America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring

The Boy in the Box: They Found His Name, But Not His Killer Pt. 3

September 3, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

The Boy in the Box: They Found His Name, But Not His Killer

For sixty-five years, he was known only as "the boy in the box"—a child found beaten to death in a cardboard box off Susquehanna Road in Philadelphia in 1957, with no name, no history, no family that ever came to claim him. And then, in December 2022, everything changed. A press conference announced that the boy finally had a name: Joseph Augustus Zarelli. But the story didn't end there. Because giving him his name answered one enormous question—who he was—while leaving another wide open. No one has ever been charged or arrested for his murder.

The Disturbing Phone Call That Split the Investigators

The first major break came in 2002, from a psychiatrist in Cincinnati. One of her patients, identified only as "Martha," had something she needed to tell police about a murder from 1957. By this point, the reopened case was in the hands of Detective Tom Augustine and members of the Vidocq Society, including fingerprint expert William Kelly and former investigator Joseph McGillin. These men had chased carnival workers, Hungarian refugees, foster families, and a hundred dead ends. So when Martha claimed she had watched the boy die, they had every reason to be skeptical—but they also had to listen.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:46) **The Boy Gets a Name, But Not Justice** - Katie introduces the final chapter: how a disturbing tip split the investigators, how DNA technology finally gave the boy a name, and why his murder remains unsolved.
  • 2 (05:08) **The Martha Tip: A Witness Who Knew the Unreleased Details** - A psychiatrist calls in 2002 with a patient, "Martha," who claims she witnessed the boy's death, and her story matches two facts never made public.
  • 3 (09:21) **The Investigators Split: Believing Martha vs. Doubting Her** - The Vidoc Society team fractures; some are convinced, but Detective Tom Augustine and co-founder William Fleischer urge caution.
  • 4 (11:12) **The Unprovable Lead: Why Martha's Story Fits Perfectly but Can't Be Confirmed** - Martha's account aligns with every piece of physical evidence, but by 2004 the Vidoc Society concludes it can neither be proven nor ruled out.
  • 5 (13:18) **The DNA Profile: Useless for Decades, Then a Revolution** - The boy's genetic profile, pulled in 1998, could only rule out suspects until forensic genetic genealogy was invented.
  • 6 (17:08) **The Golden State Killer Breakthrough: How Genetic Genealogy Changed Everything** - In 2018, the Golden State Killer was caught using public ancestry databases, a technique that would finally give the boy in the box a name.
  • 7 (19:45) **The Problem: The Old DNA Sample Is Too Degraded** - The 1998 genetic material isn't good enough for the new technique, forcing investigators to exhume the boy a second time.

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Guests on this episode

Tom Augustine

Show Notes

In 2002, a woman told investigators she'd watched the Boy in the Box die as a child, and she knew two facts that had never been made public. Investigators were split. Then, two decades later, forensic genealogy did what no detective ever could. In the third and final part of our series on the Boy in the Box, Katie Ring covers the witness who divided the investigators, the DNA breakthrough that changed everything, and the press conference where, after 65 years, he finally got his name.

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