I want you to close your eyes for a second. Picture a gray, miserable afternoon. It is late February nineteen fifty seven. The wind is biting. The wind is biting. We are in the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia. Now, if you go there today, you're going to see suburbs, houses, you know, life. But in nineteen fifty seven, it was the edge of the world. It was the edge of the world. It was scrubland, rural. It was the kind of place where the weeds grew waist high and people went to dump things. He didn't want anyone else to see. Trash, trash, old furniture, secrets. It creates a very specific atmosphere, doesn't it. I mean it's desolate, it's quiet, exactly. It's a place for hiding. Yeah. And it's here in this tangle of underbrush that a college student is walking along checking muskrat traps when he stumbles across a cardboard box. And inside that box, and inside that box was a mystery that would freeze the city of Philadelphia for sixty five years. It is arguably the most famous cold case in the history of that city, and well perhaps one of the most enduring in American criminal history. For decades, the victim was known only as the Boy in the Box. Or as the inscription on his gravestone read America's unknown Child. That's it. But, and this is why we are here today. Stories change technology. It drags the truth out of the ground, sometimes literally, because we aren't just looking at a cold case today. We're looking at a solved mystery or at least the identity part is solved. That's the huge news because. In December of twenty twenty two, the Boy in the Box finally got his name back. That's right. We now know him as Joseph Augustus Sarelli. And while that revelation answers the the burning question of who he was, it opens up a massive, complex discussion about how we found him. So here's our mission for this deep dive. We're going to do two things, and we need to give both of them some serious space. First, we are going to unpack the narrative of the investigation. Itself, the original investigation. The original we're talking about gritty noir style nineteen fifties detective work. We're talking about bizarre theories involving psychics, a foster home that looks like something out of a horror movie and a woman known only as m. It is a wild, frustrating, heartbreaking ride, it really is. And then we need to pivot. We need to look at the method because this case wasn't solved by a detective kicking down a door or some deathbed confession. No, it was solved by forensic genetic genealogy. And while that sounds like a triumph of science, and it absolutely is, it raises some profound ethical questions about privacy, surveillance, and really the future of justice. It's the Jurassic Park question right just because we can, should. We That's the question. But before we get to the philosophy, we have to deal with the reality. We know his name, Joseph august is Aarelli. But here is the tension that hangs over this entire episode. We still don't know who killed him. The murder remains unsolved. And that is the tragedy that sits at the center of this scientific breakthrough. We have a name, we have a face, but we don't yet have justice. We have half a book. Yeah, so let's reach wind the clock, take us back to Susquehanna Road February nineteen fifty seven, set the scene for the discovery what exactly happened that day. To understand the discovery, and frankly, the delay in the discovery, you have to understand the geography and the sociology of the place. Okay, Susquehanna Road and Fox Chase wasn't a main thoroughfare. It was a narrow country lane, a baby half a mile long. On one side you had heavy, dense woods on the other open fields. This it's rural, very rural. It was a habitat for small game rabbits, muskrats. It was a place for hunters and trappers. Which explains why Frederick Banonas was there. He wasn't just out for a. Stroll, right. Frederick Barnonas was a twenty six year old student at LaSalle College. It was the afternoon of February twenty fifth. He's driving home and he sees a rabbit dart across the road and into the brush. Okay, he stops the car. He knows there are muskrat traps in the area. He set some himself in the past, and he wants to check to see if the rabbit got caught. So he's trekking through the dead weeds looking for this rabbit. And he finds a box. It's a large cardboard carton the kind used to ship a bassinet. It's just sitting there in the undergrowth. He looks inside. Now, initially he thinks he's looking at a doll. Which is a reasonable assumption, I guess. I mean, you're in a trash dump. You see a box, you see a human shape. Your brain wants it to be a discarded toy. Exactly. It's a defense mechanism, I think. But then he looks closer. He realizes the doll has human skin. He sees the texture. He realizes he is looking at a deceased child. Oh god, But here. Is where the story takes a turn. That is well, it's incredibly difficult for modern minds to process. He doesn't call the police. Bonas doesn't run to the nearest phone booth. He doesn't flag down a car. He gets back in his vehicle, drives home, eats dinner, and