More than two decades after Leslie Preer was found dead inside her Maryland home, the man responsible for her brutal killing has learned his fate.
Eugene Gligor, 45, appeared in a Montgomery County courtroom on Thursday where the judge sentenced him to 22 years in prison for the second-degree murder charge.
He pleaded guilty to murdering the mother of his ex-girlfriend after his DNA was linked to the crime scene.
“This was a personal crime,” Circuit Judge David Lease told Gligor in court. “There was blood everywhere.”
Gligor appeared to remain calm, the Washington Post reported, as prosecutors reminded the court of the horror he inflicted in 2001, when he murdered the mother of his former high school girlfriend.
They had dated when they were both students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Maryland, shortly before her mother was killed.
In 2001, Preer was found dead in the bathtub of her home near Washington, D.C. Prosecutors said Gligor unleashed an “unrelenting attack,” slamming her head seven times onto the foyer floor, beating her and strangling her until her eyes bled.
“This was painful, protracted, and terrifying,” Assistant State’s Attorneys Donna Fenton and Jodie Mount wrote in court filings.
Preer fought for her life, scratching and clawing at Gligor, even raising her hands to shield her face, prosecutors said, adding: “He kept going and going until she was dead.”
At the time, another person’s DNA was found under her fingernails but police were never able to match the sample.
Then, in 2022, investigators tried forensic genetic genealogy. They were able to trace DNA markers to two distant relatives in Romania, and built a family tree that eventually led to the surname “Gligor,” and the young daughter’s ex-boyfriend from the time.
To confirm the match, investigators devised an airport sting and nabbed him with the help of a water bottle.
As Gligor returned from a trip abroad, U.S. customs officers diverted him into a secondary screening room where water bottles had been placed in advance. Gligor drank from one, leaving behind DNA that tied him conclusively to the murder. He was arrested in June 2024.
But one question remains: Why? Gligor had not dated Preer’s daughter, Lauren, for two years when the killing occurred, prosecutors said.
“Eugene has little to no recollection of the events which occurred in the home of Leslie Preer on May 2, 2001,” his attorneys said.
They described a night of heavy drinking and possible cocaine use, claiming Gligor “had no motive and no intent to kill Leslie Preer.”
But prosecutors dismissed that account as self-serving and said: “This is a crime without a motive that the defendant is willing to admit. Even now he will not give Ms. Preer’s family the answer to the question they have asked for 24 years: Why?”
For Preer’s family, the sentence did not give them answers, but it marked justice in the case that left them heartbroken.
“Lauren was consumed with fear and anxiety,” prosecutors said.
“For months, she could not shower alone, traumatized by the knowledge of where her mother’s body was found. She bought clear shower curtains. To this day, Lauren and [her best friend] both check behind closed shower curtains whenever they enter a new place.”
