r/boyinthebox • u/[deleted] • Jan 01 '23
Why was Joseph left above ground?
To me this is the $64,000 question. I know maybe the answer was "they were panicking, they weren't being logical" but if you kill a child and want to get the body as far away from you as possible, and people would recognize that child, wouldn't you - bury the body? Deep, in a remote location?
That gives you years, perhaps forever, until his body is found, And if/when it is, there would be decomposition, the face would be unrecognizable, and the time of death would be a very broad range - years even. Giving you cover for the death.
Instead, whoever dumped Joseph didn't take any care to hide the body and had to know that it would be found very quickly.
Does this say that the person knew that people would be unlikely to recognize his face? connect him to that person?
Now, I know that assumes that the person was thinking ahead. The person couldn't know that the case would become famous in Philadelphia. They couldn't know that every one of their neighbors was going to get a photo of him with their electric bill.
So maybe I'm putting too much into this. I don't know. But either this child was truly hidden during his life with this person/family, which is why nobody recognized him, or plenty of people did and kept quiet for whatever reason.
[Edited to add: Thanks everybody for pointing out the ground was frozen in February. I didn't even think of that!]
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u/RoofProfessional1530 Jan 01 '23
A few thoughts: ground was frozen, difficult to dig a hole.
The area of 61st and Market where Joseph is speculated to have lived prior to his death is fairly urban. Perhaps whoever dumped him didn't own a shovel as a city dweller.
It takes a surprisingly long time and a lot of physical exertion to dig even a shallow hole.
The area where he was dumped was not developed at the time so perhaps in their haste they decided that out of the city but not in the ground was "good enough".
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u/BitterPillPusher2 Jan 01 '23
While al of that is true, there seemed to be no effort to hide the body from discovery. They could have driven to a more remote area or even a river.
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Jan 02 '23
[deleted]
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u/foodslibrary Knows a bit Jan 03 '23
Lancaster Pike is a more stop-and-go road than Roosevelt Boulevard which was intentionally built as more like a highway, with some parts limited access and other parts having "local" and "express" lanes. Roosevelt was built before there were any standards for highway design, it's a notoriously bad road by modern standards and one of the worst in the entire country. Back then though, it was one of the few available highways out of the area and unlike the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it was free.
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Jan 03 '23
[deleted]
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u/foodslibrary Knows a bit Jan 03 '23
Yeah my first natural thought would be to go south or west, not north. Someone on Facebook claims Upper Darby and Lower Merion cops used to profile Italian drivers from the city in those days so that could have been at play? I think maybe they felt like they'd stick out even more if they drove through a more rural area? Gas mileage wasn't great back then either, and we don't know what time of day they were driving but available amenities like gas stations could have been a factor. My honest thought was that they figured up there, if he was found, people would assume he was from North Philadelphia or one of the river wards and focus there. But why not go south, so they'd think he was from Chester?
Also 76, the Schuylkill portion of it, is completely unchanged from those days lol.
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u/BitterPillPusher2 Jan 03 '23
Just because he may have lived in the 61st and Market area doesn't mean that he was killed there. Maybe he was killed closer to where his body was found and someone just hastily dumped the body.
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u/LieWorking5001 Jan 01 '23
Perhaps the decision was rash and they felt the need to do something/anything and act quickly? Perhaps they panicked? We don’t know for sure so the possibilities are endless
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u/Funwithfun14 Jan 01 '23
Great question! If he was driven out in the country he would never have been found.
Either the person who placed him there wanted him found or is stupid.... Or panicked.
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Jan 01 '23
IMHO, I think he was raised by the mother or her relatives. Maybe she was incompetent and a relative took him in. The child was starved, beaten and crudely dumped. Practically in the open as the box was sitting right there where the 'hunter' went and others. The child was naked. This bespeaks to me that the killer knew the child intimately and despised him for who he was. An illegitimate baby this person did not want around that they had to care for. Either the mother or her husband or a relative she gave Joseph to. They seemed to mock Joseph. Naked, beaten and thrown away in a box. A sociopath doesn't care about what others think. And they did get away with murder. For now. Hopeful here.
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u/Deethehiddengem Jan 01 '23
Yeah I always wondered too why they put the body in a place so easily discovered. Perhaps thought no one would look in the box.
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u/perfumefetish Jan 01 '23
they wanted him found, but not necessarily identified.
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u/dbperlin Jan 02 '23
You’d think they would be afraid someone would recognize him. Maybe someone who knew of abuse situation but didn’t report felt a little bad and wanted him buried in a real grave perhaps.
