ORLEANS, Mass. (AP) – A garbage man with a long rap sheet was charged Friday with murder and rape in the stabbing death of a fashion writer whose mysterious slaying turned a spotlight on a small Cape Cod town and inspired a best-selling book.

Christopher M. McCowen pleaded innocent and was ordered held without bail in the 2002 death of Christa Worthington, who was found lying in a bloody pool on the kitchen floor of her secluded home in Truro. Her then-2-year-old daughter, Ava, was unhurt but smeared in the blood as she clutched the lifeless body, which was clothed only from the waist up.

The arrest marks a long-awaited break in a case that baffled authorities for more than three years. There were no witnesses, nothing appeared to be missing from the house, and authorities struggled to find a motive.

“We’re happy there’s been an arrest,” the victim’s cousin, Jan Worthington, said Friday outside court. “It’s a sad day as well.”

McCowen was taken into custody at his Hyannis apartment late Thursday after his DNA was matched to semen recovered from Worthington’s body after the rape, prosecutors said.

McCowen was Worthington’s garbage man, collecting trash in front of her home once a week. As the garbage man, McCowen was asked to contribute DNA along with the mail carrier and other people who were regular visitors to her home.

He emerged as a possible suspect as early as April 2002, but did not provide the DNA sample until March 2004, District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said.

The delay in collecting the sample occurred because McCowen moved frequently over the two years. Then it took the state crime lab just over a year to analyze the sample, a problem O’Keefe blamed on a lack of resources from the state for DNA testing.

The suspect’s DNA submission was not part of an effort launched in January in which investigators began randomly collecting DNA evidence from men in Truro, a town on the outer Cape with a year-round population under 2,000. Civil liberties groups were outraged, calling the practice “a serious intrusion on personal privacy” and demanding that it stop.

Worthington, 46, had moved in 1998 to the tiny Cape town, where she had spent summers as a child. She became a single mother, leaving behind the fashion runways of Paris and New York, where she had built a successful career as a fashion writer.

Several ex-boyfriends came under scrutiny during the investigation, including Tim Arnold, who found her body, and Tony Jackett, a law officer in a nearby town who fathered her child.

A year after the murder, author and fellow Truro resident Maria Flook published “Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod,” which became a New York Times and Amazon.com best-seller. The book outraged those close to Worthington for its portrayal of her as sexually promiscuous and her family as aloof and remote.

In the book, O’Keefe makes disparaging remarks about Worthington, prompting her family and friends to demand that he excuse himself from the case. He refused, but apologized to the family and appointed an assistant district attorney from a neighboring county to play a leading role in the investigation.

Authorities stressed that McCowen and Worthington did not have a relationship.

“There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest there was any relationship whatsoever between them, other than him walking up her driveway to collect her trash,” O’Keefe said.

McCowen was charged with first-degree murder, aggravated rape and armed assault. His court-appointed lawyer, Francis O’Boy, described McCowen’s mood as “somber.”

According to Florida records, McCowen was released from a minimum-security prison there in 1998, after serving more than three years for motor vehicle theft, burglary and trafficking in stolen property in Key West. He received probation for a lengthy list of other crimes, mainly burglary and trafficking in stolen property.

AP-ES-04-15-05 1827EDT