GRANITE CITY, Ill. — A 34-year-old mother of two vanished into the night after climbing into a dark-colored pickup truck in a back alley, and for more than three decades, the only thing her family had was a question that echoed through every holiday dinner and sleepless night: who took her, and why did they never face a single consequence for it?
The answer, prosecutors now allege, was living a quiet life just a few miles away, a man named Albert Lee Ziegler, who was 70 years old when he was finally tracked down through a DNA match that investigators described as the most complex puzzle of their careers. Randy Gail Sperino, known to her loved ones as Randy Gail Black, was found on November 10, 1993, in a rural patch of Granite City, her 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮 body wrapped in a bedsheet and left discarded on the property of a farmhouse on Handfelder Lane. She had been beaten so severely that pieces of metal and fiber were later discovered embedded in her skull, a detail that would haunt detectives for decades.
The scene, investigators said, was not the place of her murder, but the place where her killer dumped her body as if she were refuse, her hair matted with blood and her flesh covered in the signs of violent impact by an object that was never found. There were tire tracks leaving the scene, and drag marks, indicators that the killer had to physically pull her from a vehicle and lay her out in the grass, leaving her 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the morning dew and the elements.
The last known sighting of Sperino was at approximately 7:30 that evening, when a witness saw her climb into a dark-colored truck with a white male driver who appeared to be of shorter stature. She had spent the previous hours visiting her father, a day in which she was seen purchasing alcohol and acting erratically, with witnesses believing she was intoxicated. She had been living in Missouri, but had come to stay with her dad, a trip intended to be a few days of catching up.
Instead, it became the last time her father would ever hear her voice. The initial investigation was swift, the sheriff’s office quickly ruling this a homicide given the magnitude of trauma to her head. Detectives began staffing out a timeline, and they found themselves hitting brick wall after brick wall.
The community, a tight-knit steel town of roughly 35,000 people, was shocked to the core at the brutality of the act, and the department was under immense pressure. But the leads were cold. They collected tire iron samples from dozens of vehicles fitting witness descriptions, brought in an entire caravan of men who had been known to drive similar trucks, and even followed an anonymous tip that led them to a Hardee’s restaurant, hoping to catch a break from a overheard conversation.
They collected DNA from a wide swath of the public, and compared those samples one-on-one, only to get negative result after negative result. The case was growing older, and the technology of the time was reaching its limits.
The victims’ children, Wesley Sperino and his sister, were raised with the knowledge that their mother was violently taken from them, but for 33 years, they lived in a world of unanswered questions. I was 15 years old then, the phone call from my father telling me that she had passed, and I didn’t ask for details, I froze, said her son, Wesley, in a victim impact statement during the press conference. They were told very little about the fact that their mother was a homicide victim.
They were left to wonder, when they walked the streets of Granite City, if they were passing the very person who had bludgeoned their mother to death. In the silence, there was also a creeping anger. I was angry at everyone at the start, angry at the police for not being able to find the person, and angry at the world for taking her away, Wes recalled, his voice trembling as he awaited the announcement of a charge.
But there was also a desperation, a need to find the person so that they could be held accountable and so that we could define who we were as daughters and sons that weren’t fully orphaned.
The case was eventually relegated to the bottom of a filing cabinet, or in the back of a detective’s drawer, but cold cases are never truly cold. The term is a misnomer for the way the investigators work, said Madison County Sheriff Jeff Connor, who inherited the case, but kept it burning in his mind and on his calendar. When I took office, I told my investigator to look over this case, I told them to give me an update, and the responsibility was passed to Detective Jacob Swoboda, a man who had only been a child the year that very woman was killed, but who took on the mantle with a zeal that bordered on obsession.
The detective began by criminalizing a box of files that was so thick, it was over thousands of pages of reports, and he started to see that the this case was a bureaucracy of its own, with each note a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The most critical piece was the preservation of the evidence, specifically, the sexual assault kit, which contained a mixture of victim DNA and an unknown male. In 1990, there was technology, today’s technology, but at the time, DNA could be compared to a database of offenders, and this unknown subject was not in that database, a fact that led to more Admiral dead ends.
The breakthrough came in a field that did not even exist when the case went cold: forensic investigative genetic genealogy, a tool that led to the arrest of the Golden State Killer. Sheriff Connor and his team decided to send the old rape kit to a lab called Othram, a company that builds its process on the precision of genomic sequencing, not just taking a snippet of a sample, but the entire genetic code. Because the sample was what scientists called a mixture, with more victim DNA than suspect, it was considered a maybe, a long shot with a high chance of failure.