goes to sleep. He waits a full day. He waits a full day before calling the police. Hold on, I need to pause here, because this is the first moment where the logic breaks from me. He finds a child, a murdered child in a box and he just sits on it. That feels impossible to square with human nature unless he's involved. It does feel suspicious, doesn't it, unless you understand who Frederick banonas was, and maybe more importantly, where he was. Okay, we have to strip away our modern lens where it's like this is nineteen fifty seven. Philadelphia is a deeply Catholic, deeply conservative city, and Susquehanna Road isn't just a place to check traps. Right, I was reading in the notes at the Good Shepherd School for Wayward Girls is nearby exactly, which just the name alone wayward Girls tells you everything you need to know about the moral panic of the era. Everything. It was a reformatory for young women who had fallen in the eyes of society, and banonas well. He wasn't just there for rabbits. He admitted later to investigators that he was in the habit of visiting Susquehanna Road to, let's say, spy on the young women at the school. So he was a peeping tom essentially. Yes, he was a voyeur. So put yourself in his shoes. He's a twenty six year old bachelor, a college student, with a reputation to uphold drive, having a desolate road peering into the woods near a girl's reformatory. So his calculation is cold but rational. If I call the police, I have to explain why I was parked in the bushes next to the wayward girls. School and in nineteen fifty seven. That's not just embarrassing. That is social suicide. That is expulsion from LaSalle College. That is the end of his reputation. So he makes a choice. He protects himself. He prioritizes his own social standing over the reporting of the body. He was terrified of the scandal. That is such a greedy war detail. It reminds me of rear window or something. The witness is compromised by his own vice. It really paints a picture of the stifling social atmosphere of the fifties. Absolutely it does. And he sits on that secret for a full twenty four hours. It's only the next morning when he hears a radio report about a missing girl named Mary Jane Barker that his conscience finally outweighs his fear. He thinks it might be here. He thinks, oh god, what if that was her. He actually consulted his priest first, another very nineteen fifties detail, and then finally called the police. And when the police arrived, Elmer Palmer was the first officer on the scene. I can only imagine what that scene looked like. The delay meant the body had been out there even longer. It was stark, the weather was cold, A grizzle was falling, turning the dust to mud. The boy was naked, wrapped in a cheap flannel blanket. The description of the body is heartbreakingly specific. He was mall for his age right. Malnourished, pale skin, blue eyes. He weighed only thirty pounds to. Thirty pounds for a child estimated to be four to six years old. That's incredibly light. It's the weight of a toddler. It signaled long term neglect or illness. But the condition of the body told a story of more than just starvation. This wasn't just a case of passive neglect. There was active violence. The autopsy report is brutal reading it is. The medical examiner found bruises all over his head and body. But here's a crucial forensic detail. They appeared to have been inflicted at the same time, not. A pattern of healing bruises over months, which you often see in chronic abuse cases. Exactly, this wasn't that this was a singular catastrophic beating. There was also a really disturbing detail about his hands and feet. The sources call it the washerwoman effect. Can we unpack that? Yes, the skin on his right palm and the soles of both feet was wrinkled and white, exactly as your skin gets when you stand the bath too long, pruned, pruned. It suggested that shortly before or after death, those specific parts of his body had been submerged in water for an extended period. That's such a bizarre specific detail. One hand, in both feet. It almost sounds like he was, I don't know, partially submerged or maybe dangling. It's one of those clues that investigators obsessed over. It implies a scenario, maybe a bathtub, maybe a stream, but it didn't give them a location. But there was another clue that spoke to something even more complex, the grooming. The haircut. This is the part that suggests a cover up. To me, right, someone had cut this boy's hair very recently, but it was a crude, hurried job. The hair was cut close to the scalp almost buzzed, but in a jagged way. So it looks like they were trying to change his appearance to hide his identity. That's the theory. And crucially, whoever did it didn't clean him off. There were clumps of cut hair still clinging to his body. So picture this. Someone beats this child to death, or beats him and he dies shortly after. Then panic sets in. They try to disguise him by chopping off his hair, but they do it so fast they leave the evidence all over him. It screams desperation. It does. But then you have to reconcile that with the fingernails and