Haunting images of the child victim appeared in liquor stores, and were slipped into Philadelphia Gas Works bills. They spoke to a front-page crime so odious that it elbowed aside news accounts of the Cold War and the intensifying international tensions.

As many as 25,000 circulars were sent to police departments across the country. Investigators vetted scores of false leads, and at one point pored through more than 11,000 photos of newly arrived refugees in an effort to identify the boy found in a J.C. Penney bassinet box in the weeds and shrubs of Fox Chase.

Finally, nearly 66 years after the dead body was discovered on an unusually balmy February morning in 1957, police on Thursday officially lifted the veil of anonymity from the child who had been known only as the “Boy in the Box.”

With the aid of remarkable advances in DNA analysis and a team of international experts, he was identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, who had just turned 4 when he was killed. Police said they were withholding information about surviving family members, citing privacy concerns.

Read more of our coverage on the news:

Genetic databases can hold the clues to solving decades-old cold cases such as the “Boy in the Box,” the 4-year-old identified by Philadelphia police on Thursday as Joseph Augustus Zarelli.

But it takes more than a few computer keystrokes to trace the family tree of a child who died in 1957, genealogist Colleen M. Fitzpatrick said at the police news conference.

“We’ve solved cases in two hours,” she said. “And we’ve solved cases in three years.”

Investigators were stymied by a series of obstacles in identifying the boy who died when DNA science was in its infancy.

Chief among the challenges: His DNA samples were incomplete and degraded. Yet even after researchers filled in the gaps as best they could, entering his DNA into a database was just the first step, said Fitzpatrick, president of Identifinders International, a Fountain Valley, Calif., forensic genealogy company enlisted by the police.

» READ MORE: How DNA sleuths identified the ‘Boy in the Box’ after six decades

— Tom Avril

It was nearly Christmas in 2017. Justin Thomas was doing some holiday shopping on Amazon when he saw a deal of the day for Ancestry.com and decided to buy a DNA Activation kit for his girlfriend as a gift. But soon after the kit came in the mail, they broke up and Thomas figured, why not try it himself?

After taking the test, Thomas said he learned a little bit about his family’s lineage – many of his distant relatives hailed from Italy. He didn’t think much more about it, he said.

Then, last year while he was at work, Thomas said he got a “random phone call” from a woman who identified herself as Misty Gillis, a forensic genealogist and cold case liaison with Identifinders International. She said he was a match to a “cold case in Philadelphia” but she needed more DNA to crack the case. Thomas called his mom who agreed to provide a sample.

“I walked my mom through it,” said Thomas, a 40-year-old engineer who lives in Northeast Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, Thomas said his sister texted him to say that Philadelphia police had just released the name of the “Boy in the Box”: Joseph Augustus Zarelli.

“I feel sick,” Thomas said his sister wrote.

“I saw ‘Zarelli’ and my mouth kind of hit the floor,” Thomas said, recognizing a close family name.

Thomas said his family believes that the boy is likely a first cousin to his mom. The last name of his mom’s uncle is “Zarelli.” His grandmother’s brother is a Zarelli. The Zarelli family lived in West Philadelphia before moving to Delaware County, he said.

Thomas, who is married with 3-year-old twin girls said he was stunned and heartbroken after reading more about the boy and the horrific injuries he sustained.

“Now that I have two young girls and seeing his pictures and hearing the story, I’m really upset about it,” Thomas said. “It strikes home. It’s horrible. I can’t imagine.”

He said he was still processing the revelation. “I want to talk to everyone in my family to try to understand,” he said.

As for his hand in cracking the nearly 66-year-old case, Thomas said, “I’m glad to be part of the puzzle in helping them solve it. It’s good to get some closure and I guess the next step would be to try to figure out the wrongdoing.”

— Wendy Ruderman

When Philadelphia police today revealed the identity of the formerly unknown Joseph Augustus Zarelli, they featured an artist rendering of the boy that was not well-known compared to other images used for decades to represent the victim then called the “boy in the box.”

The rendering used today, which looks like a high-quality pencil drawing and stands out because of the boy’s big and bright eyes, was actually created in 2016 by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Colin McNally, supervisor of the organization’s forensic imaging unit, described the process in an emailed statement:

“Each day, my team works to age progress missing children and create images of unidentified deceased children,” McNally said.

