Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It was freezing outside the day detectives found the boy in the box in Philadelphia. He was young, maybe four or five years old, though his growth was stunted by malnutrition. The boy was so shrunken, a passerby assumed that he was only a doll.
Even with his diminished size, the child barely fit inside of the cardboard box. His limbs contorted and bent by whoever shoved him into the container. He was found naked, wrapped only in a cheap blanket, with a few other items of clothing scattered around the location off of the side of Susquehanna Road. A hat, a scarf, a handkerchief with the single initial G.
These were among the only clues investigators had as they tried to track down the identity and circumstances surrounding the passing of a little boy who would come to be labeled America's unknown child. While there were signs of a possible drowning, the official cause of death for the boy was head trauma. Everything about the scene was a contradiction. The boy showed signs of both a severe beating as well as tender grooming. His hair was freshly cut and his fingernails were clean.
The case of the boy in the box captivated the country and it became a personal quest for several of the detectives involved. The mystery began with a college student named Fred walking through a field near Susquehanna Road. He would tell authorities that he found the cardboard box while chasing after a rabbit. This later turned out to be a lie. A single bony arm protruded from the damp box. This was what drew the student over and compelled him to open the lid.
And that's when the questions started. Part 1: Police Descent on Fox Chase, Philadelphia While Fred called in the discovery of the body, he wasn't the first person to actually stumble upon the boy in the box. The neighborhood of Fox Chase occupies a little under three miles of northeastern Philadelphia. Fox straddles the line between city and suburbia, containing a number of fields, parks, meadows, and woods.
The first man to find the dead boy was a muskrat trapper. He didn't report the corpse out of fear that police would find his illegal traps. They ended up discovering his traps anyways, and he eventually came forward as a witness. But his reluctance meant the body spent more time exposed to the elements of a frigid, filly winter. Police weren't called to the scene until two days later when they received a call from Fred.
The student found the boy in the box while he was out walking around Champion's Park. He hesitated and waited another day before reporting the body. Initially, he told officers this was because he was out watching wildlife and assumed the corpse was a doll. Later, however, he admitted that he was spying on girls at a nearby school and he didn't want to get in trouble, so he held off contacting the authorities.
Fred's conscience eventually got the best of him, and he led investigators to the bizarre and horrific dump site. The cardboard box was in awful shape, originally designed to hold a bassinet. The box was tall and narrow. Police were able to determine that it came from a JCPenney store, but other than that, the cardboard didn't offer much in the way of clues. The boy's body was even more of an enigma.
Several investigators also admitted they thought the corpse was a doll until they got a close look at all of the horrific details. The boy's limbs were contorted to make his torso fit into the narrow box. Clumps of blonde hair clung here and there on the naked body and on the blanket inside. It appeared that the child's hair was cut either just prior to death or immediately after.
great swollen bruises and scratches, and abrasions covered the boy head to toe. There were purple-black blood bruises and newer pale yellow marks. The worst injuries were across his face and head, where parts of his skull were nearly caved in. A number of scars stood out on the body, including healed surgical cuts at the ankle and groin, and a distinct L-shaped scar under the boy's chin.
All of the blemishes stood out sharply due to the stunted growth of the child. His limbs were thin from starvation. It was a surreal crime scene, like something out of a horror show. But the Philadelphia police focused on the fundamentals. They took fingerprints and dental imprints and hoped that they would find a local match among missing children.
While they were waiting on the lab, investigators fanned out across the Fox Chase community, knocking on doors and hunting for witnesses. The boy in the box quickly gained media attention. Due to the morbid circumstances of the corpse's discovery, this spotlight grew more and more intense as police failed to make any connections. All DNA samples that were sent out came back without a match.
Sketches of the boy were sent out across the city, followed by photographs of the boy dressed up to provide an idea of how the child would have looked while alive. Local newspapers began circulating hundreds of thousands of flyers featuring the boy's image. With the world looking on, Philadelphia police escalated the investigation. At one point, nearly 300 officers and even recruits were physically combing the area, knocking on doors, desperate for any leads.
The only clues they found were three personal items that seemed out of place at the crime scene: a blue corduroy hat, a small scarf, and a handkerchief threaded with the initial "G." The hat and scarf were quickly dismissed as useless and impossible to trace. The personalized handkerchief was more promising but ultimately proved to be another dead end. Police simply weren't able to gain any meaningful information from this single embossed letter.
In a city of millions, investigators were finding themselves unable to even learn the name of one lost boy. That's when the witnesses started coming forward, each with a claim more bizarre than the last. Part two, the boy who wasn't. Tip lines were overwhelmed with callers swearing that they recognized the boy in the box or had some information about his identity and cause of death.
