Thinking Sideways: Boy in the Box

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't understand you never know stories of things we simply don't know the answer to. Hi, welcome, This is Thinking Sideways

the podcast. I'm Devin. We're going to talk about another mystery like we always do. Yeah, and this one, this one is totally on my like par of things. I like, you know, we've talked about this. I like weird mysterious noises and weird mysterious deaths, and this is a weird mysterious death. And I don't like this death. I don't like like our Halloween episode. This one's pretty gruesome. It's kind of heart wrenching. If you're squeamish at all, if

you've got kids, just skip this one. Seriously, skip this one, you guys, Seriously, just skip this one. Okay. So the mystery we're talking about tonight is the Boy in the Box UM, which is also known as America's Unknown Child. So February seven, a young man is checking his muskrat traps um and he spies a box from J. C. Penny that says it's got a bassinet in it. Upon further inspection, he finds the body of a four year old boy UM that was battered and bruised and wrapped

in a flannel blanket. He was afraid that his police would confiscate his traps, so he didn't report it because you don't report those things. Apparently, well, you know, those traps are important. Yeah, So how did they find out about this guy? Forward? Later? Yeah, he came forward after it was reported. Um. So a few days later, a college student said he spotted a rabbit running through the underbrush, and knowing they were animal traps in the area, he

stopped his car to investigate and discovered the body. It took him a day to come up with that story and finally reported to the police because he was really in the area spying on women at the Good Shepherd School, he didn't so he took him a while to also report it. Um didn't want to eventually admit that. The only reason they came forward is because in confession, their priests convinced him to come forward. I don't remember which one of him it was. I suspected was the second

guy that he went and that would make sense. So, but it only took him a day. The other guy had found it a couple of days before that. So the boy has never been identified and this case has never been solved, which is unusual for four year old to just go to die, to be highly publicized and then just yeah, I would think that somebody would notice it next the Jones family was missing a kid, for example, right. So that was the thing was that initially the police thought, oh, well,

we've got this case late in the bag. You know, obviously somebody's going to report a four year old boy missing, or someone will come forward and say, you know, this is probably the work of a murderer. It probably wasn't somebody that knew this child. You know, we'll just post all these flyers around and say have you seen this boy, and that someone will come forward. And they put a lot of flyers, a lot of flyers out, thousands, and nobody ever came forward. Ever. Did either of you look

at the pictures of the flyers, Yeah, we're up. Yeah, in this day and age, that flyer would never be put up because it was it was of you know, his h his dead face. Yeah, it was a little gruesome picture picture of his head full straight forward and then from either side. And then they also dressed him and boys clothes of the time, sat him in a chair and took pictures of him that way, hoping that maybe if somebody had been a visitor in a home

they would recognize him more that way. You know, it's kind of hard to tell what somebody looks like if you've just got like a straight on picture. How did you look at sitting in the chair. It was just sort of like slump and it's kind of creepy with his hands in his lap and just like very still. You can tell he's a It looks like one of those strange Halloween photos that you would see of people. Where have you seen the ones where you walk by him and they change from left right. It looks as

if it's the basis of one of those. I was gonna say, it totally looks like one of those dummies that people put out, like on their front during Halloween to like scare people. Yeah, this one would definitely scare me. Yeah, I would scare me too. So nobody ever reported a missing child that fit this description, and there were thousands of leads and they were all dead ends. Apparently a bunch of people were saying, oh, yeah, that looks just like my nephew. And to be fair, it's a pretty

average looking four year old boy. You know, anybody could say, oh, that looks like Johnny from down the street. I don't wonder if he's dead. I haven't seen him in a day because he's sick. Maybe that's him. Yeah. Yeah. The investigators decided to focus on the bassinet box. The box that he was found in um it was sold from J. C. Penny and they found it. They found the store that it was sold from, which was an Upper Darby. Sorry, this is in Pennsylvania. I should have said, oh yeah, yeah, okay,

