You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilley.
That makes me Bill Thomas. We're joined today with one of our very
favorite guests, Colleen Fitzpatrick, here to talk to us about the Boy in
the Box case. Colleen, thank you for joining us. Yeah, Hi,
how you guys doing. We're good, We are good. We were
just comparing temperatures in Virginia, home of Kristen Deli, Connecticut, home of
Bill Thomas and California. And what's the temperature in California? All right?
Now it's a little nippy at sixty five, and we're all running to the
closets for our winter clothing, phrasing people in heavy coats and hats and off.
It's not swimsuit weather. Let's put it that way. I used to
love this time of year in Los Angeles. If it dipped below fifty five,
let's say at night, would you, oh god, people would have
their parkas out and they'd be shivering and take it's so cold. It's forty
one degrees here in Virginia. And I know you just got a blizzard up
there, Bill, So what temperature is it in Norfolk? Or dare we
ask? It's twenty two degrees? Are you at the moment? And where?
God? Oh god, I don't even think that means your house?
Inside your house, you keep it at sixty five, and that's toasty to
you. When I came home, I had to run some errands. I
came back and my partner, Pamela, had just taught an online art class,
and so I turned the heat down because her studio has its own special
heat. So she came downstairs and she said, did you just turn the
heat back up? And I said, yeah, it was sixty two in
the dining room. And she said, I must be getting used to this,
because that felt pretty good. It's cold. I was just sitting here
with the heater or on. I have a heat or right by my feet.
Now. We don't turn the heat on here anyway because the houses are
not insulated. Yeah, boku money to turn the heat on and have these
little floor heaters where you can cheat a little bit. And it's so cold
in southern California. Oh it's I'm telling you. It was actually forty nine
last night, and it was like, oh my god, are we going
into an ice age? The whole global warming discussion starts turning on again.
Pamela wanted to know if Colleen was ever going to come and visit again,
and I said, I hope she will. Bet I bet she won't come
in February. I'll try and be out there. I'm out on the coast
once or twice a year, out on the East Coast. I'd love to
come by. Speaking of the East Coast, Kristen and I have been talking
about having you back for quite some time because we enjoy the conversation, and
I certainly feel like I learned a lot when we talk with you about DNA
and the work that you do. But we specifically wanted to ask you a
little bit about the Boy in the Box case, which I know you've been
working on for several years. Sure, so can you start just stuff for
anybody who's not aware, who hasn't been following this wonderful solve. Can you
tell us a little bit about the Boy in the Box case? Just a
little overview? Yeah, I can to get some dates out. The boy
was found. I believe it was in February in fifty seven. You can
look that up on Wikipedia. He was found by I believe it was somebody
looking for squirrel traps or some kind of traps and he was in a J.
C. Penny bassinette box and so he was beaten, he was bruised
up. He probably died a blunt force trauma to his head. At that
time, Philadelphia, nineteen fifty seven, this was an unusual case. This
was set the whole city on fire about how how could the boy get there?
What's going on with that? And some of the people nowadays that I've
been in touch with and I worked with were actually about the same age the
boy would be. So they told me that when they were young, they
went with their parents to the grocery store to put up flyers to see if
anybody recognized the boy and could identify his parents. I have to look up
who did. But there was like four hundred thousand flyers sent out and also
included in the elect bills to people to try and see if anybody would recognize
them. And of course nobody came forward. Nobody said anything. And then
the case when cold. If you look at what we had to work within
fifty seven compared to now, yet it was very primitive technology and that nothing
could be done really except hope somebody would come forward. They I think they
tried to trace the JC penny box and they were able to trace some of
them, but not all of them, and it went nowhere. I think
there were twelve boxes sold and that maybe they traced half of them or something
like that. And there were other pieces of evidence found that sounded promising.
They found a man's cap nearby and some other things. They even traced the
hat back to a store, and again in the description of the man who
bought the hat, everything seemed to lead to a dead end. There were
people that came forward and said they thought they knew who the boy was,
just it's such a sad case. Mass media at the time, which would
mostly been newspapers, they courage case to a tremendous degree. People in Philadelphia
remembered this case. Yeah, it was one of those. It was that
case that you hope would be solved, You know that case. And of
course moner technology has advanced, and there was oh there was also a handkerchief
with g on it. Oh, yeah, I didn't remember that, and
that didn't go anywhere. He was wrapped in a blanket. They looked at
that. There was really not too much much evidence there that would lead anywhere.
