The 56-year-old woman was lying on her bedroom floor, bleeding after being stabbed repeatedly. She was found by her son-in-law, the superintendent of the apartment building where she lived in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium, on May 27, 1999. Emergency medical technicians arrived and pronounced Elsa Grullon dead.

On Monday, the police arrested Curtis Batchelor, 41, the man who they say raped and killed Ms. Grullon, potentially closing a case that had long gone unsolved. The authorities said that Mr. Batchelor’s DNA matched that left at the crime scene.

Mr. Batchelor, who lived in the same building as Ms. Grullon at the time of the murder, was arraigned on Tuesday in Bronx Criminal Court charges of first-degree murder, rape and sexual assault, the authorities said. His lawyer, Alice Fontier of the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit legal services organization, said that he pleaded not guilty.

The breakthrough in the case came in March 2016, the police said. They did not specify how they first linked Mr. Batchelor to the crime, but they said the connection emerged through the medical examiner’s office, which is in charge of the city’s database of DNA samples taken from offenders. Patrice M. O’Shaughnessy, a spokeswoman for Darcel D. Clark, the Bronx district attorney, said that Mr. Batchelor’s DNA was taken sometime after an arrest in January 2016 and was matched to that found at the crime scene.