I's on a dirt road they found it. But in Pennsylvania, in Upper Derby, there was a J. C. Penny store where they sold this baby bass net. They only sold twelve. This store had only sold twelve of this model, apparently, UM, and they could trace all of them back to the owner except for one, which is a little odd, right,

so obviously it was this one. UM. And then they took fingerprints and footprints of the boys hands and feet and sent them out to all of the hospitals in the area, and then later they expanded that search to Canada as well as the entire nation, and nothing ever came back with that there there's never a match the hospital to compare to birth certificates. Yeah yeah, to see if they could figure out who this kid was and for more more on that later. For reasons, they thought

that maybe they would have hospital records. But other than the box in the blanket, they found a royal blue corduroy men's cap in a trail leading directly from the box into the forest, and it still had tissue paper to maintain. The manufacturers shape I'm talking about. It was almost basically brand new. It wasn't it was worn, but it had been stuff like if you have a nice hat and you put it back in a box, the tissue back in it so that it holds its shape. Okay, okay,

I got it. The boy was described as having blue eyes, a fair complexion, and medium to light brown hair. But it was very crudely cut, which made investigators think that perhaps it had been cut after his death. It was really choppy, well, and wasn't it didn't They find bits of hair in the clothing and stuff around him that you would suggest that it was cut just before just after his death. Yes. His nails, however, were neatly trimmed, which for a four year old is kind of rare.

So they suspect that actually happened after his death as well. Think so, And you know, there's no way to really tell, right and nails would they think that that happened after his death as well? And he had kind of creepy his hair, nai, Yeah, And he had deep bruises covering all of his body and face. And the weather had been cold Pennsylvania in February, So they said that the child could have been in the box from anywhere between

two or three days to two or three weeks. Oh wow, that really makes it kind of hard to figure out. That's really hard to narrow down a time frame. Yeah, it was really cool that. I mean, it makes sense. A body is preserved, nothing's going to decompose because it's too cold but still and it's not snowing. It's just cold and dry. You know, that's perfect body preservation. So as he was the box sealed, was it closed, the top was open, the top was just open critters like

muskrats for example. So I would assume that it were it was less time, especially since two people within a fairly short time spin discovered it. That you would assume that if that, if it was traveled that much, that there would be more people finding it earlier. Yeah, so I assume that it was shorter rather than longer time frame. But you know, we don't know. So some more things about him. He had seven scars they recounted, uh, three of which were clean enough to be surgical scars that

had happened in a hospital or from a doctor. Two of them were on his chest and groin. They had healed quote quite well, leaving only hairline traces um. And there was another scar on his left ankle, which they said looked like a cut down incision, which is something they used to do to do transfusions to get to a big vein. They would cut down this is so gross, I'm so sorry, cut down a big chunk of your ankle to get to a big vein and stick a

needle in that to do blood transfusions. Oh, basically peel all the skin back so you can get two things easier rather than trying to find him with the needle, right, And you would do that, you know, on the ankle, so that you know that's a it's a fast place to heal. And also if you have a scar on your ankle, it's not like it's just figuring anything well.

And the veins are easier to get to in an ankle, Say, if you're going to cut down in somebody's in a form and the body step that's there's a lot of tendency to have bad things happen. So yeah, absolutely so yeah. So anyway, he's had two scars on the groin and the other one scar on his growing in, one scar

on his chest that were of surgical origin. Ostensibly um and then he had a one and a half inch scar on the left side of his chest and around kind of irregular scar on his left elbow, and there was an L shaped scar on his chin that was about a quarter of an inch long in each direction. It's poor little kid had kind of a rough go. Did they consult any surgeons about the surgical scars? I mean yes, but there's not much to be said about them.

They're just there was no record record or anything like that. They didn't know who he was, so well, it would be it would be useful probably to try to find out, you know, to a surgeon, and he would well that he was he was being operated on for his appendix because of the roan thingor something to do with his heart or whatever, or you know, I mean, you could identify the procedure that was done. Sure, I don't think they were a descript of any kind in terms of that.

