Anjelica Castillo ("Baby Hope")

Case background and investigation

On July 23, 1991, workers along the Henry Hudson Parkway in the Inwood section of Manhattan discovered a navy-blue picnic cooler that had been discarded near the highway. Inside, packed with unopened soda cans, was the decomposing body of a small girl. She had been bound with rope and Venetian-blind cord, folded into a fetal position and wrapped in a garbage bag. The child was severely malnourished, weighing only about 28 pounds, and the medical examiner determined she had been sexually abused and had died of asphyxiation. Investigators estimated she was between three and five years old.

No one came forward to claim the girl, and her decomposed features made identification impossible at the time. Moved by the case, detectives from the New York Police Department nicknamed her "Baby Hope" and, when she was buried in 1993, paid for a headstone inscribed "Because We Care." Despite an intensive canvass, extensive publicity and periodic renewed appeals over the years, the child's name and the circumstances of her death remained unknown, and the case became one of the NYPD's most haunting unsolved mysteries.

The breakthrough came in 2013, twenty-two years after the discovery, when detectives renewed their efforts and an anonymous woman told investigators about a conversation she had overheard concerning a girl who had vanished. The tip led detectives to the child's mother, Margarita Castillo, in Washington Heights. DNA comparison confirmed the relationship, and the girl was at last identified as Anjelica Castillo, who had been about four years old when she was killed. Her own family had never reported her missing, a silence investigators later attributed in part to fear within the immigrant community of contact with law enforcement.

On October 12, 2013, police arrested Anjelica's paternal cousin, 52-year-old Conrado Juarez, who confessed to sexually assaulting and killing the child and was charged with murder. He later recanted his confession, claiming it had been coerced, and pleaded not guilty. Juarez never stood trial: he died in custody on November 18, 2018, of pancreatic cancer, leaving the prosecution unresolved. While Anjelica Castillo finally has her name, the only person charged in her killing died before trial after recanting his confession and pleading not guilty, so the case ended without a conviction; it remains a landmark example of a decades-old child homicide reopened and identified through persistent police work and a single anonymous tip.

In the years before her identification, Baby Hope became a cause for the detectives who refused to let the case go. They arranged a formal burial for the little girl in 1993, and over the following decades officers and members of the public marked the anniversary of her discovery, leaving flowers and toys at her grave. Investigators periodically released age-progression and reconstruction images and offered rewards for information that might reveal who she was. It was a renewed 2013 canvass of the Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods, combined with the anonymous tip, that finally broke the case open. Anjelica Castillo's identification allowed her to be memorialized under her true name, ending twenty-two years in which she had been mourned only as a nameless child.