On a rural property along Handvelder Road in Granite City, Illinois, a family returned home in November 1993 after being away for only two hours. Inside their land, they discovered the body of a naked woman wrapped in a bedsheet. She had been beaten to death. Investigators from the Madison County Sheriff’s Office and local police arrived to find tire tracks leading away from the scene, suggesting the body had been dragged from a vehicle and left there.
The lack of blood at the site, combined with the severity of her injuries, made it clear that the murder had happened elsewhere. She had been dumped. The victim was identified as 34-year-old Randi Gail Black Sperino, a mother of two. She had been visiting her father in Granite City from her home in Missouri.
Her father told investigators she had left his house on November 9 around 1 p. m. and had not returned. Because she was known to come and go while visiting friends, he had not immediately reported her missing.
Randi was a strong-willed woman who loved to laugh and spend time with her large family. She had grown up in the area and was last seen near a back alley on the west side of Granite City, climbing into a dark-colored pickup truck driven by a short white man. Witnesses had seen her walking through town that day, apparently intoxicated, stopping at a convenience store and speaking with people along the way. The timeline narrowed to a short window: she was last seen around 8 p.
m. , and her body was discovered by the property owners at 11:41 p. m. The autopsy showed she died from blunt force trauma to the head.
Fragments of fibers and metal were found inside her skull, indicating a violent beating with some kind of striking weapon, possibly a pipe or a baseball bat. A sexual assault kit was collected, and DNA evidence was preserved even though forensic DNA databases did not yet exist. In 1993, this was simply a case that investigators held onto, hoping science would one day catch up. Granite City was an industrial community of roughly 30,000 to 35,000 people, a place where murder was rare.
The community paid close attention and cooperated with investigators. Detectives traced her movements, spoke with store employees who sold her alcohol, and interviewed the last person known to have seen her alive. That man said she had wandered into his garage, and fearing she might injure herself or damage something, he urged her to leave. He described her getting into a small dark pickup truck driven by a white man who appeared short in stature.
Another person reported hearing two men discussing the case at a restaurant, one of whom claimed to know who committed the murder, but that lead eventually fizzled after a DNA sample excluded him. Investigators collected DNA from numerous individuals over the years, always comparing them directly to the evidence. Every result came back negative. The case never went cold in the sense that it was forgotten.
It remained open, and detectives continued to review it. In 1995, the FBI introduced CODIS, a national DNA database, and by 1998 it was fully operational across the country. Around 2000, the unknown male DNA profile from Randi’s case was entered into CODIS. The system checked it continuously, but no match ever appeared.
This meant the killer had never been arrested, convicted, or had his DNA entered into the system. Randi’s son, Wesley Sperino, was 17 years old when he learned of his mother’s death. He had been living in California with his father after his parents divorced. He remembered calling her as a child and telling her that when he turned 18, he would come live with her.
That never happened. For decades, he lived with anger and unanswered questions, often wondering if he had walked past his mother’s killer without knowing it. He channeled his frustration into sports and later joined the military. At one point, frustrated with the lack of progress, he called the sheriff’s office and spoke with Sheriff Dickson.
After that conversation, he apologized, and the department kept him informed about their efforts. In 2014, Jeff Connor retired from the Granite City Police Department and eventually became the sheriff of Madison County. The case was assigned to investigator Jacob Soboda, who was asked to review the massive box of reports and see if anything had been missed. Sheriff Connor, who had grown up in the same area where Randi was last seen and had known her family, made it a personal priority.
He promised Wesley that they would find the person responsible. The key breakthrough came when investigators decided to reanalyze the DNA evidence. They sent the sample to the Illinois State Police lab to update the profile and re-enter it into CODIS. Again, there was no match.
That was expected. The next step was investigative genetic genealogy, a technology that had been used to solve other high-profile cold cases. The Madison County Sheriff’s Office had previously worked with a laboratory called Astrium on an unidentified remains case, identifying a victim named Wynona Mitchell. That success gave them the confidence to try a similar approach.
