By Rich Bockmann
Neighbors of Margarita Castillo said they knew little about the tragic cold case of Baby Hope, let alone suspected that the woman who lives in their Elmhurst apartment building was the mother of the 4-year-old girl whose murder baffled investigators for more than two decades.
“I’ve known them for over a decade,” said 24-year-old George Gonzalez, who grew up in the apartment building on 90th Street where Castillo raised six of her children. “I can’t believe that that’s actually real. I can’t believe it.”
Gonzalez, whose father is the super at the property, said he moved out a few years ago, but he returned Monday to a throng of reporters who had gathered on the revelation that Baby Hope’s cousin had been arrested and charged with her murder.
“He’s a monster,” Gonzalez simply said.
With the help of an anonymous tip and DNA evidence, detectives identified Anjelica Castillo as the nameless murder victim whose body was found in a cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway in 1991. She was known only as Baby Hope.
The girl’s cousin, 52-year-old Bronx resident Conrado Juarez, was arrested Friday outside the Manhattan restaurant where he works and, after allegedly confessing to the crime, he was charged with murder, police said.
According to the timeline now pieced together after 22 years, police said Anjelica was staying with her aunt, Balvina Juarez-Ramirez, at an apartment in Astoria where Juarez allegedly sexually assaulted her one day and smothered her while trying to keep her quiet.
Police said Juarez claimed he called to his sister, who is now deceased, and it was she who told him to get rid of the body. The two then allegedly left the apartment with the young girl’s lifeless form in the cooler and hailed a black livery cab to Manhattan, according to police.
“Carrying the cooler between the two of them, they walked through a wooded area and put the cooler down,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told a news conference this weekend. “They then separated and Juarez returned to the Bronx, and his sister to Queens, never to speak of the heinous act again, until the NYPD investigators, through their relentless investigation, caught up with Juarez.”
Construction workers found the cooler around 10:45 a.m. July 23, 1991 — Anjelica’s body weighed just 25 pounds — and for more than two decades detectives conducted a diligent search for anybody with clues as to her identity, but with little luck until recent developments cracked the case.
The girl’s mother, now known to be Margarita Castillo, of Elmhurst, never came forward and the child’s father is believed to be living in Mexico.
Castillo, an illegal immigrant, said she never reported her daughter missing because of the language barrier.
“I was afraid they wouldn’t understand me because I didn’t speak English …. this would happen to me when I’d take my girls to the hospital,” the New York Post quoted her as saying in a Spanish-language interview.
Anjelica’s gravestone at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx reads, “The identity of this little girl is still unknown” and is inscribed with the declaration “BECAUSE WE CARE.”
Each year on the anniversary of the grim discovery police have conducted a public-outreach campaign, and they said it was that effort that led to the anonymous tip that helped police find Baby Hope’s sister and, eventually, her mother.
A DNA sample taken from the girl’s exhumed body in 2006 matched a specimen take from her mother, and police were able to build a family tree and trace Anjelica’s birth to Elmhurst Hospital in April 1987.
Interviews with the girl’s family led investigators to Juarez’s apartment in the Bronx, where his daughter answered the door last Friday and told detectives he had been living in Mexico for the last 12 years, Kelly said. But when police spoke with Juarez’s wife, she told them her husband had left at 7 a.m. for his job in Manhattan, and when they arrived they were able to convince him to talk with them, according to the commissioner.
Police said Saturday Juarez admitted to his alleged crimes and was charged in Manhattan Criminal Court with murder.
Kelly thanked the detectives he said worked tirelessly on the case over the last 22 years and the anonymous tipster who came forward.
Reach reporter Rich Bockmann by e-mail at rbockmann@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
