'Facts Don't Lie'

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ID, Otis Fialet. It was three weeks after his wife's murder that Sandy Prier told investigators, he was no longer going to talk to them. My attorney said not to answer any more questions. Now, again, I don't need to show any disrespect to you guys at all.

Once Sandy said he was done talking, the detectives seem to realize this could be their last chance to get what they wanted from him. They started pressing him to confess. She got to do the right thing, man. You got to.

I think I am. In fact, I know you. And I've just had one thing you got with a wrong guy. Sandy Prier was the wrong guy. But that only became clear much, much later, more than 23 years after Leslie Prier's murder.

When police arrested, someone else. New evidence had led police to this other man.

And ultimately, that evidence cleared Sandy Prier of any wrongdoing.

But until that arrest in 2024, Sandy remained to a lot of people, the likely culprit. Here's his daughter, Lauren Prier. My father, my mom's family, used to be so close. But my mom's family believed he killed her. Not all of them, some of my uncles and some of my cousins were like, there's no way.

“I mean, I think my dad died of a broken heart.”

Sandy Prier did not live to see his name cleared. In 2017, he died suddenly after an illness. Lauren's friend Lisa says the news was yet another gut punch for Lauren. It came out of the blue. I mean, she just got a call one day from the ICU that her dad was there. And it was just so unbelievably traumatic for her, especially after losing her mom, you know,

she wasn't only child, so I think then having her dad ripped away from her and it being so unexpected. It was just such a huge blow. To this day, Lauren describes a sense of disbelief about what she and her dad went through. This is unreal.

Then it happened our family. You never think anything.

It was like that would ever happen. You know, we had to live at that until 2017.

“And he still didn't know, but all those years.”

As the years passed, Lauren says she kept prodding police for updates in her mother's case. I never gave up. I never gave up. I called all the time. I knew someone knew something. You know what I mean? So I just didn't give up. And finally, one day, my phone rang and and I didn't even answer because I didn't know the phone number. And then I got a message saying, "We're calling about your mom, Leslie, prayer." And I said, "What?"

The phone call was from a detective with the Montgomery County Cold Case Unit. A new set of detectives had picked up the investigation into Leslie's death. These detectives would re-examine the 20-year-old evidence in Leslie's case file.

And with the help of new technology, they would finally crack the case wide open.

From ABC Audio in 2020, I'm Stephanie Romos. This is Blood and Water. Episode 4 Family Tree The Office of the Montgomery County Cold Case Unit is in the basement. Underneath Police Headquarters, the room is windowless, glamorous. It is not. But it's the sort of hidden away place where no one bothers you.

Where a detective can disappear into their work. The Office is crammed with heavy duty shelves. On these shelves, sit dozens of boxes. With any cold case, we're going to take the box out and it's usually a big dusting box

This is Detective Allison DuPoi. Detective DuPoi spends her days here among the boxes

“that represent Montgomery County's unsolved crimes. And of course, behind every unsolved homicide”

or sexual assault or kidnapping, there are the victims and loved ones who never got answers.

When you're in the cold case unit, you get to reconnect with families who have otherwise probably have feeling like they've been forgotten by the police department. And we get to make contact again and kind of try to give them maybe some hope and just let them know that we're thinking about this case again and taking a fresh look at it. Leslie Prismarter has been open for over 20 years. And I got to the cold case unit.

It was one of many boxes that are sitting on our shelves. And when Tara joined our unit, she just picked right up on it. Tara is Allison's partner, Detective Tara Augustin.

Over her 20-year career in the police department, she had long hoped to join the cold case

unit. These are all major crimes. They're either homicides or rapes. And I like the challenge of trying to look at everything with fresh eyes and not take the same viewpoints that the previous investigators had. And when it's successful, it's a huge satisfaction that you're able to do something for the families and give closure. Back in 2001, Detective Zagustin and DuPoi were college students living in an around DC.

