Narrator/Host (16:58)
In 1960, about three years after the boy in the box was found, 39 year old Remington Bristow made a discovery he thought would crack the case wide open. After a psychic led him to a foster home in the Philadelphia area near where the boy was found, Remington discovered something major a white bassinet. Because the boy had been found inside a cardboard box that once held a white bassinet, Remington thought he was on the right track, and his suspicions only grew when he discovered blankets in the home that looked just like the one the boy in the box had been wrapped in. Remington looked into the couple who ran the home and found out they had a 20 year old unmarried daughter. She had four children and Remington theorized the unknown boy could have been a fifth secret son. He took his findings to the police, but after doing some more digging, they weren't able to come up with any hard evidence. Remington tried to prove it himself, but was never able to. Even then, it wasn't enough to convince him to move on. In 1965, eight years after the boy's body was discovered, 44 year old Remington joined forces with the case's fingerprinting expert, the Bill Kelly, who was now 37, neither of them had been able to forget the boy in the box. Despite all the dead ends, they knew someone out there held the key to solving the case. Since the boy didn't have any lasting marks on his arms from vaccines, as was common back then, they wondered if his parents were transient workers or immigrants. It would also explain the lack of a paper trail. With this in mind, Bill started to comb through newspaper records and soon he found an article from 1956. It was about refugees coming to the US looking for a safe haven after the Hungarian Revolution. The article contained a photo of a child who Bill thought looked exactly like the Boy in the Box. He reached out to Immigration and Naturalization Service and poured over thousands of passports. Finally, he found the boy's documentation. Bill learned his family had ended up in North Carolina, but their son went with them. He was alive and well. He wasn't the Boy in the Box. The setback must have been a huge disappointment for both Bill and Remington. For his part, Remington continued to obsess over the case for the next few decades. He even kept a plaster mold of the boy's face by his desk. Sadly, Remington never got the answers he was so desperately looking for. In 1993, he passed away at 72 years old. With Remington's death, one of the Boy in the Box's biggest champions was gone. But that same year, the investigation got an unexpected boost when the V Doc Society took on the case. The group had been founded three years earlier in Philadelphia by a group of retired law enforcement officers who specialized in cold cases. And in 1998, they got permission to exhume the Boy in the Box and And take a DNA sample from his body. But before it could be of any use to them, they had to find someone related to the boy to compare it to. In the meantime, they had the boy reburied. He was moved to a nicer cemetery and given a new headstone. America's Unknown Child. After his reburial, his grave was often covered with flowers. Flowers and toys from citizens and investigators who had followed the case for years. It was a reminder of how many people were still waiting for answers. Little did they know investigators were finally inching closer. In 1999, 42 years after the Boy in the Box was found, the authorities got a new lead, and it was very promising. That year, a local psychiatrist called the Philadelphia Homicide Division. According to the doctor, one of his clients knew the boy in the box. Over the next few years, this psychiatrist facilitated several meetings between investigators and his client. And eventually, the woman was ready to tell her story. The V Doc Society, along with 71 year old Bill Kelly, who had recently joined the group, got to speak with her as well. According to the woman, in 1954, when she was 12, her mother bought a baby named Jonathan from a family looking to give him away. She said her mother abused Jonathan for years until one night he threw up his dinner. Baked beans. She was so angry, she beat him to death, then gave him a bath. There were details from the story that made investigators hopeful. The autopsy had revealed the boy ate beans before his death. And his fingers were pruny when he was found, which would line up with the bath. There was also the witness who'd seen a woman and what looked like a 12 year old child at the scene, hours before the boy in the box was found. Still, the woman's account was hard to prove. A lot of her story could have been retrieved from public record. And since she wasn't actually related to the boy in the box, there was no way to corroborate things via DNA. Not to mention her mother was dead. So all detectives had to go on was the woman's word. It was difficult to come to terms with. It seemed like investigators had been so close to finally solving the case. But even though this particular lead didn't pan out, the boy in the box continued to stay on everyone's mind. Over the next few years, countless books, articles and websites were created in the hopes of finding the boy's killer, but or at least his identity. In 2016, the National center for Missing and Exploited Children even released a facial reconstruction image of the boy. At that point, it had been 59 years since the boy in the box was found, making him Philadelphia's oldest open case. But the end was within sight. In April 2019, the boy was exhumed once again. DNA testing had come a long way since 1998, and detectives were hoping to create a new, more advanced DNA profile for him. But since so much time had passed since the boy died, his DNA was incredibly degraded. So over the next two and a half years, an international team of experts worked to patch together a sample and create a profile. When they finally got one, they uploaded it to a genealogy site called GEDmatch to see if they could find any relatives connected to the boy. Lo and behold, one of the boy's cousins had a DNA profile on the database. This allowed investigators to find even more relatives. And by testing them, investigators were eventually able to identify the boy's actual mother. Although she was dead by then, authorities were still able to get a court order to retrieve her maternity records. They found out she'd had three children. Two were still alive, and the third was the boy in the box. In October 2021, after 64 years of looking, investigators finally learned the boy's name, Joseph Augustus Zarelli. It was an incredible moment. But their work wasn't over just yet. Before they announced their