Over time. Another thing they did was they photographed the boys sitting up
in a chair, hoping he would look a little bit more natural, and
nothing really went anywhere. He was as time went on. The National Center
for Missing Exployed Children. I believe Carl Koppelman also did reconstructions of facial reconstructions
or artists renditions of what he would look like. Then they just never had
so about nineteen ninety they exhumed his body for DNA. He was also transferred
from the Potter Cemetery to Ivy Hill Cemetery. In the cemetery donated a really
nice grave for him. That was about it. Nothing really panned out.
The DNA that they got from nineteen ninety eight, that was again primitive analysis
that went nowhere. It really wasn't anything. So the only really hope of
identifying him would be genetic genealogy. I think everybody came to that conclusion.
So that's how I got involved. At one point, How did you and
Identifyeders ultimately get involved? Did you get a phone call from somebody who said,
my gosh, you just have to look at this case or was this
always a wish list case for you? It crept up on me because I
had been in touch with the powers that be on that. I don't remember
even know how I heard about it. I got interested in it about probably
about two eleven, maybe before that, and I was in touch with somebody
named John Nemick who was working the case or one charge of it, being
a guardian of the case for a Neck Neck and probably for the VDOX Society,
and I exchanged a few emails with him. I found out they had
done mitochondrial DNA sometime in the past with midotyping, and I traced the DNA
being sent back to the Philadelphia Police Department. But that's about as far as
it went as far as mitochondrial DNA. They got some MIDO from the boy
and there was really nothing there that could you could hang your hat on.
And then I've always I think I may have touched base with him once or
twice John Nemick along the way, but nothing happened. And then about five
years ago before the pandemic, maybe two thousand, yet it must have been
two eighteen, I went to a seminar in Florida at I think it was
University of Florida wherever Aaron Kimmeley is. I think she might be at Florida
RSU, Florida, And she gave a cold k seminar and I went out
there and they were going to have a talk by on a number of things
everywhere from DNA to confessions and how do you tell a suicide from a homicide.
It was really an interesting type group. It was only like thirty people.
But when the guy got up in the beginning and welcomed everybody, he
said, blah blah blah. He was ed Gogan from Vidak and Errands and
Vitoc two, so I didn't know all that, but he said he was
welcoming people, and he happened to mention the Phoenix Canal murders, and of
course my hand caught fire and I ran after him at the break and we
had never met each other, so we met each other and convened in mind
melded on the Phoenix Canal murders. But then he said, have you heard
ever heard of the Boy in the Box? And I said, of course
I have, and I've been in touch with John Nemmick. He said,
would you consider doing it? I said, yeah, sure, you like
a challenge? Yeah, I like it. I do though eighteen whatever.
So anyway, that kind of woke me up again. And then in two
thousand, I think it was nineteen right, they came up. We had
a call from the Emmy Medical Examiner in Philadelphia in the DNA DOE project,
and on that call we had a couple of calls, and finally he asked
me if I would take the case that they had already tried once to do
the DNA micro ray and it really didn't work out. So he asked me
what. I look at it and I said sure. Then that started the
second, the real push to the end, that was, is this like
too long an explanation? Exactly what we're looking for, and you have this
fascinating backstory. We know we want all of this. This is fantastic.
So that's when it really started. And I went to the exhumation April the
twenty fifth, twenty nineteen, the second exhumation, and I have pictures of
that which I cannot share, but basically the body was just a bunch of
old bones. In nineteen ninety eight, they had redressed him in a little
jumper, his remains in a little jumper. He was probably all bones at
the time. And it wasn't like awful. It was I've been to a
couple of exhumations and basically all of a bunch of bones, and we looked
at what remains were available. They had already had some teeth, We took
a femur, we took the tailbone, but we already had some teeth,
the jaw, and so we reinterred him. Right after that, the cemetery
donated all that. His coffin was actually covered in more of a metal kind
of cover. They had to be unscrewed and lifted. He was well protected.
And so then we went back to the Emmy's office and looked at the
Morgan and looked at what was available. There was a bunch of teeth,
the bones. They had actually x rayed the coffin with him in it.