They said that he didn't have any vaccination scars, so he wasn't vaccinated, and he had been circumcised. You know, all of these things kind of seemed like he should have at least once visited the hospital well cared for. I mean, aside from the fact that somebody gave him a serious beating. Yah, it sounds like he got medical care at least at least at some point in his life. Right.

So they also did an ultraviolet light on his whole entire body, and they said that his left eye fluoresced a brilliant blue, which suggested that some kind of diagnostic dye had been applied, that maybe he had some kind of chronic eye ailment of some sort and his left eye. Oh, so that like basically something they would do when you go to the eye doctor to get tested for a

stigmatism or something. I guess, you know, I think the impression that I have is that it was more as like a treatment, like he would be needing eye drops for some kind of something that was wrong with his eye, although what that might have been, I don't know. And you know, you have to keep in mind, this boy's four years old. This is a lot of stuff to be happening to have four year old. And then, as we've said, you know, he was beaten to death and then just kind of discarded. Did they do and say

was that the cause of death. The cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. It was for the They said it was four hard blows to the head. So here's some more kind of interesting facts. His one of his hands and both of his feet had been wrinkled, which in a way that like pruned, like when they're submerged in water. It pretty skin. Yeah, so they had been submerged in water, maybe for an extended period of time just before he died, because that apparently doesn't happen

if you're dead. Your skin doesn't actually prune up, it bloats up instead. And two hands, one hand, but not the skin above. That was relatively normal as far as they could tell. Well, that's weird. Weird. Get how do you get those in the water and nothing else? I don't know. He uh, probably had not eaten three to four hours before death, although his esophagus contained a dark brown residue, which indicated that he probably vomited shortly before death.

If it is indeed that somebody you know wailed on him a lot, which is obviously what it seems like, then it would be perceivable that that would have caused him to the row up. Yeah. Additionally, he was severely malnourished, so you know, for all of the good care that it seems he may have had. It also seems he may not have had. Well, you got such a good care. We maybe got good care at one point, and that was handed up for somebody else who abused the hell

out of him. Yeah. So there's I'm actually pretty interesting theories, one of which definitely ties into that sort of idea that he was at one point cared for very well in his life and then came into bad times with a different family. But first I want to talk about the foster home theory, which is there was a foster home there was located like a mile and a half away from where he was found, um, and they had kids that were all school aged kids they were fostering.

There was a step daughter that lived there, um, and she was twenty, and the theory was that perhaps it was her child out of wedlock because you know, seven, that was still kind of a big thing, um, and that they had tried to care for him, but he was just so sickly, you know, given all of these things, that they eventually just decided that he needed to die. So they beat him to death and then dropped his body, which seems unlikely to me. I guess it seems unlikely

that people who foster kids were just as kids. Sucks. Let's just beat him to death. I mean, that's gotta be better way to have. But I've I've read accounts and I don't know if if this is you know something that we're going to go over about the step daughter and the relationship with the quote unquote father in the house, because that was a very weird thing, and

it was it was very weird. Um. They they were doing all these investigations in seven and they reopened the case in there was this detective named bristow Um and he doggedly attacked this. He just wanted to know everything there was to know and he never let it go. It was like his career passion was this case. Now, how did he come under the case? Was he one of the first investigators or was he the fingerprint guy?

