Transcript of Eugene New

The Montgomery County Cold Case Unit began reexamining Leslie Prier's murder in 2022. It was around this time that Lauren Prier, now in her 40s, ran into an old flame at a restaurant in D.C.

There is some type of, not like a party, but just a gathering, and Eugene was there.

Eugene Gligor. Her high school boyfriend. The two had split up amicably some 25 years earlier. That's when—

probably like 3 years ago. It wasn't that long ago, let me put it that way.

This chance encounter was before detectives had the breakthrough we discussed in the last episode, before genetic genealogy led police to a blog written in Romanian containing a family's history and the name Gligor.

What was he like? Did he say anything to you? What was his demeanor?

He just came up and he was like, "Hi." I was like, "Hey, I haven't seen you in so long." Looked me right in the eyes.

The conversation, Lauren says, was perfectly civil, a brief catching up between two 40-somethings who'd known each other a lifetime ago.

And I was like, "How have you been?" He was like, "I got married again." I said, "Well, that's great." You know, just casual conversation.

Mm-hmm.

And it wasn't a big deal. I didn't think anything of it. We hugged, like, "Good to see you.

Bye." This would not be the last time Lauren Prier would see Eugene Clegore. And the next time, would be under vastly different circumstances. Because not long after this chance run-in, detectives set their focus on Eugene Gligor.

He would put one persona out there and try to make himself look like one type of person, but behind closed doors, he was a different person.

So who was Eugene Gligor? And did he kill Leslie Prier? From ABC Audio and 20/20, I'm Stephanie Ramos, and this is Blood and Water, episode 5, Eugene. As I mentioned, Eugene Gligor and Lauren Prior broke up a few years prior to Leslie's murder. Before the breakup, the two were inseparable. They were part of a close-knit friend group. Lauren and her high school friends still remember those times fondly, including one particular night in the spring of 1995.

So here you are, this is the night of prom.

Correct. And that's Bryce.

Bryce Thomas, one of Lauren's friends from high school.

Yeah, this was the night of prom. Class of '95, you know, gathered at Lauren's house. A couple of the parents were out front taking pictures.

The photo shows 3 young couples. The boys are dapper, if a little awkward, in what might be rented tuxedos. The girls look pure '90s with spaghetti strap mini dresses and face-framing curls. Lauren remembers Leslie playing "cool mom" that night.

My mom had got us, um, which she shouldn't have done, but she did, um, gotten us, um, a thing of wine coolers. So we were having fun even though we were obviously under 21.

Yeah, I remember just getting in a limousine after then and Dancing more than I've ever danced in my life.

The song that topped the Billboard charts for 7 weeks that spring was Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It." So yeah, lots of dancing.

We had fun.

We stayed up all night.

It was a beautiful evening. We had a blast. That was our prom night. And that's my best friend Lisa. Mm-hmm. That's me. That's Eugene.

There were couples, and then there was Eugene and Lauren type of couple. They were together always.

The two began dating in Lauren's junior year. After that, Bryce says they started seeing each other all the time.

It was always, let's go hang out. It was Eugene and Lauren, not just Eugene. It wasn't hang out with Lauren. It was, let's go hang out with Eugene and Lauren.

He just became part of the group. We just became a crew. It was us. It was like us against the world.

Friends remember Eugene as a talker, a conversationalist, good with girls and good with parents.

He was very charismatic. He was a ladies' man. All the girls loved him. But I got him. So we just became a thing. I mean, I loved him back then. I really did.

Another friend, Lisa Wood, saw this young love up close.

I would say the relationship between Eugene and Lauren was as serious as one could be for high school.

The couple stayed together even after Lauren left for college.

I know for her, it was— you know, it felt very special. And she loved him. They were in a long-term committed relationship for years. Lauren's parents, her mom in particular, was definitely very welcoming of Eugene.

Lauren says Eugene even joined the Priors on a couple of family vacations.

My mom was just open door, you know. She loved him. She adored him. And he'd come to my parents' house when I wasn't even home yet.

