A former Nevada deputy attorney general has been accused in the murder of a 19-year-old woman in Hawaii 50 years ago.

Officials took 77-year-old Tudor Chirila Jr. into custody in Reno, the New York Post reported Friday, adding he was charged with second degree murder.

DNA linked the suspect to the deadly 1972 stabbing of the young woman, Nancy Anderson, who had recently moved to Hawaii after graduating from high school in Michigan.

“The fact that he utilized a sharp instrument to stab her 63 times, his hand — there’s a high probability his hand slid down off of the handle onto the blade and he probably injured himself,” Joseph Scott Morgan, the Jacksonville State University Distinguished Scholar of Forensics, told NewsNation this week.

“The natural inclination is to take a bath towel or a hand towel or whatever is around and transfer it over to your hand so that you’re applying direct pressure,” he added:

The young woman was stabbed inside her Waikiki apartment. Despite the difficult investigation, law enforcement never gave up on solving the case, the Post report continued:

Investigators finally got a solid lead this year after receiving a tip in December that Chirila could be a suspect, according to the criminal complaint.

Police were able to confirm him as a prime suspect after obtaining a DNA sample from his son, John Chirila of Newport Beach, California, in March. The sample identified the younger Chirila as the biological child of the person whose DNA was found at the crime scene, the criminal complaint stated.

Law enforcement executed a search warrant last week and collected a DNA sample from Chirila at his apartment in Reno, a few days before the man attempted suicide.

He was later arrested, jailed, and is being held without bail on a charge of being a fugitive from another state.

“She just was an integral part of our family,” Anderson’s brother, Jack, told NBC News. “And when she was killed, it just left a hole in our hearts, in our family.”

Chirila was deputy attorney general during the late 1970s and ran unsuccessfully for the Nevada Supreme Court in the early 1990s, according to the Post.

The outlet added, “In a 1998 federal indictment, US prosecutors in Reno identified him as the former president of a company, A.G.E. Corp., that served as a front for Nevada brothel boss Joe Conforte.”