The Three Reconstructions of Castillo: The Baby Hope Murder

    It was the perfect crime. On Tuesday, July 23, 1991, Manhattan police discovered the corpse of a four-year-old Hispanic girl rotting inside a cooler. The girl was naked, malnourished and was in the fetal position with her hands bound by rope. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered on or near July 18 of the same year. Over the course of the work week that had passed since her murder, her facial features had so badly decomposed that immediate identification became impossible. The cops dubbed the young girl "Baby Hope," a moniker she would carry for roughly 22 years. When the case remained open, the detectives buried the child under that name.

   The corpse was reexamined in 2006, then in 2011, in order to obtain more DNA information. During that time, artists created three famous reconstructions of what Baby Hope might have looked like, which eventually led to an anonymous female who informed local authorities that she had heard a conversation two years prior between a Hispanic mother and another individual about the disappearance of the woman's daughter, which led detectives to the door of Margarita Castillo, mother of Anjelica Castillo, the true Baby Hope, as DNA tests confirmed.

    Anjelica's father, Genaro Ramirez, was believed to be involved in the murder, but this led to investigators discovering Genaro had taken his children from Margarita and left Anjelica with her eldest cousin, Balvina Juarez-Ramirez, sister of Conrado Juarez, Anjelica's true killer. Police tracked down Conrado, who confessed to being given Anjelica and then raping and torturing her in his now deceased sister Balvina's Manhattan apartment before accidentally smothering her when Anjelica cried out. Conrado went to Balvina, who insisted the body be disposed of. Together, the siblings dumped the cooler, where it was discovered just 5 days later, bringing us back to the start.

    "She wasn't missing; her father took them [the children] away and maybe that was my mistake, let him take them away. I did not go to the police because I was afraid of not being heard. I was afraid, not knowing the language." -Margarita Castillo

    “It’s very painful. I have no joy right now. I think about her [Anjelica] all the time, and I wish I would have gotten the chance to meet her. She’s the sister I never met.” -Laurencita Ramirez, sister of Anjelica