On May 2, 2001, coworkers at Leslie Preer's office noticed something wrong. The fifty-six-year-old from Chevy Chase, Maryland, hadn't shown up for work. She wasn't answering her phone. The people who knew Leslie Preer knew this: she didn't just not show up.
When Montgomery County police arrived at her home for a welfare check, they found her body inside. The medical examiner determined she'd been killed by blunt force trauma and strangulation. Blood under her fingernails told investigators she'd fought back. That DNA would sit in evidence for twenty-three years — waiting for science to catch up with what detectives already suspected.
A Suspect from Day One
In homicide investigations, detectives look first at the people closest to the victim. Leslie's husband, Sandy Preer, was investigated and cleared when his DNA didn't match the sample from the crime scene. But another name kept surfacing in interviews and case notes: Eugene Gligor.
Gligor had dated Leslie's daughter Lauren in high school. The families knew each other. They lived in the same affluent Chevy Chase neighborhood. Gligor had been inside that house many times — as a guest, as a boyfriend, as someone the family trusted.
Detectives suspected him. But in 2001, suspicion wasn't enough. Without a direct DNA match to the blood under Leslie's fingernails, prosecutors couldn't bring charges. The case went cold.
Months became years. Years became decades. Lauren Preer grew up without her mother. The original detectives retired or moved on. But DNA evidence doesn't age. It waits.
The Genealogy Breakthrough
In September 2022, Montgomery County detectives made a decision that would crack the case. They submitted the blood evidence to Othram, a forensic genetic genealogy company that uses a different approach than traditional DNA matching.
Forensic genealogy doesn't require a direct hit in a criminal database. Instead, it builds family trees. Partial DNA from a crime scene is uploaded to genealogical databases, where it finds distant relatives — second cousins, third cousins — people who share genetic markers. From those matches, genealogists work backward, building family trees and narrowing branches until they reach potential suspects.
In June 2024, the results came back. A surname appeared in the genealogical matches that made detectives stop: Gligor. The name had been in the original case file for twenty-three years.
The Airport Water Bottle
Genetic genealogy identifies likely suspects, but it's not courtroom evidence on its own. Detectives needed Eugene Gligor's actual DNA — obtained directly — to confirm the match. The question was how to get it without tipping him off.
The answer came at Dulles International Airport. In June 2024, detectives followed Gligor through the terminal. They watched. They waited. When he finished a water bottle and tossed it in the trash, they retrieved it.
The DNA on that bottle was tested against the blood from under Leslie Preer's fingernails. Twenty-three years apart, and they matched. It was the first time Montgomery County had ever used familial DNA to solve a cold case murder.
Facing the Defendant's Table
Eugene Gligor was arrested in Washington, D.C., in June 2024. For Lauren Preer, the moment was two decades in the making. The man she'd dated as a teenager — someone she'd brought into her family's home, someone who'd sat at their dinner table — had killed her mother.
In May 2025, Gligor pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The charge suggested the killing wasn't legally premeditated, though critics questioned that characterization given his familiarity with the victim and her home.
On August 28, 2025, Montgomery County Circuit Court handed down the sentence: twenty-two years in prison. Lauren Preer was there, facing the man who had destroyed her family.
The motive for Leslie Preer's murder has never been publicly disclosed. Why Eugene Gligor killed his ex-girlfriend's mother remains known only to him — and perhaps to investigators who've never released that detail.
What Cases Like This Mean
The Preer case represents something larger than one family's tragedy and resolution. It's proof that cold cases — investigations that seemed impossible to close — can be solved with advancing technology and patient detective work.
For families still waiting for answers, the case offers a difficult kind of hope. DNA evidence preserved for decades can still be tested with modern techniques. Forensic genealogy has solved hundreds of cold cases in recent years. Organizations like the DNA Doe Project work to bring resolution to families, and police departments can submit evidence to companies like Othram.
The case also raises questions without easy answers. When someone submits DNA to an ancestry service, their relatives become searchable — even those who never consented. Privacy advocates argue that people who spit into tubes for heritage information didn't agree to help police catch distant family members. But for families of murder victims, that debate takes on a different weight.
Leslie Preer was fifty-six when she died. She'll never be sixty or seventy. Her grandchildren, if she has any, will only know her through photographs and stories.
Eugene Gligor was arrested at age forty-two. He'll likely be in his sixties when released. The name was in the file all along. It just took science twenty-three years to prove what detectives suspected from the start.
