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Tonight on Dateline. She was my very best friend. She was my person. My dad, he goes, I'm so sorry.
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Your mom is no longer with us. It was awful. I found the victim inside the shower.
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This was clearly not a stranger. This is someone who knew the family. When did you first realize that police were eyeing your dad as a suspect?
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Day one. I'll just tell you one thing you've got. The wrong guy. Everything pointed to the husband's involvement.
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You were her boss. Correct. They just ask you point blank, did you kill Leslie? It was very direct.
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Couldn't believe they were asking. You're just grasping at straws. It was just this big mystery.
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I felt a lot of a connection to this case. You're a mom, and this is about a mother who was killed, taken away from her family.
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I said, I'm going to solve this. We were determined to finish this. She yells from the back of the room.
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I got it. I think I got it. Hands up! Hands up! I almost fell off my chair. I'm surprised I'm still alive.
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A mom found dead in the shower. A killer hiding for decades. Could two other moms, both detectives, solve this mystery at last?
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I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Blaine Alexander with A Perfect Spring Morning.
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If there's truly such a thing as a perfect spring morning, May 2nd, 2001 in Chevy Chase, Maryland, was it.
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Crisp, clear, the kind of weather that just begs for a walk. And that suited Leslie Prier just fine.
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Leslie's daughter, Lauren. Tell me about your neighborhood. Beautiful. Yeah. Wonderful.
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Felt safe. It was a short drive to Leslie's office in Washington, D.C., but she liked taking a long walk through her upscale neighborhood to catch the bus.
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Maybe that's why she was late for work again. Was it starting to become something that interfered with work?
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Well, yeah, she's supposed to be there at nine o'clock and she couldn't couldn't make it.
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Brett Reedy was Leslie's boss at Specialties, a small advertising and promotions firm.
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She was kind of on super secret probation, if you will, because I had to push her back to 10 o'clock.
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You can't make it at nine and let's make it at 10. So really, there was pressure to be there by 10 o'clock.
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Sure. So it was more alarming that she wasn't there. Leslie wasn't answering her phone, so Brett called her husband Sandy at his office.
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I just said, did Leslie have any doctor's appointments that I didn't know about?
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And he goes, no. And I said, well, she's not here. And he goes, that's not good.
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That was big. Something's wrong. The two men met at the prayer house to look for Leslie.
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Sandy unlocked the front door and went inside. I walked in with him, and he's calling her name.
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Leslie, Leslie, he's looking everywhere for her. And I looked right to my right, and there was a pretty good-sized pool of blood.
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And he then goes upstairs. And while he's upstairs, I'm noticing blood splatter all along the wall.
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And it was alarming to me, which was like something really bad happened here. Then, in a moment that felt like something straight out of a horror movie,
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Brett noticed something moving. I look down the hall and the door slowly moves. I said, oh.
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So you're thinking maybe someone's inside. I thought it was Leslie because we hadn't found her.
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Yeah. And it moved slow enough that I thought, oh, I don't want to see this. Turns out it was Boomer, the family dog, cowering but unhurt.
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Still no sign of Leslie. As Sandy came back downstairs, all signs pointed to something horrific.
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I said, Sandy, look at this. in the kitchen. There's blood everywhere. There's blood on the back door. There's blood on the
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appliances. And he said, well, she must have fallen down. She must be at the hospital. So he grabs the
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yellow pages and starts making calls. He thinks it's an accident. Oh, yeah. She must have fallen
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down. Blood went everywhere. Did that seem to make sense to you? Not exactly. Brett called 911.
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9-1-1, which emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer.
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When I called 9-1-1, the operator says, get the hell out of the house. Get out of the house.
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Don't touch anything and get out of the house. Because they're saying it's very possible you're standing in the middle of a crime scene.
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Yeah. Another possibility, the criminal was still inside. Officer Jim Barnett with the Montgomery County Police Department was the first on the scene.
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With guns drawn, he and his partner went inside. It was clearly obvious there had been a violent struggle.
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There was blood on the floor. There were red swirl marks where someone had tried to obviously clean up blood.
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There was a lampshade knocked over, as well as an end table. I went into the master bedroom area.
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The door to the shower was closed and when I opened it The victim was curled up in the corner of the shower stall It was Leslie Officer Barnett checked for a pulse
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Nothing. She was dead, killed in a vicious attack. At that point, what we have to do is go outside and inform the husband.
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He walked up to Sandy, and he just very directly walked right up to him. Sir, your wife is dead.
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Just like that? Yeah. Lauren Prier was 23 years old back then. She was at her apartment that morning, still mercifully unaware of what had happened to her mother.
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She was my person. We talked every single day. As soon as I woke up, I would call my mom.
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And that's exactly what Lauren did that morning. She dialed her mom's work line.
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One of her co-workers answered the phone. And she was like, well, she's not here right now.
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And I said, what do you mean? And she goes, you need to call your father. Are you thinking?
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You know what I thought? I thought good things. I thought we won the lottery or there was like a surprise vacation.
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So I thought something positive happened. The truth revealed itself when Lauren saw a police car pull up in front of her apartment.
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the police officer and my dad came up to our apartment I'm sorry it's okay it was all in slow motion
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he goes I'm so sorry you. Your mom is no longer with us here anymore. It was very traumatic. She was screaming and
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crying and dropped and fell to the floor. I went to my bedroom. I just like screamed
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to one of my pillows. It was awful. Something evil made its way into the Priers' peaceful
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neighborhood that morning. But what? It was really confusing and tragic. Didn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense.
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He just talked to me straight in my eyes like nothing was wrong. And he was comforting you.
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Yes. And he's the one who did it. I'm just tired and drained. I don't know what's going on.
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I'm surprised I'm still alive. Year after year, Chevy Chase is listed as one of Maryland's safest communities.
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That made the murder of Leslie Preer in her own home all the more shocking. Leslie's brother, Frank.
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Zoom out a second. What a nice little neighborhood. Spring morning, cherry blossoms, 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning, beautiful spring day.
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She's dead. And now, a once welcoming Chevy Chase home was crawling with forensic teams.
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They responded there to collect blood, and they came back at least two additional days
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to continue collecting any possible evidence they could find. The house was a mess inside, but outside, nothing was disturbed.
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And the back door was left unlocked, a habit for the Priers. They never kept the back door locked, ever.
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Front door was always locked, but our back door was always open because we had a fence and the dog would go out.
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There was no signs of forced entry that I saw. So the person, whoever it was, I felt knew the victim, knew the family, knew the routine, entered the home and went through this violent struggle and then took the time to try and clean it up.
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And I mean, no one would do that if it was your first time in the home. This was clearly not a stranger to victim homicide.
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Once Lauren Prier learned about her mother's death, her first call was to her best friend, Lisa Wood.
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I've never heard that tone in her voice. That's got to be one of the most unfortunately memorable but defining moments of my life.
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Yeah. What could be more traumatic, you know? It didn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense.
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Lisa basically grew up in the Prier household. It became the sort of unofficial gathering spot for Lauren's friends.
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That's no small feat when you're talking about teenagers wanting to come over and hang out at their house.
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Her mom was just so vibrant. She wanted everyone to come over, feel welcome. You knew that she wouldn't judge you and she would just be there for you.
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Leslie Prier grew up in Pensacola, Florida. One of eight children. Our dad loved the beach.
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And when he finished with the Navy, he wanted to enjoy Pensacola Beach. So he would haul all eight children out to the beach, grill us flank steak sandwiches.
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He brought snorkels and masks, and we all had a great time. All of Leslie's siblings had a soft spot for her.
