"Baby Hope" Update: Mother of slain child Anjelica Castillo says fear, not knowing English kept her from reporting daughter missing
(CBS/AP) NEW YORK - Margarita Castillo,the mother of the little girl known as "Baby Hope," whose naked body was discovered inside a picnic cooler beside a Manhattan highway in 1991 and remained unidentified until now, said fear kept her from reporting her daughter was missing, reports CBS New York.
Castillo said she was held back from reporting her daughter Anjelica Castillo missing because of "fear of going onto an office and not knowing the language, that no one would help - the fear, the ignorance."
Four-year-old Anjelica was sexually assaulted, smothered and stuffed inside a cooler, authorities said. Her body was dumped along the Henry Hudson Parkway in July of 1991.
The tragic story was made all the more heartbreaking when no one came forward to identify the little girl. No family member ever publicly grieved for her and no one ever claimed her body.
But police got a break in the cold caseover the summer. An anonymous tip led investigators to the girl's mother and ultimately to the arrest of her cousin, 52-year-old Conrado Juarez, on Saturday, police said.
Authorities said Juarez confessed to killing the girl after sexually abusing her.He is charged with felony murder but has pleaded not guilty.
CBS New York reports Margarita Castillo was separated from her husband at the time of Anjelica's disappearance. She reportedly had taken Anjelica and another daughter to see their father and left them there for several days.
Castillo told the station that when she returned to pick her daughters up, they were not there.
She reportedly assumed her children were being taken care of by family members. It was not until several years later that she got a call from Juarez who said he was raising her daughters and wanted money.
But Castillo said when she showed up at his home, he only had one of the girls and did not know anything about Anjelica, reports the station.
"(He said), 'I don't know where she is, but my sister told me she died.' I said, 'How? Where is she? How? Where is she buried?' (He said), 'I don't know,' he stood up - 'We'll talk,'" Castillo told the station.
But even then, Castillo did not go to police.
"Maybe they had her with another family member," she told CBS New York. "That was my hope that one day I would find her."
"What else can I say? I wouldn't wish this on anyone," she said.
Lorena Ramirez, Anjelica's younger sister, has also spoken publicly about the case.
"She's not doing very well," Ramirez said of her mother to CBS New York. "She lost a daughter."
Ramirez added, "I'm just relieved that they caught the bad guy, but still pretty sad."
Another sister, Laurencita Ramirez, said she wished she'd had a chance to know her sibling.
Laurencita Ramirez told the New York Post she first found out she had a sister who was killed when she was 11-years-old.
But it wasn't until last week that she heard about the "Baby Hope" case.
"When I saw the news about Baby Hope on Tuesday, I got this feeling in my stomach," she told the Post. "I felt something like, 'Could it be my sister?' I was just crying because it was so horrible."
She said she never met Juarez.
Detectives from the 34th Precinct were the ones that named the child "Baby Hope" and pitched in with their own money to buy the girl a headstone and cemetery plot at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx in 1993. A laminated white sheet of paper with her real name has since been attached to her tombstone.