OAKLAND -- In what is believed to be the oldest cold case solved so far by Oakland police, a DNA match has led to special circumstance murder charges being filed against a 63-year-old ex-convict in the August 1974 fatal beating and sexual molestation of a 13-year-old East Oakland girl, authorities said Tuesday.

Curtis J. Tucker is charged with murder and the special circumstance enhancements of lewd or lascivious acts upon a child and that the killing happened during a burglary.

The victim, Julie McElhiney, a sixth grader at Sequoia Elementary School, was found about 5:40 p.m. Aug. 9, 1974, by her mother, in the bathroom of their apartment in the 3000 block of Pleitner Avenue. She had been beaten to death. Her mother told investigators she had talked to her daughter on the phone about 1 p.m. and there was no indication anything was wrong.

Tucker, a U.S. Army veteran who was arrested last Thursday at an Oakland veterans clinic, refused to talk to investigators, said Sgt. Mike Weisenberg, a patrol sergeant who works part-time in the department's cold case unit.

Weisenberg said the family did not know Tucker and had no prior contact with him. He said police are not sure of the motive.

Authorities said Tucker has a criminal record going back to the 1970s, including a felony burglary conviction in Oakland in 1972 that he went to prison for. In that case, he posed as a deliveryman and broke into a woman's downtown apartment and tried to sexually

He also has arrests in other states, including one in Washington that led to him being identified in the Oakland slaying.

The department a few years ago formed a cold case unit made up of a retired sergeant and current officers who help investigate cold cases part-time like Weisenberg. Recently an officer was assigned full-time to the unit.

Weisenberg was assigned the McElhiney case on April 2, 2010. He reviewed the evidence and found that a T-shirt Julie was wearing had semen stains on it. He requested a DNA analysis on April 22, 2010.

Because of a severe backup in the Oakland police crime lab, a possible match did not come back until last November after a nationwide DNA database search. The match with Tucker's DNA was confirmed with additional testing, as is procedure in such cases.

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DNA match leads to man's arrest in 1974 Oakland slaying of teen girl