toenails, which were neatly trimmed, which implies care. It's such a contradiction exactly. That's the contradiction that baffled police. You have signs of severe abuse and malnutrition, a panic disposal, but you also have neat nails and perhaps most importantly, surgical scars. Surgical scars, so he had been to a doctor. Yes, he had a scar on his ankle that looked like a cut down incision. That's a procedure used to expose a vein for an IV line, usually in an emergency or for serious treatment. Wow, he also had surgical scars on his chest and groin. These were well healed. So this child had received professional medical care at some point in his life. He hadn't been hidden in a basement his entire existence. Which makes it even more frustrating that nobody claimed him. If he had surgery, there was a doctor, there was a hospital record, there was. A paper trail, but they couldn't find it. And investigators knew that. They checked thousands of hospital records. They looked for every male child who had a cut down, incision or a hernia repair. But this was the pre digital age. Records were on index cards, handwriting was illegible, files were lost. They simply couldn't find the match. Let's talk about the box itself, because for a long time, the box was the best lead they had. It wasn't just a random box. It was traceable. It was It was a JC Penny bacinet box, specifically a carton for a white wicker bacinet. It was stamped fragile and furniture. The police did incredible legwork here. They traced the inventory codes on that specific box. They found that only twelve of them had been sold at the JC Penny in Upper Derby. Twelve. That seems like a manageable list of suspects. You have twelve people who bought the coffin, essentially. You would think. But remember no credit cards, no loyalty programs, no digital footprints. It was a cash and carry. World, so they couldn't track everyone down. They managed to track down eleven of the twelve purchasers through receipts, delivery logs, or checks, leaving one leaving one mystery buyer who paid cash, picked up the box themselves and walked away. That person remained a ghost, and. The evidence field around him wasn't empty either. There's a blanket and a cap. The blanket was a cheap cotton flannel plaid pattern green rust brown white. It had been cut in half and mended with low grade thread. Again, it suggests poverty, but also an attempt to make do. It suggests the household it does. And the cap. The cap was a big deal for a while. A royal blue corduroy cap found nearby. This was a tantalizing lead. It was traced to a specific manufacturer, the Robin's Bald Eagle Hat and Cap Company, and. The owner, Hannah Robbins actually remembered selling it. She did, which is amazing. She remembered the specific sale. That seems so unlikely given how many hats a shop sells. It was a custom job. She recalled a man buying it who resembled the boy, blonde hair, late twenties, wearing work clothes. He asked for a specific modification, a leather strap added to the back. So she did it herself. She did it herself. She remembered him. That is the stuff of detective dreams. You have a witness who saw the potential father, or at least a relative. But despite that vivid memory, they never found the man. They had a description, they had a custom hat, but in a city of millions, without a name, it was another dead end. So you have a body, a box, a blanket, and a cap. You have a detailed description of a boy who had been medically treated, and yet nothing. The silence from the public must have been deafening. Well, the manhunt was unprecedented. We're talking about four hundred thousand flyers sent out. They included them with gas bills. Wow, think about that saturation. Every household in Philadelphia that paid a gas bill saw this boy's face. They had two hundred and seventy police recruits shouldered to shoulder combing a twelve square mile area of Fox. Chase, just looking for anything. Anything, a piece of the blanket, another clue. And they even did something that seems quite macabre to us today. The post mortem photos. Yes, they dressed the body. They put him in clothes, sat them up, and took photos to try and make him look alive, hoping it would spark a recognition that the grim morg photos wouldn't. It was a desperate measure. So desperate they needed someone to look at that picture and say I know him. And despite all of that, the case went cold, But it didn't die because people became obsessed with it. It's the kind of case that burrows into your brain and. That brings us to the theories, and one man in particular, Remington brig. Remington Bristow, is a central character in this narrative. He wasn't a police detective. He was an investigator for the Medical Examiner's office. And he made this case his life's work. Absolutely, he spent thirty six years until his death in nineteen ninety three chasing this ghost. He spent thousands of dollars of his own money, and he. Locked onto a specific theory involving a foster home. This is where the story gets really weird. The foster home theory. There was a foster home about a mile and a half from