The victim’s DNA had contaminated the suspect’s profile, but the experts at Othram, led by Dr. Kristen Middleman, decided to attempt to detangle the two pairs of chromosomes. The process took over a year and required a massive amount of customized algorithmic work to build a profile that had enough markers to identify a family line, even with so much contamination.
The result, in a way, was an almost unbelievable lead: the DNA match pointed to a family line, and the closest relative they could identify was a young male born in 2006, who could not be the killer. That meant the killer was a father or grandfather to that child. They started building a family tree, and they started with a name.
That name was Albert Lee Ziegler, said Detective Swoboda, but as they tracked his history, they found it was a name that was entirely familiar to the region and to the older officers.
The team discovered that Albert had lived an address that was only 0. 65 miles away from where the body was found, and he had been the owner of trucks that matched the description that had been given all those years ago. Through a genealogical search of his family, they were able to trace the members to a young male relative and ask for a reference sample to confirm the link.
But their method of sampling his DNA was tricky. Albert was now an elderly man, frail, and living in a care facility. They first attempted to get a discarded cup or a cigarette from him at his home, and to follow him to a local café, for days they watched him.
Then, they learned that Albert had made a recent trip to the hospital. They visited him on a specialized unit, and the medical staff became protective, saying he was not able to consent to giving a sample. Detective Swoboda ultimately got a search warrant and returned, executing it legally.
Along the way, Albert himself had called the detective, wanting to know why they were interested in him, but they kept their cards close, only telling him they were investigating old crimes. In the hospital, they took a swab of his cheek. The nurse walked out of the room, and he said, ‘You think I could have something to do with a murder, don’t you,’ he recalled later.
I said ‘I am just fetching a DNA, Mr. Zeigler.’
The DNA was sent to the state lab for a one-on-one comparison. The result was nearly instantaneous: Albert Lee Ziegler was the single source of the unknown profile from the 1993 murder. The sheriffs office gathered the district attorney to hold a meeting.
They felt they had enough to start a formal interview, which is the key. When they sat down with Albert, they were able to get not only a confession but also a story of the night’s events. He had seen Sperino in an alley and offered her a ride.
He admitted he was the only perpetrator of the altercation that led to her death, and he gave information that only led to a finding, description of the weapon that the coroner had identified. He didn’t act like a monster, but more like man who had been holding his breath for 33 years, the detective later stated. At the end of a long evening, a 55-year-old man was told and taken to the police station, he was charged with first-degree murder.
He was also identified as living his final years inside an assisted living facility, but the criminal court determined he should be held without bail pending trial, a heffa, a judge determines to be credible to lifetension and a flight risk.
The arrest came in January of 2024. Wesley Sperino and his sister got that phone call , and they were at the press conference when the announcement was made, looking at a photograph of their mother, the woman who had held them in her arms and, perhaps, remarked about her love of strong will. This was one of the most bizarre, tedious and incredible cases of my career, said the Sheriff.
I had a dream to give closure. We gave closure. The family, they wept with a tears of joy for the first time, they hugged the sheriff and detectives.
Sperino was a son who had been raised by his father, who always felt a trauma missing form his mother, but kept his mother alive, a woman in the photograph who loved to play catch and argue and love hard. She was not just a victim, she was a person. The world knows now that she did not choose that man.
He attacked her, they waited for the trial. As they prepare to face the ultimate moment of seeing the man who killed their mother in judge, they have a sense of relief. There is a father that can be today.
A man they don’t know. They all are ready to see the final turn of page.
As for the technology that brought them to this day, the DNA companies are going to keep grabbing at the edges of what’s possible, with the labs saying the ability to get justice is not a matter of how much time passes, but how much skill is in the lab. If you have a specimen at a rs. We are going to keep trying.
There are so many other families out there who have felt the same pain. That hope is that the door is now open. Other agencies will be reopening cold cases, they know a technology now that didn’t exist for the decades before.
The evidence is there, the justice can be served. The story of Randy Gail Black Sperino, the 34-year-old mother with a smile that causes both of her children who still misses the mother with all their hearts, isn’t just a story of a murder. It’s the story of the detection.
It’s story of a relentless investigator, and the story of a family to find that they can rest a little easier.
