On Aug. 18, 1996, Mary Moore Searight, 86, a prominent landowner and philanthropist, was found in her home in Paris, Texas, where she had been badly beaten, strangled and sexually assaulted.
She was barely alive when her caretaker made the discovery, and Ms. Searight was airlifted to a hospital about 100 miles south in Dallas, the authorities said. She died there three days later.
Ms. Searight, a landlord and community benefactor, rented out many properties she owned in the Paris area, and as part of its investigation, the Paris Police Department interviewed a number of tenants, including David Paul Cady Jr., then 25 years old, on the night the crime was discovered.
The police asked him about what appeared to be cuts on his right hand, and Mr. Cady gave inconsistent explanations, the authorities said. They also took a DNA swab of his hand, but that turned up nothing, and afterward the case went dark for nearly three decades.
That swab obtained long ago eventually led to Mr. Cady’s indictment last month on a first-degree murder charge in Ms. Searight’s death, the Texas Department of Public Safety announced in a news release on Thursday.
With the help of up-to-date technology, further analysis conducted in 2023 of the swab obtained from Mr. Cady’s hand determined that it contained Ms. Searight’s DNA, tying him to the crime, according to the police.
Mr. Cady was already in jail in connection with an unrelated crime when he was charged with murder in the killing of Ms. Searight.
The motive for the killing is unclear.
The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Paris Police Department did not immediately respond to phone messages and emails seeking comment on Friday.
A lawyer who represented Mr. Cady in an arrest last year did not immediately respond on Friday to a phone message seeking comment.
The breakthrough in the investigation came through the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, a nationwide program under the Justice Department that helps investigators solve cold cases.
The Texas Rangers, the statewide investigative law enforcement agency, identified Ms. Searight’s case as eligible for the program in 2021.
Two years later, investigators submitted the swab from Mr. Cady’s hand to a crime laboratory in Garland, Texas, for further analysis, according to the Department of Public Safety. That’s where the sample was linked to Ms. Searight.
Ms. Searight grew up in Paris but spent most of her adult life in Austin, some 270 miles away.
She loved Texas history and herded cattle by driving around them in a 1964 Studebaker, The Austin American-Statesman wrote in 1996.
She founded Austin’s chapter of the Audubon Society and later donated hundreds of acres of her ranch land to serve as a city park, according to The Statesman. The park, which is named after her, sits in the Slaughter Creek area of Austin.
Later in life, Ms. Searight moved back to the family home in Paris, a white, two-story wood-frame house, where she was found on Aug. 18, 1996.
Kirsten Noyes contributed reporting.