the dumb site, run by the Nicoletti family. Bristow became convinced the boy was connected to this house. Why that house specifically? Did he have a tip? Well, this is where we veer into the esoteric. He enlisted a psychic, of course, he did, a New Jersey psychic named Florence Sternfeld. She told him to look for a house with a log cabin and a wooden railing. Bristow drove around until he found a house that matched that description, the Nicoletti home. I love how nineteen fifties investigations seamlessly blend hard shoe leather detective work with psychics. It just shows the desperation. We have no leads. Let's call the fortune teller exactly. It was a different time, but Bristow found more than just a vibe. He went to an estate sale at the house years later and found a bassinet in the basement that looked remarkably similar to the J. C. Penny one no way. Yes, And he saw blankets on the clothesline that looked like the one found with the body. And there was a pond right which connects to the washerwoman hands. Yes, a duck pond. Bristow theorized that the boy was the illegitimate child of the stepdaughter, Anna Marine Nagel. He thought the boy died accidentally, maybe drowned in the pond or was injured, and the family panicked to hide the secret child. It sounds plausible. I mean, it ties up all the loose ends. It gives a motive, shame, and a method. The pond explained the water log skin, the proximity explained the dumping. It does, and Bristow believed it until his dying day. He was absolutely certain. But here is the cold reality of forensic science. It wasn't true. Police eventually interviewed the family and ruled them out, and much later test and confirmed there was no genetic link whatsoever. The theory was a mirage. Bristow died believing he had solved it, but he was wrong. That's tragic in its own right, a life spent chasing the wrong lead. But that wasn't the only detailed theory. There was the M theory. This one came much later, in two thousand and two, and. Honestly, this one creeps me out the most. This is perhaps the most disturbing of the theories because of the brutality. A woman from Ohio, referred to only as M to protect her identity, came forward claiming her mother had bought the boy in nineteen fifty four. She said his name was Jonathan, and. Her story wasn't about a foster home accident. It was about torture. It was a house of horrors. She claimed her mother was abusive and that Jonathan was kept in the basement essentially as a slave. She detailed years of physical and sexual abuse. And she gave a specific cause of death. She said he was killed in a fit of rage after he vomited his dinner into. The bathtub, and the dinner was big beans, right. And here is where the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. The autoxy in nineteen fifty seven had noted a brown residue in the boy's stomach that was consistent with baked beans wow, and the washerwoman's skin consistent with being killed in a bathtub. Um also knew about the haircut, claiming her mother cut his long hair after he died to hide his identity. That is terrifyingly specific. She also mentioned a motorist right something about when they were dumping the body. Yes, she claimed that when they were dumping the body in the woods, a man pulled over to offer help, thinking they had a flat tire. She said her mother forced her to stand in front of the license plate while they waved him off. And that matched a secret witness report. It matched a confidential report from nineteen fifty seven where a witness, a motorist, described that exact scenario. That detail had never been released to the press. So why wasn't this the answer? It fits the evidence perfectly. It explains the beans, the water skin, the haircut, and the secret witness. This sounds like the solution corroboration, that is the gold standard. Em had a history of severe mental health health issues. Police investigated her claims thoroughly. They went to the house she grew up in. They dug up the basement looking for physical traces, bone fragments, shackles, anything. They found nothing, so no physical evidence. They couldn't verify a single part of her story with physical evidence. Despite the narrative fit. It was deemed a dead end. It's incredibly frustrating. You have these stories that feel true, that resonate with the physical facts, but the truth requires proof, and without DNA, without a confession, it's just a story. And for decades, proof was exactly what they lacked. They checked Hungarian refugee records, eleven thousand passport photos, thinking he might be a refugee from the nineteen fifty six revolution. Nothing. They checked kidnapping cases like Stephen Dammon. Nothing. So the narrative hit a wall. The detective work, the flyers, the psychics, the theories, none of it worked. The boy remained anonymous. He was a symbol of the city's failure. He was But while the investigation stalled, science was more parching forward. And this brings us to the pivot point, the shift from gumshoe detective work to the laboratory. And this didn't happen overnight. Right, let's talk about the science of