The announcement of an arrest in one of New York City's most notorious cold cases was an especially relieving moment 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 Manhattan highway.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Melissa Mourges, who was the original prosecutor in the 1991 case and is 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 an NYPD assistant chief who, in 1993, read the eulogy at the girl's burial in the Bronx 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, last week police announced that a new tip and a DNA test had allowed them to finally identify the baby's mother.
Then on Saturday, NYPD 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 he. 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 Anjelica'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.
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