Alleging Coverup by Housemates, D.C. Police Probe Theory of Bizarre Attack in Dupont Circle House
By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 1, 2009
8:50 PM
Second of two parts
A narrow street of century-old townhouses in Dupont Circle, the three-story dwellings elegantly remodeled, fronted by red-brick sidewalks and ginkgo biloba trees grown rooftop high.
Quiet now on a stifling midsummer evening.
Victor Zaborsky, just back from a business trip Aug. 2, 2006, was in bed when Robert Wone arrived at 1509 Swann St. NW about 10:30 p.m., toting an overnight bag that his wife had helped him pack. Zaborsky's domestic partner, Joseph Price, and housemate Dylan Ward greeted their friend and showed him into the kitchen, where they chatted for a while, sipping water.
That was what Price, Zaborsky and Ward later told homicide detectives, a police affidavit says.
"Then Joe went outside for a second because he saw a spider or something on the light," Ward said. The rear door of the townhouse leads from the kitchen to a patio. Price said it was "completely plausible" that he neglected to lock the door when he came back in after looking at the bulb.
Questioned separately by detectives for hours after Wone was stabbed, Price, Zaborsky and Ward would provide detailed statements about what took place that night. A former law enforcement official involved in the case in its first year said the men's stories were consistent. According to one of numerous police affidavits filed in court, the housemates gave this account of how the rest of the evening unfolded:
Ward said he and Price led Wone to the second-floor guest room, which overlooks Swann Street, and showed him the bed he would be using, a convertible love seat. Ward's room also was on the second floor, at the rear of the house. "I went in my room," he said. "I was reading for, like, five minutes or so, and then I took my sleeping pill." Before nodding off, Ward said, he heard Wone showering in the second-floor bathroom.
It was about 11 p.m. on a Wednesday. Price said he retired for the evening, too, joining Zaborsky in their third-floor master bedroom. Kathy Wone said her husband and Price had planned to finish catching up over an early breakfast the next day, before work.
Time is critical to figuring out what happened to Wone that night. If the 32-year-old lawyer was killed in the strangely drawn-out sexual assault that authorities have described, and if an elaborate coverup ensued, then everything occurred within 79 minutes or so, between Wone's arrival at the house and Zaborsky's frantic 911 call. For every moment that Wone was not in peril, the time frame in which the crimes could have occurred shrinks, weakening the prosecution's theory.
That's why a vital issue concerns e-mails that Wone either did or did not write shortly after 11 o'clock.
Examining Wone's BlackBerry after the killing, a detective noted "an e-mail purporting to be from Mr. Wone to his wife, timed 11:05 p.m., indicating that he had just taken a shower and was going to bed," prosecutor Glenn L. Kirschner told the housemates' lawyers in a recent letter. He said the detective saw another e-mail, typed at 11:07 p.m., "purporting to be from Mr. Wone" to a colleague at Radio Free Asia, confirming a lunch date.
From the tone of the letter, it appears that investigators suspect the e-mails were written after the stabbing by someone other than Wone as part of the alleged coverup. The detective noted that the messages were "unsent." In a major foul-up, however, authorities failed to preserve data from the BlackBerry for closer analysis.
The U.S. Secret Service was supposed to copy the device's hard drive, according to Kirschner. After it was believed to have been imaged, "the Blackberry was retrieved" from the agency, he said. By the time investigators realized that the data had not been replicated, the BlackBerry had been given back to Radio Free Asia and "recycled."
"The government does not presently have a copy of the contents of said Blackberry," Kirschner informed the defense.
'Someone That's Stabbed'Then, Price and Zaborsky said, they heard noises.
In bed on the third floor, the couple said, they were awakened by a security chime that sounded whenever an exterior door of the house was opened. Price said they were not worried. The basement tenant, Sarah Morgan, had gone out hours earlier, saying she planned to be away overnight. When the chime went off, Price said, he mistakenly thought Morgan had changed her mind and come home.
Minutes later, the two men said, they heard what Zaborsky described as "kind of a low scream." They said they got out of bed to investigate, and as they approached the stairs just beyond their room, they heard "another kind of low scream," as Zaborsky put it. The couple said they rushed down to the guest room at the foot of the stairs and looked inside.
Seeing their horribly wounded friend on the bed, Zaborsky said, he let out a scream of his own.
Price said he went to Wone's aid, telling the hysterical Zaborsky to go back upstairs and call for help. At this point, Ward said, despite having taken a sleeping pill, he was awakened by the ruckus down the hall from his bedroom. Price said Ward "came out of his room and . . . it looked like he had no [expletive] clue."
