BOULDER, Colo. -- More than a decade after University of Colorado student Susannah Chase was raped and killed, a man linked to her death through DNA is facing trial.

Diego Olmos Alcalde's trial begins Monday. He was charged with her death last year, after a national DNA database linked him to the crime.

The 23-year-old student from Stamford, Conn., was found severely beaten in an alley a block from her Boulder home Dec. 21, 1997. A baseball bat was found nearby.

Police didn't make an arrest in the Chase killing until last year, when a DNA sample taken from Alcalde while he was in a Wyoming prison led authorities to charge him.

Authorities in Wyoming, where Alcalde had served time in prison for a 2000 kidnapping conviction, had submitted a sample of his DNA to a national database. Authorities say the DNA matched a sample taken from the Chase case.

Alcalde faces charges of murder, rape and kidnapping. Jury selection began Monday and is expected to take three days. The trial is expected to last about four weeks.

Chase's mother, Julie Chase, came from her Connecticut home for the trial.

"I'm convinced this is who it is," Julie Chase said of Alcalde. "We're looking forward to having this over and behind us quickly."

She said she has "complete confidence" that prosecutors will prove to a jury that the 39-year-old Chilean native beat her daughter with a baseball bat, raped her and dumped her in an alley to die.

But the defendant's mother, Leticia Olmos Snyder of Aurora, a suburb of Denver, says her son has been wrongly accused by a police force desperate to close a cold case.

"I know he didn't do it," she said. "The police don't know what they're doing."

The trial could conclude one of Boulder's most notorious unsolved crimes.

Susannah Chase was walking home alone from a pizza parlor when she was attacked. Police say she was savagely beaten with a baseball bat, dying the next day in a hospital after 24 hours on life support. The same day she died, Chase was supposed to fly home to Connecticut for Christmas.

Police interviewed hundreds of people, including Chase's boyfriend. They took DNA samples from at least 50 men, hoping to match an unknown DNA profile recovered from Chase's body. But no matches were made and leads in the case eventually fizzled out.

A suspect wasn't identified for another 10 years, when a DNA collection in 2007 identified a possible culprit who'd served time in Wyoming.

Alcalde's DNA was taken while serving time for an attempted kidnapping of a woman in a Wyoming parking lot in 2000. Alcalde finished his Wyoming sentence but was arrested in Colorado in early 2008 and charged with Chase's killing.

Julie Chase said she wasn't sure her daughter's killing would ever be solved.

"I did not think we would ever see this day," she told the Daily Camera newspaper.