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#Post#: 74--------------------------------------------------
THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA - 25 Febr
uary 1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:07 am
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America's Unknown Child
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#Post#: 75--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:08 am
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Thursday, February 27, 2014
THE BOY IN THE BOX
The Tragic Story of One of America's Unsolved Mysteries
The most enduring mystery to ever perplex Philadelphia
detectives came to light on the evening of February 23, 1957,
when a La Salle College student parked his car off Susquehanna
Road and began to hike across a vacant lot in the drizzling
rain. The unnamed young man – various newspaper reports put his
age between 18 and 26 – was a “Peeping Tom” and was en route to
spy on the inmates of the nearby Good Shepherd Home, a Catholic
residence for “wayward” girls. But what he found as he walked
across the overgrown lot that night would destroy any interest
that he had in looking in young girl’s windows.
It was a cardboard box, seemingly innocuous – until he looked
inside and saw that a small corpse had been wedged into it.
Terrified, he forgot about the undressed women that he had come
to see. He turned and ran back to his car. Frightened and
embarrassed, the man confessed his discovery to his priest the
next day and he was told to call the police. He complied, after
first concocting a tale that he found the box while chasing a
rabbit through the weeds, and officers were sent to the lot to
investigate.
This would be the beginning of a heartbreaking story to which
the end has yet to be written.
The young boy was found dead in the woods in Philadelphia's Fox
Chase area, his head poking from a cardboard box. It would
become the city's -- and one of America's -- most baffling
unsolved murders.
The patrolmen who arrived at the vacant lot on February 24 found
a large cardboard carton lying on its side, open at one end. The
box had once held a baby bassinet from J.C. Penney. Inside the
box was a small boy, his pale white body wrapped in a cheap,
imitation Indian blanket. They searched the lot and 17 feet from
the box, discovered a man’s cap, made from royal blue corduroy
with a leather strap and a buckle on the back. Coincidentally or
otherwise, a beaten path through the weeds and the underbrush
led directly from the cap to the cardboard coffin.
An autopsy was performed on the boy by Dr. Joseph Spelman,
Philadelphia’s chief medical examiner. His report placed the boy
between four and six years old. He had blue eyes and light blond
hair that had been badly cut, closely shorn in some areas of his
head, shaved almost to the skull in others. He was 41 inches
tall and weighed only a pathetic 30 pounds at the time of his
death. Dr. Spelman cited the cause of death was a savage beating
that left the boy’s body and face covered in fresh bruises.
Older marks included an L-shaped scar on his chin; a one-inch
surgical scar on the left side of his chest; a round, irregular
scar on his left elbow; a well-healed scar at the groin,
apparently from hernia surgery, and a scar on the left ankle
that resembled a “cut down” incision used to expose veins for a
blood transfusion. The boy was circumcised but had no
vaccination marks, suggesting that he had not been enrolled in
public school.
Spelman’s report contained many other intriguing details. The
victim’s right palm and the soles of both feet were rough and
wrinkled, which suggested that they had been submerged in water,
immediately before or after death. When exposed to ultraviolet
light, the boy’s left eye fluoresced a bright shade of blue,
indicating recent exposure to a diagnostic dye used in the
treatment of chronic eye disease. Spelman attributed the boy’s
death to head trauma, probably inflicted with a blunt
instrument, but he could not rule out that damage had been done
by “pressure” – which prompted some of the investigators to
suggest that fatal damage had been inflicted by someone
squeezing the boy’s head when he was given his last, botched
haircut. Detectives clothed the boy and photographed his
battered face, in hopes that they might be able to learn his
name – but those hopes slowly died with the passing years.
Investigators initially focused on the box that had been used as
the boy’s coffin. It had originally held a baby bassinet from
J.C. Penney and was one of a dozen received on November 27, 1956
and sold for $7.50 between December 3, 1956 and February 16,
1957 from a store in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. The store,
though, kept no record of individual sales, but the other 11
bassinets were eventually located by detectives. FBI fingerprint
technicians found no usable prints on the carton recovered from
the empty lot.
The examination of the blanket proved to be just as frustrating.
It was made from cheap cotton flannel and had been recently
washed and mended using poor-grade cotton thread. It had been
cut into two separate, unequal pieces and then wrapped around
the naked boy. Analysis at the Philadelphia Textile Institute
determined that it had been manufactured either at Swannanoa,
North Carolina, or Granby, Quebec. Identical blankets had been
produced by the thousands, and the police were never able to
figure out a likely place where it had been sold.
#Post#: 76--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:10 am
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Continued:
A label inside of the blue cap led police to Robbins Eagle Hat &
Cap Company in Philadelphia. Proprietor Hannah Robbins said that
it was one of 12 that had been made from corduroy remnants at
some point prior to May 1956. Robbins recalled the particular
hat because it had been made without the leather strap, but the
purchaser – a blond man in his late twenties – had returned a
few months later to have a strap sewn on. Robbins told the
detectives that her customer resembled photographs that she was
shown of the “Boy in the Box,” but she had no record of his name
or address.
Philadelphia police circulated more than 10,000 flyers with the
child’s photograph on them to police departments throughout
eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, but with no
results. The Philadelphia Gas Works mailed out 200,000 flyers to
its customers with their monthly gas bills, while more were
circulated by the Philadelphia Electric Company, grocery stores,
insurance agents, and a pharmacist’s association – about 300,000
flyers in all. An article about the case was written for the
FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin, again without producing any
worthwhile leads. Someone, somewhere, knew who the boy was and
what had happened to him, but they were not talking.
