The boy had no vaccination mark, suggesting that he was not of school age. He was believed to be about 4 years old.
He had been bathed, his hair was crudely cut, his nails were clean and trimmed, his arms were carefully crossed over his chest, and he was wrapped in a cheap plaid flannel blanket that had been cut in half.
The skin on his right hand and right foot was shriveled, as if they had lain in water for some time.
An autopsy revealed that he died of multiple head injuries, but how they were sustained was never determined.
Once headlined in newspapers and medical journals across the country as the ''Boy in the Box," the child and his death remain one of the most baffling mysteries in Philadelphia police annals. Because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the boy's death, the case is being investigated as a homicide.
It is among 47 unsolved homicides linked to the Northeast during the last 50 years. The number of murders is based on an Inquirer search of homicide files and does not represent an official accounting by the Philadelphia Police Department. The department's Homicide Division does not keep such statistics.
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Police recovered the boy's body at 3:45 p.m. on Feb. 26. Remington Bristow, an investigator for the city's Medical Examiner's Office, read about it in the newspaper that evening, hours before he headed to work on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift.
"I had figured by the time I arrived at work, they (police) would have identified the boy," he said.
They hadn't, and Bristow was assigned to the case. In those days, assignments were given out alphabetically according to the first letter of the victim's last name.
Bristow's letters were M, N, O, P, Q and U. "(U) for the unknown," he said.
Eventually, the case became a personal mission for him. For 31 years, he has searched to identify the little boy, "to give the child a name, a family, a life," Bristow said recently.
