Killer Kept In Touch With Her Family for 23 Years. Until DNA Exposed Him

Killer Kept In Touch With Her Family for 23 Years. Until DNA Exposed Him

In June of 2024, a man was pulled into a side room at Dallas Airport. Told it was a routine customs check. Nothing unusual. He sat down, drank from a bottle of water someone had left on the table, and threw it in the trash on his way out. He had no idea that bottle was about to end his life as he knew it.

Nine days later, a lab confirmed what police already suspected. That water bottle held the answer to a murder that had gone unsolved for 23 years. And the man who drank from it was someone an entire family had once trusted completely.

To understand what that water bottle really meant, you have to go back to where this all started. A spring morning in Maryland, more than two decades earlier. Chevy Chase sits just north of Washington, D.C. In the spring of 2001, it was quiet, wealthy, and safe.

Leslie Preer had lived there for years, and she fit the neighborhood well. She was 48, married to a man named Carl, who everyone called Sandy, and mother to a daughter named Lauren. She worked at an advertising production company in the city.

People who knew her described her the same way, again and again. Warm, generous. She was also known for showing up on time, every time. If she said she’d be somewhere, she was there. If something came up, she called ahead.

So, on the morning of May 2nd, 2001, when 10:00 came and her desk was still empty and her phone rang out, her boss, Brett Reedy, knew something was off. He started making calls. First to Lauren, then to Sandy.

Sandy told him he’d last seen Leslie around 7:45 that morning as he left for work. She’d been getting ready. Nothing seemed wrong. That was almost 4 hours earlier. The two men agreed to meet at the house on Drummond Avenue.

What they found stopped them at the door. Blood on the wall near the entrance, a puddle on the floor, a small table knocked over. A rug that belonged in the foyer had been dragged into the living room, soaked through.

Sandy moved through the house calling Leslie’s name. Nothing. He checked outside, asked the neighbors if they’d seen her, called nearby hospitals holding onto the idea that maybe she’d fallen and gotten hurt, that someone had taken her somewhere for help.

In the basement, he found the family dog shut behind a door it couldn’t have opened on its own. Someone had put it there. Brett called 911. Both men were told to leave the house and wait outside.

When officers arrived, they asked Sandy if he’d checked everywhere. He said he had. Everywhere except the master bathroom. He hadn’t been able to make himself look. Officers went upstairs. The shower was still running. In the corner of the stall, they found Leslie. She was gone.

What investigators pieced together over the next few hours told them this wasn’t a robbery gone wrong. It was something slower. Leslie had been attacked near the front door. She fought back hard enough to leave marks of her own on whoever did this.

And afterward, someone carried her body upstairs, placed her in the shower, and ran the water, trying to wash away what couldn’t be washed away. By the end of that day, investigators in Montgomery County were left with one question. Who had a reason to do this? And who had a way into that house?

In most homicides, the first person police look at is the spouse. That’s not an accusation, it’s just where the facts usually point. And Sandy Preer knew that as well as anyone. He didn’t run from the attention, but the closer detectives looked, the worse things seemed to get for him.

By his own account, the marriage had been under strain. Leslie had been struggling with alcohol in the months before her death. Sandy told investigators that Leslie was, in his words, “an absolute love and a beauty when she wasn’t drinking.” But that she’d have a lot, and it was one of the reasons he’d sometimes come home late. He admitted it was getting hard to deal with.

When detectives asked him to walk through the evening before the murder, Sandy said he’d run errands, a stop at the dump, three different stores looking for a battery charger. Home by around 9:00 that night. To the detectives, it sounded less like a memory, and more like a man building himself an alibi one step at a time.

A neighbor added something else. The night before Leslie was found, every light in the house was on, but the curtains were drawn shut. And the neighbor thought that was strange. It wasn’t something that house usually did.

Sandy agreed to a polygraph test. He failed it. To the detectives working the case in 2001, that felt close to confirmation. A strained marriage, a shaky account of his evening, a failed polygraph. He was brought in for questioning the same day Leslie was found. And after 2 hours, he asked for a lawyer and the interview ended.

Weeks later, he came back on his own. Detectives told him they had physical evidence and that physical evidence doesn’t lie. They told him Leslie was dead before 7:00 that morning and that there was evidence she never called him from the house, no matter what he’d said.

