On the morning of Dec. 8, Rita O’Vary stood looking at two granite markers at Ivy Hill Cemetery in East Mount Airy, the grave site of Joseph Augustus Zarelli. Jesse Bunch covered her steadfast commitment to honoring a lost soul in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

She was the only one at the child’s final resting place when Philadelphia police announced the boy’s name, 65 years after his body was discovered in a cardboard JC Penney box along a road in Fox Chase.

“I can’t tell you how many times I came down here,” said O’Vary, a retired school bus driver who grew up in Chester.

With tears in her eyes, she pointed to one of the headstones that read, “America’s Unknown Child.”

Zarelli had been buried in a potter’s field since his murder in 1957 but was reburied at Ivy Hill in 1998 after investigators exhumed his grave for genetic testing.

He is remembered every year by members of the Vidocq Society, a local crime-solving club.

“Every year, they come with flowers, say a prayer,” said Dave Drysdale, Ivy Hill’s secretary-treasurer.

O’Vary was 10 years old when the news broke about the “boy in the box.”

When she could, she started visiting Zarelli’s grave, leaving behind balloons, flags, and other small tokens.

Read more about Rita O’Vary and those who memorialized the now-identified Joseph Augustus Zarelli in The Philadelphia Inquirer.