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From Big Sister Robin... Leslie was kind and caring and generous to a fault To little brother Scott Leslie inherited the best qualities from our mom who had an enormous heart
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Trust me, each one of the eight of us have a lot of quirks, but Leslie, sweetest one of the eight, for sure.
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Leslie met Sandy Prear in Pensacola. They both came from military families and hit it off right from the start.
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They met in junior college, then went to University of Florida. and they just stayed together.
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Sandy became a CPA, then an IT specialist. The couple married in 1974 and eventually settled in Chevy Chase.
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Their only child, Lauren, was the center of her mother's world. My mom loved me so much and thought I could do no wrong.
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Pretend I robbed a bank? Pretend. Yes. I would never do that. She would have gone.
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Lauren just needed a little money. She would have been there to bust you out of jail if necessary.
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Yes. Leslie had a way of winning people over. Friends, family, and co-workers like Brett Reedy.
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What was she like in the office? Oh, she was a Southern belle. She was fantastic.
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Miss Leslie, she was very sweet. She was also very self-effacing. Very much the Southern charm.
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Sounds like she really was just a bright light in the office. Very much so, yes.
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Through the years, Leslie's big, boisterous family would gather for reunions in Pensacola, taking in the Gulf waters.
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And making sure to catch a show by the Navy's legendary Blue Angels aerobatic team.
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Those reunions became a family staple, and Sandy fit right in. Sandy was, you know, he was a man's man.
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He was fun to hang with. He would drink beers with you. He had all the jokes. And he was just funny.
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He was very engaging with everybody. Paint a picture for me of your parents' marriage.
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What was their relationship like? Best friends. Yeah. They were so sweet together.
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They loved each other. They had fun. We all had fun together. They had a wonderful marriage.
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Detectives were about to ask some tough questions about Leslie, her marriage, and the people closest to her. Did that question catch you off guard?
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Oh, absolutely. That little freaked me out. The investigation into Leslie Preer's murder was picking up steam, and her husband Sandy was about
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to become a familiar figure to Montgomery County detectives, including Allison DuPois and Tara Augustin.
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They would eventually be among eight detectives to handle the case. This is such a nice neighborhood.
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It doesn't look like a place where something so terrible could happen. During an interview at police headquarters,
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Sandy told detectives Leslie was fine the last time he saw her. But he had a lot to say about her boss, Brett Reedy.
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Leslie said that he wanted to get control of her. He was one of the only sources of stress and tension in Leslie's life that Sandy could identify.
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She was always kind of complaining or stressed and worrying about her boss, Brett.
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Sandy recalled an incident about how Brett reacted when Leslie snapped at him after he pointed out a mistake she'd made at work.
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He blew up sky high about that, and she was kind of really under the gun for that one statement.
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Because she crossed him, she kind of had to pay for a period of time. Sandy, you know, listening to his wife talk about stories like that could say,
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well, you know, maybe she snapped at him and maybe he snapped. Brett had grown up in Chevy Chase and had been to the Priers' house.
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Still, Sandy wondered why he went there to look for Leslie the day of the murder.
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Brett coming to the house. Don't 100% understand that, but it happened. What do you mean Brett coming to the house?
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Why didn't he just let me go to the house? That didn't sit right with Leslie's family either.
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Don't you think it's odd that a boss would go to someone's house when that person didn't show up for work?
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I did. He was the first person to show up at the house. So that was a little alarming.
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Suspicious to you? Yes. Brett insisted it was simply a gesture of concern for a colleague who would become a good friend.
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What was his relationship with your mom? Well, they worked together, obviously. And then they definitely had a closer relationship that I think beyond work.
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I mean, my mom thought he was attractive. Maybe Brett felt the same way. Lauren says he once sent Leslie a birthday card with some very kind words.
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He's like, you're the Audrey Hepburn of the office for her birthday. That's very flattering.
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Mm-hmm. What did your dad think about Brett? That he and my mom flirted together.
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Is it possible your mom could have been having an affair? Yeah. You thought, okay, this is her coworker.
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Maybe someone who's having an affair with my mom? It crossed my mind. And maybe someone who killed her?
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It crossed my mind Was Leslie having an affair with anybody You know at the top of the list was Brett Reedy He was pretty closely tapped into her day comings and goings
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You know, the fact that he was so concerned when she didn't show up to work was also something that piqued the investigators' interest.
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Detectives brought Brett into headquarters for an interview. He described how, after calling 911, he walked around the house to do his own search.
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I went outside, went down the driveway, opened the gate, walked by the garage, kept walking
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in the backyard, walked to the backyard of the next house and maybe the next house.
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A few days later, Brett came back to the scene, this time searching along the bike path and
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creek near the Prier home. I thought that path and that creek had something to do with this.
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if I could dump evidence, what would I do? Where would I do it? And it would be in that creek.
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You can hide it in the woods and then maybe get it later. And I said, I'm going to get that and find
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it. Investigators thought Brett's search was unusual and suspicious. And did you think that
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the police weren't looking back there? I have no idea because maybe they don't know the
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neighborhood like i know i know the back of my hand brett then took his amateur investigation
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to sandy's office i went to his office parking lot and looked in his dumpster what were you
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hoping to find evidence murder weapon blade clothes yeah let's find this let's get this over
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with many people wouldn't go out and actually start looking through trash for evidence themselves
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yeah at some point your partner said okay maybe you shouldn't go to his office that could make police start to look at you.
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Yeah. Do you see her point? Yes. She said, what are you going to do if you find something?
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I said, well, I'll turn it in. I mean, you really inserted yourself in this investigation.
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Why did you take such an interest? I want to find out what happened. And also, I just thought I could help.
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Brett also felt he was being helpful during his interview with police. He said the detectives were calm and cordial until the very end.
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And they said, we have one more question. I said, sure. Did you have anything to do with this?
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And it was very direct. And I just went, no, absolutely not. Did that question catch you off guard?
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Oh, absolutely. That little freaked me out. I couldn't believe they were asking me.
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Brett says he was also caught off guard to learn what Sandy had said to police about him.
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And despite ongoing issues with Leslie being late for work, they remained good but platonic friends.
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Did you have a relationship with Leslie? No. No, romantic relationship at all. Not at all.
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No question, detectives had their hands full with what was quickly becoming a high-profile case.
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Turns out, the load would soon get even heavier. The search is on in the district for a missing woman.
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Her name is Chandra Ann Levy. A lot of people in the neighborhood were concerned and scared that there was some guy going around killing people.
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Especially women. Yes. It's textbook detective work. Start with the people closest to Leslie Prier.
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Then check to see if there were any other similar crimes in the area. Sadly, there were.
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The search is on in the district for a missing woman. Her name is Chandra Ann Levy.
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The day before Leslie Prier was found dead in her home, a woman named Chandra Levy disappeared.
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She was a young woman who worked on the Hill in D.C., which wasn't very far from the Prier household.
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Local police and the FBI are looking for clues and a high-profile disappearance.
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A California woman vanished without a trace just after she'd completed an internship.
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That becomes a huge national story. And police are looking and saying, OK, could these possibly be connected?
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Yes. A lot of people in the neighborhood were concerned and scared that there was some guy going around killing people.
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Yeah. Especially women. Yes. There was another case on the detective's radar, a few years older, but just as frightening.
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The Potomac rapist, a serial offender who had murdered one of his victims. Eight women were sexually assaulted in Montgomery County in their homes or in private residences.
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The body of 29-year-old Christine Mirzian was found near the Whitehurst Freeway.
