The Boy in the Box in a highly spoken about case that has captivated Philadelphia detectives and true crime enthusiasts for over sixty years. This harrowing mystery began on the evening of February 23, 1957, when a student at La Salle College began a hike across a vacant parking lot. The man, whose identity has yet to be revealed, was reportedly a ‘peeping tom’ within the community and was on his way to a Catholic residence for ‘wayward’ girls. It was en route to the home that the man, believed to have been aged between 18 and 26, stumbled across a grisly discovery.
Inside a cardboard box was the small corpse of a young boy.
Officers arrived at the lot on February 24th, where they approached a large cardboard box that had once held a J.C. Penney baby bassinet. Open at one end and having been tipped onto its side, the body of the boy could be seen wrapped in a blanket. A beaten path through the woods led the police to a man’s cap just 17 feet away from the crime scene- made from royal blue corduroy and with a leather strap and a buckle at the back.
The Autopsy
Philadelphia’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Spelman, performed an autopsy on the body, which revealed the approximate age of the deceased as between four and six years old. Weighing in at 30 pounds and being 41 inches tall, the pale white body with blonde hair that had been badly cut and blue eyes was covered in fresh bruises. Dr. Spelman concluded that the child’s death was due to a savage beating.
The victim’s feet and right palm were wrinkled and rough, something seen regularly when a body has been submerged in water. His head had injuries sufficient with blunt force trauma and his left eye fluoresced a bright shade of blue under ultraviolet light, suggesting recent exposure to a diagnostic dye used in the treatment of chronic eye disease.
The Box
As previously mentioned, the box was one that had held a baby bassinet from J.C. Penney. Detectives were able to conclude that the bassinet in question was one of a dozen that had been sold between December 3, 1956 and February 16th, 1857 from a store in Darby. Eleven of the bassinets were located by detectives, although the store held no record of individual sales and FBI fingerprint technicians found no worthy prints on the original box from the lot.
The Cap
The blue cap found just 17 feet away from the gruesome discovery was one of twelve that had been made from corduroy remnants prior to May 1956. Robbins, who owned the Robbins Eagle Hat and Cap company from where the cap originated from, specifically remembered the hat in question, as it had been made without the leather strap. The customer had returned months later to have the strap sewn on. Unfortunately, no records were kept of purchases and detectives were left with just a description of the purchaser- a blond man in his late twenties who resembled photographs that she was shown of the boy in the box.
The Burial
Tens of thousands of leaflets were distributed to the public, with images of the little boy circulating in the hopes of finding his identity. No leads came, and so authorities buried the boy in Philadelphia’s potter’s field, five months after he was found. The headstone, which was paid for by detectives working on the case, read: ‘Heavenly Father, Bless this Unknown Boy.’
In the years to come, the body was exhumed three times for DNA analysis without any success.
The woman named ‘M’
In February 2002, a woman who only identified as ‘M’ claimed that her mother purchased the boy from his birth parents in 1954. She alleged that the boy was named Jonathan and was subjected to a cruel campaign of physical and sexual abuse for the two and a half years that he was with them. On the night his body was disposed, the woman claims they were preparing to remove the boy’s body from the trunk of their car, when a male motorist pulled alongside to offer assistance. A male witness confirmed this interaction in a 1957 testimony. Detectives considered the story plausible, until learning of ‘M’s previous mental health history and neighbors accounts of no boy having ever lived at her mother’s address.
The case has remained unsolved, and the identity of the boy in the box is still unknown.
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