He sat and listened. Then told them plainly that he’d been cooperating since day one. That he’d answered enough questions and that his attorney had told him not to answer anymore. Near the end, he asked the detective a direct question. Was he free to leave? The detective told him yes. Sandy stood up and walked out. No hesitation. That’s not usually how a guilty man leaves a room.

Investigators also spoke with people connected to the family, co-workers, friends, and acquaintances of Lauren’s, including a boyfriend she dated in high school named Eugene Gligor, who told them he hadn’t been in touch with the family in years.

A year after the murder with no arrest made, detectives sat down with Lauren. She was 24 and she’d spent the past year caught between two things she couldn’t reconcile. She told them she believed it was someone Leslie knew. Someone she was comfortable with. Not a stranger who’d wandered in off the street. Given where her mother’s body was tucked into a bathroom that wasn’t obvious from the rest of the house, she didn’t think a random intruder would have known to look there.

But, she couldn’t fully clear her father, either. She told detectives that no matter who it turned out to be, even if it were a friend’s boyfriend, she’d never call that person completely innocent just because she knew them. Her father was no different. Except that he was her father, and she’d watched him her whole life.

He’d never hit her. He’d never hit her mother, not even at her worst. He cried easily. He buried the family hamsters in the backyard and made small graves for them. She said she couldn’t picture him beating someone to death by the front door and carrying her upstairs afterward like it was nothing. It didn’t fit the man she knew. She held both of those thoughts at once, and neither one let her sleep easier.

Two months after Leslie’s death, while Lauren still had no answer, the crime lab finished analyzing a piece of evidence from the scene. Male DNA had been found underneath Leslie’s fingernails, left there during the struggle that killed her. It didn’t match Sandy Preer, not close enough to explain away. It simply wasn’t his. Sandy was cleared.

For investigators who’d built their entire theory of the case around him, that changed everything. If it wasn’t Sandy, someone else had been in that house. Someone whose DNA didn’t match anyone they’d thought to test yet. They cast a wider net. Co-workers, friends, neighbors. Every man with a documented connection to Leslie was asked for a sample.

One by one, they were compared against the unknown profile. One by one, they were ruled out. Buried in the file was something else. A tip called in by a neighbor just months after the murder, naming a name that wouldn’t matter to anyone for another 20 years.

The unknown DNA profile was entered into the national criminal database in September of 2001, in case whoever left it had a record somewhere in the country. There was no match. Months turned into years. Sandy Preer kept living in a community that had once quietly suspected him, a suspicion that never fully lifted even after he was cleared. He raised his daughter. He grieved his wife alone in the same house where it happened.

In 2017, Sandy died. His obituary said what everyone who knew him already understood, that he had never recovered from losing Leslie. He died without an answer. He died not knowing the truth had been sitting under his wife’s fingernails the whole time because the technology that could have found it didn’t exist yet. For most of two decades, that’s where the case stayed, closed but not solved.

In 2022, the Montgomery County Police Department’s Cold Case Unit took another look. Detective Tara Augustin had spent most of her career hoping for a spot on that unit. To her, cold cases weren’t failures. They were unfinished business, cases that let her look at old facts with fresh eyes instead of trusting what the original investigators had assumed.

She was paired with Detective Allison DuPuy, and together, they pulled the Preer file out of storage and started over. Treating a 21-year-old case the way they’d treat one from that morning. What they had was a DNA profile with no name attached. What they needed was a way to find that name.

By 2022, a kind of technology existed that hadn’t in 2001. It’s called forensic genetic genealogy. Investigators take an unknown DNA sample and compare it against public genealogy databases, the same kind of services people use to trace family history or find distant relatives. If someone in that database shares even a small amount of DNA with the unknown sample, it means they’re related. Even if the connection is so distant that neither person would ever know about it on their own.

Sometimes that list comes back with thousands of names, and most of them are barely related at all. The department sent the case to a lab that specializes in this kind of work. From the evidence collected back in 2001, scientists built a detailed genetic profile of the unknown man whose DNA had been under Leslie’s fingernails.

That profile was run against an open genealogy database, and it came back with a list of people who shared some amount of DNA with him. Most were strangers with no clear link to anything. For a year and a half, Augustin and DuPuy worked through those matches, building out family trees branch by branch, trying to find a path that led somewhere real. Most of it went nowhere.

Then one match stood apart. It led to a family line in Romania. Detective Augustin started digging through public records tied to that family, trying to understand how the connection worked and where it might lead in the United States. As she worked through the names, one surname kept surfacing. Gligor. It stopped her. She’d seen that name before. In this exact case file.