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They looked into the Chandra Levy case as well as some other reports throughout Montgomery County where women were attacked.
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However, none of them matched exactly to what Leslie had in her case. they quickly ruled out that any of those other cases were related.
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With those notorious cases no longer a factor in the Prier investigation, detectives did a deep dive into anyone who might have had contact with Leslie,
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no matter how innocent it might have seemed. They looked into anybody that was doing work in the neighborhood
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or anyone that had done any work on the Prier's house. Anyone that was in the neighborhood that didn't live there,
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that there could have been a chance interaction with Leslie, they looked into. Dead ends, all of them.
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But Lauren had her own idea about what might have happened and told police. My mom loved to take public transportation.
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Because Leslie preferred taking a bus to work, Lauren came up with a theory. Maybe her mother's killer was someone she met during her commute.
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She talked to everybody. She lived the world through rose-toned glasses. Like no one does any harm. I said, Mama, not everyone's perfect.
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She takes never met a stranger to a whole new level. Correct. Were you thinking that this could be somebody maybe who met her on the bus, who followed her home?
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Yes, it was definitely a possibility in my head. An attack by someone Leslie met on a bus was an interesting theory,
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but without any witnesses or revealing security camera footage, it remained just that, a theory.
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What did police ask you for? The list of names that knew my mom and knew me and were present at my parents' house.
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So this could be a pretty long list. At least 25. Kind of describe who was on that list.
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Friends. My Jennings side of the family, which is my mom's side. Basically anybody that you knew that had come to the house.
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Yeah. Lauren says she assembled the list and included people she never thought could be involved in her mother's death.
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Like her boyfriend at the time, Scott Kendall. He would never hurt my mom. That I truly believe.
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And there was an earlier boyfriend, Eugene Glee Gore, someone she dated back in high school.
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What first attracted you to him? He was smart. He was from a good family. And he was extremely attractive.
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Leslie's brother Frank made the list too. Even though he owns a bike shop in Massachusetts
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and was hundreds of miles away when Leslie died. My uncle Frank used to stay at my parents' house sometimes, so he was on the list, but everyone was on the list.
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Lisa helped Lauren with that list, but it felt like an exercise in futility. After all, these were friends, family.
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You know, it's like you just try to rack your brain to try to make any sense of any of the details,
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because it's like a puzzle and you're just trying to put it together. You're just grasping at straws.
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There was never anyone that was like, oh, yeah, it's got to be them or it would make like none of it made sense.
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It seems detectives felt the same way because some of the people on that list were never contacted.
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And so they turned back to someone who is always on a detective's list when a spouse is murdered.
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The husband is usually the one you're going to look at first. How you doing? All right. How about yourself?
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Not bad. Not bad. It was time to circle back to Sandy Prier. I told you everything exactly how it happened.
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He didn't do himself any favors by kind of the way he answered questions. There were a lot of signs that did point to Sandy.
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The End didn't seem right. Sandy gets out of the car and comes up to me and says, hey Brett, how you doing?
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I'm doing okay, but we're here to in my head, I'm thinking we're here to find your wife.
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Inside, the scene was brutal. To Brett, it seemed obvious there'd been a struggle.
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What do police do when they get there? Well, as soon as they walked up, they drew
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their guns. And Sandy went, oh, you guys mean business. I thought that was a lot. I like to joke a lot, but not at that moment.
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Did it seem, what, flippant to you? Yeah. Officer Jim Barnett got the same strange vibe from Sandy.
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He didn't run up to me and say, I can't find my wife. There's been a violent struggle. There's
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blood in the house. He just calmly stood in the yard and waited for me to walk up. And when I said,
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what's going on? His response was, I've looked all through the house and can't find her.
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Remember, when Barnett went upstairs, he found Leslie almost immediately. I was surprised that he didn't find her in the shower stall, especially after you've seen,
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you know, all that blood and disturbance in the foyer area and your wife's missing. I would think
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you'd be looking under beds, in closets, everywhere. And then to find the victim upstairs in a shower,
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You know, that's bizarre, you know. So I'm thinking like, man, this is this is really, really strange.
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Barnett says Sandy remained calm after learning his wife was dead. I was fully expecting him to bull rush me to run upstairs and see his wife in the shower stall.
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But he did not do that. He stood right there. And there was kind of no, no, no response.
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From what I've seen and his reactions, it just didn't look realistic. Barnett kept a close eye on Sandy.
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My main concern was keeping him right there in the front yard and not letting him back into the house.
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Then Barnett had Sandy sit with him in the front seat of his cruiser and waited for backup.
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And from that point forward, the detectives showed up to take over. As crime scene techs processed the house that morning,
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detectives went door to door talking to neighbors. One reported seeing something strange.
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The lights on inside the prayer house in the middle of the night. All the blinds were drawn in the house, and that was what was weird about it.
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And that wasn't their normal pattern. No. Another neighbor said Sandy waved hello as he left for work that morning.
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He made a point to wave to her, and she thought it was kind of odd because he had never done that before.
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And he looked back at the house and started talking and the neighbor presumed it was Leslie in the doorway and he was like okay babe I see you later But the neighbor couldn tell if Leslie was even there
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After hearing this witness statement, it seemed like it was possible that Sandy was kind of creating a witness for himself
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and a bit of an alibi saying that he left for work when he did and that maybe Leslie was still there and still alive.
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When Sandy first met with detectives at headquarters, they noticed he had a few small cuts and they took pictures.
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When they talked to him, Sandy said the last time he saw Leslie, he kissed her goodbye, like he always did.
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We always kiss each other goodbye and wave goodbye. Is she at the door standing there?
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But when detectives asked some pretty straightforward questions, Sandy fumbled the answers.
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He didn't do himself any favors by kind of the way he answered questions. Talk to me about some of the things the detectives noticed about Sandy.
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They interviewed him numerous times throughout the investigation, and they realized that a lot of his answers just didn't add up.
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Like, where were you the night before Leslie was found? I could guess, but I don't know for a fact.
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Not remembering where he was or what he did was a problem for Sandy. but the things he did remember about his whereabouts seemed even more suspicious.
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Oh wait, okay, I know what I did. I was taking some computer stuff to the dump. He went to the dump to dispose of some computer parts.
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He went to the dump? Yeah, and that caught their attention a lot. That's raising a red flag.
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Yes. Sandy told detectives he got home late that night and didn't know if Leslie had eaten.
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But the medical examiner's report was more bad news for Sandy. They looked at her stomach contents in the autopsy, and there was undigested pasta in there,
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which would indicate that she died within a certain amount of time of eating that.
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And they looked at it like, well, that would have been dinner the night before. The night before, when Sandy would have been home alone with Leslie.
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It seemed nothing in Sandy's police interview was helping his cause until he mentioned that Leslie called him at his office the morning her body was found.
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She called around 9 o'clock. Now, does that come through the switchboard? Yes. So you dial the main number, ask Sandra who you need to speak to, and she transfers the call.
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A 9 o'clock call from Leslie would have given Sandy an airtight alibi. But that alibi hit a snag.
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Investigators were never able to verify that that conversation happened. So that was just Sandy's word saying that that phone call happened.
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And investigators were not going to take him at his word. Everything pointed to the husband's involvement at that point in time.
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It was time to up the pressure on Sandy Prier. You've got the wrong guy. Facts don't lie, Sandy.
00:33:05
You're going to be a man. You're going to stand up and you're going to accept the responsibility for what you did.
00:33:25
Detectives had cast a wide net, talking to Leslie's friends, family, co-workers.