identifications. Yeah, because they tried this before twenty twenty two, didn't they They exhumed him in the nineties. They did in nineteen ninety eight, they exhumed the body for the first time. The hope was to get DNA, but we have to remember nineteen ninety eight technology is ancient history compared to today. The remains were degraded, they could only extract mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA that's the stuff passed down from the mother correct. It's found in the mitochondria, the cell outside the nucleus. It's plentiful, which makes it easier to find in old bones. But it's not very. Specific, so it's not like a fingerprint. Not at all. It's useful for ruling people out, like they used it to prove he wasn't Stephen Damman, but it's not unique enough to identify a specific person. It points to a maternal line, not an individual. Millions of people can share the same mitochondrial DNA profile. So nineteen ninety eight was a partial success, but a fil you're inidentification. The real turning point was April twenty nineteen, the second exhumation. What changed was the resolution. We moved from standard forensic DNA to SMP testing. And to understand why this matters, we need to get a little technical. Okay, let's break it down. Most people know DNA from CSI or law and order that's Cody's right. Right. Cody's uses STR short tandem repeats. Think of an STR profile like a license plate. It's a string of numbers. Okay, if you have a suspect in custody, you check his license plate against the crime scene. If the numbers match, you got them. But you don't have the suspect in the database. The license plate is useless. You can't look at a license plate and say, oh, this car belongs to a guy whose cousin lives in Ohio exactly. STRs don't carry enough information to build a family tree. For that. You need SNP's single nucleotide polymorphisms SNP. SNP What are those? If STRs are license plates, SNPs are the typos in you're in struction manual. They are variations at a single spot in the DNA sequence, like having a T where most people have an AG. We all have millions of. These, millions of them. By looking at hundreds of thousands of them, you create a high resolution map of a person's genetic heritage. You can see who they are related to based on how many typos they share. But there was a massive problem with Joseph DNA right. It wasn't pristine. It had been in the ground for sixty two years. Far from it. Doctor Colleen Fitzpatrick, a forensic genealogist who worked on the case, described it vividly. She said the DNA was like confetti. Confetti that does not sound good. It means it was fragmented. The chemical bonds that hold the DNA strands together had broken down. Instead of long, readable sentences, the sequencers were getting random letters. Like a shredded document. Doctor Fitzpatrick uses this analogy of a Pseudoku puzzle that I want to push on that because it's actually more complex. Imagine a Sudoku puzzle where ninety percent of the numbers are missing and the paper has been shredded. And wet, it covered in mud for sixty years. Right. The confetti problem isn't just that the DNA strands are broken, it's that they are chemically damaged. When they tried to sequence it, they weren't getting nice, clean readouts. They were getting noise. So how did they solve it? Did they just guess? No? They use a technique called whole genome sequencing. But they did it with massive coverage. What does that mean coverage? Think of it like this, if you read a sentence once and the ink is smudged, you might miss a word. But if you read it one hundred times and different parts are smudged each time, you can overlay those one hundred reads to figure out what the sentences. That's a great way to put it. They stacked the fragmented confetti pieces until they had a consensus, a clear picture exactly. They rebuilt the genome digitally and once they had enough SNPs, enough data points, they could move to the next step, forensic genetic genealogy. This is the golden state killer technique. Yes, and this is where the genealogists like Misty Gillis from a Dentifinders International come in. They take that SMP profile and upload it to public databases. Not codies. Not codies. They uploaded to places like ged match, where regular people upload their DNA results to find relatives. So they aren't looking for the boy, they're looking for. His cousins precisely, and they found one. A second cousin, once removed, had uploaded their DNA A second. Cousin once removed. That's a pretty distant relation. I don't think I even know my second cousins once removed. Most people don't, but in the world of genetic genealogy, it's a gold mine. It gave them a thread to pull, a starting point, a starting point from that cousin, they built a family tree. They went backward in time to find the common ancestors, great grandparents, and then they had to build the tree forward in time to find all the descendants. It's like detective work, but in archives and birth records instead of on the street. They are hunting through census data. And eventually that tree narrowed down. It led them to a specific set