Interrogating a cold-case killer: ‘Honey, your DNA was in the crime scene'

Washington Post

14 hours ago

Eugene Gligor tried to deflect.
'It's guilty until proven innocent. I get it,' he told the detectives.
They were accusing him of killing his ex-girlfriend's mother, a crime that went unsolved for two decades. Gligor had never been questioned in the case. And now, inside a small, gray interrogation room, he didn't budge as the detectives bored in.
'Well honey,' one of them said, 'your DNA was in the crime scene.'
Gligor, seated on a small metal chair, waved his hands up and down, struggling to collect his words. What came next wasn't a confession. But it wasn't exactly a denial, either.
'I don't remember,' he said, his voice rising. 'I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.'
The exchange, recorded on police video obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, offers the clearest window yet on the day Gligor's 23 years of getting away with murder ended. As he could tell, the detectives knew he'd gotten inside Leslie Preer's home in Chevy Chase, Md., slammed her head repeatedly onto the foyer floor, strangled her and then carried her bloody body to an upstairs shower stall before he vanished.
Over and over, Gligor claimed ignorance, repeatedly saying 'I don't know' or 'I don't remember.' He wore black slides, black socks, jeans and a black polo shirt, the same outfit he'd put on that morning before he was suddenly arrested while sitting atop the stairs outside his apartment under bright blue skies. Now, his left ankle chained to a metal hoop in the floor, he tried to keep calm and chose his words carefully.
'I'm really confused, and I'm really at a loss,' Gligor said. 'I don't have any recollection of being involved with any of this.'
'You keep saying you don't remember and you don't have any recollection,' the detective said. 'But if somebody was not involved it would be an adamant, 'I didn't do it.''
'Oh, I didn't do it,' Gligor responded. 'I definitely didn't do it.'
At times the conversation grew testy, as when Detective Tara Augustin suggested his crying was fake.
'There's no tears coming out of your face,' Augustin said.
'I'm very dry right now,' Gligor said, adding that he was tired and drained and didn't know what was going on. 'You want me to drink water so I can tear? … What are you trying to say?'
'I'm just trying to say that this seems a little put on,' Augustin said.
Over the 24-minute interrogation, Gligor gave no ground. But the detectives from the Montgomery County Police Department had a lot anyway. For two years, they'd homed in on Gligor by analyzing DNA left at the crime scene against genetic markers in huge databases built in part by the family ancestry industry. And just nine days earlier — to confirm those findings — investigators furtively collected Gligor's DNA at Dulles International Airport during a phony 'secondary screening' they'd set up for him.
By that evening, Gligor was locked in jail. He later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and faces up to 30 years in prison at his scheduled sentencing on Aug. 28 — a hearing that could finally answer the big remaining question: Why?
In high school, Gligor dated Preer's daughter. After Preer's murder — about nine months into the investigation — his name popped up. A previous neighbor of Gligor's called police to say they 'thought that he may be somehow related to the Leslie Preer murder,' according to court records. But the tip lacked specifics, police have said, and Gligor appears to have never been pursued as a suspect. Instead, he went on to a life of hiding in plain sight in the D.C. area: successful jobs, marriage, divorce, a circle of friends who knew him as warm and gregarious. Preer's daughter, Lauren, never thought he could have done it.
A second police video from the case, recorded by an arresting officer not long before the interrogation, shows Gligor's final moments of freedom. He was sitting on his apartment steps in Washington last June, taking a break from his at-home work for a company that operated video surveillance systems. He scrolled his phone and sipped coffee.
A team of undercover officers who had been surveilling the building from inside unmarked trucks and a minivan can be seen walking toward him. Their clothing — sneakers, shorts and untucked baggy T-shirts covering their holstered guns — suggested a group of civilians out for a brisk walk. Reaching his steps, they turned to quickly ascend them.
'Hands up!' one of them shouted, cursing loudly as birds chirped.
The officers placed Gligor in handcuffs. 'What is this about?' he asked.
'You got a warrant, bro,' an officer answered.
They led him down the steps toward a black Ram pickup. A man walking his dog passed and stared at the group.
'Can, can you let my girlfriend know?' Gligor asked, indicating she'd be worried about him failing to return.
'Yeah, yeah, yeah. We will,' an officer answered.
Taken together, the two videos show key moments of a homicide case years in the making. They also show the everyday occurrences — a remote worker going outside for a break, concerns over a cellphone left behind, a cop joking about much the job has aged him — that are inevitably mixed into such investigations.
'We can't pretend, just because you look like a businessman, that you ain't going to hurt us,' one of the officers said by way of explaining the suddenness and language of the arrest.