What was interesting to me, which I did not know. They had x
ray his skull and all of that. So what was interesting, which I
did not know, is that when a child has his baby teeth coming out,
and the baby teeth are out, adult teeth are actually loaded already in
his jaw, his adult teeth are there. He's armed for armed for bear.
It's only when the adult teeth start coming out did the baby teeth drop
out. So they had the x rays with the adult teeth and then the
baby teeth under it, and they had xt rayed his head. They extrayed
the whole thing, hoping there was something else that they could find, but
it would really there wasn't. There was just a bunch of old bones.
Now, when you talk about the X ray, does that mean that the
coffin at that point, Joseph Coffin, who was unnamed at that point,
it was out of the ground when they did these x rays. Yeah,
that was in nineteen ninety eight. They x rayed the whole thing, the
x rayed him, They x rayed the coffin before they opened it, they
x rayed and that was like the probably the metal. I don't know if
the metal thing was over it at the time, but I saw you could
see the nails going in the side of the coffins, extra and stuff like
that. Yeah, it was interesting. Did they cover it with metal with
the idea that they might be able to go back to it one day and
get a DNA profile from it? Is that why they covered it? But
I really don't know. That's a really good question. It could have been
some It could be anything from a procedure that cemetery does to just attribute somebody
did some extra money to give a better burial forum all the way to the
city required it, or I don't think they really thought ahead about getting more
DNA out of it at that time. Who would have anticipated the revolution.
At the time of the exhimation, sixty two years had gone by since he
had been murdered. There's no one on the Philadelphia Police Force who would have
been working the case for that many years. Were any of those detectives from
the original case with any of them still even alive at that point, Not
to my knowledge. The detectives working on it had been They were the same
age as the boy would be now. Detective Bob Hesser and Bob and Bill
Fleischer, who were the key people. I didn't know detective son of Maala
so much. But they actually became knowledgeable about the case later as they joined
the Forests and they and of course everyone knew this case, so they probably
learned about it as young adults, but they knew about it as children maybe
in the area, but they became involved as young adults. Even some of
those people might have been in their sixties by that point. Yeah. Right,
the whole stories. Nobody the original people are gone. And in reading
the stories, it just sounds like generations almost of law enforcement officers and medical
examiners and all sorts of people have worked on this case. Yeah, of
course, and it's been along and along Hall. I'm sure that there's been
long periods of time when nothing could be done, and then it would come
up again. You would want to you would learn something new about something and
think about all right, No, I don't think anybody's left. So do
you know which DNA lab did the work or are we allowed to have that
much information? Are you trying to keep that on the DL? I tell
you the lab. There's several labs that were involved, but the final lamb
that did it I really can't disclose. They've asked me because they did it
as a favor, or they did it just to see as any part of
their experimental and releasing that information means that every genealogy company is going to start
calling them and right, and they really they're not, and they have parted
company on good terms, saying it's really not their cup of tea. The
reason we ask is because sometimes, as the DNA labs are mentioned, not
always though I noticed we read a dozen or more stories about this exciting development
in Joseph's case, but I noticed that DNA lab never came up. The
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Identifiers did, and other people that
the Vidox Society and of course the Philadelphia Police Department. But I thought it
was curious there was no mention of who actually did the lab work. Now
we understand what. Yeah, they are okay, they're happy it worked out,
but they like I said, they did their favor or they did a
professional favor out of their own interest of course, to see if what they
could do, if it would work. And it was very enlightening, I
think, to the people about what happened and the fact that we were successful,
it's very good. But they asked to remain anonymous because it's not really
what they do. Since you brought up the name, let's go ahead and
talk a little bit about the Vidoc Society and their involvement with this. So
how did they come on board? And it's true, you're a member of
the Vidox Society, is that right? Yes, i am. I'm a
full member. Became a member about a year or so ago, which is
a real high honor. I'm very grateful for that. They have really kept
the case alive. They have just devoted their own person resources, their personal
interests, their personal support. It was really the Philadelphia Police Department in the
Medical Examiner's office that identifiers and whoever this lab is or whoever we went to
several labs along the way, and that was the real technical effort. They
were just very interested and motivated to keep it out there in the public eye.
