Transcript of Blood and Water: 'Facts Don't Lie'

This is Deborah Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest true crime series from ABC and ABC Audio, Blood and Water. Remember, you can get new episodes early by following Blood and Water on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. Here's the next episode of Blood and Water.

It was 3 weeks after his wife's murder Sandy Preer told investigators he was no longer going to talk to them.

My, uh, my attorney said not to answer any more questions. And again, I don't mean to show any disrespect to you guys at all.

Once Sandy said he was done talking, the detectives seemed to realize this could be their last chance to get what they wanted from him. They started pressing him. To confess. You got to do the right thing, man.

You got to.

I think I am. In fact, I know I am. And I'll just tell you one thing. You got the wrong guy.

Sandy Preer was the wrong guy. But that only became clear much, much later, more than 23 years after Leslie Preer's murder. When police arrested someone else. New evidence had led police to this other man, and ultimately, that evidence cleared Sandy Preer of any wrongdoing. But until that arrest in 2024, Sandy remained, to a lot of people, the likely culprit. Here's his daughter, Lauren Preer.

My father and my mom's family used to be so close. But my mom's family believed he killed her. Not all of them. Some of my uncles and some of my cousins were like, there's no way. I mean, I think my dad died of a broken heart.

Sandy Preer did not live to see his name cleared. In 2017, he died suddenly after an illness. Lauren's friend Lisa says the news was yet another gut punch for Lauren.

It came out of the blue. I mean, she just got a call one day from the ICU that her dad was there, and it was just so unbelievably traumatic for her, especially after losing her mom. You know, she was an only child, so I think then having her dad ripped away from her and it being so unexpected, it was just such a huge blow.

To this day, Lauren describes a sense of disbelief about what she and her dad went through.

It's just unreal that it happened to our family. You never think anything that's like that would ever happen. And we had to live with that until 2017, and he still didn't know.

But all those years, As the years passed, Lauren says she kept prodding police for updates in her mother's case.

I never gave up. I never gave up. I called all the time. I knew someone knew something, you know what I mean? So I just didn't give up. And finally, one day my phone rang and— and I didn't even answer because I didn't know the phone number. And then I got a message saying, We're calling about your mom, Leslie Krier. And I said, what?

The phone call was from a detective with the Montgomery County Cold Case Unit. A new set of detectives had picked up the investigation into Leslie's death. These detectives would reexamine the 20-year-old evidence in Leslie's case file. And with the help of new technology, they would finally crack the case wide open. From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm I'm Stephanie Ramos. This is Blood and Water. Episode 4: Family Tree. The office of the Montgomery County Cold Case Unit is in the basement underneath police headquarters. The room is windowless. Glamorous it is not, but it's the sort of hidden away place where no one bothers you. Where a detective can disappear into their work. The office is crammed with heavy-duty shelves. On these shelves sit dozens of boxes.

With any cold case, we're gonna take the box out, and it's usually a big dusty box with lots of files. It could be several boxes, um, and you just kind of go through each file one at a time.

This is Detective Allison Dupuy. Detective DuPuy spends her days here among the boxes that represent Montgomery County's unsolved crimes. And of course, behind every unsolved homicide or sexual assault or kidnapping, there are the victims and loved ones who never got answers.

When you're in the cold case unit, you get to reconnect with families who have otherwise probably have feeling like they've been forgotten by the police department. And we get to make contact again and kind of try to give them maybe some hope and just let them Let them know that we're thinking about this case again and taking a fresh look at it. Leslie Purse murder has been open for over 20 years. When I got to the cold case unit, it was one of many boxes that are sitting on our shelves. And when Tara joined our unit, she just picked right up on it.

Tara is Alison's partner, Detective Tara Augustine. Over her 20-year career in the police department, She had long hoped to join the cold case unit.

These are all major crimes. They're either homicides or rapes. And I like the challenge of trying to look at everything with fresh eyes and not take the same viewpoints that the previous investigators had. And when it's successful, it's a huge satisfaction that you're able to do something for the families and give closure.

