Identified! PA - Philadelphia, 'Boy in the Box', WhtMale 4-6, 4UMPA, Feb'57

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The blanket? Looks like a camp blanket. Also called cowboy blanket. The blanket may be made by Pendleton, which was out west in Oregon. They were pretty popular in the '50s and '60s, IIRC.
 
I am still very much interested in this boy and the Manayunk Pennsylvania couple put in that orphanage.Please help me find out who he was and what orphanage he was put into.


Unidentified Pennsylvania Couple - In March 1957, a Manayunk, PA couple told detectives they thought the boy might be their 6-year-old son, whom they had last seen seven months earlier when he was placed in an orphanage by the Municipal Court. The mother said the boy "looks like him" and the father said he wasn't "too sure." A team of detectives later found the boy in a private orphanage in West Philadelphia.




It fits to me. The blankets were in two parts and looked like they could fit on cots from an orphanage,foster home or institution.

He had what looked like an institution hair cut.

His eye had a dye in it like they were checking him over.Possible getting into an institution of some kind?

He was in ill health and malnourished for about a year.


The Manayunk Pennsylvania couples boy was put in an West Philadelphia orphanage 7 months before.

What orphanage was he put into?


I think the orphanage possibly lied to LE that boy put in that orphanage was there when he wasn't. I think he died in there.It bothers me very much the mother of that little boy said our boy looked like her own son. I just can't get past that.

Please help me find out who that boy was and what orphanage he was put into. I please just want to see for myself.
 
Please let me know if you find out who the Manayunk couples boy was and what orphanage he was put into and also who the Horsham suspects boy in the picture found at their farm. Please.
 
I just read the book while on vacation. How many of you believe "Mary's" story about her mom and the boy named Jonathan? A lot of what she said fits but most, if not all, of the facts were already public and she could have made up her story to fit the circumstances. I see that one of the detectives never believed her.
 
I agree with him.I very adamantly do not believe her story and I won't look into her.Her Lead as a fact never panned out.She also changed her story a few times. From they picked him up and payed for him with money and did not know who the people were. To later our boy might be related to her uncle? She's full of crap and makes me mad she lied about this poor little boy.

There's a saying I read in a artilce that Haleigh Cummings great grand mother said I very much agree with.

"If can't never get your story straight, then who would you be protecting except your self? The truth has one face. The truth has one voice.....and it doesn't change.
 
I hope they will find out who he is some day. This is very sad. I think if we just keep trying to find out who he is and doing something and not giving up on him. We will find out who this little one is and give his real name to him to put on his grave. I have started calling him Our Boy. We call him that in another group I am on for him.It has been become very special to me. So he is not just the boy in the box.
 
Ms Suzanne you have worked really hard for this unknown boy and I too hope we someday find out who he is and he can at least get his name back. I also doubt the story of "Mary" because I think anybody could have made up a story to fit the facts since most of them were public. She probably has some kind of mental problem that caused her to seek attention this way. She claims to have been abused at home and there may be some truth in that, and it has led to her problems. Another thing I thought was odd in the book was it sounded like rumors were going around about her story for quite a while before the psychologist treating Mary contacted detectives. A doctor giving her counseling would not likely have been the one spreading the rumors because of patient confidentiality, so unless she started making her story public herself I don't see how rumors would have been out about it. If she is the one who started spreading the story well before detectives were contacted then it sounds like attention seeking behavior and that makes me even more suspicious about her story. The man who witnessed a woman and child with the trunk of a car open thought the child was a boy, and even though "Mary" supposedly had a rather masculine build, I think the witness may have been correct in thinking he saw a boy. Girls in the 1950s didn't typically wear clothing that could be confused for boys' clothing. In family pictures it looks like all my female relatives exclusively wore dresses except when working in the garden, and even then their clothing doesn't look (to me anyway) like something a boy would wear.
 
I read David Stouts book. It left my with more questions than before.
I personally never believed Mary. I think the only thing she said that police thought may actually connected her to the case was the fact she claimed Jonathan had thrown up after eating baked beans.
I think until then they had been quiet about the brown coating in his lungs.
I am leaning towards the Nicoletti foster family as the murderers.
I feel they had a personal Dr involved.
Possibly the dye in his eye was placed there to check for brain activity
After the injury.
When his pupil didn't react to the dye they didn't bother with the other eye.
Does anyone know who the Dr was for this family?
Or if he was even questioned?
 