He was the fingerprint guy. Okay, so that was He's the one who had to do when they were doing the fingerprints and the footprints. If I remember in the reading, that's when the story really stuck with him and he couldn't. Yeah, he was. He was an interesting character. He would go visit the grave once a week and yeah, I think you kind of This is the sort of case that if it if it hits you and you're there, it

hits you and it's part of your life forever. But it's uh, he must have been on the force a hell of a long time, because thirty one years between nineteen fifty seven and nyeh exes me forty one years

when I'm saying yes. So, when they reopened the case in police lieutended by the name of Tom Augustine took charge of the investigation, and he went back to this Foster home because they exhumed the body and took some DNA and they figured, oh, just go test this girl for DNA and if it matches, then we've got our answer. And that's super easy because you know, we couldn't do that in seven. And they went back and they said, um, you know, we're looking for so and so and the

you know, the father and the step daughter. And he said, oh, she's my wife now, yeah, yeah, And that's why the DNA obviously proves that it wasn't them. But still it leads me to think that there's got to be some stuff that was going on in that household. I agree, Yeah, he doesn't explain the story, but yeah, they're still kind

of weird going on there. So the other theory, one of the other theories is they referred to it as the M theory, and in a lot of sources they only referred to her as m. Her name was Mary Um, and she was this woman and she brought it her theory forward in two thousand two, she said that her abusive mother purchased an unknown boy named Jonathan from her from his birth parents in nineteen fifty four, basically to have a beating bag. Yeah, it's I mean, it's pretty rough.

Her story is, she said, you know that, Mary said that her mom suggested Jonathan to extreme physical and sexual abuse for two and a half years, and then Um, in a fit of rage, killed him by slamming him into the floor after he vomited in the bathtub. Mary's mother then cut the boy's long hair and dropped him just on the then secluded Fox Chase area, which is where they found him and correct me if I'm wrong. At the time, that was like a one laying ground that was kind of a dump area that it would

just take their stuff. That was kind of one of the things that was so disturbing in this. You know, some people say, well, he was kind of he was being prepared for a burial. That's why his hair was cut, his nails were trimmed. He was found with his arms crossed in this like and wrapped in a shroud, you know, and that somebody was taking him to bury him and they got spooked because there were people around, so they

just dropped him. But you know the area he was dropped in, it was this place that was known as a dumping ground. You know, people would just go dump their rubbing is on this little side track of road, which is just you know, kind of adds another layer of sadness to this story. Or yea, you know, he was just kind of dumped unceremoniously. And yes he was you know, wrapped in a shroud and all that stuff. But yeah, it's pretty pretty creepy. Yeah. So Mary would

have been twelves when it happened, and she recounted the story. Um, and apparently it took her three hours to tell it, and she said she had quirky little details. Quirky is not the right word, but she had details like, um, the boy had thrown up after eating some baked beans and her mother was enraged with the mess so she threw the boy into a bathtub and beat him um, which would have accounted for why some some of his

appendages were super wet and others weren't. And that she said that she had only ever heard the boy utter any noises and it was one shriek at his death. So yeah, it's pretty rough story. I don't want to go too into detail. The whole problem that they have with the story is that Mary has a history of mental illness, not very reliant. It's not he's she's not

very reliable, although her psychiatrists believe that she's sincere. First they've interviewed her hundreds of times and her story has never changed, which is pretty rare for somebody who's making a story up with mental disabilities like hers. So, but there's there's been many cases of folks who have an illness like that, a mental illness, who convinced themselves off

and they're very sincere and they believe it. And you know, it might be that in some way she's got savant is the wrong word, but she's able to just make something up and memorize that exactly. You know, I'm not discounting her version of what it could be but if you try to explain it away, We've seen a lot of evidence in the world of folks who who were

in that stage. Yeah. Additionally, you know, they went back to her old neighborhood and tried to interview her neighbors and they all said, no, there was never a boy here, which, on the one hand, well, they might have kept him under wraps. You think, you know, if you buy a kid to beat on, right, you're not going to be walking him around the neighborhood. Yeah, but something. So, why did she choose that particular time to come forward? And

had her mother finally died? Her parents had died a long time ago, so she had a dad also living in the house. Yeah, So I'm not totally sure what that whole situation is. It's disturbing if it's true. For sure, Well, there's people that do that kind of stuff. There are that's true that she did. Anybody ask Mary what happened after the boy died in terms of what happened to her? Did she become the punching bag then and they go find another kid? But they don't talk about that at

