Archives Text Page 9

By JOE CLARK

 There's going to be a memorial service Friday at the medical examiner's office on University Ave.

It won't be much, maybe a few investigators and a couple of city officials. A few words of eulogy from Rem Bristow, a medical examiner investigator, should do it.

Bristow's eulogy will go something like this:

"On Feb. 25, 1957, a little boy died in Philadelphia. He was apparently loved, cared for by a family who did their best for him. Apparently it wasn't enough. Having little or no money to arrange for a proper burial, they bathed him, cut his hair, cleaned his finger nails, wrapped him in a blanket, placed him in a cardboard box and took him to a lonely place in Northeast Philadelphia where they carefully set down the box in preparation for a burial service."

"FOR SOME REASON they were frightened away before the burial. The next day the boy was found. He became known as 'The Fox Chase Boy" or "The Boy in the Box." Now 15 years have passed since that date. Today we remember the boy. He is still loved, not only by his unknown parents but by others who care..."

Bristow cares the most.

He was working the day that Case 863 came in. The day the box was found off Susquehanna rd. near Verree rd.

Bristow began his investigation routinely. But after thousands of leads and equal number of dead ends, Case 863 became an obsession.

THIS OBSESSION inspires Bristow to make periodic visits to the city cemetery and place a bouquet of flowers atop grave No. 191. It has a granite marker with a simple epitaph:

Heavenly Father

Bless This Unknown Boy

February 25, 1957

"I have met other people at the grave," said Bristow. "People who have been following the case through the years like myself. Sometimes I go and watch and hope his parents might come."

So Rem Bristow continues his quest to put a name on the stone of grace 191. And this Friday he'll say a few words about the boy, who was between 4 and 6 years of age, buried there.

He'll also unveil a lifelike bust of the boy as a memorial. The bust was created by Marilyn Hodes, a sculptor who lives in Merion, gave it to Bristow as a memento of his long involvement with the case.

PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

BOY IN THE BOX AFTER 25 YEARS, FOX CHASE BODY STILL BAFFLES PROBER

Thursday, February 18, 1982

Section:?

Page: 6

BY GLORIA CAMPISI

" The minute I heard it, I started thinking, well, we've got another one", Remington Bristow recalled. When the retired medical examiner's investigator learned the body of a small, unidentified girl had been found last Friday in a trunk under the George Platt Bridge in Southwest Philadelphia, it made the upcoming 25th anniversary of the " Boy in the Box" all the more poignant.

 On Feb. 25, just a few days from now, it will be 25 years since the boy, blond, blue-eyed and about 4 years old, was discovered in a cardboard box in a dense thicket in Fox Chase, where now there are brick homes. The body was found washed, hair and nails clipped, almost as if it had been prepared for burial.

 BRISTOW STILL HAS NOT GIVEN UP his search for the identity of the long-dead " Boy in the Box."

 "It keeps on year after year, and day after day," Bristow, who himself lost a child to crib death many years ago, said last night. "The medical examiner sends me all the leads. Everything they get. There are three filing cabinets full of investigative reports," said Bristow, who retired in 1977.

 Bristow believes he came closest to identifying the dead child last year. " In 1981, I thought I almost had the answer, but I found the young fella alive and well," he said.

 " I hope they don't make the same mistakes we did," Bristow said of the investigation into the death of the little girl, black and between 5 and 7, whose cause of death was not immediately determined.

 " NUMBER ONE, THE BOX the boy was found in was never fingerprinted," Bristow said. " It was just an oversight because there were so many darn people at the scene." Bristow did not become deeply involved in the case until after the boy, naked but for a scrap of blanket when found, finally was buried, July 24, 1957, in a suit that belonged to the young son of one of the investigators.

 Listed as Morgue Case No. 29109, he was laid to rest in Grave 191 at the city cemetery on Dunks Ferry Road. A headstone erected with money donated by detectives who had worked on the case reads:

" Heavenly Father, bless this unknown boy."

 To this day even the manner of the child's death remains unknown. He died of head injuries, but whether they were inflicted by a beating or some accident could never be determined.

 " EVENTUALLY HE WILL BE identified," and the mystery solved, Bristow is certain. " Someday the mother or father or sister or brother will come forward . . . give us the answer. " I don't think any unusual investigative technique is going to bring it out."

He tried them all, he recalled in a former interview, even working with a North Jersey psychic who once asked him, " Is there a Darby in Philadelphia?"

 The large cardboard box in which the child's body was found had been traced to the J.C. Penney store in Upper Darby and had contained a white bassinet. The fruitless search reached as far away as California, and went through hundreds of tips.

 Perhaps the most macabre was the tip about two carnival workers finally located in Virginia. They admitted they had permitted six of their 10 children to die of malnutrition and neglect and dumped their bodies in places like old mines in several states. The body of each child eventually was found, and the " Boy in the Box" remained unknown.

'BOY IN THE BOX'

ONE MAN'S 25-YEAR QUEST TO IDENTIFY A CHILD

PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Monday, February 22, 1982

Section: LOCAL

Page: B01

BY MICHAEL E. RUANE

Inquirer Staff Writer

Remington Bristow has held the small, plaster death mask in his hands a thousand times in the last 25 years, searching the mold of the little boy's face and wondering.

