New York City detectives have solved the decades-old mystery of Baby Hope, a little girl whose naked body was discovered in a picnic cooler beside a Manhattan highway in 1991 and remained unidentified.
They have arrested a relative of the child after he admitted sexually assaulting and smothering her.
Conrado Juarez, 52, was arrested and arraigned on Saturday on a felony murder charge. He pleaded not guilty.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Melissa Mourges, chief of the cold case unit and the original prosecutor on the case in 1991, told a judge Juarez had made the admissions.
Mourges said he then enlisted the aid of his sister who helped him dispose of the body.
They were cousins of the girl's father, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
The girl's name, age and circumstances of her death were unknown for more than two decades.
But police last week announced a new tip and a DNA test had allowed them to finally identify the baby's mother, a dramatic turnaround in one of the city's more notorious cold cases.
On Saturday, they also revealed the girl's name: Anjelica Castillo, age 4.
Her naked, malnourished corpse was discovered on July 23, 1991, beside the Henry Hudson Parkway by construction workers who smelled something rotten.
Detectives thought she might have been suffocated but had few other clues as to what happened.
The case became an obsession for some investigators who nicknamed the girl Baby Hope.
Hundreds of people attended a funeral for the unknown girl in 1993. Her body was exhumed for DNA testing in 2007, and then again in 2011.
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