The Boy in the Box: How Philadelphia Finally Gave a Name to Joseph Augustus Zarelli

For more than six decades, he was known only as the “Boy in the Box,” one of America’s most haunting unidentified murder victims. His battered body was discovered outside Philadelphia in 1957, but despite thousands of leads, investigators could not determine who he was. Generations of detectives worked the case, while advances in DNA technology slowly created possibilities that investigators in the 1950s could never have imagined. In 2022, forensic genetic genealogy finally gave the child something investigators had been searching for for 65 years: his name, Joseph Augustus Zarelli. But identifying Joseph solved only one mystery, because the question of who killed him remains unanswered.