The girl's decomposing body was found in Washington Heights on the morning of July 23, 1991, in a cooler in a wooded area near the Dyckman Street exit off the Henry Hudson Parkway.
A cousin of the little girl known as Baby Hope, whose body was found in a cooler beside a highway in Upper Manhattan in 1991, has been arrested in her killing, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Saturday.
The cousin, Conrado Juarez, 52, was apprehended on Friday at a Manhattan restaurant where he was a dishwasher, Kelly said. On Saturday morning, Kelly said, Juarez confessed to sexually abusing and murdering the girl, and with the help of his sister, stuffing her body in a blue-and-white picnic cooler and leaving it near the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991.
Kelly identified Baby Hope as Anjelica Castillo and said she had born at Elmhurst Hospital Center in April 1987. The arrest was first reported by DNAinfo.com.
The tip that reignited the investigation came over the summer, around the time the police were handing out fliers, tacking up posters and sending a van equipped with loudspeakers through Washington Heights in an effort to generate leads in the 22-year-old case.
A woman called the police to recount a long-ago conversation in which another woman spoke of a young relative who had been murdered. There were similarities to the Baby Hope case, and detectives tracked down the woman whose relative had been slain. That led detectives to Baby Hope's mother. They obtained an envelope that the mother had apparently licked to seal, yielding a DNA profile, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The girl's decomposing body was found in Washington Heights on the morning of July 23, 1991, in a cooler in a wooded area near the Dyckman Street exit off the Henry Hudson Parkway. The girl, estimated to be 3 to 5 years old, appeared to be malnourished, and tests showed that she had been sexually abused. The authorities have long wondered why her parents or relatives never reported that she was missing.
Her body remained in the morgue for two years. Then, in 1993, detectives working on the case arranged her funeral.
In the years afterward, detectives, some of whom had joined the investigation many years after the girl's body was found, visited her grave at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx. There was no name on the headstone. "The identity of this little girl is still unknown," the words on the stone read. "If you have any information please call 1-800-577-TIPS."
© 2013, The New York Times News Service