PHILADELPHIA — Beneath a weeping tree near the entrance of Ivy Hill Cemetery, dozens gathered Friday morning at the grave of a child who, until last month, America knew only as “the Boy in the Box.”
Bill Fleisher recalled coming to this Cedarbrook gravesite on a similarly rainy morning in 1998 to reinter the remains of the murdered child.
“God smiled down, the clouds parted, and the sun came out, and it became a glorious day, just like today,” said Fleisher, who heads the Vidocq Society, a Philadelphia-based group of crime solvers who dig into cold cases.
Fleisher then unveiled the cause of celebration: a brand headstone with the boy’s given name.
Joseph Augustus Zarelli.
The rededication came five weeks after authorities publicly identified the boy’s name for the first time, but the day also carried symbolic weight: Jan. 13 would have been Joseph’s 70th birthday. After the unveiling, some yelled “happy birthday!” as others laid balloons and momentos by the new headstone.
The crowd included a host of current and former investigators, city residents who had been troubled by the case for decades, and even apparent members of Joseph’s newly identified family. Some said they came to pay their respects to the child whose memory had haunted them for decades.
“What he’s been through was hell,” said Jean Bova, 69, of Glenside, wiping away tears as she placed a wreath on the tombstone. “I’m just glad that he’s got a name now. He’s got an identity. He’s no longer ‘the Boy In The Box.’”
The case has haunted Philadelphia since February 1957, when Joseph’s body was discovered inside a cardboard box in a weedy lot in the then-rural Fox Chase. His image dominated the front pages as people hoped to identify the remains of the boy. The wait would last nearly 66 years.
Detectives served as pallbearers at Joseph’s first burial in 1957, at a Northeast Philadelphia potter’s field, where his first donated headstone read “Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy.” Authorities exhumed his remains in 1998 to extract mitochondrial DNA from a tooth, and he was reburied at Ivy Hill. (He was exhumed again in 2019 for more genetic sampling.)
Joseph’s case passed through a host of detectives, medical examiners, and other law enforcement agents for nearly 66 years. It was only thanks to remarkable advances in DNA analysis that a team of international experts, and possibly the aid of an at-home DNA test, that authorities found a match for Joseph’s DNA in the Philadelphia region late last year.
For many, his identification was a sigh of relief. Churchgoers attended Masses across the city in his memory. One devotee posted pictures on Facebook of a balloon-filled birthday party they hosted in his memory this week.
Friday’s dedication came with a sense of catharsis for many investigators. Fleisher, a retired cop and U.S. Customs investigator who helped identify the boy with others at Vidocq, said he imagined Joseph “in heaven” alongside a legion of late detectives and medical examiners.
“Bill Kelly’s up there teaching him how to tie naval knots, and Sammy Weinstein is up there teaching him how to throw a left hook, and Joe McGillin is teaching him out to hit a curveball,” Fleisher said, naming dead investigators who had worked the case over the years.
But the murder itself remains unsolved, and at least to the public, Joseph’s family tree remains hazy at best.
Police said the hunt to find Joseph’s killers remains ongoing — but they have released few details about the case since releasing the name. Not even the names of biological mother and father have been made public. That lack of information, combined with the unusual Zarelli surname, has led amateur sleuths to fill the gaps with wild speculations about the boy’s fate in what one expert called an episode of “true crime nutballery.”
The fallout has caused considerable grief for a Zarelli family of the Philadelphia suburbs.
Members of the Zarelli family, who have not spoken publicly since Joseph was identified, said said they were shocked when they learned from police last month that they were related to the young homicide victim. The Inquirer is granting them anonymity for privacy reasons due to the negative attention the family has received since the announcement.
They said they came to the dedication Friday to mourn the child.
“Our family was blindsided by this,” said one family member. “We want to honor him by finding out his entire story. We want to put a real closure to the story.”
Charles Stecker, 60, who spent part of his childhood in the Overbrook area that authorities identified as Joseph’s neighborhood in the 1950s, said he began making phone calls after police identified Joseph and eventually connected with members of the Zarelli family.
Stecker said the family has been contending with “shock, awe, depression, and yes, some denial,” and urged people to stop accusing the family of involvement in Joseph’s death on social media.
“Let’s stop pounding on them and acting like they were part of the process that took Joseph’s breath from him,” he said.
