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Stephanie Ramos
This is Debra Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest true crime series, 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. You survived the Miami weekend, nailed the speech, and maxed out your credit card in the name of friendship. Now you've got one hangover, four pastel dresses, and zero reasons to wear them again. Sell them on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. And you at least get some of your dignity money back. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now, Depop. Where taste recognizes taste. The Montgomery County Cold Case Unit began re examining Leslie Preard's murder in 2022. It was around this time that Lauren Preer, now in her 40s, ran into an old flame at a restaurant in D.C.
Lauren Preer
there is some type of not like a party, but just a gathering. And Eugene was there.
Stephanie Ramos
Eugene Glegor, her high school boyfriend. The two had split up amicably some 25 years earlier. Since when?
Lauren Preer
Probably like three years ago. It wasn't that long ago, let me put it that way.
Stephanie Ramos
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?
Lauren Preer
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.
Stephanie Ramos
The conversation, Lauren says, was perfectly civil. A brief catching up between two 40 somethings who'd known each other a lifetime ago.
Lauren Preer
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. And it wasn't a big deal. I didn't think anything of it. We hugged like, good to see you. Bye.
Stephanie Ramos
This would not be the last time Lauren Preer would see Eugene Clegor. And the next time would be under vastly different circumstances. Because not long after this chance run in, detectives set their focus on Eugene Glegor.
Detective Tara Augustin
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.
Stephanie Ramos
So who was Eugene Glegor? And did he kill Leslie Prier? From abc audio in 2020. I'm stephanie ramos and this is blood and water, episode five, eugene. As I mentioned, Eugene Gligor and Lauren Prier 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.
Lauren Preer
Correct. And that's Bryce.
Stephanie Ramos
Bryce Thomas, one of Lauren's friends from high school.
Bryce Thomas
Yeah, this was the night of prom. Class of 95, you know, gathered at Lauren's house. Kind of couple of the parents were out front taking pictures.
Stephanie Ramos
The photo shows three 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.
Lauren Preer
My mom had got us, which she shouldn't have done, but she did gotten us a thing of wine coolers. So we were having fun even though we were obviously under 21.
Bryce Thomas
I remember just getting a limousine after then and dancing more than I've ever danced in my life.
Stephanie Ramos
The song atop the Billboard charts for seven weeks that spring was Montel Jordan's this is how we do It. So yeah, lots of dancing.
Lauren Preer
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. That's me, that's Eugene.
Bryce Thomas
There were couples and then there was Eugene and Lauren type of couple. And they were together always.
Stephanie Ramos
The two began dating in Lauren's junior year. After that, Bryce says they started seeing each other all the time.
Bryce Thomas
It was always, let's go hang out. It was Eugene and Lauren, not just Eugene. It wasn't hanging out with Lauren. It was let's go hang out with Eugene and Lauren.
Lauren Preer
He just became part of the group. We just became a crew. It was us. It's like us against the world.
Stephanie Ramos
Friends remember Eugene as a talker, a conversationalist, good with girls and good with parents.
Lauren Preer
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.
Stephanie Ramos
Another friend, Lisa Wood, saw this young love up close.
Detective Tara Augustin
I would say the relationship between Eugene and Lauren was as serious as one could be for high school.
Stephanie Ramos
The couple stayed together even after Lauren left for college.
Detective Tara Augustin
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.
Stephanie Ramos
Lauren says Eugene even joined the Pre ers on a couple of family vacations.
Lauren Preer
My mom was just open door, you know, she loved him, she adored him. And he come to my parents house and I wasn't even home yet.
Stephanie Ramos
So he would be there at the house sometimes kind of waiting for you to come home. So he'd be there with your parents just hanging out?
Lauren Preer
Absolutely.
Stephanie Ramos
Without you there.
Lauren Preer
Correct.
Stephanie Ramos
So they had their own relationship. I'm sure they had their own conversations. Your mom would engage, right?
Lauren Preer
I'm sure my dad was part of that. But my mom and Eugene, my dad was like, I'm gonna go watch sports or something.
Stephanie Ramos
Like we said in our last episode, Sandy prearranged, 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.
Bryce Thomas
His house was very, very nice. Big backyard with concealed in with bushes around the back. So easy to hide from the parents. We would probably end up, we would cut class together eventually and go hang out at his house and play video games the afternoon.
