CROWN POINT | A Lake County judge on Tuesday continued the plea hearing for a man accused in the 1979 killing of a Gary boy.

Criminal Court Judge Clarence Murray moved David Bowen's potential submission of a plea to Sept. 2.

Bowen, 44, was charged in December with murder. He's accused of the sexual torture and death of 8-year-old Kenneth Conrick, court records state. Lake County police said DNA evidence unavailable 29 years ago links Bowen to the child's death.

Court records say Bowen, who was 16 years old at the time, became a suspect after police learned he had been accused more than a year before Conrick's homicide of sexually assaulting and beating a 9-year-old boy who lived near his home. The 9-year-old boy's mother agreed not to press charges against Bowen because Bowen underwent psychiatric treatment, police said.

Police said Bowen lived within blocks of Conrick and admitted knowing the boy. But Bowen claimed he didn't see Conrick on the day he was killed.

Police were forced to shelve the case as unsolvable a few months later because of a lack of evidence. However, police caught a lead in late 1992 when an anonymous woman, later identified as Bowen's sister Donna Oprish, called Gary police and said she suspected her brother had killed Conrick, police said.

Oprish gave police a DNA sample in 2006 that helped investigators establish that someone in her family had DNA consistent with DNA in seminal fluid and skin cells found on Conrick's clothing -- part of the evidence meticulously collected and preserved.

Police said they obtained a DNA sample in March from Bowen that is so consistent with the crime scene DNA that fewer than 191 people in the U.S. could be a match.

Bowen is being held in the Lake County Jail without bail.