The Boy in the Box: How Philadelphia Finally Gave a Name to Joseph Augustus Zarelli

For more than six decades, he was known only as the "Boy in the Box" — one of America's most haunting unidentified murder victims, his battered body found outside Philadelphia in 1957. Despite thousands of leads, generations of detectives working the case couldn't determine who he was, even as DNA technology slowly opened doors investigators in the 1950s could never have imagined. This episode traces that decades-long investigative trail and how forensic genetic genealogy finally broke it open in 2022, giving the boy his name: Joseph Augustus Zarelli. Identifying him solved one mystery — but the detective work on who killed him is still ongoing.