Also seems apropos of the disparities in identifying Philly's 1962
"Girl in the Box," a Black girl about the same age as Joseph Zarelli. She was found dead about five years after Joseph. She would certainly have been difficult to ID no matter what, due to the condition of her body (she was missing her head.) But as this
December 2022 Philadelphia Inquirer article points out, the case itself also received much less attention than Joseph's. The article quotes a La Salle professor who says that research shows that cases of missing Black/Latino children typically receive less attention than their white counterparts. <modsnip: not an approved source>
There's also a sad punctuation to the Girl in the Box story. She was buried in the same potter's field where Joseph was originally interred, and in 2018, researchers tried to exhume her body in order to extract DNA in hopes of finally identifying her. But they were unable to find her grave; she is presumably lost among many others in the potter's field.