That's their job. That was their job. How is the DNA profile
conveyed to you? And remember we're civilians here, do you mean how is
the DNA profile conveyed to me? Once they had an electronic profile, is
that something that can be emailed to you? Or how do they actually transmit
the information to say, okay, identifiers, here's the DNA profile for this
unknown young man murder victim. Basically, it's a it's just a dropbox or
it's a WEE send file. It's just an elect trying to file. It
tends to be can be on the large side if you let it. And
the lab did iterations for us that. We had a discussion because, like
I said, they don't do this really and we had to retro fit what
we needed into what they did. So there was a bunch of discussions.
But basically it's the same way. All of the files come through email or
through dropbox. And again because we're both civilians, and boy do I wish
I'd paid more attention in science class. Now, when you pull a DNA
profile like up on your computer screen, what are you seeing? Are you
seeing? I assume you're not seeing a DNA helix like I have on my
DNA socks, and I assume you're not seeing columns of numbers? What are
you seeing? Precisely? I wouldn't even know how to interpret it, but
try to give me an image if you will. You know, I can
even show you one. The thing is, we don't the raw data is
one thing. Then when you put it on jetmatch or family tree, the
results are something else. Sure, the raw data really has twenty lines of
the date, a name, and this is a nice file, we'd like
you to use it or whatever. And then it's what every line as we
used a million snips or something, so every line is a different snip chromosome.
It gives the GPS coordinates of the snip you want, and then it
tells you the value of that snip, what is on the chromosome at that
area, that location, And so I can even show you. It's just
it's really cut and dry. But they have a million of those. So
it's a real long text file. Very interesting because I'm still trying to imagine
it, and I think it's just gonna be one of those things that I'm
gonna I'm just gonna imagine swirling columns of numbers until I don't want yeah,
all it is. It's like a line, just a line of let me
see what it's. Oh, here I found my own twenty three in meat
data. It says, it says the name of the snip. It says
the chromosome. It's on the GPS coordinate of the snip, where it is
along the line there on the chromosome, and then it tells you what it
is agcts located. And there's the million of those you get. You have
the one, two, three, up to twenty three chromosomes, and then
you have twenty two, and then you have the X, and then you
have mitochondria. And if you're a male, you'll have y snips. So
you have the whole thing there, all the snips that they pick out.
So that's what it looks like. I'm sorry I can't show you. That's
really cool because yet the writer filmmaker in me and the person who's obsessed with
CSI is sitting there picture like swirling double helix is on a screen and I
know that's not what it is. It's just cut and dry, a bunch
of numbers and letters and stuff, and that's all it is. And then
you upload that to jed match and it does stuff with it. Is this
work that you then started or was this part of a identifieder's team who begin
and working on this boy in the Box challenge. I did it myself first
because I'm the DNA guru on our team. But two and a half years
later, after I figured out how the DNA worked, got the data that
we can't show because we can't share screens. Once I had that and we
uploaded it to Jetmatch, then our brilliant genetic genealogist, Misty Gillis went to
work and hammered that genealogy into place to get Gus's name to come up.
Where's Misty based out of Is she in California or elsewhere? She's located near
Chicago. So you handled it first, and then after two and a half
years, you handed it off to Misty for continued research into family connections and
building up family trees. It's all the genealogy. The Misty kind of hung
in there with me along the DNA. She learned a lot, but really
I was power there trying to find out it had It failed a couple of
times. It failed on micro ray, it failed on whole genome sequencing,
so we had to get a specialty lab to look at it. So this
took two and a half years. But of course Misty I always talked to
her about what the next step was and what happened and why I like it
when my team gets educated on what's going on and talking to them and they
come up with ideas sometimes. And then of course when the genealogy started,
she was taking the lead there, but I was in on it too,
making suggestions and watching what the detectives were asking us and what we should suggesting
what we should do, or asking if we had tried this or that or
the other thing, and he was learning from us, So she took the
lead after the data came in. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll
be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at Mind
over Murder. So where were you when you learned we've got the kid's name?