00:33:31
They had also looked for a connection to other crimes in the area. But it all went nowhere.
00:33:36
The investigation was now all about Sandy Prier and his relationship with Leslie.
00:33:43
So as they started talking to family members more and more about Leslie and Sandy's relationship, it became apparent that it had its struggles.
00:33:54
Sandy said as much during his first interview with detectives at headquarters. Leslie and I had our arguments and we had some pretty nasty ones at times.
00:34:02
When detectives brought Sandy in for another interview, he seemed to blame Leslie for some of those arguments.
00:34:10
She can be, I hope I'm going to shoot myself in the front on this one, but she can be demanded.
00:34:19
Sandy and Leslie lived in an upscale neighborhood. Both had solid jobs, but money was tight.
00:34:27
Leslie had an operation without any health insurance, so they owed a lot of money for that.
00:34:31
and they had credit card debt and student loan debt from their daughter, Lauren, going to college.
00:34:38
So they were struggling to keep up financially. I noticed that you had some pretty substantial bills with your credit cards, Visa, MasterCard.
00:34:48
We were trying to work those down, but yes, there's some debt there, no question about it.
00:34:54
So that was a source of tension between the two of them too. Yes. And that was one aspect that the investigators looked at to see if there was a reason that that could lead to Leslie's murder.
00:35:07
Was it possible that tension led to violence? When they first spoke to Sandy, he did describe an incident where he lost control and got physical with Leslie.
00:35:17
The most violent I ever got was I'd grab her and just say, you know, you've got to snap out of her.
00:35:24
By grabbing her by her shoulders? her shoulders, you know, and she hit the wall. Nothing smashing or anything. Hit the wall and
00:35:31
she's burst in tears. And I'm thinking, God, what am I doing? Detectives also wondered if there was
00:35:37
any infidelity that could have triggered a confrontation. So they reached out to their
00:35:42
colleague, Ed Golian, who worked in the undercover unit. We got notified by the detectives. They
00:35:48
would like us to follow Sandy. You know, is he meeting up with a, say, you know, another woman,
00:35:53
maybe some kind of relationship there So Golian started surveillance on Sandy For several days he followed him as he drove to work went to lunch did a little shopping and went back home
00:36:07
Turned out to be a pretty boring assignment. But two things did pique his interest.
00:36:13
Like Sandy's use of a payphone. The question was brought up, does he have a cell phone?
00:36:18
Of course, the answer was yes. We know he has a cell phone, but he's using this payphone.
00:36:23
That seemed strange. So did another incident just a few weeks after the murder. Sandy, parked and sitting in his car, opened an envelope and cracked open a beer.
00:36:35
I could see clearly what's going on inside the car using binoculars. He's sipping his beer, and I could see that he's laughing.
00:36:45
And my thought is, his wife's a victim of a murder, and he's reading this, whatever it is, and he's laughing.
00:36:50
At this point, detectives were suspicious over just about anything Sandy did or said.
00:36:58
But he had cooperated with police from the very start. He volunteered to take a polygraph.
00:37:04
He volunteered? Yes. That's usually a good sign. Usually. But he came in and took the polygraph and failed.
00:37:12
He failed? Yes. That's not a good sign? No. The polygraph examiner found him to be deceptive when asked about Leslie's murder, asked about Leslie's death, asked about knowing information about Leslie's death.
00:37:27
Detectives brought Sandy in for another interview, and this time they didn't hold back.
00:37:32
There's some things that you've got to try to do to set things straight, especially for other folks, because we all know what happened.
00:37:39
and I think it'd be a travesty for Lauren for her to go through the rest of her dog
00:37:44
all my trying to figure out just what the hell happened and I'll just tell you one thing
00:37:49
you got the wrong guy facts don't lie Sandy just be a man and tell us what happened
00:37:56
I told you exactly what happened but you haven't told us the truth you got an obligation man
00:38:02
to your daughter you're going to be a man you're going to stand up and you're going to accept the responsibility
00:38:07
for what you did to the right thing standing. I'm not saying anything unless my lawyer's here.
00:38:15
They had pictures of myself, my mom, and the three of us together in the interrogation room
00:38:22
to see if he would crack, to plead guilty. But he didn't. What did your dad say to you about that experience?
00:38:30
Well, we've talked, obviously, and cried together. But I think he kept a lot of it inside
00:38:37
because he knew how much I was going throughout. For Lauren, it was heartbreaking
00:38:43
knowing her father was the prime suspect in her mother's murder. Knowing he loved my mom, knowing he loved me,
00:38:51
I knew he didn't do it. He never caved. He stayed strong. But detectives were locked in.
00:38:59
Sandy was their guy. Then a new report came in from the crime lab. The blood swabs that were taken from the scene came back to Leslie, but there were several swabs that were not Leslie's.
00:39:12
They were an unknown profile. And that same unknown profile was also found underneath her fingernails.
00:39:17
I mean, that's a huge break in the case. That is your killer. What looked like the big break would become an even bigger mystery.
00:39:28
Could he have really killed her? You can just snap and then there's no telling what will happen after that.
00:39:33
She yells from the back of the room. She's like, I got it. I think I got it. You're just kind of shocked.
00:39:42
Like, is this really happening? I almost fell off my chair. It's insane. The detectives working to solve Leslie Preer's murder were methodically building their case against her husband, Sandy.
00:40:09
They looked into, did Sandy kill her for a life insurance policy payout? Or was Sandy having an affair and killed her so that he could be with his lover?
00:40:21
Or did the lover come and kill Leslie? Looked at a lot of different possibilities, but most of them revolved around Sandy.
00:40:30
As the weeks passed, detectives shared their suspicions about Sandy with people close to the case.
00:40:36
They told Leslie's boss, Brett Reedy, that Sandy had failed a lie detector test.
00:40:41
There was a lot of chatter about that around the office. That information, combined with what you had seen that day, what are you starting to think?
00:40:50
Yeah, I'm starting to think, well, their focus is on him. It'll be a matter of time, and they'll probably prove it.
00:40:56
Detectives also shared their findings with Leslie's family. There were members of your family that fully believed he was involved.
00:41:05
because of what the police said. Scott Jennings, Leslie's younger brother. Could he have done it? Yes.
00:41:11
My mom, who died in 2019, she made no bones about it that she thought Sandy did it.
00:41:19
He speculated about what happened. Leslie liked to drink a lot of wine at night.
00:41:25
She probably could have gotten a little combative. You can just snap. And then there's no telling what will happen after that.
00:41:34
Frank Jennings, another of Leslie's brothers. To me, it wasn't a stretch to think, oh, he could have killed her.
00:41:42
Detectives also explained their thinking to Lauren. She told them her dad loved her mom and would never kill her.
00:41:50
Although she had heard her parents arguing. I would be upstairs in my room but I could hear theirs Not all the time but sometimes Were they intense arguments Were they little spats It was arguments
00:42:06
Yeah. It wasn't spats. These were kind of intense arguments, fights. Yes. But they would be short and loud.
00:42:15
Lauren made an excruciating decision. She confronted her dad. I had a minute where I said, could he have really killed her?
00:42:25
So you went to your dad and you asked him, did you kill mom? Yes. What did he say?
00:42:32
He said, I'm only answer this one time. And he said, no. And then I believed him.
00:42:38
Was there ever any time that you thought that maybe he did do it? No. Maybe there are questions here.
00:42:47
No. Yeah. I mean, not for one second. Because you knew him. I did. And that, it just, there's no way.