Stephanie Ramos
You guys were rebels. I mean smoking cigarettes, cutting class.
Detective Tara Augustin
Yeah.
Bryce Thomas
Let's just say we were a little bit more resourceful than a lot of other kids at that early age.
Stephanie Ramos
But some teenaged mischief aside, Bryce was clear about who Eugene was.
Bryce Thomas
He would have been the last person to jump in if like we got 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.
Stephanie Ramos
Not really a fighter.
Bryce Thomas
No, not a fighter at all.
Stephanie Ramos
And by all accounts, Eugene and Lauren's breakup after four years or so together was amicable.
Lauren Preer
We just had a talk and we both kind of agreed, like we just had a mutual breakup. We were she were kids.
Stephanie Ramos
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 three years. For all intents and purposes, Eugene was out of the prayers lives and had been for years. But as cold case detectives looked into Eugene Glegor's history, one date in particular stood out. May 11, 2001, the day of Leslie Preer's funeral.
Lauren Preer
I remember this church service and my dad and I were obviously sitting together and we sang Beatles songs.
Stephanie Ramos
Lauren and her dad were surrounded by loved ones that day.
Bryce Thomas
Just the amount of people there, the amount of friends from high school it was very well attended. Very well attended.
Stephanie Ramos
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.
Bryce Thomas
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?
Stephanie Ramos
Sure, Eugene and Lauren had broken up a few years earlier, but other members of the Glegor 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 Augustin.
Detective Tara Augustin
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.
Stephanie Ramos
So where had Eugene been just a
Detective Tara Augustin
few days after the murder? He had been pulled over by police in a state in the middle of the country. 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.
Stephanie Ramos
So he took off right after the murder. He was on the road, headed west.
Detective Tara Augustin
Yep.
Stephanie Ramos
It was a troubling detail. And there would be others. Authorities scrutinized what Eugene Glegor had been up to in the years after Leslie Preer's death. What kind of man had he become? And what exactly was he capable of? No. Oh, no. Welcome to Get Real. I got Something to say. A weekly talk show for the reality TV obsessed. Oh, my God. It's gotta be deliciously desperate. Why do these girls forgive him?
Jordan Wires
Well, she has a soft spot for troubled men. Boo.
Stephanie Ramos
Bloody this is your show. Find Get Real.
Detective Tara Augustin
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Stephanie Ramos
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Stephanie Ramos
In the years after high school, Eugene Glegor worked in the food service industry in New York City. At one point he was a maitre 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 back living around Washington D.C. where he working at a tech startup.
Jordan Wires
My first impression of Eugene was that he was a very bubbly, friendly, gregarious person. You know, a classic salesperson.
Stephanie Ramos
Jordan Wires had just begun working at the same startup as Eugene.
Jordan Wires
People liked him a lot. Everyone's 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.
Stephanie Ramos
But Jordan liked Eugene.
Jordan Wires
You know, my boss at the time set up some time with him, just 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.
Stephanie Ramos
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.
Jordan Wires
I didn't probe too much into his background. 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.
Stephanie Ramos
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.
Jordan Wires
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.
Stephanie Ramos
Jordan says Eugene talked about concepts like self actualization and the importance of impulse control.
Jordan Wires
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 readings, 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.
Stephanie Ramos
But a few years later, as detectives continued their investigation, they found more details that suggested Eugene might not always have been as Zen as he seemed.
Lauren Preer
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Stephanie Ramos
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Detective Tara Augustin
So this is a petition for a protective order. And this was from his second wife after they got divorced.
Stephanie Ramos
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.
Detective Tara Augustin
There's a lot of details in here about the verbal and emotional abuse.
Stephanie Ramos
So she was frightened? Yeah.
Detective Tara Augustin
Yeah, she was.
Stephanie Ramos
She was afraid of something. She thought. Thought he might go after her. Detectives Augustine and dupois would interview the woman who filed this petition.
Detective Tara Augustin
I felt scared when I went to do the protective order. It was actually because he had threatened my boyfriend at the time.
Stephanie Ramos
In the petition, she said Eugene came into her home unannounced, the home they used to share, to collect his belongings.
Detective Tara Augustin
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, 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 because I was afraid of him. Yeah, probably the only time that I was like, oh, my God, like, this is really scary.
Stephanie Ramos
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 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 Glegor's other ex wife. She said Glegor could be a different person when he drank.
