Transcript of Blood and Water: Bonus: The Brother New

This is Deborah Roberts here with the final episode of our latest true crime series from 2020 and ABC Audio, Blood and Water. If you aren't caught up, you can still go back and listen through the whole series. Just search Blood and Water on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app. Now here's the final episode of Blood and Water.

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Hey, I'm Brad Milkey, host of ABC's Start Here podcast. And if you're joining us, it's because you just listened to the latest series from ABC Audio in 2020, Blood and Water. In this series, a 20-year-old murder case was reexamined. The killer turned out to be the person nobody would have expected. Leslie Prier was murdered by her daughter's high school boyfriend, Eugene Gligor. Gligor initially denied he was responsible, but later admitted admitted his guilt in court. Stephanie Ramos reported the story for 20/20 last year, and of course hosted this podcast. And today, I've got Stephanie here with me to ask exactly what it was like reporting out this story, and she's got some fresh reporting that you have not heard yet. Stephanie, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, Brad, it's great to be here.

So first off, I wanted to ask you, I had forgotten this was one of your first, like, big sort of 20/20 investigations that you were sort of leading the charge on. What was it like just as a reporter learning about this case and going through it all?

Yeah, it was so interesting. I had admired the 20/20 team for so many years. They are absolutely brilliant. And I wanted to work on something long-form like this for a while. And I learned so much just about the process of putting together a long piece like this where you have so many different characters, so many different people that you're interviewing and you're gaining information from, and then you're weaving all of this together.

And trying to figure out kind of like who knows what when too. So specific to this case.

What was interesting about this is that we were waiting for the sentencing. So as we were putting this together in this during the summer and go and making those trips to Chevy Chase and interviewing the neighbors and Brett Reedy, we still hadn't heard from Eugene in court.

So there's still news breaking as you're putting it.

Exactly. We're watching it all in real time. So it was just fascinating. It was great to really work, work on this. And I, I think Just being able to sit down with Lauren Prier, Leslie's daughter, and have her trust us to tell her story, and for her to be so open, this can't be easy for her.

For us to—

Well, and that's the thing, is when we first discovered Eugene Gligore was responsible for killing Leslie Prier, I couldn't stop thinking about Lauren, 'cause how do you even begin to wrap your mind around the idea that the person you went to prom with, you probably haven't thought about them most days since then, murdered your mom?

It's horrific. And I spoke with Lauren at length, Leslie Prier's daughter, while we were working on this 2020 episode. And all of these years, she had no idea who did this to her mother. She said that her life would be so much different if her mother was here. And she just was holding out hope for so many years. She was coming to the realization that she would never know who did this to her mother. And then she gets the call from these two detectives who say, We've been assigned to this case. We're going to figure out who did this to your mother. So, when I spoke with Lauren and she talked about that moment when she found out it was Eugene Gligor, she was shocked to learn who did this. She almost fainted.

And we heard a lot of police tape in this series. We heard Sandy Prier's interviews with the initial case detectives, through to Eugene Gligor's interview with cold case detectives 20 years later. By the way, that's some of the most compelling tape I have heard in a long time. Just like, And I love that you guys just let it play because you see how bizarre this back and forth is with this guy breaking down. Anyway, so we heard all this really fascinating tape. I've heard there was another police interview that we haven't heard so far.

That's right. So cold case detectives Tara Augustin and Allison DuPuy, they interviewed Eugene Gligor's brother, Andre Gligor. And this was after Eugene had been arrested. So throughout this process, he's just kind of out there, you know, related to this suspected killer. And detectives hadn't spoken to him, but this interview happened after Eugene was arrested for this crime.

What do we know about him? Like, who is this brother?

So Eugene and Andre, they both grew up in the same home, same neighborhood. And this is an upper middle class neighborhood, very nice. Front lawns are gorgeous, the homes are great. Everyone has some sort of interesting career in Washington, DC, because it's just outside of DC and Chevy Chase. And Their home was just a few minutes away from the prayer house, so it was walking distance. There's this park in the neighborhood that connects all of these different streets. It's a very interesting neighborhood, but they lived nearby with their parents, and their father was born in Romania, their mother was American. One was an academic, a teacher at a, at a university there in DC, and the other parent was a World Bank employee. So really solid jobs, right? Right. Andre and Eugene's parents divorced when Eugene was in high school. The brothers are 4 years apart.

Got it. So Andre's a little older. Why did detectives reach out to Andre then? What do they think he could offer?

Okay, so I'm going to take you back to 2024, right? So these cold case detectives, Tara Augustin and Allison DuPuy, they were looking for a person that the unknown male DNA belonged to from the crime scene. This is the DNA that was found at the crime scene at the home of Leslie Prier. So they used genetic genealogy and it led them to the name Gligor. We know, and detectives know, that Lauren dated a guy by the name of Eugene Gligor. So they've got the name Gligor in their case file, and they know that there was this family living nearby, living near the Prier house, with the name Gligor. So they've got Eugene, Andre, and the father. They told us if that DNA did not match Eugene, Andre was going to be next on their list because the DNA is pointing us in a direction— like, the DNA is pointing us to Gligor. Yes, yes, to Eugene Gligor. They said if that DNA does not match Eugene Gligor, Andre might be our guy. But of course Eugene's DNA did come back with a match, and detectives quickly ruled out his brother Andre and his father as possible suspects.