00:42:57
The detectives knew their strongest evidence were those DNA lab results showing the material under Leslie's fingernails and the blood in the house
00:43:05
belonged to one man, clearly the killer. So they look at everyone that was close to Leslie in her daily life
00:43:14
that would have interacted with Leslie and obtained voluntary DNA samples from those people to be able to eliminate them.
00:43:21
So we're talking about more than a dozen people. Yes. First on their list, prime suspect Sandy Prier.
00:43:28
A DNA match would cement their case against him. So it was a huge jolt when the results came in.
00:43:35
And Sandy was not a match. Was that DNA evidence the only thing that kept Sandy out of prison?
00:43:43
Yes. You believe he would have easily gotten arrested otherwise? Yes. Detectives regrouped and tried again.
00:43:50
They got a sample from Leslie's boss. Brett realized his overzealous efforts to look into Sandy may have fueled suspicion.
00:43:58
But he wasn't worried about that. In fact, he was relieved to give his DNA. Actually, I felt good doing it because I said, fine, take mine.
00:44:07
You can eliminate me. And they did eliminate Brett. It turns out he was just what he said he was, a helpful guy.
00:44:16
Detectives also ran the unknown DNA through the national database CODIS to see if it matched any offenders in the system.
00:44:24
Nothing. As you're going through this, all of these tests being done, not a match, not a match, not a match.
00:44:31
What was that like for you? A nightmare, horrifying, couldn't sleep that had to have been deflating.
00:44:38
Yes, to be able to say, oh, we have DNA, this is going to be huge. And to not get a match in CODIS and every person that is related to Leslie in one way or another was not a match.
00:44:51
It, I think, was a huge dead end for them. So detectives hit reset and came up with a new theory.
00:44:59
Sandy Prier may not have killed Leslie himself. Instead, they surmised, he paid someone else to do it.
00:45:06
They thought that perhaps he was working with someone, and the other person is the one who killed Leslie.
00:45:13
So where do police go from there? At that point, I think that they had exhausted all of their resources.
00:45:21
But Lauren Prier wasn't giving up. Every month, without fail, she checked in with detectives.
00:45:27
So here we are. A year after her mother died, Lauren met with them. And it was clear their theory hadn't changed.
00:45:35
My gut feeling is that your dad had something to do with this. It is so bizarre to think that this could be somewhere else.
00:45:47
They pressed Lauren for anything that could point to Sandy's guilt. Is he wrestling with any kind of being?
00:45:55
You know, a guilt of remorse. I don't feel guilt and suspicion in him hiding things at all.
00:46:03
I think after a year, they were maybe hoping that something had come out, something had slipped.
00:46:09
Maybe Sandy was acting differently around her. But Lauren had nothing for them, and the investigation came to a standstill.
00:46:18
We want to identify who this person is. More than two years after the murder, investigators appealed to the public for help finding the owner of that mystery DNA.
00:46:29
I know that some people are afraid to come forward with information. And what we request is that these people call us.
00:46:36
But there were still questions about the detective's prime suspect. And when a reporter from NBC4 Washington asked Lauren if her father was the killer, she defended him fiercely.
00:46:47
My father never in a tri-billion years could ever, like, kill his wife and leave her in a shower and go to work like nothing happened.
00:46:58
It would be years before new detectives jumped on the case, but when they did...
00:47:06
She seems to be described like a stalker. The investigation into Leslie Preer's murder ground to a halt in 2003.
00:47:28
And the case went into the cold files. Years passed. And for Lauren, those years were tough.
00:47:35
She got married, then divorced. She learned to live with fear and anxiety, knowing the killer was still out there.
00:47:43
You almost edit the way that you live a little bit because you just have this thing looming over you.
00:47:50
I mean, I guess because Lauren's mom was found in the shower, Lauren developed a lot of anxiety
00:48:00
anxiety around showering. And every time she needed to take a shower, she would call me
00:48:07
and I would walk down the street and I would sit in there with her because she was terrified
00:48:14
of being alone. You kept a gun in your house. I do have a loaded gun. Lauren still checked in with detectives every month. Like clockwork. You were picking up the
00:48:27
phone to say, do you have anything new? What's going on? Nothing new. Nothing. That had to have
00:48:32
just been crushing every time you hung up the phone. I'm surprised I'm still alive.
00:48:39
Finally, 2010, almost nine years after Leslie was murdered, a spark of something. A new detective
00:48:48
joined the Montgomery County cold case squad. Someone who knew the case well, Detective Ed
00:48:54
Golian. He'd surveilled Sandy in the early days of the investigation. Now he was on the case again,
00:49:02
and soon he heard from Lauren. She had spent years mulling over the killer's identity,
00:49:07
and she had a suggestion. She wants us to follow up with a guy by the name of Jim.
00:49:14
His name had been in the original file. Detectives never spoke with Jim back then,
00:49:19
nor did they run his DNA. Lauren says she went to a party at Jim's house months before her mother
00:49:25
died and had a rather unsettling conversation with him there. I saw a picture of him and a woman
00:49:35
and I said, is that your wife? And he's like, yeah. I was like, where is she? And he was like,
00:49:42
we're separated right now. And I said, oh, what happened? And he was like, she said,
00:49:47
I'm too rough in bed. And I was like, huh? Okay, so that freaked me out. So when Lauren and her mom ran into Jim one day at the bus stop,
00:50:00
Lauren introduced the two reluctantly. And Lauren notices like there's a glance.
00:50:07
There's like they're giving each like a quick eye. And she had an opinion about that,
00:50:11
that maybe there was some kind of sexual attraction between the two of them. And then Jim makes a comment to direct it at Lauren, but is, well, I can see where, you know, you, Lauren, get your good looks from.
00:50:26
Lauren says Jim suggested that he and Leslie could get together to walk their dogs since they lived in the same neighborhood.
00:50:34
And what are you thinking? No. You wanted to shut it down immediately. Immediately.
00:50:39
And she talks about a time after the murder. She's at a restaurant bar, and she's there with a friend of hers, and Jim's there.
00:50:49
He's by himself. They talk, and Jim mentioned how sorry he is to hear about her mother.
00:50:54
So here's a guy that's about 50 years old that's in there by himself. She and her friend, I think they thought it was a little odd.
00:51:03
After that, Lauren ran into Jim several times. He would show up at the local bars where I was.
00:51:09
different restaurants and bars, but places where that age of a person didn't hang out.
00:51:16
And that he would come up to me and be like, hi, Lauren, how are you? And my friends would be like,
00:51:21
what is that? Who's that? How did he know where you were? That's what my question was.
00:51:27
I thought it was following me. This is just kind of sending off alarm bells. Yes. In your mind. That really is where. She seems to be described like a stalker.
00:51:36
She wanted us to interview him. So Golian went to Jim's house. He didn't ask him if he'd been following Lauren,
00:51:45
but did ask for a DNA sample to see if it matched the mystery DNA. The results came back a few weeks later.
00:51:53
It's not him. He's eliminated. Yet another dead end. Lauren suggested a couple of other men she thought might be worth looking into,
00:52:03
including her old high school boyfriend. She says, oh yeah, by the way, I dated this guy.
00:52:08
He's a drug user. He acts a little weird. His name was Eugene Gligore. Lauren says she included him on that list she gave detectives in the early days of the investigation.
00:52:20
Gullion was interested. The main reason is because he knows the family. He's been to the house.
00:52:26
It's something that, you know, you probably want to pursue. He discovered that Eugene was living in New York.
00:52:34
and another potential suspect Lauren had named lived even farther away. Interviewing them would require time and money.
