Stephanie Ramos

It can quickly go sideways.

In similar cases to this, when a suspect has been identified, there have been a couple of times where it hasn't worked out well, where a person who thinks they've gotten away with a crime for 20, 40 years, the police are coming to finally ask them for their DNA.

They know why, because they killed someone, and then it turns into a bad situation sometimes.

So we wanted to try to do it in the safest way possible before we confronted Eugene with any of the evidence.

So we decided that we were going to have some officers follow him and try to obtain a discarded DNA sample.

Toothbrushes, discarded chewing gum, flicked cigarette butts.

Police have surreptitiously recovered DNA from all these objects and used them to crack cold cases.

Detectives Augustin and Dupuy decided to do something similar to obtain a sample of Eugene Gligore's DNA.

Doing our research, I realized that he was a frequent traveler, and we got information that he was actually overseas and that he would be returning to the United States on a certain date, and we had the flight information.

Detectives learned that Gligor would be flying into Dulles Airport in Virginia.

I relayed that information to our officers, and they decided, okay, well, we'll pick up on him at the airport and see if we can get him getting rid of anything.

According to court documents, when Gligor arrived at Customs, he was pulled out of line by Customs and Border Patrol officers.

They took his passport and escorted him to an interview room.

The room was mostly bare.

There was a couch and a coffee table stocked with snacks and miniature bottles of water.

Gligor sat on the couch while a CBP officer interviewed him.

At some point, Gligor drank one of those bottles of water and left it on the coffee table.

Sometime after that, the officers let Gligor leave.

He disappeared among the throngs of anonymous travelers, seemingly unaware that Montgomery County Police had collected a potentially key piece of evidence.

They were able to obtain a discarded water bottle, and we collected that, submitted it to the lab.