So Eugene was arrested in June of 2024. In July, just the following month, detectives asked Andre to come in for an interview. So that's when they spoke with him. They wanted to find out if he could add anything, any information, like what he knew or didn't know about Eugene from the time of the murder. And it turned out that Andre did have some details to add.

Well, and when we come back, we will hear more about what some of those details were. We're back in a bit.

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Watch Not Suitable for Work now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. All right, we are back with Stephanie Ramos. So Stephanie, at this point, Eugene Gligor has been arrested. Detectives call in his brother, Andre Gligor, to ask him some questions. What do they say? What does he say?

Okay, so it's summer of 2024. The detectives, Augustine and Dupuy, they match the DNA sample from the crime scene to Eugene Gligor. Authorities arrest Eugene Gligor sitting on a stoop outside his apartment in Washington, DC. And then a few weeks later, detectives ask Andre to come in. And there is a video of this interview. There's 4 of them in the room: the 2 cold case detectives, Andre, and Andre's lawyer. So I'll describe Andre for you just a little bit. He looks very similar to Eugene. They're both slim with dark hair. They've got glasses. And detectives, they, they wanted to know more. They wanted to see— this is the suspected killer's brother. What could he know? Did he hear anything during that time about the murder? What extra details could they— could he provide? So the detectives start asking Andre about his connections to the Prier family.

Um, did you ever meet Lauren's parents, Leslie and Carl?

Yes.

Yes. Had you ever been to their house?

Yes. The only times I went to their house was in the context of pet sitting. Okay. Mm-hmm. So—

For what, their dog?

For dog, yeah. Dog, and I think they had—

So Andre goes on to tell them about his pet sitting at the Prier house, that he had watched the Priers' dog. So remember in the first episode when Brett Reedy, Leslie's coworker, arrived at the Prier home, they go inside, clearly something has gone wrong, and Brett Reedy gets a bit spooked by the basement door. It starts opening.

That's right.

Super slow. So at this point, he tells us he's thinking, is this Leslie coming up the stairs? Is she injured? Who's down there?

Is there some perpetrator or something?

Is the perpetrator still in the home? Which is why authorities wanted Brett and Sandy to leave the home at this point, just in case someone was in there. It was the dog, the Prier's family dog, opening up this door, uh, and it was the same dog that Andre had dog sat, a black lab called Boomer. So Andre tells the detectives that he had looked after Boomer a few times and that the Pryors either gave him a key to their house or left one somewhere for him to use. So he was pretty familiar with this home.

I mean, that seems significant then that he is saying like, I knew the Pryor family, like I'd interacted with them at least.

Right, Andre knew them well enough that when Leslie died, he went to her memorial service along with his parents. And this is the part that really stood out to Lauren's friends, that Eugene wasn't there, that Eugene didn't go to the memorial, but yet Eugene's brother and his parents went to Leslie's memorial.

The prom date's not there. It's like everyone who kind of knows the person that she's most involved with.

Exactly, exactly. But this bit of information did show detectives just how close he had been with the family, where he was there, his parents were there, and the only one missing was Eugene because he's apparently on a road trip across the country. So detectives told Andre in this interview that part of the story about Eugene not going to the memorial service had really struck them as strange.

We, we know that he was out of town. We, we have like records and things that show that he wasn't in the area at all during the time of the service and things like that. And we thought that was a little is peculiar because, you know, it's your ex-girlfriend's mother got murdered. That's very— yeah, serious. I would definitely want to, you know, be there.

And obviously you felt compelled to go.

Yes.

So, um, that's one of the main things that we're kind of confused about, like why, you know, why Andre told detectives that he also thought it was odd that Eugene didn't go, but he said he often didn't know where Eugene went at the time. And you have to keep in mind that These two brothers, despite the fact that they grew up in the same home, same parents, they weren't very close.

In a way, technically, but I did not have a close relationship with him. I didn't know where he was, what he did. I didn't really, uh, we just weren't close and just different.

Yeah.

Kind of, I, I would say very different people.

Yeah.

Andre told detectives that his relationship with his brother was strained.

That's interesting that then— so this is back in 2001, so the relationship between the brothers is kind of frosty. What about later? Because we, we did hear like Eugene kind of reinvented himself as the years went on, as we got further away from this murder. Did he bring any of that zen, that newfound perspective, to his relationship with his brother at all?

