Another flurry of investigation

The case was reopened in 1998, more than 40 years after it began. Piqued by an interview Remington Bristow gave to Philadelphia-area writer Ron Avery, as well as a flood of leads from a broadcast of an "America's Most Wanted," segment on the case, Philadelphia Police Captain Pat Dempsey placed it in the hands of Augustine, a 35-year veteran.

Dempsey asked Augustine to follow up where Bristow left off in 1984 — the foster home angle. The captain hoped to match DNA from the boy to the woman Bristow claimed was the mother.

On Feb. 23, 1998, Augustine, accompanied by a member of the Bucks County police department, coasted down the driveway of an old farmhouse lined with signs warning, "BEWARE OF DOGS-STAY IN CAR." He reached out of the window to ring a bell hung from a pole, and Arthur Nicoletti, head of the nearby foster home until the 1960s, greeted them from the porch. With him was a woman he identified as his wife, Anna Marie. She wasn't just his wife. She was also his stepdaughter — the same woman whom Bristow had suspected of ditching the Boy in the Box and who, in a curious familial commingling, married Nicoletti after his wife died. "It was movie stuff," Augustine says.

Augustine got right to the point, asking Anna Marie if she'd had a child who died around 1957. Anna Marie said yes, but explained that her son had been electrocuted while seated in a malfunctioning nickel ride in front of a Philadelphia store. Records from the morgue, where Bristow worked for three and a half decades, confirmed her story.

In November 1998, the boy was exhumed and samples of his bone and teeth were removed for DNA analysis. But with nothing to match it against, the police were again at a dead end.

A poster of a missing boy

Although autopsy photos of the boy were widely circulated on a police poster, no one came forward to claim him.

In 1957, a few months after the Boy in the Box was found, a 10-year-old New Jersey boy named George Knowles visited a local police station to register the bicycle he had received for his birthday. As he was waiting, he glanced at the public bulletin board.

"There was this poster of the unknown boy. Three shots of his head, and the blanket," he recalled. "I was just totally enthralled by the case, and it just kind of stayed with me. I was mesmerized by the story."

But Knowles largely forgot about The Boy in the Box until the Oct. 3, 1998, airing of the "America's Most Wanted" segment . "It was like a sign from God," recalled Knowles, who is now 55 and lives in Edison, N.J. He was determined to help out.

In 1999, Knowles created a Web site devoted to the boy's mystery. More than a million people have visited the site, leaving thousands of tips that Knowles has passed along to the Philadelphia police.