It's funny because she and I didn't know each other then. But we also used to go hang out with friends in all the same places in Chevy Chase. And we maybe even passed across paths with Lauren at some point in our lives and not realized it because we were all in the same area at the same time but didn't know each other. The case appealed to you more because the areas that were mentioned in the case were so familiar to you. It definitely did. It made me, I guess, have more of a connection to it.

As the two detectives began working on the case, they got to know Lauren Prier. Lauren, who was 23, what her mother was killed, was now in her mid 40s. Her mother's murder and the mystery of what really happened that day had hung over Lauren for almost half her lifetime. It was very very emotional for Lauren. I mean, she could just see it on her face and in her demeanor that she was just so grateful that somebody was looking at this and thinking

“about her mom again and really she wanted to clear her dad's name. That was really important to her”

to let everybody know that her dad didn't do this. And soon, these detectives would find the evidence to prove just that. Today I want to tell you about our friends at Mikko. Mikko has built an air purifier that works hard so you can breathe easy. It works powerfully and consistently to deliver top quality results giving you cleaner air in any room of your home. Unlike other air purifiers, Mikko is designed to

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Love runs deeper than we know. And stream new episodes Thursdays on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. Last summer, I spent some time with detectives Augustine and DuPoy. We went through some of the materials in Leslie Prears' case file. This evidence collected two decades earlier was their starting place. We spread everything out across the Big Table. It was Big Mess, of photos, documents, pieces of a puzzle. The most difficult to look at were the crime scene photos.

Take it inside the prears home. So this is the four year of the house. Yes, this is the front door right here. So this is what Sandy and Brett Reedy would have seen when they came into the house.

“There was blood throughout the prear home, including some crucial spots in and around the kitchen.”

So this is the back door in the kitchen, and this is a drop of blood that was smeared. And there's a door right here that separates the dining room from the kitchen. And on that doorway, there's another drop of blood that was found. These drops of blood contained that unknown male DNA, the DNA that was not Sandy's. Authorities learned of this other DNA a few months after Leslie's killing.

It was significant because it suggested that someone else had been in the house when Leslie was killed. And yet, even after the discovery of the unknown male DNA, investigators back in 2001, still believed that Sandy prear remained a viable suspect. Some 20 years later, detectives Augustine and DuPoi examined the evidence collected by the earlier detectives, and they came to a different conclusion.

One detail police had noted in the original investigation was Sandy's demeanor at the crime scene. Police officers will go and they'll draw their weapons to search a house. Sandy made a joke about, you know, they're really taking this seriously. The exact quote in the police report was, "You guys mean business." There's blood at the scene, has wife is missing, and he makes a joke.

Yeah.

“Well, how did that land with you when you read that?”

You know, these kinds of circumstances, you don't know how you're going to deal with it. Some people make jokes, some people might be hysterical.

Some people might not take it seriously at all at first, and some people take it very seriously.

So I think you have different ways of dealing with this stuff, but certainly that did not help Sandy's case. Another thing that didn't help Sandy's case was that he failed the polygraph test. But as Detective Augustine points out, lie detector tests aren't exactly infallible. Holographs are tricky, they're not admissible in court.

You know, they're an indicator that the person is having a response and their body, if physical response to whatever questions are being asked. Detective Augustine says, "Sandy took that polygraph shortly after Detective's told him that Leslie's death was considered a homicide." She says, "Sandy understood immediately. That was bad news for him."

This is the first time he realizes that, and he even says to them, "I know where this is going."

He knows in his mind that they suspect that he's the killer, and he volunteers to take a polygraph. So his stress-solvel is pretty high already. He goes right from this interaction with the detectives, follows them and goes to the police station and takes a polygraph immediately after. I can see how he would have failed because it's a very stressful situation. The police think that he killed his wife and he didn't.

Detectives Augustine and DuPoi know today that Sandy Prayer did not kill his wife. So they also know that certain pieces of evidence, the failed polygraph, the odd jokes, aren't what they first seemed. This is part of what makes police work so difficult. Investigators not only have to uncover evidence, but they have to decide what that evidence actually means.

