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America's Unknown Child, Part 1: Over 40 Years Without a Name

© Brenda Gambrell

He has no name and no identity. When his tiny body was discovered inside a cardboard box he was known only as "The Boy in the Box," marked for his cruel death instead of for his short life. At the time no one would have thought that some of the very same police officers who searched through the crime scene for clues on that cold dreary day in 1957 would be reburying the boy as "America's Unknown Child" over four decades later.

On February 24th, 1957 a college student pulled his car over onto the side of a remote road in Fox Chase - a community in the northern outskirts of Philadelphia. The man had seen a rabbit cross the road and followed it into a garbage-strewn lot when he saw a suspicious looking furniture box. What he found inside was the body of a young boy - no more than 5 or 6 years old, wrapped in a flannel blanket. The boy was malnourished and badly bruised - the cause of death due to severe head trauma - though oddly enough, someone appeared to have recently trimmed his nails and cut his hair shortly before or after his death, for he still had remnants of hair on his body.

The greatest mystery of this case is not only that the killer of the boy was never found but that the boy to this day had not been identified. When the investigation began this outcome was far from expected, for the crime scene was not void of clues. The cardboard box the body was found in once held a bassinet purchased from the local JC Penny store, however, the store had a cash only policy and the purchase of that particular bassinet couldn't be traced. Also, the flannel blanket the boy had been wrapped in was one of thousands, and even a man's cap that they found near the scene never led to its owner. The boy had no fingerprints on file and his footprints were difficult to match because his feet were badly wrinkled from having been immersed in water for a long period of time.

The Philadelphia police circulated thousands of flyers with the boy's photo and description across the country. Calls from many concerned citizens came in, but the leads led to one dead end after another. It was unbelievable that this young boy didn't have a single relative or friend of the family who recognized him. Parents of missing children came to view the body but no one claimed the poor boy. For years investigators continued the search, many on their own time, with the hope that something would lead to the boy's identity and the boy's killer, but as the years passed, the chances of uncovering the mystery diminished.

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