of parents in West Philadelphia. They found them. They found the birth mother, who is now deceased. They dug into her records and found three birth certificates attached to her. Two were for known children, but one one was for a male child born in nineteen fifty three, Joseph Joseph Augustus Sirelli born January thirteenth, nineteen fifty three. In just like that, the unknown child has a birthday. He hasn't addressed near sixty first and Market in West Philadelphia. He has a history, and he has family. This is the part that really strikes me. He has living siblings on both the maternal and paternal sides. That's heavy. There are people walking around today, who are the brothers and sisters of this boy? Do we know if they knew about him? The police haven't released those details to protect the investigation, but we know the parents are deceased. We know Joseph wasn't reported missing. Which is a chilling detail in itself. You don't report a child missing if you know exactly where he is, or if. You are the reason he's missing. Captain Jason Smith from the Philadelphia PDA was very careful with his words. He said they have suspicions. He said it would be irresponsible to name the suspects yet because the murder investigation. Is still active, but the implication is clear. The call likely came from inside the house. So we have the who. But the who leads us directly into the how in a way that makes some people uncomfortable. This wasn't just old fashioned digging. This was genetic surveillance. This brings us to the ethical core of this deep dive. We need to talk about the shift in methodology. For a long time, forensic DNA was about verification. You have a suspect, you take their DNA, you check if it matches the crime scene. It's a one to one check. But this, this is fishing, this is casting an NED. It's searching, it's using DNA to find a suspect through their family, and that distinction changes everything. The sources break down the database ecosystem into three types. Can we walk through those? Because I think people get confused about where the police are actually looking. They assume the police can see everything, right. It's not that simple. First, you have the forensic databases. This is CODIS, the government run system. It contains DNA from convicted offenders, arrestees, and crime scenes. And there's a massive bias there, a. Huge one because of systemic issues in policing and justice. Who gets arrested, who gets convicted. CODIS is heavily skewed toward people of color. African Americans make up about thirteen percent of the population, but forty percent of CODIS records. So if you're looking for a suspect in a marginalized community, COTIS is a powerful, albeit biased tool, correct. Then you have the commercial databases. This is your twenty three and meters, your ancestry, the stuff you buy at Target for Christmas. These are private corporations you pay your ninety nine dollars. You spit in a tube and there are terms of service generally protect you from law enforcement fishing expeditions. They fight subpoenas and the bias here swings the other way. Swings the other way. These databases are roughly seventy five percent white or European. Descent because of the cost. Right, it's a luxury item. It's recreational genealogy exactly. It's for people who want to know what percent Viking they are. And then the third category public databases ged match. This is the open source world. Hobbyists download their data from twenty three and May and upload it to ged match to cast a wider net to find relatives who tested with other companies. And this is where law enforcement goes. Because the rules are looser, because. Until recently the rules there were much looser. This is where the Golden State Killer case blew the doors off and it leads to this concept of the pizza crust. President. Please explain that because it sounds like a bad Seinfeld episode, but I know it's serious. It's very serious. It refers to the Grim Sleeper case. In Los Angeles. Police had a DNA sample from the serial killer, but no match in codis, so they ran a familial search in the state database. They found a partial match that pointed to a young man. But the young man was too young to be the killer. Right, But the DNA indicated he was the son of the killer. Oh wow. So they looked at his father, Lonnie Franklin Junior, but they didn't have the father's DNA to. Confirm it, so they couldn't get a warrant, not. For his blood. No, so they followed him. They watched him go to a restaurant, eat some pizza and throw the crust away. They retrieved the crust from the trash, tested the saliva on it, and it was a match. Wow. The term for this is indirect lifelong surveillance. If your brother, or your cousin or your second cousin once removed, decides to take a DNA test, you become discoverable. There are effectively in a police lineup for the rest of your life. Yeah, without ever consenting to it. That's it. That is the crux of the debate, isn't it Privacy versus justice? And I want to play Devil's advocate here because I look at Justice Sorelli a four year old beaten to death, and look at the Golden