The tech helping crack decades-old cold cases

Randy Gail Sperino was last seen alive on the evening of November 9, 1993, as she was getting into a pickup truck in Granite City, Illinois.

The 34-year-old's body was found hours later in a field nearby, the victim of blunt force trauma.

The identity of her killer was a mystery. DNA evidence found at the crime scene was tested against standard law enforcement databases, but no matches were found.

For three decades, investigators from the Madison County Sheriff's Office chased leads and interviewed hundreds of people as they attempted to identify the perpetrator.

The case looked like it would remain one of more than 250,000 unsolved homicides in the US.

Then, last year, detectives tried a fresh approach. They sent genetic evidence to Othram, a Houston-based company that uses DNA technology to help identify the perpetrators in cold and current crime cases.

The Madison County detectives had been inspired by investigative genetic genealogy techniques used to identify the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, back in 2018. In that case, an investigative team constructed a family tree to help identify the killer.

Source: BBC News Technology RSS (Open Press / Translated Full Text)