A killer hid in plain sight for 23 years. This is how police found him.

Eugene Gligor, 44, pleaded guilty Wednesday in a Maryland courtroom to the 2001 murder of Leslie Preer in her Chevy Chase home.

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.

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.

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