Conrado Juarez had kept his silence for 21 years — but when cops came to his door, he spilled everything, the former lead detective on the Baby Hope case said Friday.
“He knew he was had,” the detective, Jerry Giorgio, said of Juarez.
“He’s an animal,” said Giorgio, who kept an eye on the case as he retired from the NYPD and went to work as an investigator for the Manhattan DA’s Office.
“What he did to this child,” Giorgio, who retired from the DA’s Office in July, said of the little girl now identified as Anjelica Castillo.
“Ugly, ugly,” Giorgio said of Juarez’s own description of drunkenly leading the girl — his cousin, with whom he lived — by the hand into his room in their Astoria apartment, where he admittedly sexually assaulted her.
“She was better off dead, I’m sorry to say, because they were starving her. She was skeletal. In six more months she would have died. I mean, she was 28 pounds and 4 years old. That poor thing.”
When Giorgio first saw Anjelica, she was naked, and had been folded and tied so she would fit in the dirty cooler that would be her coffin for eight days, until she was found.
“Her shin bones were across her face,” Giorgio remembered, anger rising in his voice.
“I hope he’s miserable every day of his life,” Giorgio added.