BOSTON, Sept. 27, 2012—A serial rapist today admitted to assaulting and strangling 87-year-old Zahia Salem to death in her South End home more than 20 years ago, accepting the near-certainty that he will die in prison for his crime, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said.

CHARLES H. BROOK, Jr. (D.O.B. 10/3/44) pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the Nov. 31, 1989, incident that took Salem’s life. Judge Thomas Connors sentenced Brook – who has cancer – to the mandatory term for that offense, life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

Had the case proceeded to trial, Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight would have introduced evidence and testimony to prove that Brook gained entry to the Union Park Street apartment where Salem lived alone, beat her, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her to death.

The case was investigated very actively by Boston Police detectives, Conley said, and even though they never developed a suspect they did have the foresight to preserve biological and other evidence from the scene.

Because those investigators maintained a cigarette butt and scrapings from beneath Salem’s fingernails under laboratory conditions, they were still viable for DNA testing when the Boston Police Cold Case Squad reviewed the matter in 2011 under a federal grant intended to help clear unsolved crimes with new forensic techniques.

Criminalists at the Boston Police Crime Laboratory developed a DNA profile from the evidence at the scene and submitted it to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, a database of DNA profiles from known offenders and unidentified subjects. That submission led to a match with Brook, who had been ordered to submit a sample to the database after rape convictions in 1989 and 1991.

Salem had no children, but a niece addressed the court on her behalf, remembering the immigrant seamstress as a spry old woman who had never driven a car and walked to church every day.

“My father remembers our aunt talking to him about retirement planning and worrying about Social Security being charity, which she didn’t want to accept,” the niece said in an impact statement.

“We felt lucky to have spent time with her in October of 1989, just a month before her untimely, unfortunate, and shocking death,” she continued. “We were all very saddened and angry … We thank the Boston Police Department and detectives for collecting DNA evidence at that time and securing it for this long. We are thankful for the grant that was awarded to open this very cold case and for the tenacity of the detectives who followed through so that we could see justice being served. We hope that other families will be touched in the same way we have been and to find some closure to their misfortune as well.”

Michael Schultz was the DA’s assigned victim-witness advocate. Brook was represented by attorney Bruce Carroll.

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All defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.