Solved cold cases in Maryland
4 documented cases.
Leslie Preer
Leslie Preer, 49, was beaten and strangled inside her home on Drummond Avenue in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on May 2, 2001; her body was found in an upstairs bathroom after she failed to show up for work. The killer left DNA under her fingernails, but it matched no one, and the case went cold for more than two decades. In 2022 Montgomery County police turned to forensic genetic genealogy, which traced the unknown profile through a distant relative in Romania to Eugene Teodor Gligor, the former boyfriend of Preer's daughter. Detectives confirmed the match with DNA from a water bottle he discarded at Dulles airport, arrested him in 2024, and he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, receiving a 22-year sentence in what prosecutors called the first Maryland cold-case murder solved with familial DNA.
Michelle Dorr
Michelle Dorr, six, spelled Michele in most press reports, vanished on May 31, 1986, from the back yard of her father's rented house on Sudbury Road in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she had been playing in a wading pool in a pink polka-dot bathing suit. Montgomery County police spent months on her father, who broke down under the questioning and gave irrational confessions that led nowhere. A neighbour two doors away, Hadden Clark, a Navy-discharged cook with paranoid schizophrenia who was moving out of his brother's house that day, cried and vomited when questioned and said he might have blacked out, but his time card seemed to clear him. The case went cold until October 1992, when Clark killed Laura Houghteling, 23, in Bethesda; he pleaded guilty in June 1993 and was given 30 years. In prison, fellow inmates got him talking, and he told them he had cut Michelle with a knife in his niece's bedroom and carried her out in a duffel bag. In 1995 investigators pulled up that bedroom's floorboards and found blood in eighty-five places. Clark was charged on September 23, 1998, convicted of second-degree murder in October 1999 without a body, and sentenced to a further 30 years. On January 7, 2000, he led police to her grave in a ravine off Route 29 in Silver Spring. The Court of Special Appeals affirmed the conviction in September 2001.
Roseann "Ann" Sturtz
Roseann Sturtz, 20, who went by Ann and was a dancer at a Baltimore club, was reported missing on August 24, 1975. Her body was found on December 15, 1975 in a wooded area off Route 108 in Columbia, Howard County, Maryland. She had been strangled. Police had no suspect, and said later there was no DNA to test, no witness and little physical evidence. In 1981 detectives interviewed Charles William Davis Jr., who had been in prison since 1978 for other murders. Police suspected she was his fourth victim, and a prosecutor granted him immunity for information about her death, but on a recorded tape he did not identify her from an old photograph. The tape and the immunity letter were rediscovered by Cpl. Wade Zufall, Howard County's cold-case detective, who took over the case in 2022. The Baltimore Banner reported that a Loyola University Maryland student's term paper on the case, asking whether the killer might be a serial killer, pointed to Davis. In 2024 Zufall showed Davis a different photograph, taken a month before she vanished. Davis recognized her and confessed. Because the 1981 immunity still stands, he cannot be charged. Howard County police announced on March 11, 2025 that they had exceptionally cleared the case.
Sheila Mary Lyon and Katherine Mary Lyon
Sheila Lyon, 12, and her sister Katherine Lyon, 10, vanished on March 25, 1975 after walking to the Wheaton Plaza shopping center in Wheaton, Montgomery County, Maryland, during their Easter school break. Their disappearance triggered one of the largest investigations in Washington-area history, but the case went cold for nearly four decades. The break came not from DNA but from a Montgomery County cold-case squad re-examining the original paper file: Detective Chris Homrock matched a 1977 burglary mugshot of a drifter named Lloyd Lee Welch to a 1975 composite sketch and rediscovered a six-page 1975 statement Welch had given that detectives had dismissed as a lie. Re-interviews of Welch beginning in 2013, family-witness testimony, 1970s eyewitness accounts, and physical evidence from the family property at Taylors Mountain in Bedford County, Virginia, built the case. Welch pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree felony murder on September 12, 2017 and was sentenced to 48 years; the girls' bodies have never been recovered.