Denying he killed her, suspect recalls short life of 'Baby Hope'

New York: Anjelica Castillo liked to ask questions. She was chatty and a little headstrong for a 4-year-old.

She took swipes at her little sister, and so the adult cousins who were supposed to care for the girls sometimes tied Anjelica to a chair. Frustrated, they thought about sending her to Mexico to live with other relatives. They never heard from her parents, who had all but given up Anjelica and her sister.

Anjelica is better known as Baby Hope, and this description of her childhood came from the man charged with killing her 22 years ago and dumping her body in an Igloo cooler next to the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Sitting in a visitor's room at Rikers Island, his voice soft and his demeanour calm, the suspect, Conrado

Juarez , spoke at length about the little girl and the dysfunctional family in which she was lost. He denied killing her - saying detectives coerced a false confession - but admitted helping dispose of her body.

"That's the mess I find myself in," he said in an interview Wednesday night with The New York Times. He said he was resigned to spending the rest of his life in prison.

The police say he confessed to sexually assaulting Anjelica, to smothering her with a pillow as he tried to stifle her screams, and to hiding her body under branches alongside the parkway in Upper Manhattan.

Arrested last Friday, he was charged with second-degree murder. The arrest capped a 22-year-search for the killer of a girl no one ever reported missing, but it left unanswered questions about how she ended up in mortal peril.

Juarez , 52, who spoke to a reporter for about 45 minutes, described a family that was overwhelmed by children who were not theirs and struggled to clothe and feed two unwanted girls. In his retelling, Juarez  conveyed a sense of resentment about the girls' presence in his sister's home.

Anjelica and her sister Maribel were the children of Juarez 's uncle, his mother's brother. One day that uncle brought the girls to Juarez 's sister's home in Queens, Juarez  said. The father never returned.

Juarez  said the girls' mother seemed to no longer be able to care for her daughters and gave them away. Juarez 's sister Balvina Juarez  Ramirez was a good choice for a foster mother, he said, because she was in her late 40s and had never had children of her own.

"I told my sister: 'You should get some kind of receipt,'" Juarez  said. "Even if it's not notarized or formally prepared by a lawyer, get the real mother to sign something. You are going to be the ones raising those girls.'"

He said he believed that the girls' mother did sign an informal document that authorized the custody agreement.

"The father was even worse," he said. "Nobody ever heard from him again."

Juarez  said his sister did not seem to mind the additions to her family. She loved the girls, even if she did smack them when they misbehaved, he said.

Juarez  described the extra workload his sister faced as she hustled each morning to drop the children at day care, then go to work at a lamp factory, only to have to make an extra trip to pick them up in the evening. Juarez  said that he tried to talk his sister into sending the children to the family's native country, Mexico, but that she never gave him a straight answer.

He said he sometimes stayed over in Queens when he had to be at work early at a job there. Several adults lived there, including another sister and her husband.

At this point, Juarez 's account veered away from the confession he made to the police.

"I told the police that I put a pillow over her face and killed her," Juarez  said. "But it wasn't like that."

He said that his sister Balvina called him one day on his cellphone to say Anjelica had been running and had fallen down the stairs. She was dead; Balvina Juarez  needed help, she told him, according to his account.

For Juarez 's account to be accurate, then Juarez , a kitchen worker who did not speak English or have working papers, would have been one of fewer than 3 percent of people in the United States who had a mobile telephone in 1991.

He said he helped his sister stuff the girl into a cooler. He recalled the child's wearing a nightie, although the police said she was found nude. The siblings flagged a taxi off the street and rode in silence to the park, where they dropped the blue picnic cooler, he said.

They never spoke of it again. Balvina Juarez , he said, looked sad but did not weep.

"I was afraid," he said. "My mind closed. Thinking about it now, I realize I should have called the police."

His story about disposing of the body with the help of his sister matches the account given to the police by an anonymous caller in 1991, who said she saw a short Mexican or South American man and a woman in heels carrying a cooler along the highway. It also matches the version given in the confession described by the police.

Juarez  said he never told a soul. Balvina Juarez  died from a stroke in 1995. Juarez  returned to Mexico to bury his sister, leaving Anjelica's sister with his female partner and their children. But Juarez 's partner made clear that the arrangement had to be temporary, he said, because the couple had little ones and were not in the market for another mouth to feed.

He said he sneaked back into the country about a month later by paying a smuggler $800. Arrangements were made with Anjelica's mother to return Maribel. That's when the mother learned Anjelica had died four years earlier.

"I'm the one who told her," he said. "I told her, 'She is no longer with us,' and that was that. She did not ask a lot of questions."

He left out the part about the cooler.

"She knew where the girls were the whole time. The truth is that she never visited or called those girls," he said. "She seemed happy to have Maribel back."

Anjelica's mother, Margarita Castillo, declined to comment.

"This isn't a very good time for her," a young woman in her Queens apartment said Thursday from behind a closed door.

In recent news reports, Castillo said the father took the children and she never knew where they were.

Juarez  is awaiting trial at Rikers, where he has had psychiatric evaluations and is in protective custody. He said he told the doctors that he was fine and felt no urge to harm himself.

His task now will be to convince a jury that he gave a videotaped confession under duress. He claimed he did not know what the signed copies said: they were written in English.

"They insisted and insisted," Juarez  said of the teams of detectives who took turns grilling him. "They would say, 'You killed her!' So after a while and after so much pressure, I accepted it and said what they wanted."

His lawyer, Michael J. Croce, who has questioned the credibility of the confession, did not return calls seeking comment. A spokesman for the Police Department said the confession was videotaped and took place in the presence of an assistant district attorney.

A person with knowledge of the case said that in his confession, portions of which were written and portions of which were videotaped, Juarez  provided investigators with details that had not been published or broadcast in the media. They included precisely how Anjelica was bound and positioned in the cooler.

"He said something about how she died that only the person who did it would know," the person said, declining to elaborate.

The investigators, the person said, had Juarez  describe each aspect of the event, from how he encountered her to "every single thing that he did."

Juarez  appeared calm during most of his confession, although he did cry at one point and asked the detectives who was going to know about what he said.

"He was embarrassed that his family was going to find out what he did," the person said.

Juarez  said in the interview that if Anjelica's body was found with traces of semen, it could have been from another man in the house, like Balvina Juarez 's boyfriend. He denied abusing her or any other child.

"I have thought about what happened, and not just once - on several occasions," he said. "I thought about it a lot when my sister died. I thought: 'What will happen if the police ever come for me, and now she is not here to say what happened?'

"Who would believe me?"