Do you recall where you were precisely when you got that news. That's
the sort of thing that would have made me jump up and down and scream
a little bit. I don't know if you're that kind of person, but
I definitely would have been. I'm sitting right in the chair right here that
the camera, but we had been in touch with the DNA lab Ryan Gallagher,
We had been in touch with Bob Hesser, the detective, and Missy
and I. So we had a call. I wish I had written down
the date. It was October twenty twenty one when we went over all of
the discussion. All we had, all the family tree, we had pulled
some birth, marriage, death records. May have been in November we convene
because so we had to pull death records, birth records for the to fill
out the family tree and find out if mom had any other kids and stuff
like that. That took months because we were in coke, coming out of
coke, and so finally I believe it was October November twenty twenty one.
We were all on the call going over that and finally at the end he
says, Okay, we have it. We have it. That was a
really nice moment. However, the medical examiner was not on the call.
This was in parallel to what the medical examiner does daily on their job.
We were just trying to solve the case now or at least get a candidate
so then to work with the medical examiner. It took several months because first
they were changing medical examiners, but also because the medical examiner from the outside,
he's going to ask questions like, how do you know dad doesn't have
another child that you don't know about Dad, Grandpa didn't have a child.
Maybe there's another brother. Dad has a brother and you don't know about it,
and somebody is going to ask whether you covered that bait. So you
have to go back and work on that, and we did. It took
once the medical examiner had it. That was the last the medical examiner had
to sign off on the death certificate, and that would make it legal.
And I think also one of the aspects was that we've had a lot of
violent crime and this is not the only priority of the detectives we work with.
Oh of course, So I think all things considered, what's going on
in a police department, how shorthanded they are, you know, how hard
it is to be a police officer these days. I think they may have
held it off just because the powers that be didn't have time, weren't informed
yet, and it just took a lot to get everybody on the same page.
Let's put it that way. We had him as the candidate in October
November two, twenty twenty one, and we just announced in December twenty twenty
two. You mentioned the name of the Philadelphia Police detective and I didn't quite
catch it. What's his name again, Bob Heusser. Once the EMMY was
on board, I do get the fact that we're talking about a case that's
over sixty years old, and the EMMY isn't just blithly going to take someone's
word for it. Okay, we've identified this legendary case without having a lot
of questions answered. But once he was on board, the thing is moving
forward. The cases moving forward, but slowly because of all the other challenges
that Philadelphia is facing. I know Philadelphia has had up, yeah, very
serious problem with murders and other violent crime. Obviously, a sixty plus year
old cold case is not going to take precedence over something terrible lipen the night
before. Yeah, it's correct. It just took a while. It had
to be discussion with the families involved. The boy has half siblings and siblings
half siblings on both sides of his family. Some of that had to be
discussed with them, and that took time, and that wasn't something you did
every day. You returned to that when you had a moment, we were
breaking out in hives almost when you kind of announced this. You just can't
tell me to come tomorrow, but you have to give some time and when
am I available, when it is Misty available, we have to coordinate this.
So it was really a question of patience for the last year. That's
gonna be hard to have all of this great information there and you just have
to sit on it. I can't imagine I would have wanted to birth through
it. Yeah, the thing is too It was tough to do that,
but it was also tough for a couple of other reasons. It was funny
about a year ago, I think it was the police, like vice commissioner
or something of the sheriff came up on he did a new spot on the
Boy in the Box about the time at the anniversary, and then he was
buried. The police officer, I believe it was the shriff for the commissioner
said there's going to be a breakthrough by the end of the year. I
always have gotten emails or messages from people and the public saying, oh my
god, just tell me, is he a Croatian? Is he Irish?
My uncle's Irish? I'm pretty sure that was my uncle's brother or my uncle's
nephew or something, or my uncle's brother. Can you please at least tell
me if he's Irish and I usually say no. Then when this announcement came
out, that's going to be your breakthrough. I had people writing me like,
oh my god, is it really you're going to make an announcement.