She went back through the old reports until she found it. A boyfriend Lauren had dated in high school, mentioned briefly years earlier as someone connected to the family. Eugene Gligor. Using the family tree they’d built from the genetic matches, the detectives worked out exactly how Eugene fit into it. He was a distant relative of the person whose DNA had first flagged the Romanian family line. Close enough that it wasn’t a coincidence.

They started building out everything they could find on him. He and Lauren had met at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and dated for about 5 years, breaking up roughly 2 years before the murder. He’d been close with the family during that time. Welcomed at dinners and holidays. Leslie had always liked him. Sandy had been more cautious, telling Lauren more than once that something about him felt off, though he could never explain exactly what.

His own history had some rough edges. His parents divorced while he and Lauren were together and he didn’t handle it well. He was expelled from a boarding school. As a teenager, he’d been accused of assaulting a woman on a bike path near their homes. Lauren went to the police station herself at the time and told detectives there was no way Eugene could have done it.

None of that had ever led to a conviction. That mattered more than it should have because it meant Eugene Gligor had never been arrested for anything serious enough to have his own DNA entered into a criminal database. There was nothing on file to compare against the sample from Leslie’s fingernails. If detectives wanted certainty, they needed his DNA directly. And they needed to get it without him knowing why.

Digging further into his adult life, they found a protective order petition filed in 2021 by his second wife after their separation. In it, she described him as unpredictable. She wrote that he threw objects and punched walls, that she was scared in her own home, that she was seeking protection from his outbursts. A judge denied the petition, finding no legal grounds to prove abuse under the statute. But to investigators building a picture of who Eugene Gligor really was, it was one more piece that didn’t match the easy-going image most people who knew him described.

There was one more complication. Eugene wasn’t the only Gligor who fit the family tree. He had a brother, Andre, living nearby in a townhouse owned by their mother. The two weren’t close after Eugene’s separation in 2021. Andre had grown wary of him. Worried Eugene was maneuvering to get him pushed out of where he lived. Unsettled by his own brother, Andre had even reached out to Lauren around that time, asking in his own way what she remembered about Eugene. Trying to understand a side of him he wasn’t sure he trusted himself.

Detectives took that seriously. The DNA could belong to either brother. Until they had a confirmed sample from Eugene specifically, Andre stayed on the list, too.

The break came when detectives learned Eugene was returning from a trip overseas, landing at Washington Dulles International Airport in June of 2024. This was the water bottle. They arranged for him to be pulled into a secondary screening room, a routine-seeming customs stop. Water bottles had already been placed on the table inside.

Eugene sat down. He opened a bottle. He drank from it. When he was done, without a second thought, he threw it in the trash. The moment he left the room, detectives retrieved the bottle. It was swabbed and sent to the lab for comparison against the profile from the 2001 crime scene. Nine days later, the results came back. The DNA on that water bottle matched the unknown male profile that had been under Leslie Preer’s fingernails for 23 years.

On the morning of June 18th, 2024, Eugene Gligor sat on the steps outside his apartment in Washington, D.C. It was warm, sunny, in the low 80s. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. A task force of U.S. Marshals approached. He was told to put his hands up. Within moments, he was in handcuffs. He didn’t resist.

A few hours later, he sat in an interrogation room at the Montgomery County Police Department, across the table from detectives Augustin and DuPuy. He still didn’t fully understand why he was there. The detectives started slowly. Basic paperwork, his rights, simple questions about his health and his state of mind.

Eugene answered all of it, but not briefly. He mentioned he’d been sober for years. He mentioned his highest level of education. He mentioned he didn’t speak any other languages fluently. He offered a steady stream of small facts nobody had asked for, speaking slowly the way someone speaks when they’re choosing every word before they say it.

Then the detectives explained why they wanted to talk to him. A case from 2001. A woman named Leslie Preer. He said he remembered. He remembered that she’d been murdered. He didn’t ask which Leslie. He didn’t ask where she’d lived. He knew immediately, the way someone knows a fact they’ve carried quietly for a long time.

They asked about Lauren. He said they’d dated back in high school in the mid-90s. He said he used to spend time at the Preer house. He knew the family. He knew the layout. He said all of this without hesitation. And the detectives, without saying so, were mapping every connection he had to that house as he spoke.