One of the strangest theories that became popular decades after the discovery of the body was that the boy was actually raised as a girl. A forensic artist named Frank Bender helped popularize the idea by noting that the corpse was covered in freshly cut hair, making it likely that he had long hair right before death.
Bender also believed that photographs of the boy showed signs of grooming more typical for women during that era, especially plucked eyebrows. Bender's reasoning was thin and didn't offer much to investigators in way of leads.
using his skills as an artist and his connections to the Vidocq Society, which was essentially a club of amateur and retired detectives. Bender created and distributed sketches of the boy in the box with a more feminine appearance and hairstyle in the hopes that it would help someone recognize the deceased.
While the drawings never led to any material developments in the investigation, the Vidocq Society still actively discusses the boy in the box case, hoping for a breakthrough. With so little information to go on, police and amateur crime solvers alike began to cast wide nets looking for any connection to the boy. Years after the body was found, there was nothing. Then, a pair of contradictory theories arose in the late '50s and early '60s.
The first was that the boy in the box was a Hungarian refugee. This deduction was made by a forensic technician who thought he recognized the child from a newspaper photograph from 1956, accompanying an article about mass immigration from Hungary. If it was true, and the boy in the photo was the same one found inside of the cardboard box in '57, it would have been one of the strangest, luckiest coincidences in any cold case investigation.
However, officials were able to track down the child from the newspaper article who was very much alive and well years after the passing of the boy in the box. Another dead end. Police next latched onto reports that the boy might be the child of Ken and Irene Dudley, a couple with a massive family who were already on officials' radar for trying to dispose of another body, their seven-year-old daughter, Carol.
Ken, a carnival worker who traveled extensively with his family in tow, looked like a prime suspect given the eerily similar circumstances between the daughter's death and the boy in the box. The Dudleys didn't much like to feed their children, and Carol's body showed signs of starvation and abuse, bruises and malnutrition on a similar level to the corpse found in Philly on that cold morning.
Carol had likewise been left out in the elements after her death. The Dudleys dumped her body, also wrapped in a blanket, out in a Virginia forest. But the weather and scavengers got to Carol before the police did, leaving many with harsh views of the Dudleys. The situation grew even more horrific when the investigation revealed that the couple had killed seven of their own children through gross neglect and negligence.
None of the kids were buried. All were thrown away after they died. It seemed exceptionally likely that the boy in the box was another victim of Ken and Irene, a son killed through starvation then dumped for convenience. However, the couple ended up having a convincing alibi for not being around Philadelphia at the same time that the boy died.
Further questioning confirmed that, despite the disgustingly similar circumstances, the boy in the box was not killed by the Dudleys. As the 50s bled into the 60s, the case became stranger and stranger. Questions emerged regarding the cause of death. While the official ruling was homicide by blunt force trauma, many who saw the body wondered if it could have been an accident.
Maybe there was a fall or a crash, something that could severely damage the corpse. Could a desperate motorist or even a parent seek to hide a terrible mistake inside of a cardboard box? In addition to the blunt force trauma and malnutrition, there were signs such as wrinkled palms and soles that indicated the body had been in the water, which led investigators to consider the idea that the boy may have been drowned.
Every year after finding the child, authorities seemed to grow less and less confident about every aspect of the case. But the detectives involved remained fiercely passionate about solving the case and giving a name to America's unknown child. In the decades following the death, this meant sometimes resorting to unconventional approaches, which is where the psychics come in. Part Three: The Dreaming House
One of the strongest leads in the case came from a source many people would find suspicious. Remington Bristow contacted a New Jersey psychic in 1960, desperate for guidance. Bristow was not a detective, at least not professionally, but he did work in a medical examiner's office and was at least a little obsessed with the case of the boy in the box. Following the psychic's advice,
Bristow combed the area around Susquehanna Road, looking for a particular house that the psychic claimed she saw in a vision. Instead, Bristow flew the psychic out to Pennsylvania and brought her to the site where the boy was discovered. The psychic immediately led Bristow to a house a mile and a half away that perfectly matched the place she'd described from her vision. Bristow didn't have a warrant or even the ability to ask for one,
but Bristow thought it was too much of a coincidence to walk away, so he started to ask around. Bristow found out that the house was a foster home for many years, but was falling on hard times. He was able to attend an estate sale on the property. It was as useful as a warrant for searching the premises. Bristow made several discoveries that reinforced his growing belief that something terrible happened at the foster home.
While walking through cluttered rooms dodging other curious shoppers at the estate sale, Bristow discovered a bassinet for sale. Originally sold by JCPenney, the cradle would have come in a cardboard box identical to the one the boy was found inside. Additionally, Bristow noticed blankets similar to the one used to wrap up the child's body hanging from a clothesline on the foster home's property drying in the sun.