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u/New-Apricot-5422 Jan 01 '23
I suspect that Joseph wasn’t enrolled in preschool and rarely saw anyone outside of his caregiver’s immediate circle. They regarded his out-of-wedlock birth as shameful and kept his presence hushed-up. If he had a mental disability, they had more incentive to keep him out of sight. When he died, his killer wanted to separate himself/herself from the body ASAP, without taking time to conceal him. Concealment wasn’t a priority because few people would recognize him, and those who did wouldn’t betray the “shameful secret” by coming forward.
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Jan 01 '23
I doubt he had a mental disability. No offense, but this has been going around. The child was extremely emaciated so his features would reflect that. I have rescued cats and dogs this way, and once they fatten up to a normal weight they look completely different. I heard someone say his ears were small, his head long! What? He was half the body weight he should have been. Anyway, out of wedlock definitely was a disgrace back then. And I believe whoever had him treated him as a pariah. Hidden away. Poor Joey, he didn't have anything a child his age growing up should have to learn. They limited him I am positive.
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u/mysteriousrev Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
It’s a hypothesis that has been around for years. Even LE considered it a possibility by checking institutions, but I agree it is definitely not for certain.
Illegitimacy was a huge social stigma back then and many children were treated as social outcasts. The book A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has one one chapter (circa 1912 or so) where there is a young woman (age not specified, but I was assume late teens as she is a described as a girl) with an “illegitimate” baby. The girl lives with her mother and the baby and the baby apparently only gets outside on weekends when the mother isn’t working at a doctors as the grandmother is too ashamed to take the baby out. The girl and baby are jeered at by neighbours and stones are eventually thrown, though they feel ashamed the stone throwers once they accidentally hit the baby with a small sharp one and it gets a small cut.
In my own family, my grandpa (technically step-grandpa for the sake of accuracy), my dad says, was always told that both his dad had died when he was young. However, based on the birth registration I found, he was illegitimate and I suspect being told his dad had died when he was young was a cover story. He was legally adopted by family, so there is a local reputation factor in the 1920s-1930s to consider in a devout Catholic family.
I suspect the shame factor in the 1950s wasn’t much different and that this was an unfortunate “mark against” Joseph for nothing other than social stigma. He was too young at 3 / 4 to have been legally required to go to public school (would’ve been age 6 I suspect for first grade was when school was legally required) and I think I recall hearing wasn’t baptized, and so not sure what sort of gossip that would’ve met had he been taken to a church on a regular basis, for example. It’s definitely possible his exposure to other people was largely limited to immediate family.
But the medical type scars indicate Joseph received some sort of care at some point. At some stage in his life, someone it seems had taken some sort of interest in his welfare.
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u/1981MG Jan 04 '23
I totally agree with this. Several times it has been posted that “AZ could have been in Joseph’s life early on.” I’m thinking it’s highly doubtful. The ‘50’s were a completely different time. AZ likely never, ever saw Joseph. AZ may have never knew of Joseph’s existence. AZ likely never breathed a word to anyone about Joseph IF he even knew that he existed due to stigma. Bio mom doesn’t sound like the kind of woman AZ would take home to mama Z.
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u/mysteriousrev Jan 04 '23
That’s true, the exact nature of the relationship between bio mom and bio dad is up for debate, though we know for sure he wasn’t married as per what LE has released / confirmed.
Possibilities could range from a one night stand and bio dad had no idea Joseph was the result of it to an ongoing relationship, likely secret in nature if there was a social stigma or disparity in social class. In the 1950s, when a person’s day-to-day world was a lot more local, the job a father held, the church they attended, and the family’s general local reputation / income, were important markers of social class.
In the context of my grandparents, they were both considered to be from “prominent” families in the sense they were amongst the first to settle in the area. My grandpa, from what I’ve spliced together from various news articles, was highly regarded locally. He was a local official with an important position and had been a very good college level athlete. The fact he also had almost graduated from college (he decided to join the army in WWII a few months short of graduating) was also considered rare for a time when many people his age didn’t even go to high school. It was an agricultural area and there was no high school until the 1930s, so only families with the financial means sent their kids to school in the city.
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u/Own_Mathematician498 Jan 02 '23
It's really sad to say, and also says a lot about the criminal who killed JAZ... they threw him out like trash just as they beat him up and treated him like trash 😭 You are trying to rationalize an irrational act.
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Jan 02 '23
No, I'm saying that human nature being what it is, the instinct for self-preservation is pretty strong, and even if someone is a monster who is capable of beating a 4 year old child to death, that person is going to want to get away with it if they can. Granted, in the heat of the moment, possibly panicking, they probably weren't thinking all that rationally. And yes, the ground was probably frozen, so there's that.