least in any of the stories. Um, but I would assume, you know, she was twelve when they purchased the kids. So I would assume that either she had already been the punching bag and was continued to be the punching bag, or they found another outlet. You know, it was never married, then it was never married. If it was always married, it was always married. But she may have needed a supplement. That's just such a weird, creepy little So there are

two other theories. One which I think is fairly plausible is that perhaps this boy was a child of an Amish family. There are a lot of Amish in Pennsylvania, many Dutch, and so they're more prone to cover things up. Additionally, they don't really they don't really have contact with the outside world. Which there were pictures, you know, being circulated, they probably wouldn't have made it into these Amish communities. So if anybody in these communities knew this boy, they

wouldn't be able to report it. But you know, that's pretty much as far as that goes. You know, he was in ill health and an accident happened, but I just don't think that the kind of bruising that he had well, and this is something that I never I never noticed, and I don't want to harp on this too long, but I do want to ask the bruising did were they able to tell was it all at

once or was it continual? Well, all of the bruises they found, they were really really deep bruises, and all of the bruises they found on his body when they found his body were new or at the same time, umuises, no broken bones. Just out of curiosity, do you know if the Amish circucis you not there eject circumcision like

a lot of other Christian faiths. So okay, I kind of yeah, And I guess I don't think of the Amish as having the most advanced medicinal technology, So I don't know that the kind of scarring that he had, I don't know. I well know I I actually I wouldn't. I wouldn't agree with that because if you think about it, if your entire life, let's say, all you do as you you work with the livestock, and when something happens, you learned to sew them up so that you can

keep your live stock alive. Well, if you've been doing that in your entire life, you're probably you know, there may be one guy that's got an aptitude for it, so everybody takes their their stock to him. He would get really good at it. It's true. Having having a sharp scalpel is just probably not against their religion. No, no, and they do They're not like Jehovah's witnesses. They do allow blood transfusions and stuff. So the ankle thing is legit,

I guess. Yeah, all right, so maybe he was wasn't because they don't circumcise, but yeah, no, I mean, we're we're off off topic here, but it's just that's very interesting. And yeah, so the last theory, So I like this theory a lot. Man by the name of Frank Bender. He's part of the VDC Society, which has taken a keen interest in this case. Is what exactly their society.

It's it's a bunch of retired police officers and detectives who for and they've gone into a lot of cases, and they've got a lot of coverage in the past. Is they opened up old cold cases and look at them with modern techniques and technologies and try and come at him from a completely different angle, and they've solved a lot, a lot of so he thinks that, um, this boy was probably raised as a girl. Cutting the hair and the nails too, because a girl would usually

have longer nails. But that nobody could recognize the pictures of this boy because he was walking around town as a girl. That's true, right, with very long blonde brown hair, longer, longer nails, dressed as a girl. You know, they would when the accident occurred or whatever occurred, chop off all the hair really short, trimm the nails, make it look like this kid has always been a boy. They're touting, you know, nobody except for the people who knew what happened. No,

this boy is a boy. Everybody else thinks this boy is a girl. I think it's fairly valid. Yeah, that's explains what the kid was found naked too, because they probably didn't have any boys clothes to dress him many. So one of the things that Vendor brings up is that, um, apparently the medical examiner, and this wasn't wildly publicized, but the medical examiner said that, um, it looked like the boy's eyebrows had been plucked, like you would if you were trying to pass a little boy off as a

little girl. Oh, they have some sketches of people of what this boy would have looked like as a girl. Yeah, now that you mentioned, and I hadn't really made the connection. When you look at the sketch and the photo, they're very similar, and it does it's very it would be very easy with long hair to mix it up and just go, well, it's a little girl. Yeah, I think absolutely, I think it's um. I think it's a really good theory. Actually, you know, this happened in two thousand three or something

like that, and they still haven't solved the case. Nobody's come forward, but there's still a really big effort. And Bender has ancent clearance rate with the society in solving cases, so maybe he's on the right track. Yeah. The sad thing is that at that time it was not uncommon for a family to have a child and not be able to take care of it because they just didn't

