Boy in the Box: Joseph Augustus Zarelli Identified After 65 Years

Sixty-Five Years Without a Name

On February 25, 1957, a La Salle College student named Frederick Benonis was driving along Susquehanna Road in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia when he stopped at a vacant lot to investigate a muskrat trap. In the undergrowth thirty feet from the road he found a J.C. Penney bassinet box. Inside, wrapped in an old flannel blanket, was the body of a small boy.

He had been dead for two or three days. He weighed thirty pounds, measured forty-one inches, and showed evidence of long-term abuse: scars on his ankles and groin, surgical scars on his chin and left ankle, an L-shaped scar on his chest, and signs of recent and prolonged malnutrition. The cause of death was multiple blunt force injuries to the head. He had been bathed after death and his hair roughly cut, consistent with an attempt to delay identification.

The Philadelphia Police Department mounted what was, at the time, the largest investigation in the city’s history. They fingerprinted 10,000 children. They circulated 400,000 flyers. They ran leads from a tip that a young boy matching the description had been purchased from an adoption agency in Exton, and from another tip that he had been abused at a foster home in the Pine Barrens. Every lead collapsed. In 1998, the Vidocq Society, a cold case organization founded in Philadelphia, took the case as its signature investigation. They developed a profile, interviewed witnesses, and kept the case in public view for another two decades. The boy was buried in a potter’s field in 1957, exhumed and reburied with a new headstone in 1998 that read America’s Unknown Child.

The 2019 Exhumation

In 2019, Detective William Fleisher of the Philadelphia Homicide Unit and the Vidocq Society coordinated a second exhumation of the remains, this time for the specific purpose of extracting DNA suitable for genealogy analysis. The sample was degraded but usable. The profile was uploaded to GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, and forensic genealogist Misty Gillis at Identifinders International was assigned to the case.

Family tree construction from distant cousin matches worked through the early twentieth-century records of Philadelphia families. The search narrowed to a single extended family whose known history included an unexplained absence in the 1950s. Birth records confirmed that Joseph Augustus Zarelli had been born on January 13, 1953. No death certificate had ever been filed. He had simply disappeared from records after 1956.

The Philadelphia Police Department announced the identification at a December 8, 2022 press conference. Captain Jason Smith stated that investigators had developed persons of interest within the extended family and were pursuing the case as an active homicide investigation. Out of respect for surviving relatives and the integrity of the ongoing investigation, no suspect has been publicly named.

What Identification Changes

Joseph Zarelli’s identification is the oldest cold case resolved by investigative genetic genealogy in the United States to date. The 65-year gap between the crime and the identification speaks to the method’s core capacity: even when every contemporary witness is dead and every original investigator has retired, genetic genealogy can reach the answer.

The case sits in a growing catalog of cold cases solved by genetic genealogy that now includes the Golden State Killer and the Bear Brook murders. For the category of unidentified child homicide specifically, Zarelli’s case has pushed several similar investigations back into active status, including cases in Texas, Ohio, and Florida that had been effectively closed for decades.

The headstone at Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia was replaced again in 2023. It now reads Joseph Augustus Zarelli. The case is still open.