00:52:43
So he held off. If nothing changes, if there's still an unknown suspect in this case,
00:52:50
if CODIS hasn't hit on anyone, we're going to have to go back and talk to these people.
00:52:54
And then Golian was reassigned to another cold case. A year later, he retired. So the Breer case went back into the cold files until one day when Lauren's phone rang.
00:53:09
I almost fell off my chair. By 2017, it seemed almost everyone had forgotten about the unsolved murder of Leslie Prier 16 years earlier.
00:53:35
Everyone, of course, except her family and friends. What was it like for you, Lauren?
00:53:41
living life for those years with just this not knowing. Haunting. But on the flip side it also made me stronger and being like we not gonna forget we We going to keep pursuing I was never going to give up
00:54:05
Lauren's father, Sandy, didn't forget either. He couldn't. Even though his DNA had cleared him as
00:54:11
the killer, detectives still thought he had a hand in the murder. What were those 16 years like for
00:54:18
him? Not knowing who killed his wife, but also himself existing under this cloud of suspicion.
00:54:23
I mean, initially, he was really, obviously, he didn't tell me. I know he was hurt.
00:54:34
Sandy, once the life of the party at family reunions, became a shell of himself.
00:54:39
At one point, Leslie's brother, Scott, had a heart-to-heart with him. Said, Sandy, the guys in the family, most of the guys, do not think you murdered Leslie.
00:54:53
Unfortunately, the women in the family, especially my mom, feel like you did. And Sandy just said one phrase to me.
00:55:03
He goes, I'm getting a bad shake on this. And the fact that police hadn't cleared Sandy had an impact.
00:55:11
Bill Jennings, Leslie's older brother. He came down to see us a couple times, but it wasn't the same.
00:55:17
I think he felt that he was still under a bit of a cloud of suspicion. I do think that was the case.
00:55:23
I think he always kind of felt betrayed from the Jennings family. And it's just, it was a betrayal.
00:55:32
Sandy retired early. He withdrew to his home. You could tell it was just so stressful.
00:55:39
And just, I mean, no one can really handle that. And at the same time, he's grieving.
00:55:47
Completely. I know for a fact that when he was home, he was crying. He tried counseling, read the Bible from cover to cover.
00:56:00
You saw the toll that took on him. Absolutely. He was always just this carefree person.
00:56:09
I think the combination of the tragedy of losing his wife, as well as the scrutiny that he was put under,
00:56:16
I think that it just changed him. Sandy Prier died in June 2017. The official cause of death was septic shock.
00:56:26
Lauren has her own thoughts. What ultimately killed your father? Broken heart. He died of a broken heart.
00:56:37
In the years that followed, there was no shortage of broken hearts. It just seems like, you know, after you cross over like the two decade mark,
00:56:46
You know, what could possibly come up and happen now that didn't happen back then?
00:56:53
Had you just given up hope at that point that they would ever solve it? I had come to a point where I was going to probably die before it was solved.
00:57:02
But then 2022, everything changed. That's when Detective Tara Augustin joined the Montgomery County Cold Case Unit and began looking into the Prier case.
00:57:15
That spring, she called Lauren. I almost fell off my chair. I said, my mom? And she's like, yes.
00:57:23
For Detective Augustine, hearing Lauren's response on the phone was all the boost she needed.
00:57:29
Kind of sounding in her voice like, I can't believe this is really happening. Someone's actually looking into her case.
00:57:35
That has to be an experience for you, too. It's one thing to go through an old box and look through old files.
00:57:41
But when you actually hear a daughter's voice on the other end of that phone, kind of feeling that hope.
00:57:48
Yeah, it makes it more real and you get more of a personal connection to the case and to the family members.
00:57:56
And that's also a motivating factor because you want to solve it for them. Oh, that's interesting.
00:58:01
Detective Allison DuPoy was also on the case. The two partners are working moms and felt an immediate connection to a daughter's decades-long search for her mom's killer.
00:58:12
If we could help bring closure for Lauren and her family, that was really important.
00:58:17
When I came to the unit, I told our captain, I said, I'm going to solve this. And he's like, OK.
00:58:22
Where do you start? You look at all of the notes, all of the reports, and just go through everything all over again with a completely open mind.
00:58:31
not trying to focus too much on what the original detectives thought, because that's the big thing
00:58:37
here is a fresh set of eyes. They used those fresh eyes to draw their own conclusions.
00:58:43
And unlike the six detectives before them, they concluded that Sandy Preer had nothing to do with
00:58:48
his wife's murder. Lauren was always adamant. My mom and dad, you know, they would argue, but they
00:58:54
would never be violent with each other. Did her word mean a lot in this investigation?
00:59:00
I think it did. And, you know, we look into it, and again, it just kind of goes where the evidence leads, and it just didn't lead to Sandy.
00:59:11
All along, Detectives DePoy and Augustine knew the key to the case was the mystery DNA.
00:59:17
It was a really strong DNA case, meaning they collected a lot of DNA from the scene.
00:59:22
If it was going to be solved, it was going to come down to this DNA finding a match somehow.
00:59:30
So they had plenty to work with, and this time they had an exciting tool in their belt,
00:59:35
one that would reveal the killer was closer to home than anyone realized. When Detective Tara Augustin began reviewing Leslie Preer case in 2022 she had a word of caution for Leslie daughter Lauren She said we going to look into it and we going to go from there and she going to take a while
01:00:10
By then, waiting was old hat for Lauren. Lisa Wood hated to see it. Lauren deserves justice.
01:00:19
She deserves healing and closure. So we just need the DNA report from the lab that has his profile.
01:00:29
For years, the owner of the male DNA found at the crime scene and under Leslie's fingernails had eluded investigators.
01:00:37
But technology had come a long way since Leslie Preer's murder in 2001. Now investigators have access to new genealogy services to search for a killer's relatives and, hopefully, the killer himself.
01:00:50
How much of a game changer is that for you in the work that you do, this technology?
01:00:56
It's huge. This was my first case using genealogy. The blue is Sandy's DNA. The pink is Leslie's. And then this green is the unknown male.
01:01:10
These genealogy searches can be tedious and time-consuming. But oh, when they work.
01:01:16
When something happens and it clicks, it's just like amazing. It can change everything.
01:01:23
Yes. It takes a lot to get started, a lot of rules and a lot of money. And at first, the detectives didn't even know if they could proceed.
01:01:33
We have to prove that the case has been investigated and there's no other avenues that we can explore.
01:01:39
And there has to be a homicide or a rape or unidentified human remains or a threat to public safety.
01:01:46
And then we have to go in front of a judge and they have to sign off on us being allowed to send off the DNA.
01:01:53
Wow. So you literally have to build a case to be able to explore this avenue. Yes. We were determined to finish this.
01:02:00
We had the DNA and it was just a matter of narrowing it down and finding that needle in a haystack.
01:02:07
Finally, they got the go ahead. Here's how it works. Investigators compare the DNA profile from the crime scene to public databases that people use to trace their own family histories.
01:02:20
If they find a link, they build a family tree using other information they find online.
01:02:27
A few times, they came close. One individual was in the area around the same time and had a pretty violent criminal history.
01:02:37
So we thought that was a good possibility. And it came up that that DNA possibly matched what was found at the scene?
01:02:45
There was a relationship. Yeah, he was in the family tree, and it was a match to our suspect DNA as a relative.
01:02:56
So what did you do? We located a family member of his, actually, and approached them, and they provided their DNA.
01:03:03
and with that we were able to rule out that branch because it was not a match. Strike one.
