Angela Samota's sorority sisters never lost hope that police would find the man who killed the vivacious 20-year-old Southern Methodist University student more than two decades ago.

They waited and they prayed. They scoured the Internet in search of news updates on the brutal 1984 slaying. They called Dallas police to check in.

The calls apparently paid off, prompting Dallas police to take another look at Miss Samota's case file. In it, detectives found preserved DNA evidence from the crime scene that they ultimately matched to a man in state prison for an unrelated rape case.

MATT NAGER/Special Contributor

About a dozen Zeta Tau Alpha members gathered Sunday in honor of a sorority sister they called vivacious and bright.

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"I was so excited," said Tish Drew, one of Miss Samota's sorority sisters who made an inquiry with the Dallas police homicide unit last year. The detective "said that they did have DNA and that they were going to send it off and that it could take up to a year."

Dallas police are not commenting about the case yet. But they are expected to announce charges this week against the suspect, who has not been publicly identified.

About a dozen of Miss Samota's Zeta Tau Alpha sorority sisters gathered Sunday evening on the SMU campus in a vigil for the athletic, bright woman they never forgot.

"We knew and we loved Angie dearly," said Evelyn Sandy. "This has been the most hopeful news in close to 24 years regarding this case."

"She was beautiful inside and out," said Ann Reeves. "She was a nice, vivacious woman ... she was incredible, but it just sometimes feels inadequate just to say that."

Several of the women wiped away tears as they prayed and sang together near a campus fountain, small candles glowing in their hands. They praised Dallas police for devoting countless hours of work to the case over the years.

This is the first case that the Dallas police homicide unit's recently re-formed cold case squad has solved. The DNA match in the case comes as the Dallas County district attorney continues to build a national reputation for using such evidence to free the wrongfully convicted.

Miss Samota's murder was preceded by an otherwise typical college night out in October 1984.

The sorority held a Trivial Pursuit party with a fraternity, Ms. Drew said. Some of the young women, including Miss Samota, continued on to the Boardwalk Beach Club, a Lakewood bar.

According to news reports after the murder, Miss Samota drove away from the bar about 1 a.m. with two friends, whom she dropped off. Then she returned to her condominium on Amesbury Drive, in East Dallas.

About 1:45 a.m., she called her boyfriend and said there was a man in her condo asking to use the phone and the bathroom. There was no urgency in her voice, the boyfriend told investigators.

The boyfriend tried calling Miss Samota back a few minutes later, but he got no answer. He drove to the condo and called police.

At 2:17 a.m., officers found Miss Samota's nude body on her bed. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed more than 20 times.

Investigators spoke to the SMU junior's friends and former boyfriends in the days following the killing. But within weeks of the murder, police publicly declared that Miss Samota probably had not known her killer.

Six months passed, and investigators lamented that they still had received no tips. The case went cold.

"A week goes by and a month goes by and six months goes by and then you're graduating and they still haven't solved it," Ms. Drew said. "And then it just continued, and it's that hole that has never left us."

With news spreading in recent days of the major break in the case, old friends who had lost touch expressed joy and relief in phone calls and e-mails to one another. It's a fitting tribute, they say, that the former social chair of her pledge class would once again reunite the sisters.

"Leave it to Angie to find a way to bring us all back together again," said Sloane Cathcart of University Park. "It's an overwhelming flow of emotions."