philly’s girl in the box remains an overlooked mystery
It was late into a warm Thursday afternoon in May, nearly 4 p.m., when Jesse F. Davis spotted a clothesline floating on the Schuylkill.
When he hauled it over, he found it was wrapped around a wooden milk box. He cut the clothesline, and a small, headless, badly decomposed body floated to the surface.
Davis, a 43-year-old barge worker from Paulsboro, N.J., called harbor patrol.
Thus began the public story of the Girl in the Box, a Philadelphia Jane Doe of whom we know as little today as we did when Davis first found her on May 3, 1962.