers at his funeral, held at Mann Funeral Home. He was buried in a potter's field in Holmesburg with a small marker: Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy.

Remington Bristow and the Foster Home Lead

Most investigators cycled through the case and moved on. Remington Bristow did not. Bristow worked for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, and from the moment the boy was found he took the case as something personal. He would describe the child as "my boy" in press interviews. He visited the potter's field grave regularly, bringing flowers and toys. He wore out shoe leather knocking on doors. He spent thousands of dollars of his own money on leads and travel. And he kept the plaster death mask in a briefcase that went with him everywhere.

His closest theory pointed to a foster home approximately 1.5 miles from where the bassinet box had been sold in Upper Darby. Bristow had consulted a psychic in New Jersey, who pointed him toward a property in the area. Later, at an estate sale at that same property, Bristow found what he believed was a bassinet similar to the JCPenney model, and blankets that resembled the one used to wrap the boy. Police interviewed the surviving family members. They were cleared.

"I've had him all those years. His parents only had him for a few."

Remington Bristow, investigator, Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, 1977

Bristow's grandson later revealed a detail that puts the obsession in context: Bristow had lost a daughter, Anne Marie, to sudden infant death syndrome roughly twelve years before the boy was found. She was three months old. The unnamed child in the box was, for Bristow, something he could still fight for.

Remington Bristow died in 1993, thirty-six years after the case opened, without learning the child's identity. His case files were passed to the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based organization of retired detectives and forensic specialists who collaborate on cold cases.

The Woman Called Mary

In 2002, a Philadelphia psychiatrist contacted investigators with an account from a patient she identified only as "Mary." According to Mary, her parents had purchased the boy through a human trafficking arrangement in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. She said his name was Jonathan. She described a household where he was subjected to violence that ultimately killed him, and described the manner in which his body was disposed of in Fox Chase.

Vidocq Society head William Fleisher assessed the claim seriously, estimating the probability she was lying at "8,000 to 1." Investigators believed her account was consistent with known details of the case. But Mary refused to cooperate further after her story received media attention, and she reportedly left the country. The lead could not be developed, and it was never corroborated or disproved.

No charges were ever filed. The case remained open.

The Reburial and the DNA Work

In 1998, the Vidocq Society funded the exhumation and reburial of the boy at Ivy Hill Cemetery in the Cedarbrook section of Philadelphia. The cemetery donated a large plot. A new headstone was installed, reading America's Unknown Child, with a plaque beneath: Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy. The reburial was accompanied by the first serious attempt to extract DNA from his remains.

Forensic technicians extracted mitochondrial DNA from his teeth, which had preserved relatively well. Mitochondrial DNA passes through the maternal line and represents only a fraction of a person's full genetic profile. There were no matches in any database at the time, and the technology of the late 1990s could not squeeze usable nuclear DNA from the degraded sample. The case went back into the files.

In 2019, the remains were exhumed a second time. Forensic techniques had advanced significantly, including statistical methods for reconstructing degraded or fragmentary DNA sequences. Even so, the sample was, in the words of forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick of Identifinders International, extremely difficult: "It took two and a half years to get the DNA in shape, it was so bad." The analysis involved a collaboration of international experts working across a twenty-seven month period before a usable genetic profile could be built.

The Christmas Gift That Broke the Case

In 2017, Justin Thomas, a forty-year-old engineer living in northeast Pennsylvania, bought an Ancestry.com DNA kit as a Christmas gift. When the relationship ended, he decided to use the kit himself. The results showed primarily Italian heritage, and he filed them away. Millions of people had done the same thing in the consumer genealogy boom of the mid-2010s, uploading partial family trees and DNA profiles to databases that were growing faster than any investigator could have designed.

In 2021, forensic genealogist Misty Gillis from Identifinders International contacted Thomas with a specific request: his DNA had matched a cold case in Philadelphia. She asked him to provide additional samples, and he walked his mother through the same process. The genealogical work that followed traced the match outward through cousins and half-siblings on both sides of the family tree, funneling through a narrowing set of candidates until only one person fit the intersection of relationships: a child named Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born January 13, 1953, to Mary Elizabeth Abel and Augustus John Zarelli of West Philadelphia.

The parents had separated around the time of Joseph's death. Neither had ever reported him missing. Mary Elizabeth Abel died in 1991. Augustus John Zarelli died in 2014. Both were gone before DNA technology caught up with them. Their exact roles in what happened to Joseph remain unknown, and Pennsylvania law does not permit the naming of individuals who cannot be charged. Their identities are sealed to protect living relatives.

December 8, 2022

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw stood at a podium and said the name: Joseph Augustus Zarelli. He had been four years old. He had been born on January 13, 1953. He had died sometime in February 1957, and his body had been found on February 26th, and for sixty-five years and nine months he had been buried under a name that was not his.

The announcement was precise in what it claimed and careful about what it did not. Investigators knew who he was. They did not know who killed him, or who placed him in that box, or who drove to Susquehanna Road and left him there without a word. The manner of death was established: blunt force trauma. Everything else that matters to a criminal prosecution remained, and remains, unresolved.

The grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery was updated after the identification. A new marker was added bearing his name: Joseph Augustus Zarelli. The older inscription, America's Unknown Child, stayed. The case file is still open. Philadelphia homicide detectives believe that identifying his name may generate new leads from people who knew the family in West Philadelphia in the 1950s. As of 2026, no charges have been filed. No one has been publicly named as a suspect.

What the Silence Means

The most disturbing fact in this case is not the death, as terrible as it was. It is the silence. A four-year-old boy disappeared from somewhere in Philadelphia, and nobody reported him gone. That silence implies a household where his absence was known and concealed. It implies adults who made a deliberate decision, for thirty-six hours or longer, not to call anyone. And it implies that everyone in a position to report him missing, to ask questions, or to notice that a child had vanished, chose not to.

Remington Bristow spent thirty-six years trying to break that silence. He died without doing it. The woman called Mary brought investigators close in 2002, and then withdrew. Justin Thomas bought a DNA kit in 2017 without knowing it would eventually give a name to a child he had never heard of. Colleen Fitzpatrick and her team spent two and a half years processing DNA that had spent sixty years in the ground. Commissioner Outlaw spoke the name in December 2022.

Joseph Augustus Zarelli was four years old. Someone cut his hair. Someone trimmed his nails. And then someone chose silence, and that silence held for sixty-five years, and the people who kept it are all dead. The question of what happened inside that house in West Philadelphia in the winter of 1957 may never have an answer. But the boy has a name now. He has a grave marker. He is not unknown anymore.