If it means anything at all, still, given the prolonged and ultimately incorrect focus on Sandy,

I had to ask detectives Augustine and DuPoi. Did investigators focus too closely on Sandy Prayer? Did that focus distract them from finding the actual

“killer? I think at the time, especially before the presence of the unknown DNA was available to them,”

he was the prime suspect. And I think there was good reason for them to focus on him. Once the presence of the unknown DNA was there, it was almost as if they were trying to find a

reactions, a felt polygraph, they all were mounting up to a probable cause.

And had it not been for that unidentified male DNA under her fingernails and in the crime scene, probably would have been charged. Instead, no one was charged in the death of Leslie Prayer. For the next 20 plus years, and over those two decades, there were few promising leads. That is, until detectives took that unknown DNA and began trying to find its family tree.

Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living

“a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. Is everyone lying to me about who they are?”

I felt such desperation. I felt it was what I had to do.

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DNA evidence can be very useful. If you get a match, back in 2001, after tests were run on the DNA found at the scene of Leslie Prier's murder, no matches were found. Not in the federal code's database of violent criminals, and not among

“Leslie's family and friends. In hindsight, this debt end showed the limits of forensic DNA in 2001.”

That federal database of violent offenders, well, by definition, it's limited to violent offenders. That's a pretty small pool of potential matches, at least compare to what came next. Tonight, in a rest, in authority, say they used a family genealogy website to make that arrest. About a decade ago, law enforcement began using a new kind of database, a pool of DNA, wider and deeper than anything before. It's a cutting-edge genetic tool now heating up the

coldest of cases. A genetic profile created from crime scene DNA was uploaded to a public genealogy database. If you're a criminal and you've left your DNA at the scene, you might as well turn yourself in now. Genetic genealogy has revolutionized detective work, especially in cold case investigations. It began with the excitement around at home DNA tests and ancestry websites. As every day people, spatten tubes and mill them off, new databases began to grow. Soon, these databases

contained the genetic information of millions of people. Today, these databases are big enough, and DNA tests sensitive enough that you can build family trees, containing the names of people

who never submitted their DNA at all. These tools were a revelation for people interested in

their ancestry and for law enforcement as well. Police, often working with outside labs, began using some of these databases, building family trees with the DNA of suspects at the center. In 2022, detectives Tara Augustin and Allison DuPoy sent some 20-year-old blood to a lab. Soon, the detectives received a list of partial matches for that unknown male DNA. We get shared matches of people from all over the place, and they can be really low matches,

which means that they share a very minimal amount of DNA with our suspect. The higher matches, that's more DNA, so that's going to be maybe a little bit easier of a family tree to build.

the lists of online profiles that were high or low matches, but another source as well, historical documents. A bituary's, marriage documents, census records, all those things,

“that's what we have to do when we're building the family trees. So it's a little bit of a history”

detective, as well as regular detective work. This work often resembled that of an amateur genealogist. Except, instead of trying to track down their ancestors, they were trying to track down a potential murderer. Geneology databases have genetic information for people all over the world. But things like

census records and obituaries, they're not always that easy to find abroad. So detective started

building family trees, featuring lots of American families, searching for someone who might have been in Maryland in May 2001. The problem was, the Americans who populated these family trees, they shared, on average, less DNA with the unknown male subject. They were multiple degrees removed from the possible killer. In the end, these lower matches got detectives nowhere.

“It had been about a year and a half of working on these low matches, and I just wanted to”

why don't we explore these higher matches. The higher matches tended to lead back to people who lived outside the United States. One match led them to of all places, Romania. Just doing basic Google searches and looking at publicly available data, I was able to find out a lot of information about this family line from someone that actually had done a lot of genealogy work that is in the family. Specifically, the detectives found a blog, maintained by sort of

family genealogist, a featured lengthy posts written in Romanian, interspersed with black and white photos and scans of newspaper articles. Precisely, the kind of primary sources the detectives needed. This person had done a really thorough job of documenting a lot of that stuff. And in one of the blog posts, I came across the name Virgil Glegor. Virgil Glegor.