The book raised a lot of new questions for me as well. I saw the statement in it several times that the boy was thought to have been sick for about a year before death. We know he was underweight and malnourished. But did they mean he was sick from neglect and not getting enough food or did they mean he was actually sick? There are a number of diseases which will cause malnutrition, even though the child may have been fed enough. Also the massive small bruising all over his body. A number of diseases cause easy bruising as well. Could this be a case of a child who had been chronically ill for a long time and maybe the caregiver, out of stress and frustration, lashed out and caused his death? This wouldn't excuse what the person did, but the amount of small bruises all over the child's body puzzled me. I could understand large bruises, especially about the head and upper body, if he were abused. But they go all the way down to his feet, many many small bruises. This made me wonder if he wasn't suffering from a disease, such as leukemia maybe, which made him bruise at the slightest touch. A disease like that also causes medical anorexia where the patient continues to lose weight even if provided with proper food. He had obviously received medical care in the past from someone. Did he maybe change families, change hands in his later days? Maybe he was diagnosed terminal by a doctor somewhere and sent home?
 
I had considered the possibility of a long illness causing the bruising as well.
I know it has happened in the worst cases of systematic abuse but it seems some of the bruising would be in various stages of healing.
I had considered the possibility of him being in an orphanage or asylum orphanage, both were I am sure horrible places to be as a child , but asylum orphanages had fields of unmarked graves why bother taking the body elsewhere?
,maybe that was the difference between the two
Asylums you could bury the dead
orphanages you could not.
Another thing that I think was a mistake in the case was the pictures on the posters that were hung virtually everywhere at one time. Seriously they were horrifying.
I think many people avoided looking at them. Women and children especially.





dogperson said:
The book raised a lot of new questions for me as well. I saw the statement in it several times that the boy was thought to have been sick for about a year before death. We know he was underweight and malnourished. But did they mean he was sick from neglect and not getting enough food or did they mean he was actually sick? There are a number of diseases which will cause malnutrition, even though the child may have been fed enough. Also the massive small bruising all over his body. A number of diseases cause easy bruising as well. Could this be a case of a child who had been chronically ill for a long time and maybe the caregiver, out of stress and frustration, lashed out and caused his death? This wouldn't excuse what the person did, but the amount of small bruises all over the child's body puzzled me. I could understand large bruises, especially about the head and upper body, if he were abused. But they go all the way down to his feet, many many small bruises. This made me wonder if he wasn't suffering from a disease, such as leukemia maybe, which made him bruise at the slightest touch. A disease like that also causes medical anorexia where the patient continues to lose weight even if provided with proper food. He had obviously received medical care in the past from someone. Did he maybe change families, change hands in his later days? Maybe he was diagnosed terminal by a doctor somewhere and sent home?
Click to expand...
 
I think the bruising on his head that looks like fingerprints was probably done within the last few hours of life. Even then, if he suffered from an illness that caused easy bruising, I wonder whether the person actually was holding his head very hard at all. Still, we do know he died from blows to the head, so someone had to inflict that on him. The medical examiner didn't seem to think it was accidental, like from a fall, plus if he died of an accident or natural causes why would anybody throw him out the way they did? Whoever was his caretaker at the end must have been the one responsible for his death. He could have been in an orphanage. Maybe the evidence of prior medical treatment was from when his parent/parents were still alive but he didn't receive good care after their passing. With every year that goes by I worry more that it will get too late to solve this.
 
Thank You. I hope we find out who he is one day too. I am sorry.I haven't left. I. Am having computer trouble. it is hard too log on and post.might be this way for another week or so. All bruises were inflicted at the same time.
 
Has the potential of psychosocial dwarfism ever been brought up in this case? It's the condition where a child matures much more slowly than normal due to living an unloved stressful life which this boy may well have experienced considering the circumstances of his end. If this condition is considered then I think the victim could have actually been as old as 9 or even 10. This would expand the realm of missing children to be looked at.
 
