Quote:Todd Barket is a Florida man charged in the 1998 cold case murder of 68-year-old Sondra Better after he submitted his fingerprints for a background check while applying for a job, The Tampa Bay Times reports.

In August 1998, Better, a sales clerk at Lu Shay’s Consignment Shop in Delray Beach, was beaten and stabbed to death days before her planned retirement during a robbery.

Police had no leads on a suspect for 20 years — until Barket applied for a job as a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home. He submitted his fingerprints for a routine background check with the Agency for Healthcare Administration and police were notified of a “reverse hit.”

Barket’s prints matched the prints found at the murder scene 20 years earlier.

Barket, 51, was arrested Wednesday.

Quote:Sonda Better, a 68-year-old sales clerk at Lu Shay’s Consignment Shop in Delray Beach was found in a pool of her own blood by police.

She was surrounded by shards of glass, a heavy ashtray, and two decorative marble balls.

An autopsy determined that Better had been repeatedly hit in the head with a blunt object and stabbed twice in the neck. One of her fingers had been severed and she had defensive wounds on her hands.

Police said a cake cutter was missing from the store and may have been used to stab the clerk.

Fingerprints found on one of the marble balls later came back as Todd Barket’s.

Quote:Todd Barket was never a suspect in the murder and appears to have stayed out of trouble during the two decades since the murder.

In January, Barket applied for a job as a certified nursing assistant and submitted fingerprints to the Agency for Healthcare Administration for a routine background check.

The agency notified Delray police of a “reverse hit” when Barket’s prints matched those found on the marble ball. The prints had been stored in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

Quote:After the fingerprints came back as a match, detectives obtained a search warrant and collected a DNA sample from Barket. The sample came back as a match to the DNA found at the crime scene.

Quote:Todd Barket was never a suspect in the murder and appears to have stayed out of trouble during the two decades since the murder.