IT was a sunny summer day, and Eugene Gligor was sipping coffee and scrolling through his phone on the steps of his city apartment.
The 44-year-old was taking a break from his home-working job, unaware that he was moments away from being arrested for murder. It was the culmination of a 23-year manhunt that revealed a story of drug-fuelled rage, betrayal and cowardice – finally cracked by an ingenious police sting.
What looked like a group of male friends walking down the street, dressed in shorts and polo shirts, approached on the sidewalk in June 2024.
They were, in fact, US Marshals, and as they drew level with Gligor, they charged up the steps towards him in Washington DC.
The Marshals’ body cam footage captured Gligor’s reaction as he was put in handcuffs.
“Can you tell me what this is about?” he asks, shocked. “You have a warrant,” one of the marshals answers.
“For what?” Gligor replies. “I don’t know. Did you do anything recently?” says the marshal.
Gligor hadn’t done anything recently. The warrant for his arrest was for a brutal murder he had committed over two decades previously.
At 10am, on May 2, 2001, 50-year-old Leslie Preer hadn’t shown up for work.
It was unusual for the married mum-of-one not to be at her desk on time at the advertising firm in Chevy Chase, Maryland, so a male co-worker called her husband, who had left for work before her, and the two men drove to the family home.
When they entered the house, there was no sign of Leslie, but they immediately noticed signs of a struggle – a table that had been knocked over and a bloodstained rug that was ruffled up like it had been kicked at.
Then, they saw blood spattered and smeared in the foyer and immediately called 911.
Detectives found Leslie dead in an upstairs bathroom, face down in the shower. The coroner’s report revealed that her head had been repeatedly slammed into the hallway floor, and then she had been strangled.
“This was no gunshot to the head,” one of the prosecutors in the case, Assistant State’s Attorney Donna Fenton tells The Sun. “This was no quick death. This was painful, protracted and terrifying and in her final moments, she struggled, she suffered, and she fought for her life, but she lost.”
This was undoubtedly an intent-to-kill murder
Donna Fenton
It was clear to investigators from the blood smears at the crime scene that Leslie’s killer had tried to cover their tracks, dragging her dead body from the hallway, upstairs to the bathroom, where they had attempted to wash away the blood with scalding water.
The wealthy neighbourhood, in the D.C. suburbs, where the murder took place, was stunned by the brutality of the murder. With no immediate suspects, the investigation quickly focused on DNA collected from the crime scene.
A single male’s DNA had been found throughout the house, including underneath Leslie’s fingernails, suggesting she had fought for her life.
Male co-workers, friends and family were asked to voluntarily provide DNA samples, but one by one, all the samples were compared and eliminated.
State and FBI databases were cross-referenced, but there was still no match, and the suspect list dwindled to zero. To the family’s horror, the case went cold.
Meanwhile, as the Preer family were ripped apart, with some family members even suspicious that Leslie’s husband, Carl, was somehow involved, Gligor roamed free.
He left Washington to work in hospitality in New York before eventually moving back home, where he worked for a company selling video surveillance systems.
DNA breakthrough
Then, in 2022, detectives from the LAPD’s newly formed Cold Case Homicide Unit reviewed the case.
It was reinvestigated for the first time in decades using a brand-new process called forensic genetic genealogy that had become available in the intervening years.
“In 2018, law enforcement was allowed to access consumer genetic databases,” explains Fenton.
“These are the family ancestry sites, where people can surrender their DNA to try and find out more about their past, and, it has been a game-changer. Without access to these databases, Eugene Gligor would still be walking free today.”
For the cold case detectives, it began with a match to a woman thousands of miles away in Romania, whose DNA profile was a partial match to the samples taken from the crime scene. Her surname was Gligor.
With the surname to work with, the cold case detectives examined the old case files of the Leslie Preer murder to see if it had been mentioned in any of the paperwork from the original investigation.
To begin with, they found nothing. Then, buried in one of the reports, they found a tip that would break the case.
“The police case file revealed that during the original investigation, a tipster reported that the Gligor residence was often visited by the police for noise complaints, underage drinking, and drug use,” says Fenton.
“But Eugene Gligor was never a suspect or person of interest, and his DNA had never been collected.”
Investigators found out that Eugene Gligor knew the Preer family well.
He had dated Leslie’s daughter, Lauren, in high school for about five years and for that time, he was a regular visitor to the home where he was welcomed in by Leslie Preer.
But the relationship didn’t last after Gligor and Lauren both moved away to college.
Detectives discovered that in the days after the murder, Gligor left Maryland on a cross-country trip to Oregon, which also gave him an excuse not to attend Leslie Preer’s funeral.
“Eugene Gligor became the prime suspect,” says Fenton.
Ingenious trap
What detectives needed now was a sample of his DNA to compare with the crime scene sample.
An ingenious trap was set for him at Washington Dulles International Airport on June 9, 2024, when investigators learned he would be flying back into the US after a work trip to Europe.
Working with US Customs officials, detectives set up a fake “secondary screening” at the airport, whereby arriving passengers are selected for extra checks.
Gligor was channelled into a room where he was left on his own, sitting at a table.
In front of him, were sterile bottles of water, and detectives watched on CCTV as Gligor took the bait, drinking from one of the bottles while he was waiting to be interviewed, and then putting it in the bin.
After he had been released, he was put under surveillance while the DNA from the water bottle was analysed.
It matched to the original DNA from the murder scene, which led the US marshals to the steps outside Gligor’s home nine days later.
Gligor was charged with first-degree murder, but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder on May 14 this year.
What was killer’s real motive?
While friends and family of Leslie Preer awaited his sentencing, the question that haunted them was ‘why?’
What motive did Gligor have to carry out such an unrelenting attack on someone who had been so good to him?
“This was undoubtedly an intent-to-kill murder,” says Fenton.
“There is no other reasonable way to view a murder carried out by bashing a woman’s head into the floor seven times and severely strangling her.”
At his sentencing, on August 31, Gligor’s defence attorneys told the court that the night before the murder he had been drinking and taking cocaine.
They said he vaguely remembered driving to work and stopping off at the Preer house around 9:30am, but had no recollection of killing Leslie Preer or trying to cover his tracks after the murder.
“I vaguely remember leaving the Preer house in the morning, but the rest is a blur,” Gligor said, as he sat in court in his jail jumpsuit.
“I know Lauren and Leslie’s family want to know why I was there and what happened. I’m sorry, I’m unable to remember and provide an explanation.”
Gligor’s attorneys tried to get his sentence reduced with a diminished capacity defence. However, the state prosecutors argued that he knew exactly what he was doing and weren’t going to let him get away with murder for a second time.
“He remembers much more than he claims,” says Fenton.
“He drove specifically to the Preer residence that morning, perpetrated a prolonged attack, cleaned and covered up the crime scene and took an impromptu cross-country trip, while the rest of his family attended Leslie Preer’s funeral.”
Gligor was sentenced to 22 years in prison, one year less than he spent walking free, after murdering Leslie Preer, whose family and friends filed out of the courtroom with closure on a decades-long ordeal.
“Eugene Gligor described Leslie Preer in his sentencing memo as ‘kind’, and someone who ‘made him feel he was part of the family,’” says Fenton.
“He repaid her with murder.”