More than 65 years later, US police announced Thursday that, thanks to new genealogy and DNA research, they had identified a young boy who had been discovered dead in a cardboard box in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. and whose killer was never found.
On February 25, 1957, the lifeless body of the boy was discovered, with marks of numerous blows, wrapped in a blanket inside a cardboard box, in a wooded area of the city in the northeastern United States.
In addition to the beatings, “the child appeared to be malnourished…it was obvious that in his very short life this child had experienced horrors that no one, no one should experience,” Philadelphia Police Chief Danielle said during the interview. . Outlaw at a press conference.
An autopsy had concluded that the victim was between four and six years old, but no one had ever come forward to claim his body and the investigation into “the boy in the box” had never identified him, despite previous DNA tests.
In 2019, police re-exhumed his remains, buried next to a headstone marked “America’s Unknown Child,” after new forensic techniques were developed, police Capt. Jason Smith said.
a long investigation
The test results were uploaded into DNA databases and then analyzed by genealogists, tracing back to the child’s biological mother. The investigators then found a birth certificate of one of his sons born in 1953. Further analysis then allowed the identification of the father and the day of birth of the child, identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli and born on January 13, 1953.
Police did not identify the parents, but said the boy had “several siblings” still alive.
“This is still an active homicide investigation and we still need the public’s help to complete this child’s life story,” Danielle Outlaw said.
By the end of October, another mystery in the northeastern United States had been solved. Federal police and justice had announced that they had identified a woman who had been discovered dead, her hands cut off, on a beach on the east coast of the United States in 1974, and whose murderer was also not found. Ruth Marie Terry, a Tennessee native, was 37 years old at the time of her death.
Source: BFM TV