have the money for it. So you were sent to uncle Jim's farm to live with him because he had enough money, and you were gonna be raised there and taking care of their and so it could very easily have been that the situation was a somebody who did this said, oh, well I sent to the kid to uncle Jim's farm or the kid was sent to Uncle Jim, who then committed to atrocity. I mean, you know, this doesn't play in any of the theories you've talked about it. It's just kind of things that you have to think

about when you remember the time frame. Yeah. I think that's that's totally fair. Um, you know, it's hard. It's hard to imagine somebody who just couldn't afford to raise a child killing them so brutally. You know, there are definitely ways to get rid of these, you know, fun topics for the night, fun ways to get rid of people. But you don't beat a child to death with like deep deep bruises just because you can't. Normal people don't,

well normal people don't. But you know, I think that people who I generally want, people who are concerned about the welfare fair of their family into normal people. Yes, very true. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. So Yeah, once again, I'm going on record, I don't like the story. This was a creepy, crazy I don't like it either. Sorry, I'm sorry everyone, Sorry for hunting your nightmares. Picture all of these wonderful, beautiful things to start the holidays, ye think,

happy thoughts. So I'm guessing it's like some some girl from Philadelphia or somewhere around there, just too pregnant out of wedlock. And at some point, once she was going to start showing, she decided to head to some relatives place or somewhere where she could have, you know, maybe a home for her wayward mothers, that kind of thing mothers, and had the baby. She was probably a little bit of a head case and had convinced herself that she was going to have a daughter, or for some reason

believe she was gonna have a daughter. So she told everybody she was going to adopt her niece and bring him back to live with her because her niece needed at home and her parents had been killed or whatever. And when she comes back siver months later, while she's with she's got a little boy had on her niece because well, it turns out the baby wasn't a girl after all. She screwed up, and so she had to hide the fact that her this kid was a boy and not a girl. That makes sense, but him, Why

is the kid dead? There could be It could be a number of things. It could be just a burden of keeping this secret and just being a single mother etcetera, got to be a bit too much. Um, it might be that at some point she came to realize that that keeping the secret forever was just not going to be possible, or if she's mentally unbalanced, mentally she's mentally yeah, it's always that too. Unfortunately things happen. Yeah, either way,

I don't know. I don't know the facts in this one for me to ever say, I think it's this unfortunately for me, I I think it probably is Mary's story. I think she's got a lot of facts, right, and you know, all of them more things that you know the general public knew. But her story is pretty convincing. But nothing. She didn't have any details that we hadn't already been put in the papers, right, No, But I guess why would you? Why would you make something like

that up. It's not like she's earning money from it. She's not getting any kind of public notoriety of a lot of people do that kind of stuff. Though Tons of people confess to murders they haven't committed just because they like the attention. So it's I don't know. So I don't really know what the is I could have met. Mary's story is plausible. Yeah, it runs in line with your theory. I mean there's a lot of you know, crossover between what you were looking at what or what

you were talking about and her story. But yeah, I don't I don't know. I don't like it can well, so we still have to solve this mystery. Okay, forget it now. I think it's too sad to solve. I think the I think that we just have to say that it was actually just a Halloween dummy that everybody thought was a real boy. That's what the cops thought when they first got there, was that it was a dummy. Yeah, that's part Yeah, it was this Pinocchio. Yeah, the whole

thing was actually PoCA. Yeah, thank you, thank you. And lovely unicorns running in the field. I see them now. You know. It's like kids get beaten to death every year, even today. It's like they usually don't wind up in a junkyard, you know, and never never identified. But it happens all the time, too bad, unfortunately it does. So this is an open case. It's ongoing. Ostensibly, if you know something about it, you've talked to the authorities. But if you want to talk to us instead, an email

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thanks a lot else, See you next time. I think happy thoughts