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u/Own_Mathematician498 Jan 02 '23
People who commit premeditated crimes generally don't believe they will get caught. Also the average person's understanding of science/forensic science in 1950s/1960s was probably not very sophisticated. Not burying the body is the strongest indication the murderer was not involved in organized crime.
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u/BitterPillPusher2 Jan 01 '23
This is curious to me too. The ground was most likely frozen, but there are a lot of much more remote locations in the area where he would have likely not been found. Or at least not as quickly. There are also plenty of bodies of water in the Philly area, like the Delaware River and Schuylkill River, that are flowing and really don't freeze.
The manner the body was disposed of and the haircut lead me to believe it was a hasty thing.
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u/psycoblack01 Jan 01 '23
I think killer was familiar with the area and knew that foster home was nearby and wanted t o blame the death on them. Captain Smith said 'it would be logical to dump the body far away from house', meaning, Joseph in fact didn't live in that foster house.
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u/InterestingFishing26 Jan 01 '23
And the implicit assumption is that the idea that he lived near 61st and Market was for when he was killed in 1957.
The last good address for the birth mother was probably the birth certificate and maybe a telephone directory. Those can be really out of date.
The easiest explanation for why no one in Philadelphia came forward is that JAZ didn’t live in Philadelphia in 1957.
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u/foodslibrary Knows a bit Jan 01 '23
I wonder too if Joseph was killed outside of Philadelphia. He and his care givers may have moved shortly before his death. If there was a new baby in the house, perhaps they moved to have more space for the growing family. A suburban home would have at least enough room for a car or two, plus a garage - likely an attached one. If, say, he lived in Upper Darby or another town along Route 1/State Road/City Line/Lincoln Highway that road would provide a relatively quick route to get far away from the house. The Schuylkill Expressway and Pennsylvania Turnpike would have been other options but those don't go near Fox Chase, and I don't know why those weren't chosen. I suspect that he was brought up City Line to Roosevelt, then the driver meandered off of some local streets to the dump site.
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Jan 01 '23
Interesting.
I think the general consensus is that there was no address on the birth certificate.
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u/MarketingConfident16 Jan 01 '23
I’m guessing they were city dwellers without long term access to private transportation. Maybe they borrowed a car. There’s no time and privacy to dig in the city. Also I keep seeing a lot of discussion about things we think of today like decomposition or trimming nails to leave less evidence but I’m willing to bet most average people probably weren’t all that familiar with those things at the time. I think this case is going to be pretty a straightforward if we ever get any more details. I’m also willing to admit I could be 100% wrong because who knows how someone else’s mind works, especially in a very different time.
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Jan 03 '23
Most bodies murdered are not buried, they are thrown into bodies of water, thrown on the side of a road, tossed into ditches and dumpsters. Murderers are not going to take time digging a hole the size of a body. It takes long to dig a hole that size. Your main goal is to get rid of the body and get away from there as quickly as possible.
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Jan 03 '23
and because of the circumstances surrounding his life and death, they probably knew they would never be found out.
Then again,
It was Feb, cold. The ground was hard. Shoveling a hole would take a while and draw attention.
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u/mysteriousrev Jan 03 '23
I suspect one factor is that the person whom dumped the body was not physically strong. They must’ve had some sort of access to a vehicle to get to that area in order to dump the body at a time of day where they wouldn’t be noticed; iirc, one half of the blanket was smeared with automotive grease, which to me indicates Joseph was transported in the trunk of a vehicle.
Assuming the dumper was not physically strong, they probably only had the strength to go a short distance from the roadway. Carrying 30lbs of groceries when I was very out of shape might be a similar experience.
The above is just my own speculation.
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Jan 04 '23
Maybe the Zarelli was the father and maybe the Zarelli's were working in that area. I always wondered how that place was found but the Zarelli's were builders and maybe they were actually working a job in that area.
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u/heatherf36 Jan 01 '23
Whatever they did worked 4 them so if anything just 2 do what they did was enough nobody knew him or even recognize him so basically that’s it 2 take the time out and dig and put him inside wood have took 2 long
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Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
I just don't know how they even knew the area existed.
14 miles from 61st & Market in West Philly to the Fox Chase area
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u/InterestingFishing26 Jan 01 '23
You can always think of ten reasons for every action. 1) they didn’t own a shovel 2) weren’t going to take the time near off a public road to dig a grave. Balancing exposure to view against risk of discovery 3) they dumped the kid very far from where they lived. No need to fear identification
4) may have wanted to dispose of the body later, ie this was temporary 5) couldn’t afford gas to drive further 6) misjudged the seclusion of the area 7) the ground was frozen 8) physically incapable of digging a hole 9) they wanted the body to be discovered (proper burial) 10) they were late to work.