So he would be there at the house sometimes, kind of waiting for you to come home.

Yeah.

So he'd be there with your parents just hanging out.

Absolutely.

Without you there.

Correct.

So they had their own relationship. I'm sure they had their own conversations. Your mom would engage, right?

I'm sure my dad wasn't part of that, but my mom and Eugene, my dad was like, I'm gonna go watch sports or something.

Like we said in our last episode, Sandy Prier never liked Eugene. Whether that paternal instinct was justified or not, it was true that Lauren and some of her friends were no strangers to some light mischief. Bryce remembers smoking cigarettes with Eugene after school and spending time at his place.

His house was very, very nice. Big backyard was concealed in with bushes around the back, so easy to hide from, like, the parents. We would probably end up, you know, we would cut class together eventually and, you know, go hang out at his house and play video games in the afternoon.

You guys were rebels.

I mean, smoking cigarettes, cutting class.

Yeah, let's just say we were a little bit more resourceful than a lot of other kids at that early age.

But some teenage mischief aside, Bryce was clear about who Eugene was.

He would have been the last person to jump in. If, like, we got in a scuffle with any guys from, like, a different school and, like, there was any kind of altercation He would be one of the last people you want to have your back.

Not really a fighter.

No, not a fighter at all.

And by all accounts, Eugene and Lauren's breakup after 4 years or so together was amicable.

We just had a talk and we both kind of agreed, like, we just had a mutual breakup. We were— we were kids.

The two went their separate ways. Their lives went on, and then Lauren lost her mom. By the time Leslie Prier was murdered, Lauren and Eugene had been broken up for about 3 years. For all intents and purposes, Eugene was out of the Prier's lives and had been for years. But as cold case detectives looked into Eugene Gligor's history, one date in particular stood out. May 11th, 2001, the day of Leslie Prier's funeral.

I remember this church service, and my dad and I were obviously sitting together and we sang Beatles songs.

Lauren and her dad were surrounded by loved ones that day.

Just the amount of people there, the amount of friends from high school, it was very well attended, very well attended.

Lauren's friend Bryce was there, along with droves of others—friends, family, acquaintances—all there to pay their respects. But Bryce noticed one person was missing from the church.

I remember asking Lauren specifically, I was like, "Where is Eugene?" And her saying to me that it was too much for him to handle. And I just remember being so upset, just being I can't believe that he would make this about him. That's the most selfish thing I've ever heard. It just rubbed me so wrong. I was like, where the hell is Eugene?

Sure, Eugene and Lauren had broken up a few years earlier, but other members of the Gligor family did attend the funeral. Eugene's parents and brother were there. Two decades later, when cold case detectives were looking into Eugene, his absence on this day was suspicious. Detective Tara Augustine.

His mom and dad and brother went to the funeral, felt compelled because their families had this close relationship at one point. But yet Eugene decided he didn't want to go. It made no sense.

So where had Eugene been?

Just a few days after the murder, he had been pulled over by police in a state in the middle of the country, Nevada. Nowhere near here. And later on, after talking to some of his friends, we realized that he took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Oregon, all the way across the country, to visit a friend that had moved there. And he called him while he was on the way and said, oh, I'm in Iowa, I'll be there in however many hours, and caught the friend by surprise.

So he took off right after the murder. He was on the road. Yeah. Headed west. Yep. It was a troubling detail, and there would be others. Authorities scrutinized what Eugene Gligor had been up to in the years after Leslie Prier's death. What kind of man had he become? And what exactly was he capable of? It's my first day of work and I need to make a big impression.

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In the years after high school, Eugene Gligor worked in the food service industry in New York City. At one point, he was a maître d' at a Michelin-starred restaurant. He reportedly hosted Super Bowl parties and joined fantasy football leagues. He was married twice, divorced twice, and by 2018, he was Eugene was back living around Washington, D.C., working at a tech startup.

My first impression of Eugene was that he was a very bubbly, friendly, gregarious person. You know, a classic salesperson.

