PHILADELPHIA — Haunting images of the child victim appeared in liquor stores, and were slipped into Philadelphia Gas Works bills. They spoke to a front-page crime so odious that it elbowed aside news accounts of the Cold War and the intensifying international tensions.
As many as 25,000 circulars were sent to police departments across the country. Investigators vetted scores of false leads, and at one point pored through more than 11,000 photos of newly arrived refugees in an effort to identify the boy found in a JC Penney bassinet box in the weeds and shrubs of Fox Chase.
Finally, nearly 66 years after the body was discovered on an unusually balmy February morning in 1957, police on Thursday officially lifted the veil of anonymity from the child who had been known only as the "Boy in the Box."
