A man was still in jail Thursday after being arrested by federal police in connection with the death of a former girlfriend’s mother in Maryland in 2001.
On Saturday, a U.S. marshals task team arrested Eugene Teodor Gligor, 44, in nearby Washington based on a warrant that said he killed Leslie Preer.
Montgomery County Police said this week in a statement that the guy has been charged with first-degree murder in their area.
It wasn’t clear if Gligor had hired a lawyer, and a representative for the Montgomery County public defender’s office said it was probably too early to say if they would represent him. A voicemail was left for a woman who was named online as a possible relative of Gligor’s didn’t get a response.
Gligor was being held by the Washington Corrections Department on Thursday, based on information about its prisoners. In their statement, Montgomery County police said that they wanted him to stay in jail in Washington until he could be sent back to Maryland.
The killing of Preer shocked people in the area, which has wealthy towns like Chevy Chase and Bethesda. Police say Preer was found dead at her home in the Chevy Chase area just before noon on May 2, 2001. Her boss had called her husband to say she hadn’t shown up for work that day.
Authorities said in a previous statement that her boss and her husband went to the family’s home to check on her and found her dead body. They then called the police.
Police said Preer’s body looked like it had been hurt, but the exact way she died hasn’t been made public so that it can be used in court if anyone is charged.
Jones, the chief of police in Montgomery County, told NBC Washington that the attack was felt all over his county. “There were a lot of people on edge,” he noted.
It was reported by the county police in 2022 that cold case detectives would look into the case again with fresh eyes.
Jones told NBC Washington that at first, DNA from the crime scene meant only that the killer might be a man. But in 20 years, the technology used to get DNA out of cells and identify it has gotten better.
In the past few years, police have brought cold cases back to life by searching family DNA databases for matches with DNA found at crime scenes. If they find close relatives, they can use other clues and common sense to rule out more relatives until they get to one they think fits the case.
In the case of Gligor, cops said they “collected” DNA evidence from him but wouldn’t say anything else. The DNA found on him matches DNA found at the crime scene 23 years ago, the cops said.
When asked for a response, Preer’s daughter didn’t answer right away.
Jones said that the reason was still being looked into. He said that over the weekend, his agents talked to Gligor for hours to try to figure out why he might have attacked Preer.
Source: NBC