01:03:11
And then there was another individual that at the time lived pretty close by where Leslie lived
01:03:16
and we ended up just talking to that person and got his DNA and he was not a match.
01:03:24
Oh, that's got to be frustrating. It is. Strike two. The best prospect was the one farthest away in Romania.
01:03:35
And it was the highest match. So meaning the highest probability that that person is related to the suspect.
01:03:41
The higher the number means they're more closely related, which means less family tree to build.
01:03:49
Less degrees of separation. Yes, and less time spent on it. They decided to pursue it.
01:03:55
More tree building. Detective Augustine took the lead. She was relentless. She sat there and built family trees for days. And I was working on other cases, on missing people. And she would go back to these family trees and didn't give up.
01:04:13
And then one day... She yells from the back of the room. She's like, I got it. I think I got it.
01:04:20
I kind of brushed it off. I was like, yeah, we've said that before. It's probably not going to be him.
01:04:24
But then I walk over and she starts telling me who she has and how she found it.
01:04:30
You're looking at all of these names. And then suddenly there's a name that stands out.
01:04:36
Yes. And you'd seen it before. Yes. At first I was just kind of like, am I making this up?
01:04:42
Like, is this, did I really recognize that name? And when you look in the case file and you see it,
01:04:47
and it is a match to what you're building with these other names that you've never seen before,
01:04:54
it's kind of like eye-opening, and you're just kind of shocked. Like, is this really happening?
01:05:00
It was a pretty awesome moment. There were lots of expletives, I believe, because we just couldn't believe that we found this guy.
01:05:09
We were all excited, so we called our sergeant. And we were like, get down here now. I think we got it.
01:05:13
This is big. This is a name. Yeah. His name had been in the prior murder files from the very beginning.
01:05:21
Overlooked. Collecting dust. That was about to change. As she searched ancestry websites looking for the owner of the mystery DNA,
01:05:46
Detective Tara Augustine had come across a name, Gligor. That's a pretty distinctive name.
01:05:53
Yes. Did you recognize that name immediately I did and I was trying to figure out why I had to go back to the case file to figure out where I seen it And there was a folder with the name Eugene Gligor Hmm
01:06:06
So this was one of Lauren's high school boyfriends. It was the break detectives had needed for more than two decades.
01:06:15
The one that kept eluding them. When you made that connection, that had to have been huge.
01:06:20
Yeah, it was like bells went off. Like, how did we not see this before? This is crazy.
01:06:27
Lauren says Gligor's name was on that list she gave the original detectives. And just nine months after the murder, one of Gligor's neighbors actually called in a tip, suggesting police look into him.
01:06:41
He was a troublemaker in the neighborhood, and she just had a weird feeling about him.
01:06:44
So the police created a file. They pulled up any reports that had his name in them as a suspect or as a person that was charged with something.
01:06:54
Detectives drove past Eugene Gligor's house but didn't see his car there. After that, according to the case file, there was no concerted follow-up.
01:07:04
So let me ask, Eugene Gligor's name had been in the case file the entire time. Had police ever gotten a DNA sample from him?
01:07:11
No. Why? I don't know. Should they have? There was nothing pointing to him as an obvious suspect at the time.
01:07:20
Was that an oversight? I don't think so. I mean, other than people saying his name is, you know, Lauren's ex-boyfriend, there was really no link to Leslie.
01:07:31
And it just didn't make sense. Like, why would he hurt Leslie? The detectives dug into Eugene Gligore's past. What do you learn about him?
01:07:39
He had some instances where he was mentioned in reports where homes had been broken into and money was stolen.
01:07:46
And there were people that we interviewed that went to high school with Lauren and with Eugene and said that, oh, he would break into cars and steal money and things like that.
01:07:58
So we knew that the possibility of him breaking into houses was there. Lisa told Detective Augustine about another incident.
01:08:08
In the mid-90s, she said, Eugene was questioned about an assault on a woman on a neighborhood path.
01:08:15
But she and Lauren were so convinced it couldn't be him that they personally vouched for him.
01:08:20
We knew him and we were like, there's no way that he would ever hurt anybody. This is crazy.
01:08:26
One of the things that we thought of was, you know, his appearance and the sketch that the police had.
01:08:31
It actually resembled multiple other people that we knew that were the same age and the same grade going to the same school.
01:08:40
And so we actually took my school yearbooks down to the police station and we showed the police like, here's Eugene, here's this guy.
01:08:50
And we left the yearbooks with the police to see if the victim could differentiate.
01:08:56
And she couldn't. Wow. So it effectively cleared him because it created doubt. That seemed to be the end of it.
01:09:06
Lisa never heard anything more, and Detective Augustine found no record of it. The detectives learned that over the years, Eugene Gligore had lived a seemingly unremarkable life.
01:09:20
He'd worked in restaurants, some high-end, and in real estate. He'd been married and divorced twice.
01:09:26
Lisa remembers a moment, years after Leslie was killed, when Lauren ran into him, and the two had a long conversation.
01:09:34
He had gone on about how he had gotten sober. He had been to rehab. He was talking about, you know, all the benefits of sobriety.
01:09:44
So at the time, I remember she noted that it was like this very pleasant conversation.
01:09:51
If Eugene Gligore did indeed murder Leslie Prier, the detectives wondered how he got away.
01:09:58
When they walked the path near the Prier's old home, they had their answer. The path connected Gligor's neighborhood to the Priers.
01:10:07
On a weekday morning, it would have been practically empty. Eugene knew it well.
01:10:12
It was obvious that this would be the best escape route for him. Leaving out of the back door, going through the backyard.
01:10:18
Cut through a couple of yards, jump on the trail, walk around, go under that little bridge, and you're in your dad's neighborhood.
01:10:26
And this is somebody who's familiar with the home. Yes. would have known, theoretically, that the back door is always kept unlocked.
01:10:35
Yes. Still, they needed one more puzzle piece, the trickiest one of all. We needed to get a confirmatory DNA sample from him.
01:10:46
To see if it matched the DNA from the crime scene, and they wanted to do it without letting him know they were on to him.
01:10:54
They learned Eugene was now living in the D.C. area. That was when we reached out to our plainclothes unit and they created a plan.
01:11:03
They discovered Eugene was out of the country and would soon fly into Washington's Dulles Airport.
01:11:10
Working with federal agents, they created a ruse. Eugene would be pulled aside for an extra custom screening to an area where they'd placed sanitized water bottles.
01:11:20
So there was a trash can that was completely empty there. And the water bottles were provided so that he would drink out of it and throw it away.
01:11:33
It worked. The detectives took the bottle, bagged it, and sent it for DNA testing.
01:11:40
Days later, bingo. Confirmation that this is our guy. This is the killer. Yes. It was so big, it was hard to grasp.
01:11:49
irrefutable evidence that they finally had the right man. 23 years after Leslie Prier was murdered, two detectives who were college students when
01:12:00
had found her killer. What are you thinking in that moment? It's just kind of like a goose bumps situation
01:12:07
where you're just thrilled and there's an adrenaline rush and you're like, I can't believe I solved this.
01:12:13
I can't believe it. But before they could break the news to Lauren, they had to arrest Eugene Blegore.
01:12:20
Our plainclothes officers went down very early that morning. They were watching his house
01:12:24
and he was sitting out on his front stoop having a cup of coffee. The arrest was captured on body cam.
01:12:32
Hands up! Hands up! And the officers walked up pretty quickly. Probably startled him a lot.
01:12:40
When the officers approached him, you know, they have to do it in a very swift movement.
