THE WASHINGTON POST – Eugene Gligor took a seat on the steps outside his apartment building in Washington, D.C. He scrolled through his phone, drank a cup of coffee. It was June 18, 2024, sunny and 80 degrees.
“Hands up!” came a sudden voice moving toward him with rising volume. “Hands up!”
“What’s going on?” Gligor responded. “What is this about?”
Gligor, 45, stood in a courtroom Wednesday and finally acknowledged the dark secret he’d been hiding for half his life, the one that brought police to his doorstep last summer.
He pleaded guilty to the 2001 beating and strangulation of Leslie Preer inside her home in the Chevy Chase area of Maryland.
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The case had gone unsolved until last year, when Montgomery County detectives homed in on Gligor, who had dated Preer’s daughter in the 1990s. He’d quietly gone on to a professional career, most recently as an account executive for a nationwide firm operating video surveillance monitoring at commercial properties.
To friends he was warm, gregarious, seemingly committed to personal growth and self-improvement — and living in Washington’s trendy U Street Corridor.
Investigators got to Gligor using a relatively new form of DNA analysis that links genetic clues left by suspects at crime scenes to people who have submitted their DNA to ancestry research companies.
The method doesn’t so much lead directly to the suspect, but can point investigators to possible relatives, even distant ones.
In this case, that meant two women — completely innocent — in Romania, said Sgt. Chris Homrock, head of the Montgomery Police Department’s cold-case unit.
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From there, and over about two years, Detective Tara Augustin built out a traditional family tree, eventually learning there were distantly related American family members with the surname “Gligor.”