A boning knife from the kitchen butcher block was lying on Wone's stomach, Price said. He said he put the knife on an end table and lifted Wone's gray William and Mary T-shirt. There were three stab wounds in his torso, and Price said he saw "a lot of blood on his chest."
Up in the master bedroom, Zaborsky dialed 911 on a cellphone at 11:49 p.m., sounding frightened and overwhelmed.
"Ma'am, calm down," the operator said, asking, "The person that stabbed him, is he still in the home?"
"I don't know," Zaborsky answered, lapsing into sobs.
As they waited for the ambulance, the operator told Zaborsky to tell his spouse to put pressure on the victim's wounds with a dry towel. "Once it gets saturated with blood," she said, "tell him to get another one." Zaborsky, indicating that he had returned to the second-floor guest room, replied calmly, "My partner . . . is applying pressure right now."
Price later said: "I put the towel on Robert. . . . I just held the towel on him."
Time ticked by, Zaborsky gulping air, alternately gaining composure and losing it in waves of panicked impatience.
"We really need the ambulance here," he said on the phone.
And then came a response by Zaborsky to the operator that defense lawyers say was spontaneous and genuine, showing he truly was scared of an intruder in the house.
"They enroute now, ma'am," the operator said of the paramedics. "Go to the door. They should be pulling up any moment, okay?"
To which Zaborsky, with barely a pause, replied in a quivering, desperate voice, "I'm afraid to go downstairs."
A minute later, from a guest room window, he saw the strobing red lights. Wearing a bathrobe, and still on the cellphone, he hurried outside to the front steps, pleading to the medics, Jeffrey Baker and Tracye Weaver, as the two gathered their equipment from the idling ambulance.
"Help us!" Zaborsky cried over the engine noise. "We have someone that's stabbed; they're on our second floor . . .
"Please hurry!"
No Signs of a StruggleLugging their gear, the medics tromped upstairs.
Wone, in gym shorts and a T-shirt, was on his back atop the bedcovers, his head on a pillow, his arms by his sides -- dead. In his mouth was the night guard he routinely wore to prevent his teeth from grinding in his sleep. Beneath him, the comforter and sheets were neatly turned down at a 45-degree angle. His wallet and Movado watch were in plain view on the table at the foot of the bed. A crumpled white bath towel was on the floor nearby. On the end table to the right of the bed was a kitchen knife.
That comes from crime-scene photos and a police affidavit recounting what Baker, Weaver and homicide detectives said they saw in the guest room.
There were no signs of a struggle, they said. Although at least one of the victim's wounds was big enough to "fit your fingers into," as Weaver put it, the medics said they saw hardly any blood on his body or in the room. And there were only a few small bloodstains on the sheets and pillow. Weaver said it looked to her as if the body had been "showered, redressed and placed in the bed."
As police officers fanned out around the house, the affidavit says, they noticed that "Price, Zaborsky and Ward were together in the living room, all wearing crisp, white robes and appearing as if they had just showered."
Separated by detectives, the three were driven to a fortress-like building in Anacostia, six miles and a world removed from Swann Street. At the offices of the D.C. police violent crimes branch, in a blockhouse of brick, chain-link and safety glass, they were interrogated individually well into Thursday.
This was long before authorities developed their theory of a bizarre murder involving an incapacitating injection and elaborate coverup. This was before the autopsy produced its curious results, before the sadomasochism came to light and before various crime labs analyzed dozens of items taken from the residence.
This was in the predawn hours after the stabbing. And just from the looks of things in the townhouse, detectives weren't buying the intruder story, according to the former law enforcement official who was involved in the investigation and who declined to speak on the record because of the criminal case.
There was no evidence of forced entry and no disarray in the house, and nothing had been stolen. Detectives wondered instead about a possible sex angle connected to the housemates being gay. In an interrogation room, for example, Detective Daniel Wagner, then a 23-year veteran of the force, goaded Price, saying it was obvious to him that the men had planned to make Wone a part of their family that night.
"I got three homosexuals in the house and I got one straight guy," Wagner said to Price. "What's he doing over there? What's he doing over there?"
Then he answered his own question. "I think we were all drinking wine," the detective said. And he imagined the men's thoughts toward their visitor: "You are coming to Jesus tonight; that's what is going on tonight."
But the housemates held fast through sunrise, denying any wrongdoing, Price saying: "I know Victor and Dylan better than I know my mom. There is no chance on the face of the earth that anybody did anything to Robert." He said, "They couldn't even spank a child that was being bad." After the three finally left Anacostia -- Price having been grilled intermittently for about six hours, Zaborsky for about eight and Ward for about 12 -- the men hired criminal-defense attorneys.
