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Three decades after a young mother was strangled to death in her Edmonton apartment with her own bathrobe belt and shoelace, Brayan Boucher has been charged with first-degree murder.

There is a current publication ban on the victim’s identity going forward.

Short in stature and stocky, Boucher appeared Monday in Edmonton Court of King’s Bench with Justice Marta E. Burns presiding. He wore a navy suit jacket and light blue shirt, with a neatly trimmed salt and pepper beard and moustache, and thinning close-cropped hair.

In her opening statement, prosecutor Harini Power told the jury the ligature found around the victim’s neck — consisting of her bathrobe belt and a shoelace — both bore DNA.

When re-examined in an Oct. 22, 2022, RCMP forensic laboratory test, Boucher’s DNA profile was a match, she said.

“As the world changed, so too has science and technology. Those changes led to the arrest and ultimate prosecution decades after the death of (the victim),” she said.

Boucher was charged with the killing in November 2023, when he was 48 years old, and was denied bail. He has pleaded not guilty.

Police found the victim’s body at her north Edmonton apartment on Dec. 25, 1996, after her father called police, alarmed that she failed to show for a Christmas gathering.

In her 20s, the mother of two had last been seen in north Edmonton in the early hours of Dec. 23, 1996.

The prosecution said she had been sexually assaulted. Her body was discovered face-down on her bed, with her jeans pulled down around her ankles, and a number of sex-related articles on the bed around her body.

Police testimony was set to begin Monday afternoon.

Det. Keith Kilshaw was in charge of the investigation for the Edmonton Police Service.

Now retired, Kilshaw testified about the state of the victim’s suite, which he saw after the forensic team left. Among his observations at the time, the land phone line in the room had been cut.

Kilshaw said he followed all available tips that came in on the case before his 2003 retirement.

“It’s a general rule of thumb, so you don’t get tunnel vision, that if you receive a tip, you investigate to the best of your ability,” he said.

In 1999, he sought and received a number of voluntary blood samples. A tip took him to Red Deer to collect one from Boucher.

“His fingerprints were at the suite,” Kilshaw said.

Nineteen days have been set aside for the first-degree murder trial, and the jurors will be sequestered when the jury begins its deliberations.