Jordan Wires had just begun working at the same startup as Eugene.

People liked him a lot. Everyone was like, "Oh, you know, that's Eugene." He was like a salesy kind of guy, so I think probably that turned some people off. Of like, "Okay, well, you know, he's a fast talker," and that kind of a thing, in the way that, like, a lot of salespeople will turn people off, you know?

But Jordan liked Eugene.

You know, my boss at the time set up some time with him to say, you know, "Talk to Eugene about what he does and his job." And I just remember leaving the meeting with good vibes. And, like, I mean, I was a young employee navigating how to be a professional, you know? I went to him for advice. All the time.

Their office had a workplace mentorship program, and Eugene became Jordan's mentor. Over countless trips to a Starbucks near their office, Jordan's mentor doled out what seemed like hard-earned wisdom.

I didn't probe too much into his background, but I— everybody knew it was open knowledge that he didn't drink. He was a recovering alcoholic. He had clearly been to AA and internalized a lot of self-help best practices, so to speak.

Jordan described Eugene as having a certain zen quality. Jordan says that at one point, Eugene gave him a gift. It was a copy of the self-help classic The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom.

Can I remember the Four Agreements right now? No. Some of the things I remember are you need to agree to not take anything personally. How other people interact with you and go through the world is not a reflection of you. It's a reflection of them.

Jordan says Eugene talked about concepts like self-actualization and the importance of impulse control.

I remember distinctly having lunch with him and him telling me, you know, having control over your thoughts and being able to see them as they come in and not just impulsively react to them is, you know, the first step toward being able to have control over your life. He was clearly a guy who had done some reading, some self-help books, who had, like, I assumed, been to therapy. Maybe a little woo-woo, not in the sense of, like, you know, he was into, like, mysticism or anything. But, like, he just wasn't afraid to have conversations about difficult topics, egos, setting your ego aside about things. I mean, he really taught me a lot. He did.

But a few years later, as detectives continued their investigation, they found more details that suggested Eugene might not always have been a zen, as he seemed.

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Cold case detectives Tara Augustin and Allison DuPuy had their big breakthrough in June 2024. That was when genetic genealogy led them to the name Gligor. As they looked into Eugene, they found hints of a volatile past.

So this is a petition for a protective order, and this was from his second wife after they got divorced.

The petition was one of the documents laid out on a table during my interview with detectives last summer. It was filed in Maryland court in 2021.

There's a lot of details in here about the verbal and emotional abuse.

So she was frightened.

Yeah. Yeah. She was— she was afraid of something. She thought he might go after her. Detectives Augustine and Dupuy would interview the woman who filed this petition.

I felt scared when I went to do the protective order. It was actually because he had threatened my boyfriend at the time.

In the petition, she said Eugene came into her home unannounced, the home they used to share, to collect his belongings.

He had moved out and he showed up. He was supposed to let me know and get my approval before coming over, and he just came in. Um, and it was very scary, and I ended up calling the police, and I ended up leaving that house that night. I did not stay there again, um, because I was afraid of him. Yeah, he was probably the only time that I was like, oh my God, like, this is really scary.

She wrote in the petition, Eugene is an addict and has two guns. His behavior has been erratic and scary for a couple of years, off and on. Eugene repeatedly calls me a whore and yells into my face. He throws objects, punches walls, and I fear for my safety when he has these outbursts. I am seeking protection from this verbal abuse and escalation. The petition was ultimately denied by the court, which said there were, quote, no reasonable grounds to believe that abuse as defined in the statute occurred. Detectives also spoke with Gligor's other ex-wife. She said Gligor could be a different person when he drank.

Was he like a danger to himself, like saying he would like harm himself, or just being impulsive, going out drinking and driving, or what kind of stuff? Second, latter.

Okay, okay. He definitely started taking two different directions where my crutch was making celery juice and his was hiding a bottle under, you know, kitchen counter while working kind of thing. But he did a really good job of, I guess, juggling hiding. I don't know what you want to call that.

