A 70-year-old southern Illinois man faces two counts of first-degree murder in the beating death of a 34-year-old woman whose body was found in a field more than three decades ago, a case that went cold for years until investigators turned to forensic genealogical DNA to identify a suspect.
Albert L. "Buddy" Zigler of Caseyville was arrested and charged in connection with the 1993 killing of Randy Gail Sperino, Madison County State's Attorney Tom Haine announced Tuesday. Zigler remains in custody. A public defender has been appointed to represent him, and prosecutors are seeking to keep him behind bars pending trial.
The case sat unsolved for more than 30 years. Sperino's body was discovered on November 9, 1993, in a field in unincorporated Granite City. Court records describe her injuries as "massive blunt force trauma to the head." The charges allege Zigler "intentionally beat Sperino with a bludgeon, causing her death."
Zigler allegedly told investigators he picked up Sperino in Granite City, beat her with a metal bat or steel pipe at his residence, and then dumped her body in the field where she was later found. The New York Post reported the charges were announced alongside praise from both the state's attorney and the sheriff for the forensic genealogy work that broke the case open.
No motive has been publicly disclosed. Prosecutors have not said whether Zigler and Sperino knew each other before the night of her death. The charges describe a violent, non-probationable offense, the basis for the prosecution's push to keep Zigler detained.
Associate Judge James Hackett presided over Zigler's initial court appearance Tuesday and scheduled a detention hearing for Wednesday afternoon.
The break did not come overnight. Madison County Sheriff Jeff Connor recognized the potential of forensic genealogical DNA roughly seven years ago, when the technology was still in its early stages. He directed his investigators to apply it to the Sperino case.
That decision paid off. Forensic genealogy, which traces family connections through genetic evidence found at crime scenes, eventually led investigators to Zigler. The specific database and technique used have not been publicly identified.
Haine credited Connor's foresight and the persistence of his team, as Fox News reported:
"Seven years ago, Sheriff Connor had the foresight to know that a new investigative tool, even though it was just emerging, might be able to provide a breakthrough in this investigation. The sheriff and his investigators never wavered in seeking justice in this case."
The state's attorney also pointed to the broader implications of the technology for law enforcement nationwide.
"This case demonstrates the extraordinary value of modern investigative tools such as forensic genealogical DNA. Advances in technology and science are creating opportunities to solve cases that, years ago, might never have been solved."
But Haine was careful to note that technology alone does not close cases. He praised the investigators who "revisit evidence, follow leads, knock on doors, conduct interviews and continue pursuing the truth, no matter how much time has passed."
The Sperino case is part of a broader wave of decades-old crimes cracked by forensic genealogy. Across the country, law enforcement agencies have increasingly turned to DNA databases and genealogical research to identify suspects in cases that once seemed permanently cold.
In one recent example, a Texas cold-case suspect was arrested in Mexico after DNA technology linked him to the 1986 killing of a 16-year-old. That case, too, had gone unsolved for decades before modern science caught up.
The technology works by matching crime-scene DNA to genetic profiles uploaded voluntarily to genealogy databases by members of the public. Investigators then build family trees from those matches, narrowing down potential suspects through traditional detective work, interviews, records checks, and surveillance.
It is the same approach that famously led to the capture of the Golden State Killer in 2018, and it has since become a standard tool for cold-case units with the resources to deploy it. A San Francisco woman missing since 1973 was identified as a Texas Jane Doe through a similar DNA breakthrough, illustrating how the technology serves victims and their families even when a criminal prosecution is not the immediate goal.
What makes the Sperino case notable is the timeline. Sheriff Connor committed to the approach around 2016, when forensic genealogy was still emerging and unproven in many jurisdictions. That early bet, and the years of patient investigative work that followed, is what Haine highlighted in his public remarks.
For Sperino's family, the arrest comes more than 30 years after her death. Haine acknowledged that gap directly.
"While nothing can erase the pain experienced by Miss Sperino's loved ones, we hope this development provides some answers after so many years."
He called the arrest "an important step toward justice in a case that has remained unresolved for more than three decades."
Several key questions remain unanswered. It is unclear what DNA evidence was originally recovered from the 1993 crime scene, or whether investigators had identified any suspects or persons of interest before the forensic genealogy breakthrough. The nature of Zigler's alleged statements to investigators, whether they constitute a formal confession or something short of that, has not been clarified publicly.
Zigler's detention hearing was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. Prosecutors have framed the charges as involving a violent, non-probationable offense, signaling they intend to fight any bid for pretrial release.
Similar cases have shown how forensic DNA genealogy is reshaping American criminal justice. Florida deputies recently charged a suspect in a decade-old Tampa murder after DNA evidence and new witnesses surfaced, and in another case, a DNA breakthrough led to the arrest of an American fugitive in the Philippines for a 1989 child abduction. The pattern is clear: time no longer protects the guilty the way it once did.
The Sperino case carries a straightforward message for every sheriff's office and prosecutor in the country. Forensic genealogical DNA works. But it only works when investigators refuse to let a case die, when they store the evidence properly, revisit it with fresh eyes, and have the institutional will to spend years chasing a lead that might not pan out.
Connor and his team did that. They took a case with no public suspects, applied a technology most departments had not yet adopted, and followed it to a 70-year-old man living 15 miles from where the victim's body was found in 1993.
Randy Gail Sperino was 34 years old when she was killed. She deserved better than to become a forgotten file in a cabinet. The people who kept working her case made sure she didn't.
Some crimes are so old that the system shrugs and moves on. The right answer is the one Madison County gave: don't.