01:12:45
They want to do it quickly. They don't want to give anybody an opportunity to flee or fight or reach for any weapon that they may have.
01:12:52
He was shocked. So you didn't know anything about this warrant? He wasn't expecting this.
01:13:00
Eugene Gligor was charged with the first-degree murder of Leslie Prier. So what would he say when detectives Augustine and DePoy got him in the chair?
01:13:12
If somebody was not involved, it would be an adamant, I didn't do it. Oh, I didn't do it. I definitely didn't do it.
01:13:30
Minutes after Eugene Gligor was arrested for the murder of Leslie Prier, Detective Augustine was on the phone to Lauren to break the news.
01:13:43
She asked me, do you know someone named Eugene Gligor? And I lost it. I used to date him.
01:13:53
I was like, yes. And she's like, he's the one who did it. I mean, I lost my... And I was shocked.
01:14:03
They'd been so close in high school. He was always at the Prier house in those days.
01:14:09
He even joined the Priers on vacation. Once Lauren and Eugene broke up, they drifted apart.
01:14:15
But after Leslie's murder, Lauren remembered how he comforted her. He was working in a restaurant in Bethesda.
01:14:22
And I saw him and I said, my mom died. And he was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.
01:14:29
All that kind of, yeah, I'm so sorry. But he talked to me straight in my eyes like nothing was wrong And he was comforting you Yes And he is the one who did it Hi Jean Hello Hello
01:14:45
Later that day, when detectives Augustine and Depoy breezed into Gligor's police interview room,
01:14:50
they were the picture of confidence. I am Detective Augustine. This is Detective Depoy.
01:14:56
Hi there. Gligor, in ankle shackles, was a model of injured innocence. I'm sure you're wondering what this is all about.
01:15:03
I would really like to know. This has been really, really hard, whatever's happening.
01:15:10
They were happy to tell him. Do you recall back in 2001, Leslie Preer? Yes, that she was murdered, yeah.
01:15:18
Okay, so that's the case that we are investigating. They told him they had DNA from the crime scene that had never been matched,
01:15:26
and they asked if he'd been at the Preer house that morning for any reason, if he had anything to tell them about Leslie's murder.
01:15:33
Why not just call me and ask me to come in and talk to me versus have marshals come and arrest me and bring me in?
01:15:42
Because there's a little bit more to it than what we've told you so far. Could you tell me?
01:15:49
Well, we're getting there. I'm trying to give you an opportunity to be a little bit forthcoming before we...
01:15:54
I mean, I feel very, I feel a little bit trapped here, like... Well, you're under arrest, so you should be trapped.
01:16:01
Right. And so I think, you know, I mean, probably asking for a lawyer is my best course of action.
01:16:08
That's totally fine. And we don't have to ask you any more questions, but we are going to just tell you some stuff.
01:16:15
The detectives did want to share a few things. From the crime scene, the DNA that was taken, we actually have a sample of your DNA and it was compared to the crime scene DNA and it matched.
01:16:27
So we know that you were there at the time when Leslie died. But I never gave a sample of DNA.
01:16:34
That's correct. We obtained a sample from a discarded water bottle that you drank out of.
01:16:40
So your DNA matches the crime scene DNA. A shocked silence. And then... I don't know what to say.
01:16:48
I have no recollection. I have no memory. I have no... I don't know what to say.
01:16:57
He sputtered, lashed out, cried. I don't know. I don't know. Or tried to. There's no tears coming out of your face.
01:17:08
I'm very dry right now. You're dry? I'm very dry. I'm partially dehydrated. You can probably see my eyes are bloodshot red because I just tired and drained I don know what going on I just trying to say that this seems a little put on Are you kidding me
01:17:25
You know, in your eyes, it's guilty until proven innocent. I get it. Well, honey, your DNA was in the crime scene.
01:17:32
That's why, like, there's a reason. There's just, there's due process, right? So you're saying I'm guilty before I've even been put into a court of law?
01:17:43
I'm saying that there's probable cause to believe that you were there when she died.
01:17:48
I think what you were saying was the contrary to that. So, okay, but I don't remember.
01:17:54
I don't know. I don't know. You keep saying you don't remember and you don't have any recollection.
01:17:59
But if somebody was not involved, it would be an adamant I didn't do it. Oh, I didn't do it.
01:18:06
I definitely didn't do it. Eugene Gligor spent almost a year in jail, charged with first-degree murder.
01:18:14
We have an update now to a cold case murder that rocked a Montgomery County neighborhood more than two decades ago.
01:18:20
Then, his story changed, and he was ready to admit that he had murdered Leslie Prier.
01:18:27
In May, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, avoiding a possible life sentence and a trial.
01:18:34
There are questions that go unanswered in many, many cases. John McCarthy, the Montgomery County State's attorney, admits they'll probably never know Gligor's motive.
01:18:46
His theory? That Gligor went to the Prier house that morning to steal money to feed his drug habit.
01:18:53
He was surprised to find Leslie Prier still at home, and he turned on her. As for Gligor's claim that his memory of the murder is a blur?
01:19:03
Read the crime scene, the viciousness, the cover-up, the hiding. This guy knew exactly what he had done.
01:19:10
And the state's attorney had this to say about the original detective's fixation on Sandy Prier,
01:19:17
despite the DNA results and despite the neighbor's tip. I think that police investigations sometimes become myopic.
01:19:26
They seized upon a theory. I think they were convinced it was Sandy. maybe to the exclusion of a lot of other potential leads.
01:19:34
At Gligor's sentencing hearing in August 2025, prosecutors described the savage nature of the crime
01:19:40
and pointed out that Gligor confessed only after he was caught. And this defendant is now finally at his day of residence.
01:19:50
Gligor's defense attorneys argued the murder took place when their client was a heavy user of drugs and alcohol Now they said he was a changed man and deserved leniency Eugene brings the best in people
01:20:07
And I think this is a trait that fundamentally defines him. That's the person you will be sentencing today,
01:20:14
not the 21-year-old that committed this offense. Gligor addressed the court, too.
01:20:21
The greatest regret of my life is taking Leslie's life. I'm so sorry for the pain that I caused.
01:20:29
I can't express that enough. Leslie's family wasn't buying it. I thought his words were empty, impossible to believe.
01:20:40
The state's attorney had harsh words of his own. Where were you for 23 years when Sandy was under the specter of being a suspect in the case?
01:20:49
Where were you for 23 years where Lauren, your former girlfriend, was without her mother?
01:20:54
Where were you if you cared for any of these people? In the end, Leagor got 22 years.
01:21:01
Outside the courtroom, Lauren could finally exhale. I can't believe it's over. It's been so long.
01:21:08
The family, grateful to be spared the ordeal of a trial, paused for a group photo.
01:21:14
The tragedy will always be there. Nothing's going to bring my sister back. But at least we know the murderer is starting to pay for the crime.
01:21:25
Eugene Gligor claimed three victims on that spring morning in 2001. Leslie, of course, and Sandy, who died before he was cleared.
01:21:36
The final victim, Lauren, sentenced to live with anxiety and fear for decades. But now she says she's ready for a new life, knowing there has been justice for the mother she adored.
01:21:50
And finally, peace for the parents she calls the best of the best. The Prier family.
01:21:58
Well, they're lucky to have you carrying on their name forever. Yeah. And they're together.
01:22:04
Yeah. That's the silver lining, that they're together. That's all for this edition of Dateline.
01:22:15
And don't forget to check out our Talking Dateline podcast, which will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode.
01:22:23
Available Wednesday in the Dateline feed, wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 central.
01:22:31
I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.