Correction:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Kathy Wone was giving her first extensive interview since her husband was slain Aug. 2, 2006. She spoke to Washingtonian magazine in April 2010. This version has been corrected.
Kathy Wone mourned. She went to grief counseling once a week and tried hard to heal. She went back to work part time. She tried to see friends.
But 26 months after Robert Wone was stabbed to death inside his friends’ million-dollar townhouse near Dupont Circle, the killing became a tabloid sensation, and Kathy Wone said she had to start mourning all over again.
(Bill O'Leary/WASHINGTON POST) - Kathy Wone said she’s “moving on” after settling the civil suit in her husband’s killing.
Police charged the three friends — who were involved in a sexual relationship with one another — with conspiracy and tampering with the crime scene to conceal the identity of the killer. Fourteen pages of court documents detailed what prosecutors think happened in the upstairs bedroom where Wone was killed on Aug. 2, 2006.
Robert Wone, 32, was probably drugged into a paralytic-like state and sexually assaulted, the documents said. There was no sign of a struggle. Nothing was stolen. And police found sadomasochistic sex toys and machines in the elegant house.
“It was a huge shock for me. It pushed me way back. I felt like Robert had been killed all over again,” Kathy Wone, now 40, said in an interview Wednesday.
Wone spoke on the day that she settled her wrongful death lawsuit against the three men: Joseph Price, 40, Victor J. Zaborsky, 45, and Dylan Ward, 40. Price, Zaborsky and Ward denied any involvement in the killing, and they were acquitted in the criminal case by a Superior Court judge. They said someone broke into the house and killed Wone. No one has been charged in the actual stabbing.
Terms of the civil settlement were not disclosed Wednesday. But in a far-ranging interview, Kathy Wone spoke about her husband, her life since he died and the three men she sued.
“I am moving on. I want to spend the next 40 years of my life focusing on good,” said Wone, a petite, reserved woman with a slightly dimpled, shy smile.
Wone said she looks forward to the next phase of her life, including a trip in October to Korea, where her mother was born.
Moving ahead without her husband, she said, has been challenging. She still smiles when she talks about Robert Wone, whom she referred to as the “cute” and “nerdy” man she had known for more than four years, three of them as husband and wife.
“I miss Robert every day,” said Wone, a lawyer at the American Health Lawyers Association. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about him. It’s tough going through each day without the person you assumed you’d spend the rest of your life with. I’m getting better at it. It’s lonely.”
Quest for accountability
Kathy Wone filed a $20 million wrongful death lawsuit against Price, Zaborsky and Ward just as the three men went on trial on the criminal charges.
Wone’s team said the suit was less about money than about trying to hold someone accountable for her husband’s death.
But in September, attorneys for the three men told the judge that their clients would invoke their Fifth Amendment right not to testify. During subsequent depositions, the men repeatedly declined to answer questions about the night of the killing, leaving Kathy Wone and her attorneys frustrated and resigned to the fact that they may never learn what happened.
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