Unbeknownst to Eugene T. Gligor, investigators were quietly watching him as he walked through Dulles International Airport earlier this month. They saw him open a water bottle, drink from it and throw it away. Only after Gligor had moved on did they go grab the bottle.
The airport surveillance, as described by investigators in new court records, was a huge moment in the case, allowing them to collect genetic clues to test their possible match to a long-unsolved homicide from Chevy Chase, Md.
“The DNA from Gligor’s water bottle,” police wrote in the records, “was a positive match.”
The 44-year-old is now charged with first-degree murder in the 2001 death of Leslie J. Preer. At Gligor’s first and very brief court appearance Monday in Montgomery County, his attorneys Isabelle Raquin and Stephen Mercer waived Gligor’s right to have the terms of his bond reviewed. They did not comment on the case. Gligor remains held without bond.
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The new records, submitted as a sworn affidavit, describe how investigators say they closed in on Gligor 23 years after Preer, then 50, was found dead inside her home. As a teenager, Gligor had dated Preer’s daughter when the two were students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. He was still living in the Washington area last week when he was arrested.
The affidavit also reveals the full brutality of the crime scene. Police found blood on the walls and floor near the front door. Preer’s body was found in an upstairs bathroom shower, face down with her legs partially extending out — a sign to investigators that someone had tried to wash the body. An autopsy showed deep bruising to Preer’s neck, indicating strangulation, and seven lacerations to her skull, according to the affidavit. Investigators matched those head injuries to the sharp edges of baseboard molding of the house, leading them to believe that Preer’s head was “battered onto the foyer floor.”
There is no indication from the affidavit that Gligor was close to being arrested after the killing. But the document does reveal that on Jan. 30, 2002 — nearly nine months after the homicide — a tipster reported concerns about him to police. The tipster, a previous neighbor of Gligor’s, “thought that he may be somehow related to the Leslie Preer murder,” detectives wrote in the affidavit. He was 21 when the killing occurred, public records show.
After court on Monday, Montgomery State’s Attorney John McCarthy said that Gligor and Preer’s daughter were no longer dating at the time of the killing. McCarthy also spoke about the moment in the case when detectives were watching Gligor at Dulles.
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“They watched him drink a bottle of water,” McCarthy said. “After he abandoned that bottle of water, they seized the bottle. They swabbed it for DNA at the top.”
The charging documents describe the case from its opening moments.
About 10 a.m. on May 2, 2001, after Preer didn’t show up to her job at an advertising production company, a co-worker grew concerned and called her family. A short time later, the co-worker and Preer’s husband, Carl, who’d left for his own job at about 7:30 a.m., walked into the house, according to the court filing.
They saw dried blood, a knocked-over table, a moved rug.
“Carl Preer called out her name and looked throughout the house but could not find Leslie,” detective Tara Augustin wrote in the affidavit.
The co-worker called 911 and was told they should exit the house.
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Officers arrived and found Leslie Preer’s body upstairs. Investigators studying the blood stains concluded that whoever had killed Preer had tried to cover their tracks.
“It was apparent that the perpetrator(s) had attempted to clean up the blood from the crime scene,” Augustin wrote, “and physically carried the body from the foyer area upstairs to the shower stall and ran water over the body (via the shower) to wash away the blood and prevent the body from bleeding further on the floor of the residence.”
In those opening days of the case, investigators collected DNA evidence from the home and from under Preer’s fingernails — the latter a sign she’d tried to fight off her attacker. But they could not match the DNA to anyone — including men who knew Preer and who were asked to provide DNA samples. “All these samples were compared and eliminated, excluding them as suspects,” police wrote.
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The case went cold. In 2022, investigators sought to use genetic genealogical analysis, a relatively new technique in which an unknown suspect’s DNA from a crime scene can be compared to millions of DNA samples that customers submit to ancestor research companies. This can lead investigators to possible family-tree connections to the suspect’s DNA. From there, detectives look for someone linked to the family who might otherwise be connected to the crime — having lived in the area at the time it was committed, for example. These connections are often made through a relative who doesn’t actually know the suspect and lives far away from them.
In the Preer case, the genetic genealogical analysis yielded the surname “Gligor” as having possible links to the DNA thought to have been left by the assailant.
Then on June 4, 2024, as Augustin was going through case records, she found the tip submitted in 2002 about Eugene Gligor.
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Still, the investigators didn’t have his DNA.
That is why, according to the new records, they put him under surveillance at Dulles and why they grabbed his used water bottle. (Investigators and crime labs can extract DNA from objects touched by suspects or from their saliva.)
After matching the water bottle DNA with the crime scene DNA, according to police, they got a warrant charging Gligor with first-degree murder. He was arrested in D.C. on June 18 by a U.S. Marshals Service task force. He was brought to the Montgomery County jail on Friday, according to court records.
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