You must hold the child's face yourself, he tells visitors. " Feel it," he says, offering the mold, " just hold that little face . . . then you'll know."

Bristow, a retired investigator for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office, wants others to understand why he has been obsessed for 25 years with the face of a child he never knew.

" I feel a closeness to the boy crying out, 'Who am I?' " he says.

Bristow's obsession began at 3:45 p.m. Monday, Feb. 25, 1957, when a passer-by found the boy's nude body - freshly scrubbed and groomed, wrapped in a tattered blanket and laid in a cardboard box stamped "fragile."

The box was in a clump of woods at Verree and Susquehanna Roads in Fox Chase. The boy was about 5. He was thin and probably sickly, with blond hair and blue eyes. His hair had been cut recently - in a crude, hurried way. Small clumps of his hair clung to his body, suggesting that someone had groomed him after death. He had a small, L-shaped scar under his chin, and he was slightly buck-toothed. His arms were carefully folded across his stomach.

Bristow, working out of the old city morgue, at 13th and Wood Streets, took on the task of identifying the boy. For more than two decades the child has been known only as " the boy in the box," although Bristow ran down leads, offered rewards and traveled across the country in an attempt to determine the boy's real name.

The search has been in vain. Thursday will mark its 25th anniversary. But even as Bristow's quest approached that milestone, a similar search began recently under a bridge in South Philadelphia.

About 1:50 p.m. Feb. 12 two state Department of Transportation workers decided to investigate a rusted steamer trunk they had noticed under the west end of the Platt Memorial Bridge. The men broke open the single lock and lifted the lid. A foul odor drifted out. The men removed nine carefully layered plastic trash bags, five folded bed sheets and two pieces of heavy clear plastic. Beneath the coverings lay the decomposed nude body of a girl about 6 years old.

Fourteen days short of the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "boy in the box" Philadelphia now had a little girl in a box, and investigators began the task of trying to identify her.

She was a black child and was missing three of her top front baby teeth. She had a single filling in one molar. Deputy Philadelphia Medical Examiner Dr. Robert L. Catherman performed an autopsy and found three recent rib fractures and seven old rib fractures.

 He classified her as " a suspect battered child" and speculated that whoever disposed of her might know the circumstances of her death. However, he could not pinpoint the cause of death.

 Because of the advanced decomposition, the little girl's facial features were unrecognizable. She had been dead at least a month, perhaps several months, Catherman determined. Identification would be difficult.

 News of the discovery brought back memories for Remington Bristow. Identification " will be next to impossible unless they get a lucky break," he said. The kind of break he never got. As officials sought to identify the unknown child last week, Bristow sat at a desk in the basement of his house in the city's Bustleton section and looked back on his crusade.

 He produced the now-famous plaster death mask, removed the two paper bags that covered it and laid it on a faded green desk blotter. The mask, an ashen color, is scuffed and chipped now from 25 years of

being carried around in Bristow's black briefcase. Some of the strands of the boy's hair, which were implanted in the plaster to simulate eyelashes and to make the mask look more realistic, are gone.

The years have also taken a toll on Bristow. He retired in 1977. Asked his age, his only reply is " over 60." He has had two serious strokes in the last year, he says, one of which left him with a broken shoulder. There is a numbness on the left side of his body, and he admits he has " a little trouble with the left hand."

 Still, he says he has not lost hope that somehow, perhaps through publicity, he will learn the boy's name. " I always have this feeling about it in the back of my mind," he says. " I hope that sometime, some mother or father or brother will finally come forward and say, 'This is my baby.' "

 Bristow believes the boy was loved. " He was placed in a box big enough to be a casket. He was bathed. His hair was cut. His arms were crossed over his stomach. There was love there. Somebody had to have loved him." An autopsy disclosed the boy had suffered head injuries, and some investigators began calling the case a homicide. Bristow disagrees. " If it were a homicide, they would have put him in a bag and thrown him by the side of the road," he says. " Someone had planned to bury him, but they were scared off."

 Discovery of the boy's body caused a sensation. Scores of citizens telephoned authorities saying they thought they knew who the boy was or had seen him somewhere recently. A barber said he thought he had given the boy his haircut. A waitress thought she had served him dinner.

 Photos of the boy went up in State Stores and were sent out in Philadelphia Gas Works bills. About 25,000 circulars were sent to police departments across the country.

 Parents in Manayunk, Bethlehem, Lancaster, Dover, Del., and Tulsa, Okla., thought the boy was their son. A young Marine thought the boy was his missing brother. Another man, who told police he had dreamed he killed a boy, was released after questioning.

 For a time police thought the boy in the box was a youngster who had been kidnapped in New York in 1955. Police also began searching for a roofer who had been seen with a little boy in Camden. The roofer eventually was found - with his son.

 Several years later attention focused on an itinerant carnival couple who admitted they had disposed of five of their own malnourished children at different places across the country. However, the couple insisted they had never been to Philadelphia.