You've identified them, and we had to sit on it. So what I
did was one of my close friends wrote and she said, is it the
boy in the box? Are you going to announce it? And I said
no. He made a mistake. I think he meant the girl in the
box? And I said, do you know anything about the girl in the
box? Anything about that case? And the friends said no, I don't
know. I had never heard about it. I said, okay then,
and she let it go. I thought that was a little bit clever,
right at the right moment. I do remember it made news when the senior
officer said what he said about the fact that it's going to be significant news
in the camp you play telephone, even within the police department, and somehow
everybody knew it was solved. I don't know how we were really tight lipped,
and it's probably because the detective stepped out the room with his cell phone
every time it came up. Mark, are you giving somebody a surprise birthday
party? And every time they walk in the room, you have to go
in the next room because him something. And there's even one of the members
of the Vetox Society told me that after this phone call that we all decided
we had it. We had to present it to the medical examiner. He
got a call. He was in Europe traveling and in the middle of the
night somebody called him and said that they we had the identification made and the
blue He's in Europe and somebody calls him in the middle of the night.
So then he said, a couple of weeks ago, the same guy,
same person, he will not identify. It's Russian spies and deep throat and
all this stuff going. I'm quite okay, I don't care. What do
we know about Joseph Augustus Arelli. I heard you call him Gus earlier.
I think that's sweet. What do we know about him? That? Not
too much. We haven't released the name of the family last named Zarelli,
so there's not that many face. A group is going wild with that name.
We don't know too much except that it's an open homicide and the boy
was badly abused. And we also knew none of the theories was right,
none of them, which is interesting. A woman wrote me maybe a month
ago and she said, I wrote a book on the boy in the box,
and here's a picture of who I think it is compared to the boy.
And she says, I'm absolutely sure that sim and I know she was
waiting for me to jump through emails saying, oh my god, how'd you
figure it out? That's wonderful. But she was wrong, she was dead
wrong. So all I said was listen, thanks, I appreciate you keeping
this story alive. But all the theories that were developed over the years,
all the way back to nineteen fifty seven, none of them pan out,
absolutely none, And some of them seem so close, like very plausible possibilities.
One is this Foster home that was only a mile and a half from
yeah, where his body was found. And I know there's the leads from
the JC penneybox and the hat, the man's hat that we talked about a
few minutes ago. And this woman, Martha came forward. Oh, Martha,
yeah, she offered a pretty plausible possibility, although she unfortunately herself had
mental illness in her background, so that kind of colored law enforcement perception of
what she had to say, although what she described sounded very plausible, something
about the baked beans and his stomach. He had baked beans, and I
don't know that part about the baked beans, but the boy was very Martha's
story was interesting because of the baked beans, but because he was clean,
his hair was cut, and you would imagine that a child dying covered with
vomit, including baked beans, would be cleaned up. And she knew some
of that, but it turned out she was wrong. She was weird,
and she didn't know what she was talking about. Now was wrong. By
the way, you mentioned Carl Coppelman a few minutes ago, and of course
Carl's done some incredible work, and he's a self trained artist, and he
actually did a facial reconstruction of the boy when he was unknown, and actually
his artistic renderings of victims are so good because unlike autopsy photos and other things
that are just off putting and hard to grasp what someone would have looked like,
he actually introduces life back into what these people might have looked like.
And he has him cleaned up with a nice haircut and a fifties style shirt
to the point where you could actually picture if you had seen that little boy,
let's just say, at the grocery store or something. Carl's rendering might
actually trigger memory, as opposed to staring at these awful photographs of this poor
boy when he's lying on an autopsy table. I agree, And again the
technology has improved a lot, and the boy was actually photo grab The general
picture of the boy was in sitting up, all dressed and in a chair
and more like that. But again that's very primitive compared to what we know
today. Police sounded very confident when this announcement was made about Gus. As
you were saying, Joseph Augustus Sarelli finally having a name. They sounded very
confident that they had some strong leads now on what might have happened to him.
He was badly beaten, obviously, and this is an open homicide investigation,
and there are sort of some clues to who did it, who did
him in Again, I wish I could tell you more. I can't because
it's open homicide. We are not involved in that we already know the story
and we know who we don't know who did it. There's enough clues that
you can think about certain candidates rise to the top as opposed to others.
The boy was just very badly abused and he was probably died just because he
was hitting the head. Something I wish I could tell you more because it
is a rich story and here I'm on this very famous podcast to talk about
it and I keep hitting my head against the police. Don't tell anybody wall
that. Is there something something else you would like to talk about? Did
you pick up much on the emotion? Several of the retired detectives and active
duty detectives talked about how much of a personal connection they felt to this case.
