AFP, published on Thursday, December 08, 2022 at 21:36
More than 65 years later, US police announced on Thursday that, thanks to new DNA and genealogy research, they had identified a little boy who was found dead in a box in Philadelphia in the late 1950s and whose killer was never found.
On February 25, 1957, the lifeless body of the boy, with the marks of numerous beatings, was found wrapped in a blanket in a cardboard box in a wooded area of the city in the American Northeast.
In addition to the beatings, “the boy appeared to be malnourished (…) it was evident that in his very short life this child had experienced horrors that no one, no one should ever experience,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said at one Press conference.
An autopsy had revealed the victim was between four and six years old, but no one had ever come forward to claim his body and investigations into “the little boy in the box” had never identified him, despite earlier DNA tests .
In 2019, police again exhumed his remains, which were buried next to a headstone that read “America’s Unknown Child,” after new forensic techniques were developed, Police Capt. Jason Smith said.
The test results were uploaded to DNA databases and then analyzed by genealogists to trace the child’s biological mother. Investigators then found a birth certificate of one of his children, born in 1953. New analyzes then enabled the identification of the child’s father and date of birth, identified as Joseph Augustus Zarelli and born on January 13, 1953.
Police did not identify the parents but said the child had “a few siblings” still alive. “This is still an active murder investigation and we still need the public’s help to complete this child’s life story,” said Danielle Outlaw.
At the end of October, another mystery was solved in the north-east of the USA. Federal law enforcement and the judiciary have said they have identified a woman found dead with lacerations on a beach on the east coast of the United States in 1974, whose killer has also never been found. A native of Tennessee, Ruth Marie Terry was 37 years old at the time of her death.