It got to a point with both of them that they ended up getting divorced because of his substance abuse issues.

For detectives, an image of Eugene Gligor was coming into focus.

Seeing that one of his ex-wives had filed for a petition for a protection order, um, immediately that kind of put red flags in my mind because I'm like, okay, well, that's because of either a threat of violence or a fear of violence.

When detectives suspected that Gligor might have killed Leslie Prier, they still needed more evidence. Remember, at this point, the detectives have the crime scene DNA from an unknown male. They had used genetic genealogy to find possible relatives of whoever's DNA that was. That process led them to the name Gligor. What detectives did not have was Eugene Gligor's DNA. Without that, they couldn't be sure that his DNA matched what was at the scene. But as Detective Augustine points out, getting a suspect's DNA is no easy task. It can quickly go sideways.

In similar cases to this, when a suspect has been identified, there have been a couple of times where it hasn't worked out well, where a person who thinks they've gotten away with a crime for 20, 40 years, the police are coming to finally ask them for their DNA. They know why, because they killed someone, and then it turns into a bad situation sometimes. So we wanted to try to do it in the safest way possible before we confronted Eugene with any of the, the evidence. So we decided that we were going to have some officers follow him and try to obtain a discarded DNA sample.

Toothbrushes, discarded chewing gum, flicked cigarette butts. Police have surreptitiously recovered DNA from all these objects and used them to crack cold cases. Detectives Augustine and Dupuy decided to do something similar to obtain a sample of Eugene Gligor's DNA.

Doing our research, I realized that he was a frequent traveler, and we got information that he was actually overseas and that he would be returning to the United States on a certain date, and we had the flight information.

Detectives learned that Gligor would be flying into Dulles Airport in Virginia.

I relayed that information to our officers, and they decided, okay, well, we'll pick up on him at the airport and see if we can get him getting rid of anything.

According to court documents, when Gligor arrived at customs, he was pulled out of line by Customs and Border Patrol patrol officers. They took his passport and escorted him to an interview room. The room was mostly bare. There was a couch and a coffee table stocked with snacks and miniature bottles of water. Gligor sat on the couch while a CBP officer interviewed him. At some point, Gligor drank one of those bottles of water and left it on the coffee table. Some time after that, the officers let Gligor leave. He disappeared among the throngs of anonymous travelers, seemingly unaware that Montgomery County Police had collected a potentially key piece of evidence.

They were able to obtain a discarded water bottle, and we collected that, submitted it to the lab. We obtained the sample on a Sunday, and by Friday we had a report saying that it was a match.

Finally, after more than 2 decades, you finally have a DNA match. Yeah. What was that like?

I mean, it's always a huge sense of satisfaction when you can finally say, oh, we solved it, we know who did it.

For detectives, there was no longer any doubt. Eugene Gligor had killed Leslie Prier. The DNA proved it. The news spread to the county prosecutor's office, State's Attorney John McCarthy.

The lead prosecutor, she literally was jumping up and down. My God, we got a hit on this case. If you put 2 years of your life as an investigator and as a prosecutor into building probable cause for an arrest, it's a pretty joyful moment to realize you've got your guy.

Being able to give that answer to the entire family, to Lauren, and to clear her dad's name is huge. It was— it was just really satisfying on multiple levels.

But before Detective Augustin could share the news with Lauren and with the world, there was one more thing to do.

Hands up, man. Hands up!

With Eugene Gligor in custody, detectives finally have the opportunity to talk to him face to face and confront him with what they had found. Hi, Eugene.

Hello.

It's an interrogation unlike any other. Blood and Water is a production of ABC Audio and 20/20, 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 by Bob Mallory. Scoring by Kiara Powell. Special thanks to Katie Dendaz, Janice Johnston, Sean Dooley, Chris Donovan, Camille Peterson, Christina Corbin, Gail Deutsch, Amanda Carr, Ellie Joestad, Angie Adam, and Michelle Margulis. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Eamon McNiff is our executive producer.