Back in 2001, Detectives Augustine and Dupuy were college students living in and around DC.

It's funny because she and I didn't know each other then, but we also used to go, like, hang out with friends in all the same places in Chevy Chase. And we may have even passed— crossed paths with Lauren at some point in our lives and not realized it because we were all in the same area at the same time but didn't know each other.

Did the case appeal to you more because the areas that were mentioned in the case were so familiar to you?

It definitely did. It made me, I guess, have more of a connection to it.

As the two detectives began working on the case, they got to know Lauren Prior. Lauren, who was 23 when her mother was killed, was now in her mid-40s. Her mother's murder and the mystery of what really happened that day had hung over Lauren for almost half her lifetime.

It was very, very emotional for Lauren. I mean, she could just see it on her face and in her demeanor that she was just so grateful that somebody was looking at this and thinking about her mom again. And really, she wanted to clear her dad's name. That was really important to her, to let everybody know that her dad didn't do this.

And soon, these detectives would find the evidence to prove just that.

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Last summer, I spent some time with Detectives Augustin and DuPuy We went through some of the materials in Leslie Prier's case file. This evidence, collected 2 decades earlier, was their starting place. We spread everything out across a big table. It was a big mess of photos and documents, pieces of a puzzle. The most difficult to look at were the crime scene photos taken inside the Prier's home. So this here, this is the foyer of the house.

Yes, this is the front door right here.

So this is what Sandy and Brett Reidy would have seen when they came into the house.

There was blood throughout the Prier home, including some crucial spots in and around the kitchen.

So this is the back door in the kitchen, and this is a drop of blood that was smeared. And there is a doorway right here that separates the dining room from the kitchen. And on that doorway, there's another drop of blood that was found.

These drops of blood contained that unknown male DNA, the DNA that was not Sandy's. Authorities learned of this other DNA a few months after Leslie's killing. It was significant because it suggested that someone else had been in the house when Leslie was killed. And yet, even after the discovery of the unknown male DNA, investigators back in 2001 still believed that Sandy Preer remained a viable suspect. Some 20 years later, Detectives Augustine and Dupuy examined the evidence collected by the earlier detectives, and they came to a different conclusion. One detail police had noted in the original investigation was Sandy's demeanor at the crime scene.

Police officers will go and they'll draw their weapons to search a house. Sandy made a joke about, oh, you know, they're really taking this seriously.

The exact quote in the police report was, you guys mean business. There's blood at the scene. His wife is missing. And he makes a joke.

Yeah.

Well, how did that land with you when you read that?

You know, these kinds of circumstances, you don't know how you're going to deal with it. Some people make jokes. Some people might— be hysterical. Some people might not take it seriously at all at first, and some people take it very seriously. So I think you have different, different ways of dealing with this stuff. But certainly that did not help Sandy's case.

Another thing that didn't help Sandy's case was that he failed the polygraph test. But as Detective Augustin points out, lie detector tests aren't exactly infallible.

Polygraphs are tricky. They're not admissible in court. You know, they're an indicator that the person is having a response in their body, a physical response to whatever questions are being asked.

Detective Augustin says Sandy took that polygraph shortly after detectives told him that Leslie's death was considered a homicide. She says Sandy understood immediately that was bad news for him.

This is the first time he realizes that, and he even says to them, I know where this is going. He knows in his mind that they suspect that he's the killer, and he volunteers to take a polygraph. So his stress level is pretty high already. He goes right from this interaction with the detectives, follows them, and goes to the police station and takes a polygraph immediately after. I can see how he would have failed because it's a very stressful situation. The police think that he killed his wife and he didn't.

Detectives Augustine and DuPuy know today that Sandy Preer did not kill his wife. So they also know that certain pieces of evidence, the failed polygraph, the odd jokes, aren't what they first seemed. This is part of what makes police work so difficult. Investigators not only have to uncover evidence, but they have to decide what that evidence actually means. If it means anything at all. Still, given the prolonged and ultimately incorrect focus on Sandy, I had to ask Detectives Augustine and DuPuy, did investigators focus too closely on Sandy Prier? Did that focus distract them from finding the actual killer?