Detective Tara Augustin
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 ladder. Okay, okay. He definitely started taking two different directions where my crutch was making celery juice
Stephanie Ramos
and his was hiding a bottle under,
Detective Tara Augustin
you know, kitchen counter while working kind of thing. But he did a really Good job of, I guess, Jekyll in 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.
Stephanie Ramos
For detectives, an image of Eugene Glegor was coming into focus.
Detective Tara Augustin
Seeing that one of his ex wives had filed for a petition for a protection order 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.
Stephanie Ramos
When detectives suspected that Glegor might have killed Leslie Preer, 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 Glegor. What detectives did not have was Eugene Glegor's DNA. Without that, they couldn't be sure that his DNA matched what was at the scene. But as Detective Augustin points out, getting a suspect's DNA is no easy task. It can quickly go sideways in similar
Detective Tara Augustin
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 evidence. So we decided that we were going to have some officers follow him and try to obtain a discarded DNA sample.
Stephanie Ramos
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 Dupois decided to do something similar to obtain a sample of Eugene Gligor's DNA.
Detective Tara Augustin
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.
Stephanie Ramos
Detectives learned that Glegor would be flying into Dulles Airport in Virginia.
Detective Tara Augustin
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.
Stephanie Ramos
According to court documents, when Gligor arrived at customs and he was pulled out of line by customs and border 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. Glegor sat on the couch while a CBP officer interviewed him. At some point, Glegor drank one of those bottles of water and left it on the coffee table. Sometime after that, the officers let Glegor leave. He disappeared among the throngs of anonymous travelers, seemingly unaware that Montgomery county police had collected a potentially key piece of evidence.
Detective Tara Augustin
They were able to obtain a discarded water bottle, and we collected that, submitted it to the lab. We obtained the sample on a. And by Friday, we had a report saying that it was a match.
Stephanie Ramos
Finally, after more than two decades, you finally have a DNA match.
Detective Tara Augustin
Yeah.
Stephanie Ramos
What was that like?
Detective Tara Augustin
I mean, it's always a huge sense of satisfaction when you can finally say, oh, we solved it. We know who did it.
Stephanie Ramos
For detectives, there was no longer any doubt Eugene Glegor had killed Leslie Preyer. The DNA proved it. The news spread to the county prosecutor's office. State's Attorney John McCarthy, the lead prosecutor,
Bryce Thomas
she literally was jumping up and down, my God, we got a hit on this case. If you put two 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.
Detective Tara Augustin
Being able to give that answer to the entire family, to Lauren, and to clear her dad's name is huge. It was just really satisfying on multiple levels.
Stephanie Ramos
But before Detective Augustin could share the news with Lauren and with the world, there was one more thing to do. With Eugene Glegor in custody, detectives finally have the opportunity to talk to him face to face and confront him with what they had found.
Detective Tara Augustin
Hygiene.
Stephanie Ramos
Hello. It's interrogation unlike any other. 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 dendoz, janis johnston, sean dooley, chris donovan, camille peterson, christina corbin, gail deutch, amanda carr, ellie joestad, ng adam and michelle margulis. Josh cohan is our director of podcast programming. Eamonn mcniff is our executive producer.
Jordan Wires
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Stephanie Ramos
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Com.
Date: May 27, 2026
Host: Stephanie Ramos (ABC News)
This episode of “Blood and Water” focuses on Eugene Glegor—his complicated past, his relationship with Lauren Preer, and the investigative journey that led to his identification as the killer of Leslie Preer, Lauren's mother, more than two decades after the murder. The episode provides an in-depth look at Eugene’s background, the evidence that implicated him, and the emotional impact on the Preer family and friends as the cold case unravels.
The episode blends emotional recollection with methodical investigative narrative. The tone alternates between nostalgic sincerity when friends and family remember the past, and journalistic rigor as cold case detectives reconstruct the path to justice. There is a subtle undercurrent of relief and closure juxtaposed with the tension of long-held suspicions finally being resolved.
“Eugene” peels back the layers of a decades-old cold case through personal memories, careful detective work, and the marvels of forensic science. The episode spotlights the complexities of relationships, the haunting nature of unanswered questions, and the relentless pursuit of truth—culminating in the conviction of a killer who thought he’d escaped justice.
Next: The investigators finally confront Eugene in custody—an interrogation years in the making.