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(CNN) - A suspect was arrested for the murder of a woman four decades after the body of the 21-year-old was found in Nevada, authorities said.
Charles Gary Sullivan was extradited to Nevada on Friday from Arizona, where he was arrested and charged with the murder of Julia Woodward, committed in 1979, the Washoe County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
This is one of the last arrests that were possible thanks to advances in DNA technology decades after the crimes were committed. In this case, a detective in the new unresolved case unit of the sheriff's office requested evidence of the scene to be examined.
Woodward's body was found on March 25, 1979 in Hungry Valley, about 24 miles north of Reno, according to the sheriff's office. The cause of death was forceful trauma.
Her parents told investigators that at the time she lived with them in San Rafael, California, before going to look for work in the Lake Tahoe / Reno area, authorities said. She was last seen alive in California on February 1, 1979.
Biological evidence identified Sullivan as a possible suspect in the case. In August, the Nevada secretary of justice received an accusation against him.
Technological advances are leading to more and more arrests for unsolved cases. The most famous is probably the arrest in the case of the Golden State Killer in April 2018, in which the researchers used DNA and a free genealogy database to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, for allegedly murdering 12 people and rape more than 50 women in the 70s and 80s.
In Philadelphia, researchers used photography enhancement technology to link an old sock to the then boyfriend of a woman killed in 1991. The 52-year-old man was arrested in September.
DNA