I think at the time, especially before the profile presence of the unknown DNA was available to them, he was the prime suspect, and I think there was good reason for them to focus on him. Once the presence of the unknown DNA was there, um, it was almost as if they were trying to find a reason why Sandy was acting so suspiciously, because a lot of his movements, a lot of his reactions, the failed polygraph, they all were mounting up to, you know, probable cause.

And had it not been for that unidentified male DNA under her fingernails and in the crime scene, he probably would have been charged.

Instead, no one was charged in the death of Leslie Prier for the next 20-plus years. And over those two decades, there were few promising leads. That is, until detectives took that unknown DNA and began trying to find its family tree. Whoa! We need some water. I need a martini.

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DNA evidence can be very useful if you get a match. But back in 2001, after tests were run on the DNA found at the scene of Leslie Prier's murder, no matches were found. Not in the federal CODIS database of violent criminals, and not among Leslie's family and friends. In hindsight, this dead end showed the limits of forensic DNA in 2001. That federal database of violent offenders, well, By definition, it's limited to violent offenders. That's a pretty small pool of potential matches, at least compared to what came next. Tonight, an arrest, and authorities say they used a family genealogy website to make that arrest. About a decade ago, law enforcement began using a new kind of database, a pool of DNA wider and deeper than anything before. It's a cutting-edge genetic tool now heating up the coldest of cases. A genetic profile created from crime scene DNA was uploaded to a public genealogy database.

If you're a criminal and you've left your DNA at the scene, you might as well turn yourself in now.

Genetic genealogy has revolutionized detective work, especially in cold case investigations. It began with the excitement around at-home DNA tests and ancestry websites. As everyday people spat in tubes and mailed them off, new databases began to grow. Soon, these databases contained the genetic information of millions of people. Today, these databases are big enough and DNA tests sensitive enough that you can build family trees containing the names of people who never submitted their DNA at all. These tools were a revelation for people interested in their ancestry and for law enforcement as well. Police, often working with outside labs, began using some of these databases, building family trees with the DNA of suspects at the center. In 2022, Detectives Tara Augustine and Allison Dupoy sent some 20-year-old blood to a lab. Soon, the detectives received a list of partial matches for that unknown male DNA.

We get shared matches of people from all over the place, and they can be really low matches, which means that they share a very minimal amount of DNA with our suspect. The higher matches, that's more DNA. So that's going to be maybe a little bit easier of a family tree to build.

Detectives spent months building family trees. They used not only the DNA test results, the lists of online profiles that were high or low matches, but another source as well: historical documents.

Obituaries, marriage documents, census records, all of those things. That's what we have to do when we're building the family trees. So it's a little bit of, like, history detective as well as regular detective work.

This work often resembled that of an amateur genealogist. Except instead of trying to track down their ancestors, they were trying to track down a potential murderer.

Hmm.

Genealogy databases have genetic information for people all over the world, but things like census records and obituaries, they're not always that easy to find abroad. So detectives started building family trees featuring lots of American families, Searching for someone who might have been in Maryland in May 2001. The problem was the Americans who populated these family trees, they shared on average less DNA with the unknown male subject. They were multiple degrees removed from the possible killer. In the end, these lower matches got detectives nowhere.

It had been about a year and a half of working on these low matches, and I, um, I just wanted to Why don't we explore these higher matches?

The higher matches tended to lead back to people who lived outside the United States. One match led them to, of all places, Romania.

Just doing basic Google searches and looking at publicly available data, I was able to find out a lot of information about this family line from someone that actually had done a lot of genealogy work that is in the family.

Specifically, the detectives found a blog maintained by a sort of family genealogist. It featured lengthy posts written in Romanian interspersed with black and white photos and scans of newspaper articles, precisely the kind of primary sources the detectives needed.

This person had done a really thorough job of documenting a lot of that stuff.

And, um, in one of the blog posts, I came across the name Virgil Gligor.