Then they told him about the DNA. A sample from the crime scene in 2001 that had never matched anyone. Sitting unidentified for over two decades. And his name had come up during their investigation. They asked if he remembered anything from that time that might explain it. He said he didn’t recall.

At that point, Eugene asked for a lawyer. The detectives told him that was his right and that they wouldn’t ask him any more questions. But they had one more thing to tell him. They told him a sample of his own DNA, taken from a water bottle, had been compared to the DNA from the crime scene. It matched.

Eugene sat with that for a moment. Then he said he didn’t know what to say. He had no memory of it, no recollection at all. One of the detectives made a quiet observation. She noted there were no tears on his face. He said he was dry. Tired, dehydrated. She said it seemed like his reaction was for show.

He pushed back, saying this felt like guilty until proven innocent. That he had rights. That this wasn’t fair. She reminded him he was entitled to due process. And that all she was asking was a simple question. Why was his DNA in that house?

He offered the theory himself, unprompted, that maybe it was an interrupted burglary. That maybe he hadn’t expected anyone to be home. Then, almost in the same breath, he said he didn’t know. That he didn’t remember. That he wanted his lawyer.

Near the end, one of the detectives told him something that wasn’t really a question. If he truly had nothing to do with it, an innocent man would say so, clearly, without hesitation. Instead, all Eugene offered was the absence of an answer. He talked instead about his own history. Years of struggling with alcohol, a difficult childhood, an abusive father, hard years he said he’d worked through in recovery.

He said he knew he hadn’t done this. Even while admitting he had no memory that could prove it. The detective told him plainly that she didn’t know why his blood was in that house, either. The only person who did know was Leslie Preer. And she couldn’t tell them.

Eugene said two words. Wow. Wow. Then he asked if he could make a phone call. The interview ended there.

For nearly a year afterward, Eugene Gligor maintained he had no memory of what happened inside the Preer home on May 2nd, 2001. He denied any involvement every time investigators spoke with him.

Then, on May 7th, 2025, in a Montgomery County courtroom, he changed his answer. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He didn’t offer a full account of what happened that morning. He told the court he’d experienced blackouts in the days around the murder tied to drug and alcohol use, and that his memory of entering the Preer home was real. But, everything after was a blur. He said he only remembered stopping by around 9:30 that morning and getting into a physical altercation with Leslie. He said he was sorry he couldn’t give Lauren and the rest of the family the explanation they’d been waiting 24 years for.

Prosecutors weren’t satisfied. In their filings ahead of sentencing, they wrote that this was a crime without a motive the defendant was willing to admit, and that Eugene was still unwilling to acknowledge the full extent of what he’d done. They described what Lauren had lived with in the years since, that for months she couldn’t shower alone, that she’d bought clear shower curtains so she’d never have to wonder what was behind one, and that even now, years later, she still checks behind every shower curtain she comes across in an unfamiliar place.

On August 28th, 2025, more than 60 people filled the courtroom for his sentencing. Many were Leslie’s family and friends. Some were people who knew Eugene and had come to speak on his behalf, describing him as a kind person.

Six members of the Preer family addressed the court that day, describing what the last 24 years had cost them. When it was Lauren’s turn, she looked at Eugene directly and asked him why he had killed her mother. She told him Leslie was the sweetest of all the sinners, that she never judged anyone. She called him a monster. She called him a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

When it was his turn to speak, Eugene told the court he wanted to express his deepest regret, shame, and remorse for the tragedy he’d caused. He said he was grateful the time had finally come. He said he was relieved. He said the secret was over.

Judge David Lease called it a personal crime. He said there had been blood everywhere. He said he’d spent time trying to make sense of something senseless, and that he couldn’t. He sentenced Eugene Gligor to 22 years in prison with 5 years of supervised probation to follow. He ordered a mental health evaluation and barred any contact with the Preer family.

Sandy Preer never lived to see that sentence handed down. He died 8 years earlier carrying a suspicion he never deserved. Eugene Gligor is currently serving his sentence at a correctional facility in Maryland.

For 23 years, the man responsible for Leslie Preer’s death lived an ordinary life a few miles from where he killed her. He got married twice. He built a career. He kept in touch occasionally with the family whose lives he destroyed, once even offering condolences at a chance encounter years later, as if none of it had ever happened.

He was never a stranger in that house. The mystery was never who had access. It was which of the people already inside that circle was capable of what happened on May 2nd, 2001.