Geraldine Brooks delivers a rich account of marriage and mourning
She was not with him, so strangers comforted him in his last moments. She herself was alone when she got the news, delivered by an impatient resident on duty in the ER. She rushed to Washington from Martha's Vineyard, where they lived, only to learn that his body had been whisked away to the medical examiner, and she was not allowed to follow. Her older son heard of his father's demise from a friend before she could reach him. Her younger son was at boarding school, and she had to listen to his sobs down the phone line without being able to offer a comforting hug. Most of all, as she writes in her new memoir, 'Memorial Days,' Brooks was robbed of 'the life I would have had, the life I had counted on having. Life with the sunset-facing rocking chairs, growing old with Tony beside me.'
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Washington Post
3 days ago
- Washington Post
Interrogating a cold-case killer: ‘Honey, your DNA was in the crime scene'
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.'
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Yahoo
Family of mom murdered in ritzy DC suburb decades ago gets justice as perp nobody expected pleads guilty
A killer nobody expected has pleaded guilty in the 2001 murder of a Chevy Chase, Maryland, mother. Defendant Eugene Gligor, 45, of Washington, D.C., walked free through the nation's capital for more than 20 years before his DNA linked him to then-50-year-old Leslie Preer's murder in 2001. Preer's daughter, Lauren Preer, told Fox 5 D.c. that she dated the suspect when they were both 15 years old. She was 24 when her mother was killed. Montgomery County authorities linked DNA found beneath Preer's fingernails at the time of her murder to Gligor's "distant relative from Romania" who had voluntarily submitted her DNA to an online database, ultimately leading authorities directly to him last year, Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy said during a Wednesday press conference. California 1977 Cold-case Murder Suspect Identified As 69-Year-old Former Army Private Living In Ohio Gligor had lived in the D.C. area since committing the gruesome crime some 24 years ago. Fox News Digital has reached out to his attorney for comment. Read On The Fox News App "Lauren, her family, and friends have waited 24 years to finally get closure and justice for this horrific crime that tore her family apart," family attorney Benjamin Kurtz told Fox News Digital. "The fact that it turned out to be someone they allowed in their home with open arms, just makes it that much harder to understand." California Attorney General Takes Stance On Menendez Brothers Prosecutor Staying On Case Amid Resentencing Battle Kurtz added that "Lauren has been given a sense of peace knowing that her father has finally been vindicated of any wrongdoing, even if after his death, and she feels he can finally rest in peace with the knowledge her killer has been caught." She also "wanted to express her gratitude to the Montgomery County Police Department who never stopped trying to get justice for her family and to the State's Attorney's Office for their efforts of securing a guilty plea from Leslie's murderer." "Lastly, while the guilty plea will never bring back her mother, or create any of the moments she never got to experience due to losing her at such a young age, she and her family can finally have some closure to this horrific loss and try to start the healing process," Kurtz said. "She wanted to express her sincere appreciation to all of her family and friends for the love and support over the years and decades and during the last year waiting for a conviction." Sign Up To Get The True Crime Newsletter Preer's boss found her dead in the second story of her Chevy Chase home on May 2, 2001, after she did not show up for work that day. Her death was ruled a homicide. There was blood all over the house, McCarthy said. She died of blunt force trauma and strangulation. In 2022, police submitted DNA collected from the crime scene to a lab for forensic genetic genealogical DNA analysis and later identified Gligor as a potential suspect. McCarthy called Preer's case "historic" during a May 7 press conference, saying it was the first time familial DNA was used in a cold-case murder in the county. Attempted Murder Fugitive Busted As 40-Year Scheme Posing As Dead College Mate Unravels "This was excellent police work that took place for over two decades," former Washington, D.C., homicide detective Ted Williams told Fox News Digital. "This is how science, familial DNA, was able to help law enforcement catch a person who felt that they had committed the crime.… The fact that the DNA that was found under [Preer's] fingernails was preserved all of those years and was later used to track down Mr. Gligor – he would have gotten away with murder, absent having this… near-exact science, and that is familial DNA." Authorities obtained a sample of Gligor's DNA by staging a fake second security screening at Dulles International Airport. They escorted the then-suspect into a room, where there were several water bottles. Gligor drank one water bottle and threw it away before leaving the room, according to court filings obtained by The Washington Post. GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE True Crime Hub "There are times, unfortunately, when the evidence that is gathered at a crime scene does not lead in any one specific direction," Williams said. "I am sure that at the early stages of the investigation, the investigators were looking at anybody they believed may very well have been involved with this murder, but [Gligor] did not come up on their radar screen. That happens in murder cases all the time… and at some stage or another, the development of the scientific evidence… is something or two that law enforcement now have in their possession to go back many, many years." Gligor worked at a real-estate firm and was known as a "zen" and friendly person, the Post reported last year, when he was named as a suspect. Dna Sample Ties Elderly Man To 40-Year-old Cold Case Murder Of Texas Woman Court records and accounts from those who knew him obtained by the Post show that he was a mischievous high-schooler with some history of substance abuse. His parents divorced while he and Lauren were dating in high school, and he did not take the separation well. He was also expelled from boarding school, the Post reported. Following Preer's death, when friends and family offered support to Lauren, Gligor apparently drove cross-country to visit a friend in Oregon while Lauren was grieving. That friend told the Post that Gligor didn't tell him he was coming to Oregon until he was already on his way. Lauren recalled a moment years before her mother's murder, when she and Gligor were still dating, when Gligor was accused of assaulting a woman on a bike path between the two then-teenagers' houses. Lauren told the Post she went to the police station with a friend, insisting to officers that Gligor was innocent. Follow The Fox True Crime Team On X "We both said, there is no way Eugene would have done this," Preer recalled to the Post. Authorities have not shared any kind of motive behind Preer's murder. McCarthy said it will be up to the defendant to share what the motive was in his decision to kill Preer, adding later that there was no evidence to suggest the murder was "premeditated," and Preer had no criminal record. McCarthy, speaking on Lauren's behalf during the Wednesday press conference, remembered Preer as a "spectacular, loving, wonderful person." Gligor faces up to 30 years in prison, which was the maximum penalty for second-degree murder in 2001 when the incident occurred. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Aug. 28, 2025, at 9 article source: Family of mom murdered in ritzy DC suburb decades ago gets justice as perp nobody expected pleads guilty
