This story discusses domestic violence and assault.
Lauren Preer's mum Leslie was brutally torn from her life when she was just 23 years old.
On May 2, 2001, Leslie, who worked at a successful advertising firm in Maryland, USA, failed to show up at the office.
Her colleagues immediately knew something was wrong - it wasn't like Leslie to let anyone down. According to police reports, after not being able to reach Leslie by phone, her boss Brett Reidy drove to the family home, where together with Carl Preer, Leslie's husband, they entered the house to make a grizzly discovery.
The walls were spattered with blood. There were signs of a struggle, and a puddle of water lay by the front door. Upstairs, in the master bathroom shower stall, Lauren's mum lay face down, with several lacerations to the back of her head.
She was dead, with a medical examiner later ruling blunt force trauma as her cause of death.
Numb from shock, Lauren was forced to confront several horrific realities at once. Not only was her mother gone - brutally murdered inside the family home but now, her father was a suspect.