Stacy Horn

I should go see Gravity! And eat a cream puff! And, and, pet a cat!

Below: fashion. That reminds me, I am so sad What Not to Wear is going off the air. Off the air! That has no meaning in NYC, where we are all digital. There is no air involved. Soon, it will have no meaning anywhere. Anyway, I keep hoping someone will nominate me to be on the show so I can have all my fashion woes fixed, but now, that will never happen. SOB.

This painting/sign was in the garbage in front of my building. What does it say? Pigs enslav [sic] us? This is flipped 90 degrees, by the way. Those garbage cans should be on the bottom. And what’s that a picture of? Some sort of nacho/lucha libre thing? Or am I just being an old person and this is completely obvious?

I heard them before I saw them. The wind was blowing and the ground was being bombarded with acorns. When they hit the ground they sounded like gunshots. ‘I bet that hurts if they hit you,’ I thought. It did. It felt like someone had thrown a rock at me. Thanks a lot, nature.

Yeah, yeah, they look so small and how bad could it be. Fine. You go stand under that tree in the next storm.

Tonight, at 6:30 EST, (7:30 pm, CDT) to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Verdi’s birth, the Verdi Requiem will be streamed live by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. A pre-concert show begins at 7:15 p.m. CDT.

Remember when we all use to watch TV together? Everyone knew not to call anyone when certain shows were on. I specifically remember having an attitude about anyone who dared call me during: Moonlighting. Let’s listen to the Verdi Requiem together! I’ve never heard a requiem I didn’t love, but the Verdi is quite dramatic. It’s perfect for this kind of thing, I think.

An old subway sign at the 190th Street stop on the A train. This is right at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park, my new favorite park, located in Washington Heights. If I wasn’t on so many deadlines I’d be up there now. Except maybe not since it’s supposed to rain, but you get the idea.

I wrote about Baby Hope on my blog for my cold case book, but I wanted to also mention her here. This is a cold case from 1991 that is now on its way to being solved. I still remember the crime scene photos, they were so awful. Crime scene photos were part of the reason I decided I didn’t want to write about crime anymore. Here’s the section about Baby Hope from my book. You can tell from my description here how freaked out I was about the pictures.

On July 23, 1991, a little girl was found in a 40 quart, dark blue Igloo cooler off the Henry Hudson Parkway in northern Manhattan … Someone folded her in half, wrapped a cord from a venetian blind around her neck and behind her knees, and put her in a plastic bag underneath an cheap black tablecloth, and a bunch of red Coke cans.

Crime scene pictures show a naked little girl, hog-tied and badly decomposed, her tiny hands peeking out from between her legs. Her skin is black, brown and pink and bone is exposed all over. One eye is gone, and the other bulges like a horribly constructed toy. For the roughly four and a half years of her life, someone barely managed to feed her. She was a little over three feet high and weighed 20 pounds. They beat her. They sexually abused her. Finally, they suffocated her. There was almost no forensic evidence of the killers, no fingerprints, and no DNA. She was never identified, and her case was never solved. The detectives nicknamed her Baby Hope. For two years she was stored in the morgue, but that was more than the detectives could bear. They pooled their money, paid for her funeral, and buried her at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx in a plot donated by the Catholic Archdiocese.

Her mother was just identified and now that Baby Hope has been identified (not publicly) the real investigation can begin. Detectives can start talking to her family and people who knew her. I’d like to know why her mother never reported her missing.

Update: Baby Hope was Anjelica Castillo. She was born in Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens in 1987, so she was 4 years old when she died. Her cousin Conrado Juarez, 52, sexually abused her and killed her. Juarez’s sister, Balvina Juarez- Ramirez helped him dump Anjelica’s body. He’s been arrested, Balvina is deceased.