It didn't seem like it. So this was a really interesting thing that, that popped up. A few years before Eugene's arrest, Andre claimed that Eugene was trying to sabotage him. And that was his word in the police interview— sabotage. He alleged that Eugene was trying to get him evicted from his home. And at the time, Andre was living in a house owned by their mom, and Eugene had recently separated from his wife. So Andre claimed that Eugene was trying to get him to move out so that he could move in.

I didn't know the extent of it, so I thought, if I— if my brother's turning around the house, right, does that mean he's just dangerous?

Like, what lengths would he go to?

Yeah, I don't know, you know, right, right, exactly. What lengths would he go?

Andre told detectives he was afraid of Eugene. He said he was afraid Eugene would show up to the house unannounced and claims that Eugene had stolen from him in the past. Though we should say Eugene has been convicted of second-degree murder, he has never been convicted of theft. Andre goes on to tell detectives that around February of 2020, he reached out to someone in Eugene's past to talk about all of this. Lauren Prier.

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All right, so to hear Andre tell it, In early 2020, he's not getting along with his brother Eugene. And so Andre reaches out to Lauren Prier. What did she say?

Remember Lauren and Eugene, they had split up some 2 decades earlier. It's been a long time. Andre and Lauren weren't even friends, even though Andre had come over to dog sit. He was familiar with the home. They weren't close friends.

But like they knew each other.

Right, right. And Lauren had spent a lot of time at Eugene's. Eugene's house— Eugene and Andre's house, uh, when they were in high school and dating. So in his interview, Andre told the cold case detectives that he asked for her opinion on his relationship with Eugene.

Do you remember what, what exactly you wrote to her?

Um, I just basically said, you know, I, I feel like my brother just— he, um, dislikes me. Perhaps he always he always did dislike me. Um, some days I'm scared of him. Should I trust my instinct or am I going crazy?

Lauren was not the only one Andre messaged. He also wrote to Eugene's first wife. In those messages, he wrote, quote, I'm starting to get fearful of Eugene. And he asks her, do you think Eugene has a conscience or can feel remorse? From her interview with detectives a few years later, Eugene's ex said that Andre could be dramatic. And I'm going to quote from her police interview here. She said the brothers had this love-hate for one another, and she thought that this was just another brotherly quarrel. And even in those messages, you can see she's like, well, hopefully you all can, can mend this relationship. Uh, but as for Lauren Preer, she told me that she remembered getting that message from Andre she didn't send anything back. So she didn't respond to him. But the next time Lauren and Andre would see each other was at one of Eugene Gligor's court hearings.

Well, and the one thing we kept hearing was how shocked people were to hear that Eugene was the killer, that he was pleading guilty to this, especially Lauren, who at one point knew him so well. And I do want to come back to what I said earlier, just about finding out that your high school boyfriend killed your mom. Because all these details about Eugene do help us make sense of that picture, but there's still a lot I guess we'll never know. How does that sit with you as somebody who's reported on this for a while now?

It's still shocking. I feel for Lauren because her life completely changed, and she was so close to her mother. She told us this was her best friend. She had the most perfect childhood, and it was— It was just heartbreaking to know that it was someone so close, someone who had been welcomed into the family. Eugene Gligor would go on vacations with the Preaher family. He was a regular at that home while they were dating. So it's heartbreaking, but to know that Lauren has a little bit of peace just knowing after so many years, there's the relief. I mean, imagine going so long, more than 20 years without knowing. But for her, it was a shock. It's still a shock to this day, and she still has so many questions. About why, why did he do this? But at least she knows who did it.

And they kind of like what prosecutors would say was a cop-out of him saying, "I don't exactly remember everything." Like, that still has to be frustrating, I imagine.

Oh, absolutely. And even though he apologized to Lauren in court, there is still no explanation. Why did you go into the house? Eugene still had these huge memory blackouts about the day of the murder. In fact, prosecutors took real exception to that. And I want to read you a little bit from the sentencing memo. Uh, it's a little spicy in the most legal way possible. They said that Eugene's memory blanks, quote, conveniently allows him to avoid taking full responsibility for the most gruesome and calculated aspects of the murder. Prosecutors made the point that Eugene was able to drive a car, kill someone, and try to clean up the crime scene because there were still smears, blood smears in the foyer, heading up the stairs, but it was evident that someone tried to clean this up.

Which then doesn't sound like that person is completely incapacitated or something.

Right. It doesn't add up. Eugene's lawyer tried to argue against that, saying that the cleanup attempts were, quote, obviously frantic and not planned or considered. They also said that the memory blanks weren't an excuse, but actually consistent with what's called a fragmented blackout, and that can happen under the influence of alcohol. But no matter how you look at it, Lauren will probably never know the true details of that day.

It's just an absolutely fascinating case. Great reporting by you and the team at 20/20 and at ABC Audio. I do want to tell listeners that the next true crime series from ABC Audio is coming out soon. It's called The Snare. Stephanie Ramos, thank you so much for the time.

Thank you for having me.

And I'm Brad Milkey. You can catch me on Start Here every morning, wherever you're listening now. I'll see you later.

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