For the past 23 years, Lauren Preer has been tormented by the knowledge that her mother’s killer was out there somewhere in the world, walking free.
Her mum, Leslie, was brutally murdered inside her family’s home in 2001. Her bludgeoned body was discovered in an upstairs bathroom.
With no leads, the case soon went cold.
The devastated daughter has spent over two decades conjuring an image in her mind of what kind of monster could be responsible for such a horrific crime. Now, she may finally have an answer.
Her high school sweetheart.
The boy she had fallen in love with at 15, who had sat down for countless dinners and board game nights with her parents. The boy who went on family holidays with her mum and dad, who celebrated many Christmases with them.
That same boy would be the man who would eventually be arrested for the brutal murder of her mother 23 years later. Who had looked Lauren in the eyes and told her he was “sorry” to hear about what happened.
But what could have possessed him to carry out such an unimaginable act?
“Leslie hasn’t shown up for work …”
May 2, 2001, was a stunning spring morning in Chevy Chase, a wealthy area of Washington DC.
It started out as any other regular Wednesday, with Leslie saying goodbye to her husband Carl as he left for work in the early hours.
She worked at a popular advertising firm in town called Specialities Inc., and was a beloved employee, known for her dedication and punctuality.
So when she failed to show up for her shift, her colleagues knew something just wasn’t right.
This was not like her. If she needed the day off, she always gave plenty of notice. If she was sick, she would have called.
They waited a bit longer, but after a few hours and still no Leslie, her boss Brett Reidy decided to call her husband.
The men met at the Preer’s stunning 6 bedroom, 6 bathroom home just before midday. They knocked at the door with no response. Calling out Leslie’s name, they were met with silence.
Hearts racing, they decided to step inside the house. Neither had any idea of the unimaginable horror that lay inside.
A gruesome discovery
As soon as the men entered the home, they instantly knew something terrible had happened.
According to police documents, there was blood splattered and smeared on the walls in the foyer.
There was dried blood on the floor in the corner by the door, next to a puddle of water. A table had been knocked over and a rug with dried blood stains on it had moved from the foyer into the living room.
Continuing to shout his wife’s name, Carl was met with nothing but eerie silence. After calling 911, police soon arrived. That is when a gruesome discovery was made in an upstairs bathroom.
The mother’s lifeless and battered body lay face down inside a shower stall. It was clear her death had been horrific, with Leslie suffering multiple lacerations to her head and deep bruising to her neck, indicating strangulation.
Investigators matched the lacerations to her skull to the sharp edges of baseboard moulding of the house, leading them to believe that her head had been “battered onto the foyer floor”.
Her shocking death was swiftly ruled a homicide, specifically from “blunt force trauma inflicted during a struggle”.
The stomach-turning crime left the tight-knit community shocked and shaken. Things like that simply did not happen in Chevy Chase.
It was known to be a safe neighbourhood, with US Census results regularly dubbing Chevy Chase one of the “most affluent towns in America”, where the median average income sits at around USD$220,000 (AUD$332,000).
In the days after the murder, police took as much evidence as they could, which included processing the scene for fingerprints, swabbing suspected blood samples, taking photographs, and vacuuming the foyer area for hairs and other artefacts.
DNA evidence was also able to be extracted from underneath Leslie’s fingernails — a sign she tried to fight off her attacker — and was matched an unknown male suspect.
However, due to limited technology at the time, they were unable to match it to anyone.
Detectives spoke to a handful of potential suspects, including Leslie’s husband, Carl. However, DNA soon ruled him out.
With no other leads, the case went cold.
Unbelievable breakthrough
Lauren Preer was just 23 when she lost her mother in one of the most horrific ways imaginable.
Tragically, Lauren’s father Carl also died in 2017 from septic shock. However, Lauren believes his “broken heart” was also to blame.
He died without ever having known who killed his wife.
Despite the odds, Lauren said she had always held out hope that one day her mum’s killer would be brought to justice.
Finally, earlier this month, this dream seemed like it might become a reality.
Back in 2022, hard-working cold case investigators sought to use genetic genealogical analysis in a bid to close in on who murdered Leslie.
The technique is relatively new, and involves taking an unknown suspect’s DNA from a crime scene and comparing it to millions of DNA samples that customers have submitted to ancestor research companies.
This can help detectives potentially track down family-tree connections to the perpetrator’s DNA, hugely narrowing down the suspect pool.
In this case, genetic genealogical analysis was able to yield one common surname: Gligor.
While it did not mean much at first, this clue would end up the vital clue needed to find Leslie’s alleged murderer.
On June 4, 2024, police uncovered an old tip off submitted back in 2002 about someone called Eugene Gligor. The caller, who is understood to be a neighbour, had been suspicious of him and decided to share their thoughts with detectives.
While it did not amount to much at the time, it ended up being the smoking gun that lead police to Eugene.
The only thing detectives needed was a sample of his DNA to see if it was a match for that left at the crime scene.
And so the hunt began.
Plain-clothed detectives tracked him down at Dulles International Airport, where they waited and watched as he finished off a bottle of water and disposed of the plastic bottle in a nearby bin.
After he walked away, they pounced. With the fresh evidence in their clutches, forensic labs were able to extract his DNA from saliva left on the bottle.
It was a match.
Eugene was charged with first-degree murder and arrested in Washington DC on June 18 by a US Marshals Service task force, according to court records.
Terrifying connection
It soon came out that Eugene had dated his alleged victim’s daughter, Lauren.
Both were in high school when they began seeing each other, but the pair eventually broke up on good terms due to long-distance.
The pair grew up in the same neighbourhood and their families had been friends. Eugene had been over many times for dinner and even joined Lauren’s family on holidays.
They had not talked for three years when her mother was murdered.
“It’s been a hell of a day. He was my ex-boyfriend,” she told Fox 5 DC after the news broke.
“We started dating when we were 15, so his family and my family knew each other.”
Lauren told The Washington Post that during their relationship, she had witnessed Eugene struggle with his parents’ divorce and knew that some of his relatives had volatile tempers.
However, this was never something she had ever experienced with him. He had never been violent and she never suspected that he was even capable of it.
Eerily, Lauren’s mother had always spoken fondly about Eugene. Her father, on the other hand, was not so sure.
“He always said ‘Lauren, there is something off about him,” she told the outlet.
While hundreds of her friends and family members came to her mother’s funeral to support her, Eugene was not there.
Lauren recalled how she ran into him at a bar in the weeks following the murder and told him that her mother had been killed.
In response, he simply said “I’m so sorry”.
Just last year, she ran into him again at a restaurant.
“He didn’t seem weird,” Lauren said of the interaction.
“How you could look someone in the eye and know that you committed this crime and act like nothing happened is pretty unreal.”
Lauren said she never imagined that her high school sweetheart could have been capable of murder, let alone being accused of killing her mother.
The alleged motive is not currently clear.
Eugene Gligor waived his right to a bond hearing and is currently being held in jail. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for July 19.