“In 2016, the NCMEC Forensic Imaging Unit created a 2-D facial reconstruction image of the unknown boy from Philadelphia who has now been identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli,” McNally said.

“The image was created from autopsy photos and through the use of Adobe Photoshop. Through a process of photo compositing, digital painting and rendering, the final image is a result of art and the science of knowing facial structures of children at different ages, McNally said.

“In total, the process to create the final image shown to the public takes approximately 8-10 hours. Since beginning the program, our team has created images for over 600 unidentified deceased children,” McNally said.

— Robert Moran

Jim Hoffman, a teacher from Apple Valley, California, traveled to Philadelphia for the 50th anniversary of Joseph’s recovery for research. He wrote the book The Boy in the Box: America’s Unknown Child in 2012 and said he’s thinks of the case daily. “I’m stunned today,” he said from California. “But mostly I’m grateful. I just wanted to know before I died.” Hoffman, 58, said he developed close relationships with many of the late investigators who kept Joseph’s story alive. Thursday’s news, he said, was a tribute to them. “They’re the real heroes.”

— Jason Nark

The breakthrough identification in the nearly 66-year-old “Boy in the Box” cold case is an illustration of advances in forensic technology that investigators said they hope will aid in many more homicide cases across the city.

The “brand-new technology” used dates back to 2017, said Colleen Fitzpatrick, president of the ‘Identifinders International genealogy group.

“We’ve solved cases in two hours and we’ve solved cases in three years,” she said. “As the databases grow and our tools develop and we go forward with the technology, there’s going to be a lot more and it’s going to go a lot more quickly.”

“Every case we saw, we learned something from that pays forward to the next one,” she added. “So we look forward to a lot more success stories.”

Calling the “Boy in the Box” case “one of the most challenging of my whole career,” Fitzpatrick said it took her and a fellow genealogist two and a half years to make the boy’s decades-old DNA usable, collaborating with experts from several countries.

Fitzpatrick said she and her coworkers worked “day and night to get that boy his identity back.”

“Because after all, what can we hope for in life and death but to be buried under a stone carrying our own name?”

If the technology used to uncover Joseph Augustus Zarelli’s identity was available 20 years ago, finding the person responsible for the boy’s death “would’ve been a different story,” said Philadelphia Police Homicide Captain Jason Smith, calling the decades-old investigation an “uphill battle.”

The case marks the first identification made “but definitely not the last” in a new partnership between the the city’s medical examiner’s office and police detectives, said Ryan Gallagher, criminalistics manager of the Philadelphia Police Department’s forensic science office.

The group meets weekly, he said, to determine which cases may benefit from the technology to identify unknown human remains or suspects in criminal cases. The group is working on testing in “dozens” of cases from 1957 to 2022, he said.

“Our goal for the project is that there will never be another unidentified homicide victim in the city of Philadelphia,” he said. “The victims of a homicide deserve and their families deserve no less.”

“There’s still many other unsolved cases,” said Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw. “I would ask that everyone not lose hope, but recognize that this is something breaking for us, and that we’re hoping to use it moving forward so that we can continue to improve not only how we provide service but to improve the quality of our investigations.”

— Oona Goodin-Smith

More than six decades after the badly bruised body of a young boy was found in a cardboard box in Philadelphia’s Fox Chase section, police Thursday announced the long-sought identity of the boy — finally naming “America’s Unknown Child” and providing some closure in what police say is one of the city’s most enduring unsolved homicides.

Long-known as the “Boy in the Box,” Joseph Augustus Zarelli was newly 4 years old when he was found in a bassinet box in the rural Northeast Philadelphia field in February of 1957, police said. He likely died from blunt force trauma, Philadelphia Police Homicide Captain Jason Smith said.

For decades, investigators tried to uncover Zarelli’s mysterious identity with little luck, canvassing the city with fliers of his face, scouring local orphanages, and even distributing pictures of the boy’s clothed body posed in a chair in hopes of jogging someone’s memory.

But new forensic genealogy technology provided a breakthrough.

After exhuming the boy’s remains in 2019 to extract new DNA, investigators were able to use modern forensic genetic genealogy methods to locate and contact possible relatives on the boy’s mother’s side.

