HILLSBOROUGH — Prosecutors are dusting off evidence boxes and digging out yellowed witness lists as they prepare to try a second defendant in a 1995 child kidnapping and extortion plot after he fatefully surfaced last week.

Kevin Tayueh Lin, 68, was arraigned in a Redwood City courthouse Monday — which incidentally marked the 22nd anniversary of the crime — following his arrest over the weekend in the Los Angeles area. Apparently thinking the coast was finally clear, he applied to renew his visa to stay in the country, triggering an identity check that would unearth a long-forgotten but still active warrant for him, authorities said.

Lin appeared in court with a Mandarin interpreter, and when asked if he could afford an attorney, said his “money was tied up in Taiwan,” said Karen Guidotti, San Mateo County’s chief deputy district attorney.

Lin was sent back to the San Mateo County jail where he is being held on $5 million bail on kidnapping and conspiracy charges.

“We’re basically resurrecting the case,” Guidotti said. “We’re in the painstaking process of sifting through the evidence, and see what more we can do with the evidence given developments in technology we may not have had back then. And finding those witnesses.”

Lin presumably fled the country following the Dec. 11, 1995 snatching of a 9-year-old girl from South Hillsborough Elementary School by two men in a white Mazda van. They held the girl captive for nine hours in an apparent attempt to extort her wealthy parents.

But the abductors ended up with much more trouble than they expected. Within a few hours, the girl’s photo had been plastered all over the evening news and in bulletins to area police agencies — a high-tech feat for the time — and then were told that their demand for $800,000 in ransom would be delayed because her parents were in Taiwan.

The victim, who no longer lives in the area, testified in a 1997 court trial that her captors gave her three quarters to use a pay phone to call her aunt before abandoning her, unharmed, outside the Hilton near San Francisco International Airport.

That trial ended with the kidnap and conspiracy conviction of John Paul Balocca, a Pasadena man who was 20 years old when the crime occurred and was arrested in 1996. Prosecutors at the time said Balocca was paid $5,000 for his role.

But Lin and a third suspect, Brian Shieh — thought to be the masterminds of the kidnapping — were believed to have left the United States.

Hillsborough police Capt. Doug Davis, who was the lead investigator in the kidnapping, recalled how strongly the case resonated with the public.

“It was the kidnapping of a very young person that occurred in front of other children,” Davis said. “There was a massive manhunt. The FBI was involved.”

For a time, Davis said it was his primary focus: “I spent a majority of my time working this case. I spent a great deal of time in L.A.”

Then out of the blue last week, Davis got a rapid trip down memory lane: the State Department contacted him to tell him that someone with Lin’s name was “requesting to renew a visa.”

They sent Davis a photograph, and besides some signs of aging from the past two decades, it looked like Lin.

It was back to Los Angeles for Davis. On Friday, he and the federal agents covertly summoned Lin under the guise of follow-up for his visa application.

“We confirmed it was his identity,” Davis said.

Shieh remains at large. Guidotti lauded the law-enforcement officers who made the connection to Lin long after it had been forgotten in many minds. It’s time now, she said, to jog some memories.

“The work,” Guidotti said, “begins again.”

Staff writer Julia Prodis Sulek contributed to this report.