Solved cold cases in Maryland
2 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.
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.