“That kind of clicked in my head because I remember the name Glegor, and I knew it was in the case file.”

The name Glegor was in the case file because it was the surname of a Eugene Glegor. Lauren Prior's high school boyfriend. Eugene Glegor had been the subject of a tip to detectives got back in 2002. A lady that lived in the neighborhood where this individual Eugene Glegor lived said, "I know that he used to date the victim's daughter and he was getting in trouble in the neighborhood

for noise complaints and just nuisance things where the police had come out there for some reason he stuck out to her," and she said, "I just want to let you guys know, look at this guy. It was just a hunch." The detective who took the tipster's call back in 2002 did act on it. He went by the residence that the tipster had given to try to locate Eugene or to get

any information about him and it appears that he had a couple of dead ends and that was it. It seems like Eugene at that time may have just fallen into the list of people who knew the family and who were acquainted with the family and maybe it would have been a knock-and-talk and a request

for DNA, but they weren't able to locate him and it just one of those loose ends that was never tied up.

It's worth emphasizing. According to law enforcement, police had no probable cause connecting Lauren's high school boyfriend with her mom's murder. The two had broken up a few years before Leslie's murder. By all accounts, the breakup was perfectly amicable and at the time of the murder, Lauren and Eugene weren't really in each other's lives anymore. There never was any indication that there was a bad relationship between Lauren and him or Leslie and

him and his name was brought up and they looked at him and they said, well, he's gotten a little bit of trouble with the police, but nothing raised flags to say, hey, this guy's a killer. But there was someone else suspicious of Eugene even before Leslie was murdered.

Here's Lauren. My dad never liked him. He thought there was always something off and you know

a dad's instinct. And of course as being a teenager girl, I was like, that day you're just being

100% involved with Eugene. She would just say you're being over protective. He's a good kid,

“kind of thing. And then after she was gone, he said, you think Eugene could be a part of this.”

It was mentioned more than one time. And again, of course, I said, now, what are you talking here about? Her high school boyfriend, killing her mom, Lauren didn't buy it. And police say, Eugene Gleegore didn't have a wrap sheet that screamed murderer. Eugene did have some police interactions throughout the years. At some point, he had been charged with marijuana possession. There were a couple of incident reports for thefts or burglaries where he was listed as a suspect,

but he was never charged because either there wasn't enough evidence or the family decided not

to go forward with anything. So these findings did a really paint a picture of a brutal bloody murderer. Did it? No. Not at all. No. No. And yet the discovery seems significant. A partial genetic match that had led detectives to a name that had come up to ring the original investigation, a name that was in the case file. I remember I was downstairs in our office, and

“I said, Ali, come over here and look at this. Look at this and make sure it makes sense. And I think”

this is something really good. And she came over and she was like, oh, wow. And I thought, this is a really good lead. Like, this is like the biggest break we've had up to this point. Detectives looked into Eugene Gleegore. What they learned was troubling. I ended up leaving that house that night. I did not stay there because I'm afraid of them. She thought he might go after her. Once I saw that, that kind of changes things to where he might be capable

of actually killing someone. Blood and water is a production of ABC audio and 2020 hosted by me, Stephanie Robos, produced by Madeline Wood, Shane McKean, and Kira Powell, with help from Emily Schutz and Katelyn Schiffer. Edited by Gianna Palmer, our supervising producer is Susie Lou, music by Evan Biola, mixing and mastering by Bob Mallory, scoring by Kira Powell. Special thanks to Katie Den Doz,

Janis Johnston, Sean Dooley, Chris Donovan, Camille Peterson, Christina Corbin, Gale Doitch, Amanda Carr, Ellie Joe Stad, Angie Adam, and Michelle Marguelis. Josh Co-Han is our director of podcast programming. Amen with Kniff is our executive producer. Star Wars is back on the big screen with the Mandalorian and Grogo. Gakes your score criminals. I'll take out every bad guy in your take of cards.

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