By William Kenny
Times Staff Writer

Northeast Philadelphia resident William Kelly served with the U.S. Navy in two wars, worked 14 years in the Philadelphia Police Department’s identification division and spent another 17 years with the adult probation department of Common Pleas Court.
Yet, even in his retirement, Kelly has never seen anything as ghastly and heart-wrenching as the homicide case he was assigned to investigate in early March 1957. Just days earlier, on Feb. 25, a male college student had discovered the body of a small boy along an unpaved Susquehanna Road, just west of Verree Road, in Fox Chase.
“One thing that is never easy to digest is man’s inhumanity to man,” Kelly said in a recent interview.
“Coming from combat, you’re used to seeing soldiers do things to other soldiers. But it was different to see what was done to the little unknown boy.
“That was probably the first little child we had ever encountered (in a homicide case). I never had another one.”
The naked boy had been wrapped in an old blanket and stuffed into a box that was sitting among piles of household trash that had been dumped throughout the rural area. Unlike today, there were no rowhomes at the time, just the gravel road and farms, separated by clumps of roadside trees.
The man who discovered the body allegedly had been spying on a nearby home for “wayward” girls operated by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.
Five days into the investigation, when detectives still hadn’t identified the boy, who was about 4 years old, they called upon Kelly, then 30, who specialized in fingerprint and footprint analysis, as well as other crime scene evidence.
More than 45 years later, Kelly is still trying to determine the identity of the victim, who was known only as “The Boy in the Box” for more than 40 years before investigators affectionately renamed him “America’s Unknown Child” in November 1998.

Kelly, of Mayfair, is one of three experts leading the current investigation. The two others — retired medical examiner’s investigator Joseph McGillen and active police Detective Thomas Augustine — are Northeast residents, too.
McGillen inherited the case from longtime colleague Remington Bristow, the man most known for keeping the investigation alive through the years until his death in 1993.
Augustine volunteered to take the case in addition to his official duties in 1998, when the boy’s body was exhumed from its Potter’s Field grave in Parkwood so that investigators could obtain DNA samples.
The three men were all pivotal figures in the media blitz surrounding new developments in the case in late June. Someone with access to sensitive information about the case leaked to the media that the men had traveled to Ohio for an interview with a witness and returned with a name for the boy — Jonathan.
The Times has confirmed through sources that those reports were accurate, as was the rest of the story that the boy had been sold to a wealthy Main Line couple and was killed by a so-called “caregiver” who slammed him into a bathroom floor after he had vomited.
The alleged killer died in or about 1985. Her husband had preceded her in death. The witness in Ohio was a child living in the Main Line home at the time of the boy’s killing. She called Philadelphia police on Feb. 25, 45 years to the day after the discovery of the boy.
Citing promises of confidentiality, Kelly and McGillen each decline to confirm any of the new information. Yet, they say, whatever new information they have remains unconfirmed and incomplete.
That is, Kelly explained, they still don’t know where the boy was born. They still don’t know who his natural parents were. They still don’t know his last name. And they vow not to rest until they get those answers and more — not only for the boy’s sake but to finish the work begun by Bristow nearly a half-century ago.
“When he retired, he took this case into retirement with him,” McGillen said. “It was a crusade with him. He never let the case die.”
Added Kelly: “I feel good about (the progress), but I would like to feel better. I would like to have all of the answers. Some things we may never know. That will be hard to live with.”

Kelly remembers many details of the early investigation vividly. Several years earlier, during a 17-month tour of duty by his Navy reserve unit in the Korean War, he saw many bloody sights. His job was to help evacuate wounded soldiers.
“I was stationed on land. The peninsula we were on at the time was surrounded by communists,” he said. “I came home with a deeper value of life, I think.”
After a lengthy study of crime scene investigation in college and the military, he was hired by the police department in 1952. By 1957, he was the youngest supervisor in the unit.
There was always an emphasis placed by the department on homicides, simply because of the violent nature of the crime, but the case of the Fox Chase boy was even more exceptional.
“It was almost unheard of at the time that someone could take the holy innocence of a child and kill him — batter him — then throw him in a box on the side of the road,” Kelly said. “It was like an outcry for justice. It was a challenge for my own profession to seek and find the killer of the boy.”
Kelly’s tasks were multi-fold. One of the first jobs was to commandeer a local plane and take some aerial photographs of the crime scene, photos that Kelly preserves today in a binder with other information about the case.
The investigator took fingerprints and footprints of the corpse, reducing the latter photographically to the size of a newborn baby’s prints. That way, comparisons with the birth records kept by area hospitals would be easier to make.
“There were well over two-thousand footprint records that I compared,” Kelly said. “Many of the prints were improperly recorded, which was tough to deal with.”
Kelly worked closely with Bristow in narrowing his search of hospital records.
“With the autopsy, we wanted to determine when the child was born,” he said. “It was probably 1952. But he could have been older with more of a slender frame. I had to search three years to be accurate. Then people said to me, ‘Bill, maybe the child was born at home.’”
The vast majority of records were supplied by Philadelphia-area hospitals, although the investigators followed out-of-state leads, too. And there were literally hundreds of those, although most were easily dismissed.
The comparison work lasted “well into the fourth or fifth year” after the discovery, Kelly said. He maintained his regular workload all the while.
“I either had to do it after work or on my day off,” he said. “I could only do it for two or three hours at a time.”
The body remained in the morgue for about five months, during which time countless people visited in hope of identifying a missing loved one. But none of those leads came to fruition.
Finally, the decision was made to bury the boy in the city’s Potter’s Field, along Dunks Ferry Road across from the present-day Parkwood Youth Organization headquarters. Concerned homicide detectives took up a collection for a headstone.
The boy’s grave was the only one marked with anything more than a number in the field. Every year, without fail, Bristow would mark the anniversary of the boy’s discovery by visiting the grave. Kelly accompanied him on many occasions.
“I was up there not all of the time, but most of the time,” Kelly said. “One year, he’d get the flowers. One year, I’d get them.”

Residents of the developing community around the gravesite also took an interest in the boy.
Around Christmas time, some would leave flowers or toys.
Even after leaving the police department in 1966, Kelly maintained an interest in the case. Few new leads required his expertise, however.
“For many years, it was just dry. We didn’t have any phone calls or letters,” he said. “Then maybe around the anniversary, we’d get a letter or phone call.”
Interest in the case began to build again in 1998 when a local, private organization of law enforcement, forensics and criminal investigatory experts — the Vidocq Society — adopted it. Kelly and McGillen are both members of the society. Through the society’s efforts, the case was featured in a segment of the television show America’s Most Wanted and the DNA evidence was obtained. The body was reburied in a donated grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery in West Oak Lane to the dismay of some Parkwood neighbors who also placed flowers at the grave on holidays, Kelly said.
To this day, the identification expert is still amazed by the number of people who have contributed to the investigation of the boy’s identity and the perpetuation of his memory.
“It’s not a one-man operation,” he said. “And no child ever had so many foster adoptions by well-meaning people.”

Anyone with information about the case of the Fox Chase “Boy in the Box” is asked to call homicide detectives at 215-686-3334.