The announcement of an arrest in one of New York City's most notorious
cold cases was especially relieving for two hardened investigators, who
for 22 years had been working to identify the girl they nicknamed Baby
Hope after discovering her body stuffed in a picnic cooler along a
highway.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Melissa Mourges, the original
prosecutor in the 1991 case and now chief of the cold case unit, told a
Manhattan judge that Conrado Juarez, 52, was charged with felony murder
late Saturday.
The charge came shortly after police announced the Bronx man was a
relative of the tiny victim, 4-year-old Anjelica Castillo. Police
revealed her name for the first time earlier in the day.
Juarez, wearing a white short sleeve button-down shirt and blue pants,
pleaded not guilty but said nothing else after he was remanded to
custody. Attorney information was not immediately available.
"Over the years, the optimism was always there except the frustration
would grow," said Detective Joseph Reznick, now a New York Police
Department assistant chief who, in 1993, read the eulogy at the girl's
burial before hundreds of mourners. "I think reflecting back on what we
named this little girl, Baby Hope, I think it's the most accurate name
we could have come up with."
"You know the expression I'm on cloud 9? Well, that's where I am right
now," said former detective Jerry Giorgio, who had the case from 1991
until this summer, when he retired from the Manhattan district
attorney's cold case squad.
For more than two decades, the girl's name, age and circumstances of
death were unknown. But in a dramatic turnaround, police last week
announced that a new tip and a DNA test had allowed them to finally
identify the baby's mother.
Then, on Saturday, police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced the
arrest of Juarez, a dishwasher, who Kelly said confessed to the killing,
claiming he killed the girl at his now-deceased sister's apartment
after sexually abusing her. He told authorities that the sister helped
him dispose of the body. They were cousins of the girl's father.
The case became an obsession for some investigators, who worked tirelessly to chase down every lead and generate new ones.
In July, detectives tried another round of publicity on the 22nd
anniversary of the discovery of Baby Hope's body. They canvassed the
neighborhood where she was found, hung fliers, circulated sketches of
her and a photograph of the cooler and announced a $12,000 reward for
information leading to an arrest.
A tipster, who saw recent news stories on the case, led police to
Anjelica's sister, who told detectives she thought her sister had been
killed. Police matched DNA from Anjelica to their mother. The mother,
who was not identified, didn't have custody of Anjelica at the time of
the girl's death — she had been living with relatives on the father's
side, including Juarez's sister, Balvina Juarez-Ramirez, police said.
Police closed in on the suspect and waited for him Friday outside a
Manhattan restaurant where he worked. He told them he noticed Anjelica
while visiting the family apartment and killed her, police said.
"When she went motionless, he summoned his sister from another room," Kelly said.
Then, the sister got the blue cooler — which still contained full cans
of Coke. They took a livery cab from Queens to Manhattan, where they
dumped the cooler, then separated.
