A man was arrested 23 years after a woman was found dead in her suburban Washington home, authorities said Tuesday — and, in an unexpected twist, the victim’s daughter revealed she had gone out with the suspect.
Eugene Teodor Gligor, 44, was arrested Tuesday by the U.S. Marshal’s Task Force in Washington, D.C., in connection with the 2001 death of Leslie Preer, the Montgomery County Police Department announced in a news release. Gligor was charged with first-degree murder and was being held at the D.C. jail pending an extradition request from Maryland authorities.
On May 2, 2001, a co-worker went to check on Preer after she failed to show up for work, according to the Washington Post. The co-worker found blood in the foyer of her Chevy Chase, Md., home and called police, who then found Preer’s body in an upstairs bedroom, the newspaper reported. His death was ruled a homicide.
Without any leads, the Preer murder case remained unsolved. In 2022, police offered a $10,000 reward to anyone with information that could lead to an arrest, CBS affiliate WUSA-TV reported.
NOW: 23 years after her murder, Montgomery Co. Police say a suspect has been arrested in the death of Leslie Preer.
Eugene Theodor Gligor was arrested today in Washington and will await extradition to Maryland on a charge of first degree murder. https://t.co/LKsJc7BbXe
–WUSA9 (@wusa9) June 18, 2024
Later that year, DNA evidence recovered from blood at the crime scene was submitted to a laboratory for forensic genetic analysis. Detectives were eventually able to identify Gligor as a possible suspect.
On June 9, detectives collected DNA evidence belonging to Gligor and compared it to DNA recovered from the crime scene. Gligor’s DNA matched that from the crime scene, police said.
An arrest warrant for Gligor was obtained Saturday and he was taken into custody Tuesday.
Lauren Preer, the victim’s daughter, told WTTG-TV that Gligor was her ex-boyfriend, saying they lived in the same neighborhood and started dating when she was 15.
“It’s been a hell of a day,” she told the station. “He was my ex-boyfriend.”
She told the station she even ran into Gligor at a Washington restaurant last year.
“He didn’t seem weird and how you can look someone in the eye and know they committed this crime and act like nothing happened is pretty unreal,” she said at WTTG.
When asked if Gligor had ever been considered a person of interest by the family, Lauren Preer told the station: “No, not at all. »