The man accused of strangling 87-year-old Zahia Salem to death appeared in Suffolk Superior Court today, more than 20 years after a neighbor found her bloodied remains inside her South End residence, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

CHARLES BROOK, Jr. (D.O.B. 10/3/44), a.k.a. CHARLES BROOKS, a.k.a. CHARLES LEWIS, also a one-time resident of the South End, was arraigned on a single count of first-degree murder today in connection with Salem’s Nov. 29, 1989, homicide. Acting on a request by Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight of Conley’s Homicide Unit, Clerk Magistrate Gary D. Wilson ordered Brook held without bail.

The Suffolk County Grand Jury indicted Brook on July 8 after a renewed investigation into Salem’s death by the Boston Police Cold Case Squad, criminalists from the Boston Police Crime Laboratory, and Suffolk County homicide prosecutors.

“This case shows the power and promise of DNA technology as a proven crime solving tool,” Conley said. “We’ve seen it exonerate the innocent and hold the guilty accountable. Here, it allowed us to reach back more than two decades to identify a suspect in a terrible, terrible crime.”

Salem’s remains were discovered on the evening of Nov. 30, 1989, inside her Union Park Street apartment, Knight said at today’s proceedings.

“It was apparent that her face and body had been battered,” Knight said. “Her clothing was in disarray with her skirt and undergarments pulled down around her knees.”

The prosecutor said Salem had been strangled to death and sustained “multiple contusions to her face and body, a blackened eye, fresh fractured ribs, contusions to her lips and tongue,” and other injuries.

The 1989 investigation never developed a suspect, but investigators at the time seized evidence from the scene that included scrapings from beneath Salem’s fingernails and a cigarette butt found in a saucer. Salem did not smoke.

Thanks to a grant that funded the use of DNA to investigate unsolved cases, members of the Boston Police Cold Case Squad undertook a new investigation into Salem’s slaying. Among other things, they submitted the crime scene evidence to the Boston Police Crime Laboratory for testing.

Criminalists were able to develop a DNA profile from the cigarette butt, which had been stored under laboratory conditions. In May of this year, they were also able to match that DNA profile to a DNA sample Brook had been ordered to provide in light of a 1991 felony conviction.

Members of the Cold Case Squad travelled to the Old Colony Correctional Center, where Brook is currently serving a 10- to 20-year sentence, Knight said. Detectives interviewed Brook, who denied knowing anyone in Salem’s building or ever being inside it. When shown a picture of the diminutive woman, however, he said he remembered helping her to her door after meeting her at a nearby store.

Also during the interview, Brook agreed to give a DNA sample to detectives. As the sample on file did, the fresh sample also matched the DNA profile recovered from the cigarette butt found 21 years earlier inside Salem’s apartment.

Michael Schultz is the DA’s assigned victim-witness advocate. Attorney Bruce Carroll represents the defendant. The case will return to court on Sept. 20 and a trial date has been tentatively scheduled for July 23, 2012.