In Episode 2, two years into the investigation, half the country has heard of Baby Hope, but the detectives are still no closer to discovering her real name.
The mystery that unfolds over the succeeding episodes resembles the sort of true-crime narrative made popular by podcasts like “Serial” and “In the Dark.” But this time, the creators are not journalists or sound engineers, but members of the law enforcement agency that pursued the case for more than 20 years and (spoiler alert) finally charged a man with the crime.
After decades of seeing its work depicted by others in ventures like ABC’s drama series “NYPD Blue,” the New York Police Department has begun to mine its own material for a true-crime podcast, “Break in the Case,” which debuted last week.
It joins several other law enforcement agencies around the country that have decided that podcasts are an effective way to polish the image of the police, humanize them, explain the intricacies of their work and enlist the public’s help in gathering information.
“The way that we’ve traditionally disseminated information is standing on a soap box and yelling at people about what’s happening,” said Lt. Saul Jaeger of the Mountain View Police Department, outside San Francisco. “That’s not listening, and it doesn’t allow the community to be truly engaged.”
The Mountain View department developed its podcast, “The Silicon Valley Beat,” several years ago and said it had been happy with the results. Early next year it will release a parallel series about its investigation into the murder of a 21-year-old Ethiopian immigrant in 1985.
“One of the best tools that we can use to connect with people is stories,” Jaeger said. “At the end of the day, that’s what people remember.”
The New York project is directed by Jill Bauerle and Edward Conlon, a former detective who became a best-selling author (“Blue Blood” and “The Policewomen’s Bureau”).
Last year Conlon, who retired in 2011, returned to become director of executive communications for Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill. He began trying to inject more storytelling into the department’s communications strategy, writing and posting long narratives like “Old Hays and His Descendants: The Legacy of the Last High Constable of New York City” and “The War at Home: Remembering Foster and Laurie” on the police website. But he found the results disappointing.
“People weren’t going to the website for long-form nonfiction,” he said. “They were going for traffic closings and Civil Service test information.”
So Conlon and his departmental collaborators — Bauerle, the series’ executive producer, and Kenzie Delaine, a producer and writer — decided to create a podcast that would be very different from one that the department had produced several years ago, which focused on distributing practical information like event announcements and street closings.
“It’s such an intimate medium,” Bauerle said. “A lot of what police officers and detectives say is filtered through other sources,” she added. “To have them telling their own stories is very powerful.”
The first season of “Break in the Case” will cover three investigations. Five episodes written and narrated by Conlon will trace the “Baby Hope” case, which was revived by an anonymous tip in 2013.
A single episode, scheduled for release in December, will focus on the efforts by detectives to identify a woman whose remains washed up along the Brooklyn waterfront in 2015. It will be titled “Monique” for the tattoo found on the victim’s leg. Bauerle, who wrote the episode, said she hopes it will aid investigators in turning up new leads.
Larry Davis, who wounded six officers in a 1986 shootout with police, will be the subject of the season’s final episodes. New installments are to be published online weekly.
Jane Kirtley, an expert on the media, cautioned that nonfiction podcasts from sources other than news organizations or academic institutions were not necessarily impartial.
“It seems important to recognize this for what it is: a public relations exercise,” said Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. “The stories that are being told are being told from the perspective of law enforcement. It’s not journalism.”
But the podcast’s creators said they were committed to reflecting with accuracy the details of the crimes they will discuss.
So, in the case of Baby Hope, the producers interviewed the various people involved in a complicated investigation that stretched over two decades.
Sean Kenny, a former police sergeant who was among the first on the scene when Baby Hope was found, recalled dealing with his supervisor at the time, a crusty lieutenant.
“He said: ‘Kenny, this is a big deal. Be careful and take your time. Do it right.’”
In 2013, Baby Hope was finally identified as Anjélica Castillo. Later that year, police charged Conrado Juárez, the brother of a woman who was caring for the child, with the killing.
Juárez confessed, but later said his admission had been coerced and pleaded not guilty. He spent five years in jail awaiting trial, a delay partly caused by a dispute over whether a New York Times reporter who had interviewed Juárez in jail could be forced to testify in the case. Juárez died of complications from cancer last year, still in custody and awaiting trial.
Joseph Reznick, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner of internal affairs, who as a commander of detectives led the investigation for many years, recalls on the podcast why detectives pursued the case for so long. After all, the police precinct in that Upper Manhattan neighborhood recorded 121 other homicides that year.
“What made this one different,” he says on the podcast, “was the fact that it was a child.”
This article originally appeared in
.