Given how close the house was to the scene of disposal, the bassinet, the blankets, and the accuracy of the psychic's vision, Remington Bristow was certain he'd cracked the case. Bristow even developed a theory after meeting with the foster home's owner. The man had a young, unwed stepdaughter who seemed anxious during the conversation. What if the boy in the box was her son?
Maybe there was an accident followed by a coverup to avoid scrutiny and shame directed towards the family. This was Bristow's guess. And due to all of the circumstantial evidence, he was able to bring police over to investigate the property. To Bristow's great frustration, however, no concrete evidence was found that could clearly link the family to the boy. Interviews went nowhere and the theory slowly faded away over the years.
The foster homeowner was put under the spotlight again decades later when a Philly police officer, with the help of the Vidocq Society, began a series of new interviews with the family in 1998.
In the time between the original investigation and the new evaluations, the foster father had married his stepdaughter. While police found this highly unusual, they were still unable to unearth any concrete evidence or connection between their foster home and the boy in the box. Part four, M is for Martha. While the foster home connection remains perhaps the most popular and practical theory today to explain the boy in the box,
there is a competing account that rivals it. In a case filled with gruesome acts, disturbed individuals, psychics, visions, and monsters, this final theory still manages to stand out as equally bizarre and evil. More than 40 years after the discovery of the boy in the box, a woman approached police with a horrific story, only ever identified as Martha in files or by her initial M.
The woman told investigators in 2002 that she knew the identity of the boy. He was, essentially, her brother and was named Jonathan. But he was not her biological sibling nor actually adopted. Instead, Martha claimed that her mother bought Jonathan in 1954 from his original family.
Her mother spent the next three years torturing the boy simply for sadistic joy, while also sexually abusing him, starving him, and beating him regularly. While this was occurring, Martha was just a young child. According to Martha, her mother got carried away with violence during one of her sessions torturing Jonathan, causing severe damage to his skull. Her mom then gave him a bath, hoping to revive the boy, but he ended up dying while he was in the water.
Young Martha then was forced to help her mother put the body in a box, load it in her car and take him to the dump site. Martha even had to allegedly distract a motorist who stopped to see if the woman needed assistance.
The story sounded both absurd and vicious, but Martha was able to provide other details to investigators that matched the existing evidence. She told them that Jonathan's final beating occurred when he spilled his dinner of baked beans. That was the last meal the coroner found inside the stomach of the boy in the box. Martha also mentioned her mother giving Jonathan a haircut while he was in the tub to disguise his appearance.
the hair clippings and being submerged in water would fit with the condition of the corpse. Police confirmed that officers spoke to a male motorist in 1957, near where the boy in the box was discovered, who mentioned stopping to help another car not long before the corpse was reported. So many connections were lining up that investigators began to take Martha seriously, even though her account involving years of torture was terrible to consider.
The final beating that her mother allegedly delivered to Jonathan ended with the woman slamming the boy's head into the kitchen floor over and over until blood pooled on the tiles. Armed with Martha's witness statements, officers began digging through her family history, hoping for solid, undeniable evidence. However, just like with the foster home, all of the promising leads led to dead ends.
Friends and neighbors of Martha noted that the woman had a history of mental illness. They also told police no one ever saw a boy living with Martha and her mother during the years she claimed. Detectives could find no record of Jonathan ever existing. And so that chapter in the case stalled out just like all of the rest. The boy in the box nearly had a name, but the moment was gone as quickly as it arrived. Part five, "America's Unknown Child."
The case of the boy in the box is officially closed, but unofficially still fiercely investigated. The Vidocq Society continues to hunt down clues and foster discussions online about the boy's identity. While the child's name is unknown, his story has not been forgotten, especially by those who have tried to solve his murder. The boy in the box was first buried in a potter's field, a general grave area for the poor in 1957.
His body was exhumed in 1998 so that investigators could retrieve additional DNA samples. Those samples were compared to living individuals that one theory or another claimed could be connected to the child. There were no successful matches. After the samples were collected, the boy in the box was buried for a second time, now at Ivy Hill Cemetery. His original headstone read, "Heavenly Father, bless this unknown boy."
when he was reburied. The new gravestone simply read, "America's Unknown Child." The cemetery donated the boy's plot, while the coffin and stone came from the son of the man who sponsored the first burial. To this day, residents of Philadelphia and the surrounding area will leave toys, flowers, and messages at the gravesite of the boy in the box.
For many, he truly is America's unknown child, a stand-in for every lost, innocent soul who disappeared from the world, but especially for those children who didn't even have a chance to leave their name.