Virgil Gligor.

That kind of clicked in my head because I remembered the name Gligor, and I knew it was in the case file.

The name Gligor was in the case file because it was the surname of a Eugene Gligor, Lauren Prior's high school boyfriend. Eugene Gligor had been the subject of a tip detectives got back in 2002.

A lady that lived in the neighborhood where this individual Eugene Gligor lived said, I know that he used to date the victim's daughter, and he was getting in trouble in the neighborhood for, um, noise complaints and just nuisance things where the police had come out there. For some reason, he stuck out to her. And she said, I just want to let you guys know, look at this guy. It was just a hunch.

The detective who took the tipster's call back in 2002 did act on it.

He went by the residence that the tipster had given to try to locate Eugene or to get any information about him. And, um, it appears that he hit a couple of dead ends. And that was it.

It seems like, you know, Eugene at that time may have just fallen into the list of people who knew the family and who were acquainted with the family. And, you know, maybe it would have been a knock and talk and a request for DNA, but they weren't able to locate him. And it's just one of those, you know, loose ends that was never tied up.

It's worth emphasizing, according to law enforcement, Police had no probable cause connecting Lauren's high school boyfriend with her mom's murder. The two had broken up a few years before Leslie's murder. By all accounts, the breakup was perfectly amicable, and at the time of the murder, Lauren and Eugene weren't really in each other's lives anymore.

There never was any indication that there was a bad relationship between Lauren and him or Leslie and him, and it just his name was brought up and they looked at him and they said, well, you know, he's gotten in a little bit of trouble with the police, but nothing raised flags to say, hey, this guy's a killer.

But there was someone else suspicious of Eugene even before Leslie was murdered. Here's Lauren.

My dad never liked him. He thought there was always something off. And you know, a dad's instinct. And of course, as being a teenage girl, I was like, Daddy, you're just being a protective dad.

What would your mom say about that, knowing that your dad wasn't 100% on board with Eugene?

She would just say, you're being overprotective, he's a good kid, kind of thing. And then after she was gone, um, he said, you think Eugene could be a part of this? It wasn't mentioned more than one time. And again, of course, I said said, no, like, what are you talking about?

Her high school boyfriend killing her mom? Lauren didn't buy it. And police say Eugene Gligor didn't have a rap sheet that screamed murder.

Eugene did have some police interactions throughout the years. At some point, he had been charged with marijuana possession. There were a couple of incident reports for thefts or burglaries where he was listed as a suspect, but he was never charged because either there wasn't enough evidence or the families decided not to go forward with anything.

So these findings didn't really paint a picture of a brutal, bloody murderer, did it? No, not at all.

No.

And yet the discovery seems significant. A partial genetic match that had led detectives to a name that had come up during the original investigation, a name that was in the case file.

I remember I was downstairs in our office and I, I said, Ali, come over here and look at this, look at this and make sure it makes sense. And I, I think this is something really good. And, and she came over and she was like, She was like, oh, wow. And I thought, this is a really good lead. Like, this is, like, the biggest break we've had up to this point.

Detectives looked into Eugene Gligor. What they learned was troubling.

I ended up leaving that house that night. I did not stay there because I was afraid of him.

She thought he might go after her.

Once I saw that, that kind of changes things to where he might be capable of actually killing someone.

Blood and Water is a production of ABC Audio in 2020, hosted by me, Stephanie Ramos, produced by Madeline Wood, Shane McKeon, and Kiara Powell. With help from Emily Schutz and Caitlin Schiffer. Edited by Gianna Palmer. Our supervising producer is Susie Lu. Music by Evan Viola. Mixing and mastering by Bob Mallory. Scoring by Kiara Powell. Special thanks to Katie Dendaz, Janice Johnston, Sean Dooley, Chris Donovan, Camille Petersen, Christina Corbin, Gail Deutsch, Amanda Carr, Ellie Joestad, Angie Adam, and Michelle Margulis. Josh Cohen is our director of podcast programming. Eamon McNiff is our executive producer.

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