The challenge was significant. The evidence sample was a mixture containing DNA from both the victim and the unknown male suspect. In fact, there was more victim DNA than suspect DNA in the sample, making it what scientists call a DNA mixture. The laboratory had to develop new methods to separate the profiles and extract enough information to build a usable genetic profile of the suspect.
They also used a reference sample from the victim to help identify which DNA markers belonged to her and which likely belonged to the suspect. The process required careful testing and reanalysis to avoid false negatives, where relatives might be missed because the two unrelated DNA profiles interfered with each other. After about 12 months of painstaking work, the laboratory produced a genetic profile that could be uploaded to public genealogy databases. The results identified a distant paternal relative of the suspect.
That relative was a young man born in 2006, clearly not the killer, but his DNA pointed investigators toward a family. Investigators contacted a close family member and obtained a reference sample, then traced the lineage further back until they identified a name: Albert Ziegler. The name immediately stood out to investigators. Albert Ziegler was from Granite City.
When Soboda looked through old high school yearbooks, he found Albert Ziegler listed in the Granite City High School records. Further digging revealed that at the time of the murder, Ziegler owned a property located only 0. 65 miles from where Randi’s body was found. He also owned vehicles matching descriptions that witnesses had provided of a small dark pickup truck.
Physically, he was described as short, around 5’7″, consistent with the witness account. At that point, Albert Ziegler was living in a senior apartment complex and was hospitalized with heart problems. Investigators first tried to obtain a DNA sample without his knowledge, but medical staff interfered, saying he did not understand what was happening. They left rather than risk the case.
When they were about to seek a warrant, Ziegler called the investigator’s office directly, saying he had heard they wanted to talk. Over the phone, they discussed people he knew from that time period, and he eventually mentioned that he had known a girl named Gail. When he said that, the investigator nearly froze. A warrant was obtained, and Soboda went to the hospital to collect a DNA sample.
Ziegler consented. After the sample was taken, Ziegler seemed reluctant to let the investigator leave the room. The sample was sent to the state lab for comparison with the unknown profile from the crime scene. The result was a 100% match.
Albert Ziegler was the sole contributor of the DNA evidence. The following week, investigators planned an interview with Ziegler at his home, with the district attorney’s office involved in determining the next steps. During the interview, Ziegler admitted to knowing Randi under the name Gail and described areas where she had been seen, details he could not have known unless he was involved. He then made initial admissions about the murder.
He provided information about where he had taken her, matching details of a sexual encounter, and even described implements that could have been used in the killing, consistent with the autopsy findings. He ultimately confessed that he was the sole person involved in the fight that led to her death. He was taken to the sheriff’s office to complete the interview. Albert Ziegler was 70 years old at the time of his arrest.
He was charged with murder and remained in custody. A hearing determined he would be held without bond until the conclusion of his case. Because the case remained in active litigation, investigators could not disclose all the details of his confession. Sheriff Connor called Wesley Sperino to deliver the news.
Wesley said he felt chills and had to sit down. He cried tears of joy, something he had never expected after nearly 33 years. He went straight to his sister’s house to tell her, and she was equally stunned. Wesley and his wife traveled to attend the press conference announcing the arrest, where officials declared that Albert Lee Ziegler was responsible for the death of Randi Gail Black Sperino.
Wesley said afterwards that he had never imagined such a day would come. For more than three decades, he had lived with the pain of not knowing. He had missed his mother through every holiday, every birthday, every Mother’s Day. He expressed relief that the suspect was still alive and in custody, though he wished it had happened much sooner.
His mother, he said, deserved to have the world know who did this to her, and his family deserved the chance to close this chapter. The technology that solved the case, he noted, was not even conceivable to the original investigators. The case stood as proof that forensic science continues to advance, and that old evidence should not be ignored.