Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, everyone. I'm Lester Holt. Welcome to Talking Dateline. I'm with Blaine Alexander today to discuss A Perfect Spring Morning, the title of her latest episode here on Dateline. If you haven't seen it, go to the Dateline podcast feed, pull it up, and then come right back here and listen to the discussion. By the way, you can also stream it on Peacock.
Chapter 2: What is the background of the murder case discussed in 'A Perfect Spring Morning'?
So to recap, when loving mother and wife Leslie Prier was found brutally murdered in her Maryland home in 2001, investigators zeroed in on her husband, Sandy, only to clear him. As the years passed, the couple's daughter, Lauren, pushed to keep her case alive.
And finally, 20 years after the murder, new detectives got the case and found the real killer, Lauren's high school boyfriend, Eugene Gligor. First of all, Blaine, good to have you here. This is one you go in, you think you know pretty quickly where this is all leading, and then there are several points we're just left shaking our heads in this one.
Give me your overall impression of doing this episode.
So Lesser One, this is our first talking dateline together. So I feel like this occasion should be marked.
This is a special moment. I have no champagne, but I do have a cold cappuccino. There you go.
And I've got this water right here. So there we go.
No, I'm glad to join you, my friend. I mean, this one was a striking episode for me for a number of reasons. I mean, I think at the core of this, this is about a daughter who embarked on this decades-long quest to find her mother's killer.
In talking with Lauren Prier, it was very clear immediately that she and her mom, Leslie, had the kind of mother-daughter relationship that you dream of having, right? If you're a mom, you dream of having with your daughters, that you dream of having with your mom. They were incredibly close and, I mean, just good friends. She was an only child.
And so that made her mother's very sudden, very brutal death all the more difficult for her to deal with over these years, on top of the fact that they were without knowledge of who the killer was for so long.
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Chapter 3: How did Lauren Preer's persistence impact the investigation?
Lisa would come over, basically sit with her in the bathroom. I mean, imagine that type of fear for Lisa. a good majority of your life. The other piece of it is, again, that this was an unknown. So there's always the question of who did this and why? And if they were angry enough or whatever it was enough to kill my mother, might they come after me?
Yeah, but people, members of the family, certainly the police all suspected in this case, the husband did it. Yeah. Not the case here, but the whole family seemed to pay a price because that suspicion went on for a very long time.
It went on past Sandy Prier's death. I mean, he went to his grave with people in the family still suspecting that he could have been the person who killed his wife. He went to his grave not knowing who the real killer was and still feeling like, you know, there were all these people and all these eyes on him. So that's something that Lauren really spoke to when we sat down and talked.
And it's clear that that's a pain that she still carries. You know, one of the things that I've been struck with, Lester, when I do these stories is when there are stories that
where kids are caught in the middle, whether it's, you know, a spouse did kill the other spouse and they are faced with the loss of two parents in a way, or if there's suspicion over one of the parents and they kind of have to deal with that. And that's what Lauren dealt with. But also members of the family. I mean, Leslie's parents wondered, hey, is our son-in-law a killer?
There was just a lot of turmoil that this caused in the family.
Yeah, when Lauren finally confronted her dad and asked him point blank, did you kill my mom? And he said no. That was a very powerful segment.
Can you imagine that? I mean, it's one of those things where Lauren admitted she was like, because the detectives, in her telling, because the detectives were kind of so sure that it was her dad, she started to have that thought in her mind too. Now, she was pretty clear with me. She never really believed that it was him.
She really, you know, in her heart, but she did allow doubt to creep in to the point that she sat down and asked her dad. And he said, I'm only going to answer this once. No, it was not me. And she said, from that moment on, I dropped it, believed him. That was it.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did the family face during the investigation?
When he said, I'm going to do it, I'm like, wow, that's a stand-up thing. That's what innocent people do. Yeah.
Yeah. Test me. Exactly. That's what you think too. And then you fail the test. It's like, oh no, that's what not innocent people do, right?
Yeah.
But we know that there are so many different factors that go into a polygraph. Let's say that you take it, but obviously you're nervous, you're upset. Your wife was just brutally killed. Who knows what's going to happened to impact the results. And to your point, that's why, again, these are not foolproof. They're not admissible. But again, it just never looks good when you fail one of them.
And I know police don't want to jump to conclusions, but as you point out, this one had a lot of arrows pointed, seemed to be pointing in one direction. The The use of science, of course, ruled the day. They had a lot of evidence in terms of the blood patterns and what they found in the shower and upstairs. It seemed at one point that that was going to really solve the question of who killed her.
That and once the DNA came, once they said, okay, we've got DNA. And I'm sure a lot of our consistent viewers will know when you hear DNA, it's like, okay, great. What does that mean? Yes, exactly. Case closed. Let's find this person.
But when it doesn't match anyone, then you're left with this question of, okay, we've got something in our hand that would theoretically solve this case, but we just don't know who to connect it to. For investigators, that's always a very frustrating thing in the first place. But I will say in this case, And I asked Detective Tara Augustin this.
I said, did the fact that there was DNA that didn't match Sandy Prier, did that keep him out of jail? And she said, absolutely. Like, he would have very likely been arrested had it not been for the fact that his DNA didn't match. So, yes, the DNA was there, and in many ways, that saved Sandy.
All right, we'll take a break. When we come back, we have an extra clip of Leslie's brother, Bill, speaking at Gligor Sentencing. We'll be right back. Do you think that this case would have been solved if not for Lauren's persistence? I mean, she was on the police on a regular basis.
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Chapter 5: Why was Sandy Prier initially suspected in his wife's murder?
The knowledge that the killer was someone she knew. That's a pretty heavy burden to carry around.
Not only knew, but had spent time in the house, would go on vacations with them. I mean, their house, when you think back to kind of like your high school years, most friend groups have a house where all the friends would go. Whether you had a pool there or the parents were really cool and would let you hang out and didn't mind the noise, whatever. Their house was kind of like that cool house.
That was the hangout house. And so Eugene was, of course, part of their friend group, was part of that group. So he was always at the house. He would be there hanging out. So he was familiar. in the sense that Leslie was always very welcoming, would, you know, talk to the kids when they were there.
So when you think about all of that, all of the kind of motherly love that Leslie poured into any kid who was in her house back in the day, including Eugene, then that just kind of heightens the sense of betrayal here that Lauren certainly feels.
The question that hovers over the whole thing is why? Why did she die?
So prosecutors' theory of this was that Eugene had a drug habit. back then and was trying to rob the house to get money to feed his drug habit, was surprised by the fact that Leslie was there in the house when he went there and turned on her. They kept the back door unlocked. That's something that he would have known. They believe that's what he used to come in, go out, use the path to get away.
And so they believe that he was possibly thinking, hey, I can go and grab some things Leslie was there, and then it just unfortunately went downhill from there.
Okay, so the suspect in this case, of course, confesses, so there's no trial, but there is a sentencing in court, and that always provides, I think, some really telling moments in any case. We've got some sound here that did not make this episode. It's the family, it's the brother in this case of Leslie addressing the court on the issue of sentencing. Here it is.
As we report the sentencing, the lessons covered, Do you hear the word closure? The word closure euphemistically attempts to give some relief to Western's family and friends. But to notice the rest of the Wild West, a person who never had a name, never met a stranger, closure is impossible. A pain in the finger for the rest of our lives. There was no closer to proceeding to it
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