“For sixty-five years, the story of America’s Unknown Child has haunted this community, the Philadelphia Police Department, our nation, and the world,” Outlaw said, who opened Thursday’s news conference by praising generations of police officers who worked the case, some of whom are no longer alive. That changed this week when police announced they had successfully identified the child through detective work and with the help of genetic genealogists – a field that in recent years has led to numerous breakthroughs in cold cases, including in that of the notorious Golden State Killer, and reunited families with missing loved ones. But no one ever came forward to claim Joseph as their child, and his identity remained a mystery despite numerous attempts to identify him over the years. The case attracted “immense” public interest, Outlaw told reporters Thursday. The identification, made through DNA analysis, represents investigators’ biggest break in the decades-old cold case, which dates back to late February 1957, when the child was discovered wrapped in a blanket inside a cardboard box, exhibiting evidence “of recent and past trauma,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said. Police on Thursday publicly identified a boy found dead in a box in Philadelphia 65 years ago as four-year-old Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the victim of what police say is one of the city’s oldest unsolved homicides.
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