Fox News
12-05-2025
- Fox News
Family of mom murdered in ritzy DC suburb decades ago gets justice as perp nobody expected pleads guilty
A killer nobody expected has pleaded guilty in the 2001 murder of a Chevy Chase, Maryland, mother. Defendant Eugene Gligor, 45, of Washington, D.C., walked free through the nation's capital for more than 20 years before his DNA linked him to then-50-year-old Leslie Preer's murder in 2001. Preer's daughter, Lauren Preer, told FOX 5 D.C. that she dated the suspect when they were both 15 years old. She was 24 when her mother was killed. Montgomery County authorities linked DNA found beneath Preer's fingernails at the time of her murder to Gligor's "distant relative from Romania" who had voluntarily submitted her DNA to an online database, ultimately leading authorities directly to him last year, Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy said during a Wednesday press conference. Gligor had lived in the D.C. area since committing the gruesome crime some 24 years ago. Fox News Digital has reached out to his attorney for comment. "Lauren, her family, and friends have waited 24 years to finally get closure and justice for this horrific crime that tore her family apart," family attorney Benjamin Kurtz told Fox News Digital. "The fact that it turned out to be someone they allowed in their home with open arms, just makes it that much harder to understand." Kurtz added that "Lauren has been given a sense of peace knowing that her father has finally been vindicated of any wrongdoing, even if after his death, and she feels he can finally rest in peace with the knowledge her killer has been caught." She also "wanted to express her gratitude to the Montgomery County Police Department who never stopped trying to get justice for her family and to the State's Attorney's Office for their efforts of securing a guilty plea from Leslie's murderer." "Lastly, while the guilty plea will never bring back her mother, or create any of the moments she never got to experience due to losing her at such a young age, she and her family can finally have some closure to this horrific loss and try to start the healing process," Kurtz said. "She wanted to express her sincere appreciation to all of her family and friends for the love and support over the years and decades and during the last year waiting for a conviction." Preer's boss found her dead in the second story of her Chevy Chase home on May 2, 2001, after she did not show up for work that day. Her death was ruled a homicide. There was blood all over the house, McCarthy said. She died of blunt force trauma and strangulation. In 2022, police submitted DNA collected from the crime scene to a lab for forensic genetic genealogical DNA analysis and later identified Gligor as a potential suspect. McCarthy called Preer's case "historic" during a May 7 press conference, saying it was the first time familial DNA was used in a cold-case murder in the county. "This was excellent police work that took place for over two decades," former Washington, D.C., homicide detective Ted Williams told Fox News Digital. "This is how science, familial DNA, was able to help law enforcement catch a person who felt that they had committed the crime.… The fact that the DNA that was found under [Preer's] fingernails was preserved all of those years and was later used to track down Mr. Gligor – he would have gotten away with murder, absent having this… near-exact science, and that is familial DNA." "[H]e would have gotten away with murder." Authorities obtained a sample of Gligor's DNA by staging a fake second security screening at Dulles International Airport. They escorted the then-suspect into a room, where there were several water bottles. Gligor drank one water bottle and threw it away before leaving the room, according to court filings obtained by The Washington Post. GET REAL-TIME UPDATES DIRECTLY ON THE TRUE CRIME HUB "There are times, unfortunately, when the evidence that is gathered at a crime scene does not lead in any one specific direction," Williams said. "I am sure that at the early stages of the investigation, the investigators were looking at anybody they believed may very well have been involved with this murder, but [Gligor] did not come up on their radar screen. That happens in murder cases all the time… and at some stage or another, the development of the scientific evidence… is something or two that law enforcement now have in their possession to go back many, many years." Gligor worked at a real-estate firm and was known as a "zen" and friendly person, the Post reported last year, when he was named as a suspect. Court records and accounts from those who knew him obtained by the Post show that he was a mischievous high-schooler with some history of substance abuse. His parents divorced while he and Lauren were dating in high school, and he did not take the separation well. He was also expelled from boarding school, the Post reported. Following Preer's death, when friends and family offered support to Lauren, Gligor apparently drove cross-country to visit a friend in Oregon while Lauren was grieving. That friend told the Post that Gligor didn't tell him he was coming to Oregon until he was already on his way. Lauren recalled a moment years before her mother's murder, when she and Gligor were still dating, when Gligor was accused of assaulting a woman on a bike path between the two then-teenagers' houses. Lauren told the Post she went to the police station with a friend, insisting to officers that Gligor was innocent. "We both said, there is no way Eugene would have done this," Preer recalled to the Post. Authorities have not shared any kind of motive behind Preer's murder. McCarthy said it will be up to the defendant to share what the motive was in his decision to kill Preer, adding later that there was no evidence to suggest the murder was "premeditated," and Preer had no criminal record. McCarthy, speaking on Lauren's behalf during the Wednesday press conference, remembered Preer as a "spectacular, loving, wonderful person." Gligor faces up to 30 years in prison, which was the maximum penalty for second-degree murder in 2001 when the incident occurred. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Aug. 28, 2025, at 9 a.m.
