Nearly 66 years after the battered body of a young boy was found stuffed inside a cardboard box, Philadelphia police have revealed the identity of the victim in the city's most notorious cold case.
Thursday, December 8, 2022 8:00PMThe body of the little boy was found in a cardboard box on the side of Susquehanna Road in Philadelphia's Fox Chase section back in 1957.Nearly 66 years after the battered body of a young boy was found stuffed inside a cardboard box, Philadelphia police say they have finally unlocked a central mystery in the city's most notorious cold case: The victim's identity.
"When people think about the boy in the box, a profound sadness is felt, not just because a child was murdered, but because his entire identity and his rightful claim to own his existence was taken away," she said. Police said both of Joseph's parents are dead, but that he has living siblings. They said his family lived in west Philadelphia.
Detectives pursued and discarded hundreds of leads - that he was a Hungarian refugee, a boy who'd been kidnapped outside a Long Island supermarket in 1955, a variety of other missing children. They investigated a pair of traveling carnival workers and a family who operated a nearby foster home, but ruled them out as suspects.
They got permission to exhume his body for DNA testing in 1998 and again in 2019, and it was that latest round of testing, combined with genetic genealogy, that gave police their big break.
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