A 51-year-old Nevada man has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the death of an elderly woman 33 years ago in Bryn Mawr.

Ronald Wayne MacDonald, 51, entered the plea Thursday; he’s being held in the county jail in downtown Seattle on $2 million bail.

MacDonald was charged in September with the murder of Arlene Roberts, an 80-year-old widow, who was found dead in her trailer at the Lakeshore Manor Mobile Home Park on Lake Washington in October 1978.

Roberts, who weighed less than 100 pounds, was “seriously beaten, tied up and strangled,” prosecutors wrote in asking for $2 million bail in September.

MacDonald had fought extradition to Washington state.A case-setting hearing is 1 p.m. Dec. 22 in courtroom 1201 at the King County Courthouse in Seattle.

In an interview at his home in Reno in June with King County Sheriff’s detectives, MacDonald said it had always been in the back of his mind that his arrest could come someday, according to court documents.

MacDonald’s arrest was made possible by advances in print identification technology, which allowed cold-case detectives in 2010 to link MacDonald to fingerprints found at the crime scene in 1978.

The case is the 19th cold case homicide filed by the King County Prosecutor’s Office since the office initiated its Cold Case Unit in 2005.