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

[Zorro]

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.

https://wapo.st/4k1nDog

[UpInArms]

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[marble falls]

2. Good article.

[marble falls]

3. I just can't understand having any sort of normal life after murdering someone. I do not get it at all.

[Deuxcents]

4. Technology..ain't it great?!

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. I can see nothing about his motive

He dated her daughter "in the 1990s" - so at least a couple of years earlier. He seems to have had a normal, stable, successful life since - there's no indication he's been unstable or violent after the murder (or before). Perhaps we can imagine some festering resentment about how dating the daughter ended - but it'd be pure speculation on our part.