Philly police exhume 8 bodies from potter’s field in hopes DNA tests can help identify them

By Maryclaire Dale, The Associated Press

PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia investigators are exhuming evidence from eight bodies buried in a potter’s field this week, hoping that advances in DNA-based research can help them identify long-ago victims and perhaps learn how they died.

The victims include a 4- to 6-year-old girl found dead in 1962, a boy found in 1983, and three men and three women found between 1972 and 1984.

“When there’s an ID, it’s satisfying to be able to give that information to the family, to give that closure to the family. The loved one has now been identified,” said Ryan Gallagher, deputy director of the Philadelphia Police Department’s forensics unit.

The dig is the latest task in the city’s long-running effort to identify its unknown dead, who were buried in the small field in northeast Philadelphia until the late 1980s. Detectives will now work with genetic genealogists, the Medical Examiner’s Office of the city, with the FBI and others to piece together the mystery of who they are and how they died. Some of the work, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, is funded by federal grants.

And they have reason to be optimistic, after scientific breakthroughs in recent years led them to identify the city’s most famous unclaimed victim, long known as “America’s Unknown Child” or “The Boy in the Box.” The toddler, whose battered body was found in a cardboard box in 1957, was identified in late 2022, after decades of work, as 4-year-old Joseph Augustus Zarelli. Investigators have several theories about how she died, but have not yet announced any conclusive findings.

This case followed a string of cold cases that were reexamined and sometimes solved across the country, including the Golden State Killer, through advances in genetic genealogy.

Joseph’s body had also been buried in the city-owned potter’s field, until those devoted to the case moved it to a featured spot just inside Ivy Hill Cemetery, under a weeping cherry tree. Last year, they dedicated a new tombstone with his name and picture on it, on his 70th birthday.

Police hope they can one day do the same for the eight victims included in their current project, all of whom died in violent or suspicious ways. If they can find family members through DNA tracing, they will ask if they can help piece the story together.

Lt. Thomas Walsh, speaking Tuesday from Potter’s Field, said it’s rewarding to see “the relief on people’s faces when you can sit in their living room and say, ‘Hey, that’s their loved one, who’s gone . for 30, 40 years.”

“Of course, it’s tragic, how it ended, but the relief is there, that I finally know that this is my loved one and this is where he is,” he said.

Solving cold cases is a years-long pursuit that mixes art with science.

“There’s always that eureka moment,” Walsh said.

“It’s not all cellular devices and video cameras,” he said. “Sometimes it takes good old-fashioned police work to make a case.”