 Meanwhile, experts pored over the boy's body. They were baffled by wrinkling that had been found on the boy's feet and left hand, as if he had been left in water for some time. And there was the strange fluorescence in his left eye. Some speculated he might have been retarded.

 Anthropologist Wilton M. Krogman noted the boy was of Northwestern European ancestry and had been " in chronic ill health for about a year . . . ( perhaps ) due to neglect and malnutrition."

 Last week, other experts were examining the body of the little girl in the steamer trunk. One of them, William F. Russell, a fingerprint specialist with the Police Department, this week plans to take what he hopes will be a major step toward identification.

 Russell will remove her body from the decomposition refrigerator in the Medical Examiner's Office, where decomposing bodies are kept cold. He wants the body to warm a little and the skin to become flexible so he can take prints from the girl's foot. Most children are too young to have their fingerprints on file anywhere, but they are all " footprinted" at birth.

 Because of the decomposed state of the girl's body, investigators have even fewer tools to help them identify her than they had with the boy in the box.

 Russell plans to make a silicone mold of the child's foot, and then make a good footprint from that. Even if the print is a good one, however, he will need some kind of lead to know which hospital's birth records to check. He says he does not know if he will ever get it.

 On Thursday, a group of people will gather in the bleak city cemetery on Dunks Ferry Road in the city's Northeast to remember the " boy in the box." Of the scores of graves there, his is the only one with a tombstone. It reads " Heavenly Father Bless This Unknown Boy." The date inscribed is Feb. 25, 1957.

 If Russell and other investigators fail in their efforts to identify the girl in the steamer trunk, officials say she too could be buried as an unknown child. Remington Bristow hopes that will not be the case.

RITES FOR 'BOY IN THE BOX' ON 25-YR ANNIVERSARY, A CLUE TO HIS IDENTITY

PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

Friday, Feb. 26, 1982

By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE

"Father of all consolation, from whom nothing is hidden..."

With those words from the Epistles of St. Paul, the Rev. Joseph D. Bowen opened a memorial service for the "Boy in the Box," the dead child found a quarter-century ago but never identified.

 As Bowen spoke yesterday on the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the boy's body, a 4-man team from the Phil. Police Dept's homicide unit worked to learn the identity of another unknown child - a 5 or 6-yr old black girl found in a truck Feb. 12 under the George Platt Bridge in South Philadelphia.

 And that same team also was working a new lead in the still active case of the Boy in the Box. Homicide Capt. Jerrold Kane said police had gotten a call Tuesday night from someone with new information on the case. The info turned out to be correct, police said this afternoon, but it concerned a different child - not the Boy in the Box, but someone else who was sent to live in a foster home in Bucks County some 25 yrs ago and is still alive.

 Kane said police periodically get calls about the Boy in the Box, although the case last made big headlines in 1957. The blond, blue-eyed boy, thought to be 4 yrs old, was found Feb. 25, 1957 in a cardboard box in a dense thicket in Fox Chase.

 Surprisingly, police have not received a single call about the girl found under the bridge in the 3 weeks since she was discovered. As a result, Kane said, police still have very little to go on.

 "I think it's a sign of the times," the captain said. "We don't get as many calls about anything now,..In 1957, we were flooded with them." Police will soon have a footprint of the dead girl made by William Russell, the dept's fingerprint expert. They hope to learn her identity by matching the print w/birth records at a hospital. First they must identify neighborhoods where the girl may have been from since every hospital cannot be checked.

 Police had hoped to do that either through a tip, through a computer bulletin sent to other depts nationwide, or by tracking the manufacturers of the trunk and the sheets the girl was wrapped in and determining where the items may have been sold. None of those avenues has proven fruitful yet, Kane said.

 The 15-minute graveside service for the Boy in the Box was conducted at the city cemetery for indigents, a muddy, rutted field off Dunks Ferry Rd. near the Bensalem Township- Bucks County line that can barely be distinguished from an adjacent soccer field. The boy's grave marker, inscribed "Heavenly Father Bless This Unknown Boy", is the only headstone among hundreds of graves.

 About 20 people attended the service, including retired Phil. police det. Remington Bristow, who worked on the original investigation of the boy's death and continues to track down leads on his own.

 "Most of the people here are like I am, that's why they came," said Bristow. "They're compassionate and they love kids."

All content copyright 1982

'BOY IN THE BOX' CLUE FAILS

PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS

Sat. Feb. 27, 1982

Phil. police have checked out a new lead in the "Boy in the Box" case, but it will not lead them to the identity of the child found dead 25 yrs ago in Fox Chase.

The info provided in a call Tues. night turned out to be correct, police said, but it led them not to the Boy in the Box, but to a child sent to a foster home in Bucks County 25 yrs ago who is still alive.

About 20 people commemorated the 25-yr anniversary of the finding of the unidentified Boy in the Box at a memorial service at the city cemetery off Dunks Ferry Rd in the Northeast on Thursday.

The anniversary and the discovery of a 5 or 6-yr old black child in a trunk under the George Platt Bridge earlier this month has sparked renewed interest in the case.

Police still have not identified the girl under the bridge and said yesterday they have no leads in that case.  

All content copyright 1982