A 44-year-old man was charged with murder Tuesday in the 2001 killing of a Maryland woman after investigators used DNA evidence from the long-ago crime scene and more recent genealogical research to identify the man and obtain a warrant for his arrest, Montgomery County, Maryland police said.

The victim, Leslie J. Preer, then 50, was found dead May 2, 2001, in an upstairs bedroom of her home in the 4800 block of Drummond Avenue in the county’s Chevy Chase area, The Washington Post reported at the time. There were signs of a struggle in the home, and an autopsy found that Preer had died partly of blunt-force trauma.

The man now charged with killing her, Eugene T. Gligor, was arrested in D.C. by the U.S. Marshals Service’s fugitive task force and was being held pending an extradition hearing, Montgomery police said in a statement. He was 21 when the killing occurred, public records show.

Eugene T. Gligor as he was taken into custody Tuesday after police said DNA evidence linked him to the Preer’s 2001 killing in Montgomery County. 

A key step in the cold-case investigation apparently came in September 2022, when blood from the crime scene, in storage for more than two decades, “was submitted to a lab for forensic genetic genealogical DNA analysis,” according to the statement.

You can read more in an article by Paul Duggan published in the Washington Post at: https://bit.ly/4cAtMEd.