breakthrough to the public, investigators spent the next 414 months researching Joseph and his family. They found his father's name and learned that Joseph was born in 1953. They also discovered that Joseph once lived in West Philadelphia and was born out of wedlock. So it's possible he'd been put up for adoption. Finally, in December 2022, investigators held a press conference. They revealed Joseph's name and everything they'd learned about him. After 65 long years, the anonymous boy who had endured so much in his short life got one step closer to justice. But there was still one major question to answer. Who killed him? It's unclear if Joseph's parents are the murderers or or if they're associated with any other theories, like the woman who claimed to be his adoptive sister. At the moment, authorities aren't revealing the parents identities for privacy reasons and to protect the investigation. So for now, we'll just have to hope that more answers are coming. But we can rest assured there are people out there who won't give up until they find them. Up next, we'll shift gears from Philadelphia to Baltimore, where 23 year old Jody Lecornu was shot to death in a parking lot in 1996. After a bizarre account from several witnesses and a series of dead end clues, investigators were left baffled. But decades later, the search for Jody's killer continues. When it comes to cold cases, you never know when you'll make a breakthrough. For Joseph ZARRELLI, it took 65 years. But for this next case, the victim's loved ones hope they won't have to wait that long. This one took place in Baltimore, 100 miles and 50 years from the discovery of the boy in the box. On March 2, 1996. Sometime before 4am The Baltimore Police received a flurry of emergency calls. Someone had been shot in the parking lot of a strip mall in the north end of the city. It was snowing when police arrived at the crime scene. There they found a white Honda Civic. Inside the car was a woman they identified as 23 year old Joanne. Jody LeCornue slumped over the steering wheel. She'd been fatally shot in the back. They learned that Jody was a student at nearby Towson State University and was working part time at a bank while she put herself through school. Her family referred to her as a sunbeam, a bright, friendly person who people gravitated towards. She had three sisters. One of them was an identical twin named Jennifer who lived in California. But despite her sunny moniker, Jody struggled with anxiety and alcohol abuse. Her drinking was actually the reason she'd gotten into a fight with her fiance Steve, a few hours before she was shot. We don't know the nuances of the argument, but it was bad enough that on Friday, March first, after Jody finished her shift at the bank, she decided to go to a bar. Instead of going home, Jody and a friend went to a favorite spot of hers, the Mount Washington Tavern. It's not clear what she did or who else she talked to, but she stayed there until closing time, which was probably around midnight. She must have been friends with the staff there because she gave one of the bar employees a ride home. But her night wasn't done yet. Once she dropped him off, she went to an ATM and got some cash and bought some beer from a liquor store. Afterwards, she went to the Drum Castle Shopping center on York Road. She parked in the lot, then sat in her car to make a few calls. Sometime after 3am a man in a white BMW drove up next to her. It seems like the two had an exchange of some kind because Jody's window was rolled down. After their interaction, he pulled out a gun and fired a shot through Jody's open window. The bullet hit Jody in the back, but she still had enough strength to try and flee. She put her car into gear and made it all the way across the street to another shopping center before she passed out and the car rolled to a stop. Her attacker slowly followed after her and parked beside Jody's car. Then he got out and casually approached her open window. He reached inside to turn off the lights and put it in park. He also seemed to grab something from the interior. After that, he got back in his BMW and took off. Several witnesses heard the gun firing and saw the scene play out. One of them was a man named Vince Raines. He was across the street unloading a truck when the attacker first fired the shot. Vince didn't have a cell phone, so he jumped in the truck and drove to a local gas station and told the police what he'd seen. Unfortunately, he didn't get a plate number for the killer's car, and none of the other witnesses did either. But he remembered it was a white BMW and had gotten a decent look at Jody's attacker. He was a black male in his 20s or 30s, around 6ft tall and over 200 pounds. He was dressed in a green army camo jacket. This description was blasted out over the police radio as first responders rushed to the crime scene. Once Jody's body was secured, investigators started looking for evidence. They were able to lift fingerprints from the interior and exterior of her Honda, but they didn't match anyone in the police database. Their next hope was to find some surveillance footage from one of the nearby stores. But in a terrible coincidence, most of the Cameras around the shopping center weren't working. Investigators did find one functioning system, but. But it was snowing that night, so the footage was too blurry to make anything out. It doesn't seem like anyone at the bar matched the killer's description, and neither did Jody's fiance, Steve. But the police still wanted to talk to him. It's not clear if he said anything about their fight, but he told them he'd gone out to a work party and that Jody didn't tell him she was going that night. When she didn't come home, he assumed she'd gone to stay with her parents, who lived nearby. Even though Steve was eager to help the investigators, it doesn't seem like his information gave them any leads. For the moment, all they had to go on was the evidence at the crime scene. They thought it might have been a robbery. Since Jody's purse was gone. Most likely the killer had taken it when he went back to her car. There was also the possibility that it was a drug deal gone wrong. Since Jody had struggled with substance use in the past, however, the police were able to rule that one out as well. But at some point, they considered an alternate theory. Maybe Jody's murder wasn't about her at all. Perhaps she was just collateral damage. Her father, John Lecornue, was worked as a prosecutor in nearby Annapolis. His specialty was drug and violent crimes. The police wondered if at some point during his career, he made someone so angry they wanted revenge, and Jody paid the price.