No more would they talk with the police.
A Head-ScratcherThe autopsy raised as many questions as it answered.
Lois Goslinoski, a deputy D.C. medical examiner, conducted her postmortem examination of Wone the day after he died and filed her eight-page, single-spaced report two weeks later.
She said she found two tiny spots from broken capillaries in Wone's right eye and left eyelid. The spots, called petechial hemorrhages, are caused by the flow of unoxygenated blood in a person who is fighting for air, as with a victim of strangulation or suffocation. In Wone's case, though, the "asphyxia event" wasn't fatal, she said.
It was the stabbing that killed him, she concluded. The blade had pierced his heart, pancreas and right lung.
Stab wounds tend to be irregularly shaped, a result of the victim struggling and writhing during the attack. Yet Wone's three wounds were "perfect, slit-like defects," clean and symmetrical, Goslinoski noted. She said she saw no defensive cuts anywhere on him.
Although he suffered no injuries consistent with a sexual attack, she said, she discovered semen around his genitals and in his rectum. DNA showed that the semen was his own.
She said she counted six premortem needle marks on his chest, right foot and left hand and several more on the left side of his neck. If the marks had come from hypodermic injections, she said, she couldn't tell what was in the syringe.
Searching for drugs in a body is hit-or-miss. There's no single, all-encompassing test that can identify every foreign substance in a dead person. There are specific tests for thousands of different substances, so toxicologists need to know what they're looking for. If they just aimlessly run tests, hoping to stumble on something, they might grope in the dark for months, using up all the bodily fluids that were saved before the victim was embalmed and buried. Then later, if detectives were to find a clue to a particular drug, the lab would have no way to confirm it.
The medical examiner's office ran a standard battery of tests in Wone's case.
The toxicology lab searched for alcohol, cocaine, barbiturates, opiates and amphetamines. It looked for the date-rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate, or GHB. It checked for benzodiazepines, a class of sedatives that includes at least three other date-rape drugs. It looked for phencyclidine, or PCP, a hallucinogen, and depending on how the PCP screening was done, the test also might have found any traces of ketamine, another common date-rape drug.
All the results were negative.
By the time Goslinoski wrote up her findings, authorities had taken control of the townhouse and were scouring it for evidence in a case that fast became "a frustrating head-scratcher," as the former law enforcement official put it.
For three weeks after the stabbing, investigators dismantled parts of 1509 Swann St., hauling away computers, household appliances, slabs of floors, walls and staircases, bags of goop from drain traps, and boxes of the men's belongings. In Ward's room, besides discovering a large collection of sadomasochistic sexual implements, detectives said, they found a box for a three-piece cutlery set that the culinary school graduate kept in a cabinet. In the box, they saw a carving knife, a serving fork and an empty space for a smaller knife different from the one in the guest room.
With so little blood visible in the room, investigators suspected the scene had been wiped down. Police technicians applied forensic chemicals and discovered traces of blood that were too faint to be seen with the naked eye, according to an affidavit written two days after the killing. "This trace blood evidence was located on the walls, floors, sofa bed and door frame."
Or so it seemed. For here was another foul-up in the case.
Crime-scene chemicals react not only with blood, but with other substances containing proteins or iron, causing a glow or stain, depending on the chemical. The reaction isn't proof of blood; it's just an indication. The traces then have to be tested to determine what they are. At the townhouse, the technicians sprayed a product called Ashley's Reagent, which reacts with proteins, creating a blue stain. It is designed to enhance suspected blood traces so they can be photographed. But the crew botched the job, applying the chemical "in a manner not intended by the manufacturer," Kirschner later said in a letter to defense lawyers.
After the misapplication of the chemical, the former official said, authorities were unable to confirm through lab tests that the "trace blood evidence" was, in fact, blood.
The crumpled white towel on the floor, which Price said he had used to put pressure on Wone's wounds, also raised suspicions. Detectives saw only a few small blood blotches on it.
The towel was among scores of items given to outside forensics experts for analysis. Then, as investigators waited weeks and months for lab reports to come in, they delved into the housemates' backgrounds. They talked with Kathy Wone about her husband. They consulted with Goslinoski, who expanded on her findings. And they brainstormed in meetings, reviewing what they knew or suspected, arranging and rearranging the puzzle pieces, hoping a clear picture would emerge.
"None of it made sense," the former official recalled. "The intruder theory had problems. The theory that it was one or all of these guys had problems. There was simply no cohesive theory that we could come up with to account for everything."