I know you were dealing with the Philadelphia detectives mostly long distance and via
electronic means, but did you pick up on that their sense of how excited
they were to finally see a breakthrough in this I did because I was at
the exhumation and I met a lot of them there, and I met a
lot of the VDAC people there, and they told me that they remember this
story and they have been They would be the same age as the boy,
right now, and they went around, as they said, giving out those
flyers with their families at the grocery store. It's not something you forget.
Somebody your age is murdered and it's in like your neighborhood, or it's close
to you, it's in your town, and it's a situation that never happens.
Not only is he murdered, and I'm sure this child abuse that had
been going on just in general, but then when you find a young boy's
body somewhere, just dumped in the public area that's accessible by the public,
that's not something you let go of. When you're a kid, when you
see that, that's your first exposure to death, your first exposure to death.
And not only that, but the murder of somebody who's your own age.
We're seeing here, I think the same sort of intense emotion that we
also saw when the lady in the Dunes case broke a couple of months back,
and there were so many people who were so excited and felt so connected
to the victim of this truly horrible crime. I think it's fantastic that you
guys are able to work on these much older cases. Is there I feel
like wish list is maybe a little bit of a gruesome way to put it.
Do you have a wish list of other older homicides that you would like
to sink your teeth into in order to do this? Continue to doing that,
Yeah, let me think about that. We just you must know about
the Somerton Man. That was a pretty good one. Yeah, that was
good because that was based on hair. Let's see, there's a couple as
one from Deadwood. I worked on Deadwood. South Dakota was being like renovated.
There was a house that was they were building a retaining wall near the
house and they found a cemetery that was some people still left in a cemetery
underneath the house. One of them was a man who's never been identified.
I did the y DNA on that some time ago. I think I'd like
to do that. That's a really cool historical case. You have to be
incredibly challenging. Work you did on the Somerton Man case, which we talked
about a while back here on Mind of a Murder was just absolutely fascinating.
Do you feel like you're going to be the go to person for these historical
cases? You've really faced down some pretty serious challenges. I really hope.
So it's I love international work. I do that pretty well. I've worked
with Australia on several cases that have yet to be announced that were very interesting
and they were very international. There's always other cases the Plaza woman from isisl
woman. Those are like the same as the Somerton Man that are out there,
and the authorities in those countries really don't want to go anywhere with that
right now because they're still getting their toe in the water. I forgot we
had talked about the Somerton Man right that. I'm just fascinating conversation and yeah,
I'm just trying to remember everything I've done in the last few months.
You must do a ton of media, Like what for a case like this,
how much how many interview requests are you fielding? How much media are
you actually doing for these sorts of this particular case. What happens is if
you give an interview for let's say the Philadelphia Inquirer, it's mirrored all over
the place. I've really been this one. Somerton Man was over the top,
we had everybody. This one is actually more social media that's exploding over
it, less just regular conventional media. It probably will develop into see.
The problem is too, is that Somerton man. We could talk about and
talk about we knew the family. Family has come forward. We could talk
about the long history, the piece of paper in the pocket, the hair
in the cast and all that. But the problem with the boy right now
is we can't really talk too much because he was only four years old.
He didn't have a history. It's not like he went to college and then
he found his body and they investigated all his roommates and stuff like that.
He was a boy. Probably pretty if there's a four year old child living
two blocks for me, I'm not going to know it because I don't have
children myself, so he's a lot more obscure. And the fact it's an
and homicide is hard to speak about. It's very frustrating because there are some
very interesting things I could tell you about that, but I don't want to
interfere it with the investigation. That's understandable, and I don't want to make
it sound like we're criticizing the Zarelli family either. I know they said specifically
that the mother and the father of this boy are dead, but that he
does have siblings or half siblings, but they haven't necessarily come forward, and
I understand that they might prefer to remain in the background. Another avenue where
if someone like a brother or a sister or someone like that came forward and
began talking about Joseph Augustus Sarelli as little kid, would paint more of a
complete picture. Perhaps that will happen down the road. If an offender's ever
identified, Yeah, I got that, because he's younger than all of these
half siblings that are still us. And I think there's another half sister who
was adopted out who never met him. He didn't know anything about him.
