Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Clark was previously convicted of raping a 14 year-old girl in Mississippi. The victim in the case was 18 and Clark, then 20, pleaded guilty.

A Palm Beach County jury will begin deliberating today in the case of a 50-year-old Mississippi man who could face the death penalty if convicted of the 1987 cold-case murder of a young mother of three.

It has been three decades since police found 27-year-old Dana Fader’s body, raped and strangled, in the backseat of her Ford Fairmont at her Lake Worth apartment complex. Prosecutors in their final words to jurors on Monday said DNA evidence pieced together more than 20 years after the case went cold make it clear that Rodney Clark was her killer.

Defense attorneys, on the other hand, told jurors that Fader’s killer could be a mystery man on a motorcycle who had followed her and her sister, Martha Jo Bailey, home from a local bar just hours before the murder when the two returned from a night out on the town.

Assistant Public Defender Elizabeth Ramsey, part of a four-attorney team on Clark’s case headed by Palm Beach County Public Defender Carey Haughwout, also criticized the way investigators processed evidence in the case, saying they could have contaminated samples later linked to Clark because items from the crime scene hadn’t been properly separated.

A partial palm print on the outside of the car matched to Clark fails to prove he had any involvement with Fader’s death, Ramsey said, because the car was routinely parked outside and therefore open to similar contact from anyone who lived in or visited the area.

The case is the first death penalty case that the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office has taken to trial since since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death penalty sentencing system as unconstitutional in January 2016.

Assistant State Attorneys Aleathea McRoberts and Reid Scott rested their case on the strength of Clark’s DNA, found both on a pillowcase in the backseat of the Ford and on the back of Fader’s dress. After 30 years, Scott said, Clark’s case is as strong a circumstantial case as a jury could get.

"Killers don’t get to get away with crimes just because there’s no person sitting there watching them do it," Scott said. "It’s not that easy."

Circuit Judge Charles Burton sent jurors home for the day after closing arguments Monday, telling them to bring an overnight bag with them Tuesday in case their deliberations stretch beyond a day. If that happens, because it is a death penalty case, jurors will be sequestered until they reach a verdict.

If the jury convicts Clark of first-degree murder, then the case at a later date will go to a second phase, in which jurors will decide whether Clark will spend the rest of his life in prison or be put to death by lethal injection.

Before the January 2016 Supreme Court ruling declaring Florida’s death penalty sentencing system unconstitutional, Florida juries needed a simple majority vote to recommend a death sentence to a judge, who ultimately imposed a sentence. Florida lawmakers since then have made several revisions to the law, which now requires a unanimous 12-0 vote for a death sentence and gives jurors all sentencing power.

Who killed Fader remained an unsolved mystery for investigators for years after they initially failed to find any viable suspects in her murder.

Fader was living with her youngest child and her brother, Joseph Bailey, at the Willow Lake apartments on 10th Avenue North at the time she was killed in the early morning hours of June 20, 1987.

In 1989 investigators placed DNA from the scene of her death into Florida’s DNA database, but it turned up no matches.

Meanwhile, Clark pleaded guilty in 1988 to a rape charge in Mississippi and was declared a convicted sex offender.

More than two decades later, investigators ran the samples through a national database, which turned up a match to Clark.

McRoberts told jurors at the start of the trial last week that when investigators subsequently questioned Clark, he described Fader as "pretty" when he saw her photo and admitted living in Palm Beach County at the time she was killed, but said he never met her.