The Mystery Between The Boy In A Box

In 1957 a grisly discovery was made that to this day still has police and the public stumped. The body of a young boy was found hidden in a cardboard box in a Philadelphia neighbourhood. The boy, believed to be four to six years old, was never identified—despite tireless searches and appeals to the public. Tests found he was malnourished and abused, leading to theories that he was an abandoned orphan. No one knows who the boy was or how he ended up in the box.

Investigation

The police received the report and opened an investigation on February 26, 1957. The dead boy's fingerprints were taken, and police at first were optimistic that he would soon be identified. However, no one ever came forward with any useful information.

The case attracted massive media attention in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. The Philadelphia Inquirer pressed 400,000 flyers depicting the boy's likeness, which flooded the area, and were included with every gas bill in Philadelphia. The crime scene was combed over and over again by 270 police academy recruits, who discovered a man's blue corduroy cap, a child's scarf, and a man's white handkerchief with the letter "G" in the corner; all clues that led nowhere. The police even went so far as to distribute a postmortem photograph of the boy fully dressed and in a seated position, as he may have looked in life, in the hopes it may lead to a clue. Despite the publicity and sporadic interest throughout the years, the boy's identity is still unknown. The case remains unsolved to this day.

On March 21, 2016, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children released a facial reconstruction of the victim and added him onto their database. In August 2018 Barbara Rae-Venter, the genetic genealogist who helped to identify the Golden State Killer using a DNA profiling technique, stated that she was using the same method to try to identify the Boy in the Box

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