So there's nobody really that can speak about it. There's really nobody. There's
maybe an uncle here or one of the sides. He may not know anything
either, But it's so far in the past. Like I say, Somerton
man, he was an adult. You have his divorced decree, he was
married, the brothers, sisters, they all grew up in the same house.
You have family pictures. But in this case the boy is four,
there's and the parents are dead. So if there were any family pictures,
and why would you take family pictures? And he could like Gabriel Hernandez or
whatever. But back then there's just so little about him known about him,
and being four, he's not even a school yet. So there's where he
would have met his peer, right, hopefully he would have met there would
have been school records, or there would have been He was originally thought to
be maybe as old as seven, but in that case, maybe that somebody
in second grade would know him a first grade. He was four. He
didn't even go to school, so he's probably at home a lot. And
some of the theories, which I know have been put aside, seemed to
have a through line that there was a possibility that he was adopted and then
abused by adoptive or foster or foster parents. Yeah. I don't know.
I don't think that's correct. I think he stayed with his parents, or
his at least one of the original parents. I don't think he was really
adopted out. I don't think that's right. I guess the ultimate tragedy is
that this happened and he was murdered and obviously missing and no one ever reported
him. Yeah. Again, if you think about my neighborhood here, I
have kids running around, or if you had kid two or three houses over,
if the kid doesn't show up, if the kid disappears, I wouldn't
even think to ask. If I had my own kids, it would be
one thing. And then you look back fifty years sixty years ago, you
can always say, oh, he's off visiting his aunt. Were considering moving
in New York, so I sent him to live with my aunt for a
few months. There's nothing and there's no record of him except there's birth certificate.
Other than that, there's no school record. No, I'm not sure
we had you could get a baptismal record. We didn't try that. Oh.
We are so glad though that he has a name, and it's down
to the fantastic work that you and your team did that this poor little boy
now actually has a name and someone can actually put it on a stone for
him. So what is up next for your team? Can you tell us
or do you have to keep it on with the DL like normal. I'll
tell you we we have some really cool cases we're working on, and you
really can't talk about some of them. Nom I will talk about that I'm
very interested in is that we're doing Madison Jane Doe. She is a little
girl that was found in a suitcase and two fifteen or sixteen in Texas and
she had a feeding tube in the suitcase with her and she was discarded by
the side of the road and some area of Texas. And we're doing a
really bang up job. We've been working on it, I think three years
four years now, three or four years now, and it's gonna It's not
as prominent as buying the box, but the little girl is just it's so
interesting because the DNA says she's got Mexican, she's got calif Old, California,
Spanish, she's got French, Canadian, and she's got Central American,
Guatemalan and El Salvadorian. What's interesting, We've made contact with the forensic people
in Guatemala and El Salvador and they're helping us. We have her teeth being
analyzed for the isotope analysis, and that will tell you where you grew up.
Is Wolves in your teeth because everything you eat and drink, breathe becomes
part of you in some sense. So when you are a baby, in
your teeth are forming. Everything you eat drink becomes part of the enamel and
that never changes. That's the one part of the body that never changes.
So having her to find out where she was born to see if she was
born in Central America or here. And I love that because your body is
like a book on who you are, where you're coming from, and we're
just turning one page after the book after another for the book. Do you
think you'll be able to identify Madison Jane Doe? Yeah, I think so.
We're going to keep trying. The databases are not great for Concentral Americans
necessarily, so there's some distant matches and the forensic people in El Savador,
we've turned over to them some candidates for cousins and relatives and great uncles and
stuff. They're going to do some work for us trying to find those families
and discuss with them, help find out. That is one case that we
really are very interested on, interested in and just taking a long time because
of the ethnic back. That's one we're working on. Another Donde called Tuna
Lake, and that's a man in the lake in Georgia, in Altuna,
Georgia, who was he was shot, but at the same time he had
swim fins on in the lake with rocks in his pockets. So you have
to think, is what happened there? Is it murder? Is it suicide.
It's so weird that one's carrying on for a long time because we had
some problems with the samples, but I think we have them worked out now.
Colleen, as always, thank you for taking the time to talk to
the two of us about the amazing work you're doing. And please just keep
right on doing it and as long as you keep breaking cases, we'll have
you right back on the podcast. Okay, it's a deal. Sounds like
a plan. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of My
Different Murder. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production
of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and
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