NILES, Mich. (AP) — An Indiana man has pleaded no contest in the 1987 killing of a woman whose husband found her dead in their southwestern Michigan home.

The Berrien County Prosecutor’s office says 67-seven-year-old Patrick Gilham pleaded no contest Friday to second-degree murder and has agreed to a minimum 23-year prison sentence. A no contest plea is not an admission of guilt but is used as such at sentencing.

Gilham was arrested last month on open murder and other charges in the killing of 30-year-old Roxanne Leigh Wood. Her husband found her dead, with her throat cut, in their Niles Township home in February 1987.

At the time of the crime, a DNA sample was collected from her body and put in a nationwide database, but as the decades passed, it never yielded a match.

A company called DNA-ID received the case in April of 2021. Genealogists created a genetic profile of the previously unknown DNA using genome sequencing and uploaded it to public databases GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA. Then family trees of shared matches were built out to to identify common ancestors, according to a release.

In June 2021, Michigan State Police investigators gathered a cigarette butt that Gilham had thrown away. They sent it for DNA testing and it was a match and police then confirmed the DNA belonged to Patrick Gilham.