Ok.I'm back from my vacation in Florida for 2 1/2 weeks. I did not want to tell everyone I was gone and not at home.The computer trouble was the Wi Fi was not good in the hotel and I was on my son's tablet which I really did not know how to work and when I would post it would make me look stupid LOL. So I just waited until I got home to post. I'm on my big old fashioned computer at home now and I'm comfortable.

Has any one called and found out if anything at all is going on in this poor little ones case. Are they going to do the isotope testing on him to hopefully find out more on him? I am very sorry if I am sounding like a broken record about that. But were not hearing anything at all if they will do the testing for him.I really think it will find out more information about him and I do think it might help find out who he is. I am very interested in knowing why they haven't said anything about him or even an update in awhile now.
 
Ms. Suzanne, I just want to thank you for your tireless, dogged determination in finding out who this precious little boy was. I check here every so often, hoping you will be successful. I am rooting for you. God bless the little boy, everyone deserves acknowledgement in life, but also in death. It appears he had neither and that just breaks my heart.
 
When I was going to bed last night I had a thought.I don't know why I had it. Just one of those knowing thoughts I get sometimes that our boy was crippled some how and couldn't really walk or not real well.
 
I looked and studied why he could be crippled or not able to walk real well after I had that knowing thought.It really bothered me.I do not know about too many autopsy pictures or how they are.On the autopsy pictures our boy toes and feet are not pointed outward.At least his right foot is pointed inward kind of like it's pigeon toed.I noticed he looks nocked- knees also.I wonder if he could have been in leg braces,crutches or a wheel chair. I do not think the bruises on his legs were from leg braces.But I guess they could have been.I feel the bruises on his legs might possibly have been from someone hitting his legs with a type of stick or something in the tub? to keep him possibly in line grooming and cutting his finger nails and toe nails.Like I feel a female caretaker might do. I always thought he might have been born prematurely.
His legs kind of looked like Tibial torsion and or knocked-knees in this link.Do you think so?

http://www.marksimonianmd.com/muscle-system/


I mentioned this awhile ago.I don't know if anyone noticed this. But Terry Lee Speece's grandmother viewed our boy in the morgue she said this.It is not mentioned on the America's unknown child's website(I don't know about the autopsy report) that our boys right toe was like this.That also is why I think he could have possibly been crippled also_Our boy is not Terry Lee Speece.I looked into him first.He died I believe mid 80's?

She told them she was not positive it was her grandson. She said the features resemble Terry Lee, the dead boy is about the same size, and the middle toe of the right foot is bent in the same way as Terry Lee's was since an iron fell on his foot four years ago, when he was four years old.

http://americasunknownchild.net/Archives3Text.html#doubts

Autopsy pictures on the America's unknown child's website of his legs,knees and feet.Please be WARNED they are are very graphic of this poor little boy.It's under medical examiners photo's.

http://americasunknownchild.net/Pictures.htm

 
Looking at the original posters for the little boy, he really does look closer to 3-4 than much older, he still had that 'baby' shape to his little head and features. Just my opinion, but he does look very young to me.

The issue of his care is a real puzzle - one one hand, he's washed and nails trimmed, has had various medical procedures. On the other, he is undernourished, his hair is chopped like a prisoner of the time, roughly and without care, he is covered in bruises and he was dumped out there like trash.. He wasn't wrapped lovingly in the blanket, it was only partially covering his body.

It made me think of one parent perhaps caring for him, the other being abusive. I thought maybe a step parent, callous and tired of being responsible for a sickly child. Was maybe amid giving him a bath and lost their temper. Maybe his mother died and this was how the people he was left with dealt with him. Just theories, to why there's a such a dual aspect to the state he was in, and why he was not reported missing.
 
Fresh news coverage but not much in the way of new details:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/mystery-dead-boy-box-baffles-nation-article-1.1898191

Detectives probed families living on the fringes of society, the kinds of people who had more children than they could support, such as traveling carny workers who had lost some children to disease, and a foster home nearby. Rumors had placed a small boy fitting the description in their homes, but police could confirm nothing. A mother of nine in Colorado fell under suspicion because of a previous charge of having dumped her daughter’s corpse in a trash can after the child died of natural causes. But there were only rumors behind these leads...
Click to expand...
 
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