A Missouri man was arrested Friday in the sexual assault and murder last month of 90-year-old woman in her Lafayette home, authorities announced Friday.

Detectives tracked down Richard Craig McNew, 30, at a jail in St. Louis. They identified him through a national DNA database from evidence at the crime scene, according to a statement from the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office.

He remained Friday at the St. Louis jail, where he was being held on an unrelated charge. The statement said detectives arrested McNew on suspicion of killing of Ann Elizabeth Vuori based on forensic evidence and the results of a Friday morning interview with McNew.

He was formally charged Friday with Vuori's homicide, with special circumstances for murder committed during a rape, robbery and burglary. His extradition to California is underway, according to the statement.

A relative found the retired accountant on her bed Dec. 10, after a neighbor noticed several newspapers on her doorstep.

Her ankles and wrists were bound, and a gag was wrapped around her mouth and tethered to a bedpost. She had been sexually assaulted and smothered, authorities said.

It was the second arrest made in the case. Police arrested a Moraga man on Dec. 15. A DNA test later proved his innocence.

The crime has sent shock and fear through the elderly community. Over the past few days, police were going door-to-door handing out fliers with pictures of a ball cap and a work glove that the killer left behind in Vuori's house.

There were no signs of a break-in at the cottage on a quiet block of Moraga Boulevard near downtown, where the retired accountant had lived alone for 37 years. Cash and $18,000 in savings bonds were missing from the home, according to court documents.

But Lafayette police Chief Mike Fisher said earlier in the week that he believed sexual assault was the motive.

Such "sexual homicides" of the elderly are rare. About three percent of homicide victims in the United States are elderly women. One in seven victims of sexual homicide are 60 or older, a 1997 federal crime survey shows.

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