'I understand,' said Gligor.
The 2001 killing stunned Preer's quiet neighborhood just north of Washington. Investigators found DNA thought to have been the killer's throughout Preer's home and under her fingernails — the latter an indication she had tried to fight off her attacker. But all they knew about who left it was that he was male. The investigators spoke to Preer's family and associates, collecting names of possible suspects. Those men were asked to provide DNA samples. No matches.
In 2022, Montgomery County cold-case investigators dove into the case. They obtained a court order authorizing them to conduct genetic genealogy analysis of DNA left at the crime scene. The method doesn't so much lead directly to suspects but can point investigators to possible relatives, even distant ones, who had submitted their DNA for ancestry testing. In this case, it pointed to two women — completely innocent — in Romania. From there, Augustin slowly built out a family tree, eventually learning there were distantly related Americans with the surname Gligor.
The name caught the detectives' attention. In the old case records, Eugene Gligor was listed as a former of boyfriend of Preer's daughter.
To confirm their family tree work, the detectives needed to get a sample of Gligor's DNA. They didn't want to spook him, so they set up the 'secondary screening' ruse at Dulles, complete with water bottles waiting for him to drink from. Gligor did so, leaving behind the bottle and his DNA. They matched it with DNA evidence from the crime scene, the arrest team went out to pick Gligor up, and they brought him to a police station. He was later moved into the interrogation room equipped with a video camera.
The recording would later be submitted as a court exhibit during a Jan. 24 hearing. Gligor's attorneys sought to have the video disallowed at his pending trial, because, among other reasons, the detectives kept questioning Gligor after he repeatedly said he wanted to consult a lawyer. Circuit Judge David Lease agreed and ruled that much of the video could not be played at the trial. The video shows detectives acknowledging that they couldn't continue questioning Gligor after he asked for a lawyer, but the conversation continued — many times after their prompting, sometimes from Gligor himself.
Ten days after that hearing, Gligor's attorneys and prosecutors jointly asked Lease to seal the video from public release. They gave two reasons: The video contained several references to specific medical information, and allowing the public to see the video — much of it now ruled inadmissible — could taint potential jurors. Lease granted their request.
Gligor subsequently pleaded guilty, meaning there would be no trial and no jurors to possibly be tainted, and The Washington Post asked Lease to unseal the video. Lease granted the request this week, with a small section containing medical information redacted.
In the interrogation video, detectives Augustin and Alyson Dupouy can be seen walking into the small room and starting off gently. They advised Gligor of his rights to remain silent and consult an attorney. Then they eased into their questions.
'So we were working on a case that came from Chevy Chase, and when we were going through the case file, your name was in there as someone that was related to the family. We have a big list of people, friends, family,' Augustin said. 'So do you recall back in 2001, Leslie Preer?'
Gligor kept his hands clasped on his lap and looked directly at the detective.
'Yes, that she was murdered,' he said politely.
The three spoke about him earlier dating Preer's daughter, Lauren, and how he used to hang out at her home. The detectives asked how he'd learned about the murder. From Lauren, Gligor answered.
'She had actually told me that,' he said. 'She had come into where I was working at a restaurant, and she had told me what had happened.'
Lauren Preer, in a later interview with The Post, recalled a similar encounter. She said that after her mom's funeral, she ran into Gligor at a bar in Bethesda, Md. She said she told him that her mom had died, and he looked at her and replied, 'I'm so sorry.'
The detectives pressed more.
'We wanted to reach out to you and see if you remember or recall anything about the time when Leslie was killed, anything that you remember about your life at the time that, like, could be relevant,' Augustin said.
'I really don't recall,' Gligor said.
The detective said that back in 2001, investigators found DNA presumably left by the person who killed Preer. Gligor soon began asking for a lawyer.
'That's totally fine,' Augustin said. 'And we don't have to ask you any more questions, but we are going to just tell you some stuff, okay.'
'Okay,' Gligor said, still seated in the small metal chair.
She spoke about secretly collecting his DNA and how it matched DNA from the scene. Gligor kept asking for an attorney and — at times after prompting by the detectives — kept talking.
'I know I wasn't involved, and I just don't understand how this has come to this,' he said. 'I really wish I knew, and I really wish I could tell you, give you some answers and give you more feedback from an honest perspective.'
Augustin said there was another person who knew — Leslie Preer. 'And she can't tell us.'