From there, Smith said, detectives uncovered the identity of Zarelli’s birth mother, using that information to obtain the family’s birth records. They pulled three birth certificates belonging to the family — two for the boy’s siblings and one for a name they had never before seen: Joseph Augustus Zarelli, born Jan. 13, 1953.

The birth certificate, Smith said, led detectives to relatives of the boy’s father, and additional genealogy testing confirmed the father’s identity.

Both parents of the boy are deceased, Smith said, declining to elaborate on where Zarelli’s living family members reside “out of respect to them and their parents.”

While Smith said investigators have their “suspicions” as to who may be responsible for Zarelli’s death, the case remains an active criminal investigation. A missing persons report was never filed for the boy, police said.

The “extraordinary” announcement, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said, “only closes one chapter in this little boy’s story, while opening up a new one” as police now investigate who may have been responsible for the boy’s death.

“In his very short life, it was apparent that this child experienced horrors that no one no one should ever be subjected to,” Outlaw said. “When people think about the boy in the box, a profound sadness is felt. Not just because the child was murdered, but because his entire identity and his rightful claim to own his existence was taken away.”

— Oona Goodin-Smith

Rita O’Vary remembers sitting in her Chester living room when she was 10 years old, watching her mother learn about the Boy in the Box’s brutal homicide on television.

On Thursday, as wind swept through the Ivy Hill Cemetery, she was the first person to stand over his granite headstone to say his name: Joseph Augustus Zarelli.

“I couldn’t believe what they were saying on the television about this little boy,” said O’Vary, a retired school bus driver, as she remembered first hearing the news. “He was practically naked, and was all beat up. My mother was crying.”

Sixty-five years is practically a lifetime, and O’Vary’s world has changed dramatically since the 1957 discovery. In the last decade, her husband and son passed away, the former from health complications from the chemical Agent Orange after serving in the Vietnam War.

Still, O’Vary hasn’t stopped visiting the boy’s gravesite at Ivy Hill, leaving small ribbons and balloons in the boy’s memory.

“I can’t tell you how many times I came down here,” O’Vary said. She paused, tears swelling in her eyes as she pointed to the grave. “One of those ribbons is mine.”

» READ MORE: At the ‘Boy in the Box’ gravesite, a decades-old mystery comes full circle

— Jesse Bunch

Philadelphia Police Capt. Jason Smith said officials won’t be releasing information identifying Joseph Augustus Zarelli’s parents — both of whom are deceased — out of respect for the family.

“Joseph has a number of siblings on both the mother’s and father’s side who are living and it is out of respect for them that their parents information remain confidential,” Smith said during Thursday’s press conference.

Smith said officials currently don’t know who was responsible for Zarelli’s death.

“We have our suspicions as to who may be responsible, but it would be irresponsible of me to share these suspicions, as this remains an active and ongoing criminal investigation,” Smith said.

— Rob Tornoe

After 65 years, the “Boy in the Box” has been identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw announced during a press conference Thursday.

Zarelli lived from 1953 to 1957, officials said.

Outlaw said new science and technology was instrumental in the decades-long breakthrough, and noted it is still an active and open homicide investigation.

— Rob Tornoe

Drive into Ivy Hill Cemetery, and the grave is one of the first things you’ll see.

“America’s Unknown Child,” the headstone reads. “Heavenly Father, Bless this Unknown Boy,” says another, several yards away.

The “Boy in the Box” has been buried here in East Mount Airy since 1998, after police exhumed the body from its original burial location for genetic testing.

Dave Drysdale, the secretary treasurer of Ivy Hill cemetery, called Thursday “another birthday” for the unidentified boy, whose gravesite continues to get visitors every year.

“Every year they come with flowers, say a prayer,” Drysdale said.

Just yesterday, Drysdale saw a man run out of the pouring rain and into the cemetery right at 4:30 p.m., when the site closes.

“I saw him get off the bus, he comes running into the gate,” Drysdale said. “He says, ‘I won’t take your time, I know you’re closed – I just gotta’ see him.’ We went over, said a little prayer.”

— Jesse Bunch

Philadelphia police announced Tuesday they are “finally able to identify the child” in the notorious “Boy in the Box” homicide in 1957 that has haunted investigators for decades.

They will reveal the findings in a press conference Thursday at 11 a.m.