Five months after the boy was found, the authorities buried him
in Philadelphia’s potter’s field, near the Philadelphia State
Hospital at Byberry, a mental institution. The beleaguered
detectives who worked the case collected enough money to erect
the grim graveyard’s only headstone. Its inscription read:
“Heavenly Father, Bless this Unknown Boy.”
The case went cold, silent and deathly still until November 4,
1998, when the “Boy in the Box” was exhumed in order to extract
DNA samples, collected for future comparison with any suspected
relatives. A year passed before the authorities finally admitted
that they had not been able to obtain a satisfactory DNA profile
from the boy’s remains. Another attempt was made in 2000, this
time from the boy’s teeth, but this attempt also failed. A
second attempt, though, was reported as successful in April
2001. Although the discovery of any living relatives seems
fairly hopeless at this point, some investigators have remained
optimistic.
In 1999, Frank Bender, a forensic artist and a founding member
of the Vidocq Society, came up with a new idea that he believed
might help solve the case. The Vidocq Society is a crime-solving
organization that is based out of Philadelphia. The group is
named for Eugène François Vidocq, the ground-breaking
nineteenth-century French detective who helped police by using
criminal psychology to solve "cold case" homicides. At meetings,
the members – forensic professionals, current and former FBI
profilers, homicide investigators, scientists, psychologists,
prosecutors and coroners -- listen to law enforcement officials
who come from around the world to present unsolved cases for
review. Bender sculpted a bust that he believed could bear a
strong resemblance to the dead boy’s father. The case was
profiled for a national television audience on America’s Most
Wanted, but no leads were discovered. Regardless, efforts to
identify the boy continue.
Like most unsolved murders, there have been a number of theories
advanced toward a solution of the case. Most of the “Boy in the
Box” theories were dismissed, but two possible solutions created
interest in recent years.
The first, which was eventually ruled out, involved a foster
home that was located a little more than a mile from the vacant
lot where the boy’s body was found. In 1960, Remington Bristow,
an employee of the medical examiner's office who doggedly
pursued the case until his death in 1993, contacted a New Jersey
psychic, who told him to look for a house that seemed to match
the foster home. When the psychic was brought to the city, she
led Bristow straight to the house. Bristow refused to let it go,
investigating the case on his own. When he attended an estate
sale at the foster home, Bristow discovered a bassinet similar
to the one sold at J.C. Penney. He also saw blankets hanging on
the clothesline similar to that in which the boy's body had been
wrapped. Bristow believed that the child belonged to the
stepdaughter of the man who ran the foster home. He believed
that the stepfather was involved in a sexual relationship with
the girl and she became pregnant. The boy was hidden away, but
when he died accidentally, the man disposed of the boy so that
the girl would not be exposed as an unwed mother, a significant
social stigma in 1957.
Despite this circumstantial evidence, the police were unable to
find any real links between the family and the Boy in the Box.
In 1998, Philadelphia police lieutenant Tom Augustine, who
remains in charge of the investigation, and several members of
the Vidocq Society, interviewed the stepfather and the daughter,
whom he had married. The interview seemed to confirm to them
that the family was not involved in the case. After a DNA test,
which ruled out the stepdaughter as the boy’s mother, the
investigation of the foster home theory was closed.
The second theory emerged in February 2002, reported by a woman
identified only as "M." She claimed that her abusive mother
purchased the unknown boy, named "Jonathan," from his birth
parents in the summer of 1954. The youngster was subjected to
extreme physical and sexual abuse for two and a half years. Her
mother then allegedly killed the boy in a fit of rage when he
vomited in the bathtub. The woman then cut the boy’s long hair
(accounting for the ragged haircut) and dumped the body in the
secluded vacant lot. "M" went on to say that as they were
preparing to remove the boy's body from the trunk, a passing
male motorist pulled alongside to inquire whether they needed
assistance. They ignored him and he eventually drove away. This
story corroborated confidential testimony given by a male
witness in 1957. The police considered the story quite
plausible, but were troubled by "M"'s testimony, because she had
a history of mental illness. When interviewed, though, neighbors
who had access to the house denied that there had been a young
boy living there, and said that "M"'s claims were "ridiculous."
And so the case remains unsolved. Despite the huge amount of
publicity at the time and sporadic re-interest throughout the
years, the case remains unsolved to this day, and the boy's
identity is still unknown.
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#Post#: 77--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:17 am
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HTML http://americasunknownchild.net/textlist.html
HTML https://i.imgur.com/833Dehb.jpg
#Post#: 78--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:18 am
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Current Gravesite
HTML http://i.imgur.com/C167qla.jpg
#Post#: 79--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:19 am
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HTML http://i.imgur.com/WjzIbRq.jpg
#Post#: 80--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:21 am
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Hat found nearby
HTML http://i.imgur.com/x5tOWbZ.jpg
#Post#: 81--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:22 am
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Philadelphia Police Department
HTML http://i.imgur.com/ucNdbGR.jpg
#Post#: 82--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:24 am
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HTML http://i.imgur.com/KCQkebS.jpg
#Post#: 83--------------------------------------------------
Re: THE BOY IN THE BOX: WM, 4-6, found in Philadelphia, PA, Feb
1957
By: Akoya Date: November 25, 2018, 9:29 am
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Autopsy Photographs
HTML http://i.imgur.com/ez7wrxa.jpg
HTML http://i.imgur.com/0XnQs5k.jpg
HTML http://i.imgur.com/WmlP9N7.jpg
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