State killer who raped and murdered with impunity, And I say, so. What, so what if we catch them? Exactly? So? What if my DNA is in a database. If I haven't murdered anyone, why do I care if the police look at my cousins to rule me out. It feels like a theoretical privacy violation versus a tangible public safety benefit. That's the nothing to hide argument, and it's powerful. There's a concept in Jewish law called picock nefesch, the idea that saving a life overrides almost all other religious rules. Okay, the argument is that catching a serial killer or identifying a murdered child is a moral imperative that outweighs privacy concerns. Survey show the public generally supports this for violent crimes. So what's the counter argument? Why should I be worried? It's the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The argument is that my genetic code is my property. By searching through my family to find me, you are conducting a warrantless search. But the pizza crest, the pizza crest was abandoned legally, once you throw it away, it's trash. But the data in the database isn't trash. And here is where it gets slippery. Okay, right now, we trust the police to use this for murder and rape. But what if the definition of serious crime shifts ah mission creep exactly, what if this technology is used to track political dissidents or women seeking abortions and states where that's illegal or petty theft. The infrastructure is now built, The family trees are mapped, so. Once a tool exists, it could be used for anything. If the government can use your family tree to narrow down a suspect pool to you and then follow you to wait for you to spit out gum, you are effectively under surveillance without probable cause. Plus there's the issue of unintended findings. The sources mention this as a major side effect. Oh, this is huge. When police and genealogists start digging into family trees, they don't just find criminals. They find secrets, family secrets. Adoptions that were never disclosed, sperm donors, affairs. You might be looking for a murderer and accidentally reveal that a man isn't the biological father of his children. Precisely, you can destroy families collaterally. You are exposing secrets that people took to the grave, secrets that have nothing to do with the crime you are investigating. And then there's the hacking risk. Yeah, the sources mention a breach at ged match in twenty twenty. Yes forced open the profiles. They made it so law enforcement could search profiles that had explicitly opted out of law enforcement matching. It showed that these databases aren't Fort Knox. If you digitize your DNA, you lose control of it. You lose control. It's a heavy price. But then you look back at the beginning of our story. You look at a box in the woods, You look at a child who is nameless for sixty five years, and you have to ask, is the loss of my anonymity a fair price to pay to give him his name back? That's the question, and I think for most people, when they see the face of the victim, the answer is yes. But in the abstract, when you think about the power of the state, it's terrifying. So what does the future hold. This was the first identification of its kind in Philadelphia, but it won't be the last. No, Captain Jason Smith mentioned they have over a dozen similar cases in progress. Doctor Constance DiAngelo called it a snowball effect. What does she mean by that? Every solve case teaches them new techniques, They get faster, they get better at handling the confetti DNA, the costs come down. This is only going to accelerate. But there's a sobering reality check here. We know Joseph's name, what are we going to see an arrest? It's unlikely. We have to be realistic about the passage of time. It's been sixty six years. Witnesses are dead. The perpetrators, if they were the parents or adults known to the child, are almost certainly dead. Captain Smith admitted that he said, we may not make an arrest, but we're going to do our darnedest. And maybe in this specific case, justice isn't handcuffs. Maybe justice is simply the truth. Maybe it's removing the unknown from the headstone. I think that's a powerful way to look at it, because for decades that grave in Ivy Hills Cemetery was a symbol of sadness. It read Heavenly Father blessed this unknown boy. That was his identity unknown, And now now it reads Joseph Augustus Sorelli. He'sn't a symbol of failure anymore. He's a person, he's a son, he's a brother. We moved from a boy in a box to a dot on a genetic map, and that journey took sixty five years. It did, and the science that got us there is the same science that is rewriting the rules of privacy for every single one of us. It really makes you think you might never commit a crime, you might never take a DNA test, you might guard your privacy with your life, But if your second cousin, once removed, gets curious about their ancestry. You are in the system. You and your genetic secrets are part of the lineup. Is the loss of that anonymity a fair price to pay for giving a name to a child who waited sixty five years to be found. That's the question to leave with