“Despite numerous attempts to identify the child throughout the years, the identity of the boy remained a mystery,” the Police Department said in an email Tuesday announcing the news conference.

“Through detective work and DNA analysis, police are finally able to identify the child,” the department said.

The announced participants at Thursday’s news conference include Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw; Capt. Jason Smith, commanding officer of the Homicide Unit; Ryan Gallagher, assistant director of the Office of Forensic Science; and Philadelphia Medical Examiner Constance DiAngelo.

Also expected to attend are Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder and president of Identifinders International, and William C. Fleisher of the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based collection of international forensic experts who meet to discuss and reexamine unsolved murders, using modern forensic techniques.

» READ MORE: Police have identified the ‘Boy in the Box’ 1957 homicide victim. They will reveal findings Thursday.

— Robert Moran

The young boy’s body was found along then-rural Susquehanna Road in Fox Chase on Feb. 25, 1957.

The nude body was wrapped in a cheap flannel blanket in a box for a JCPenney Co. bassinet. The boy appeared to be 4 to 6 years old. His blond hair had been cut short in a crude fashion, with clumps of hair still on his body. The back of his head had been smashed in. He was face up in the box, which was stamped “fragile.”

A major investigation commenced. Police Commissioner Thomas J. Gibbons approved the citywide distribution of posters with the boy’s face. News of the murder case, and a plea to help solve it, was literally hand-delivered to nearly every household in Philadelphia in the form of copies of the poster inserted with gas bills.

The case was reexamined over the decades, and was the subject of numerous media reports.

The unknown boy’s body was exhumed from his pauper’s grave for a DNA test, which proved fruitless at the time, and was reburied at Ivy Hill Cemetery in 1998.

Police said the case remains one of Philadelphia’s oldest unsolved homicide.

— Robert Moran

In 2002, 45 years after the boy was found, investigators got what seemed like a promising lead. An Ohio-based psychiatrist told Philadelphia authorities that a patient known under the pseudonym Mary claimed that her mother and father purchased the unknown boy from a human-trafficking ring in Kensington, according to a 2017 Inquirer report.

Vidocq Society members traveled to Cincinnati, where the woman resided, and spoke with her and the psychiatrist, the Daily News reported in 2002. The boy, the woman said, was physically and sexually abused, and malnourished for months before his death. His name, she said, was Jonathan.

One day in 1957, the woman’s mother was struggling to bathe the boy, and beat him to death, the woman claimed. She had told the psychiatrist that she accompanied her mother to the spot where the boy was found, and watched her wrap him in a blanket and place his body in a cardboard box.

Investigators, however, were unable to conclusively verify what Mary told them. And she later refused to cooperate in the case, The Inquirer reported in 2017. Her real name was leaked in the media, and she stopped talking. Ultimately, she reportedly left the country.

The Vidocq Society’s Fleisher, though, told The Inquirer in 2017 that he believed the woman and her doctor were telling the truth. Even if she studied the case, Fleisher told The Inquirer that year, her testimony checked out to such a degree that he put the odds at “8,000 to 1 that she’s lying.”

But still, nothing conclusive emerged. And now, with Philadelphia police set to release the boy’s identity, some sort of conclusion appears to be on the horizon.

“I think it’s going to happen when it was meant to happen” Fleisher said in 2017. “Hey, I hope it happens when I’m alive.”

» READ MORE: ‘Boy in the Box’: The history of the notorious Philadelphia homicide case

— Nick Vadala

Once a year, or sometimes more, Remington Bristow would drive to the potter’s field with some flowers and toys, and kneel by Grave 191. He’d dust off the snow around the holidays and pull out the weeds in summer. Then he’d pause, in silence, to honor the nameless boy who never left his thoughts.

Bristow, a long time investigator with the Philadelphia medical examiners office, and some police investigators, pitched in to buy a headstone that read “Heavenly Father, bless this unknown boy.”

“Someday, somebody will claim him,” Bristow told The Inquirer in 1971.

As news spread through Facebook groups last week that investigators may have finally uncovered the identity of the “boy in the box,” many thought of Bristow, who died in 1993 without the answers he so desperately sought.

“He was truly haunted by that case,” said Mark Kimelheim, Bristow’s grandson. “Throughout his life, he returned to it again and again.”

» READ MORE: The ‘Boy in the Box’ haunted one late investigator for decades

— Jason Nark