PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Investigators in Philadelphia are exhuming samples from eight bodies buried in a potter's field this week in the hope that advances in DNA-based sleuthing can help them identify the long-ago victims and perhaps learn how they died. The victims include a 4- to 6-year-old girl found dead in 1962, an infant boy found in 1983 and three men and three women found between 1972 and 1984. “When there is an ID, it is satisfying to be able to give that information to the family, to give that closure to the family.
Your loved one is now identified,” said Ryan Gallagher, assistant 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 at the small field in northeast Philadelphia through the late 1980s. Detectives will now work with genetic genealogists, the city Medical Examiner’s Office, 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 being funded through federal grants. And they have cause for optimism, 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 small child, whose battered body was found inside a cardboard box in 1957, was identified in late 2022 after decades of work as 4-year-old Joseph Augustus Zarelli.
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