The intruder problems: Guy tries the rear door, which -- lucky him -- just happens to be unlocked. Detectives suspected that the spider story was a lie to explain how someone could have sneaked in. Undeterred by the chime, he picks up a kitchen knife, crosses two more rooms to get to the front of the house -- bypassing a flat-screen television, a laptop computer and other valuables -- and, without being heard, climbs 16 hardwood stairs to the second floor.
At the top of the steps, he's staring straight at Ward's bedroom. But instead of going in there, he turns 180 degrees and walks noiselessly down the uncarpeted hall to the opposite end of the house -- where he just up and stabs the guy in the guest room. And he abandons his weapon on the victim's stomach. And he leaves without grabbing the wallet or watch.
Another problem: The intruder scenario did not explain the strange autopsy results or the suspected cleanup of the room.
But if not a stranger, then who? And why? Sifting through reams of the housemates' e-mails, detectives saw no hint of a conspiracy in the days before Wone's visit, the former official said. By all accounts, Wone and the men were good friends. Consensual sex gone violently awry? Investigators said they found no indication that Wone had a secret lifestyle. And the night guard in his mouth suggested he was about to go to sleep when whatever happened to him happened.
A head-scratcher for sure.
Charges in the CaseUnder a cloud, they resumed their lives.
Price, then a 35-year-old partner at Arent Fox and the general counsel of the gay rights group Equality Virginia, continued his law practice, litigating a trademark case for America Online and winning a major appellate decision in a groundbreaking child-custody fight between estranged lesbian parents.
Zaborsky, who was 40, stayed with MilkPEP, eventually sharing in an Effie award from the advertising industry for the "milk mustache/Got Milk?"campaign. And Ward, then 36, went on soliciting donations at A.B. Data Ltd. until he finished massage school in February 2007. The following summer, he traveled to Thailand for more training. Then in the fall of that year, he rented a condo from friends in Wilton Manors, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale, and joined the staff of Chi Spa, a candlelit massage parlor featuring deep sea mud wraps and body butter treatments.
The investigation plowed on, focusing for a time on Price's troubled younger brother, Michael, who lived in Silver Spring. Just weeks after the stabbing, Michael Price (who was later treated for substance abuse) and another man allegedly burglarized the townhouse and were quickly arrested. Detectives tried for months to link Michael Price to Wone's murder, a tangent of the case that put a whole new cast of offbeat characters under scrutiny, the former official said. But it reached a dead end.
Fixing the townhouse after the police were done searching it (including replacing floors and walls indelibly stained blue by the Ashley's Reagent) cost Price and Zaborsky $250,000, their lawyers said. They sold the place for $1.47 million last summer and bought an investment property in Miami Shores, Fla., about 25 miles from Wilton Manors. Ward, still a Chi Spa massage therapist, moved to the Miami Shores house as caretaker, and Zaborsky and Price leased a luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, three blocks from Swann Street.
And they waited.
Until two days before Halloween last year, when the case finally popped.
Ward was arrested first, in Florida. Price and Zaborsky were charged three weeks later. All are accused of tampering with the crime scene, disposing of evidence and lying to investigators. Although authorities have yet to seek an indictment in the killing, an affidavit made public Oct. 31 lays out their theory of what happened.
Page 12: "The evidence demonstrates that Robert Wone was restrained, incapacitated, sexually assaulted and murdered."
Restrained . . . in a way that halted his breathing long enough to cause the petechial hemorrhages. The affidavit uses the example of an attacker "placing a pillow over" someone's face.
Incapacitated . . . by an injection, while being restrained. To investigators, the clean wounds (which Goslinoski said had been "methodically" inflicted) indicated that Wone neither struggled nor flinched in pain during the stabbing, meaning he was unconscious or paralyzed. Questioned by detectives, Kathy Wone said her husband had no medical appointments in the days before Aug. 2 that might have accounted for the premortem needle marks on his body.
Injected with what? No lab finding so far. In court recently, Kirschner said toxicologists would soon conduct a final test, using up the one remaining milliliter of Wone's blood. As for what they hoped to find, the prosecutor said: "It's a little bit of a shot in the dark. . . . All of this is a little bit speculative, quite frankly."
Sexually assaulted . . . while incapacitated, before the stabbing.
As for the semen on and in Wone's body being his own, Kirschner explained at a court hearing how investigators think the alleged assault occurred. "The government has now, courtesy of experts, learned a lot more about electro-ejaculation than frankly this counsel ever knew," he said. "And there was, indeed, an electrocution unit in Mr. Ward's bedroom that can produce electric ejaculation of a person who is under anesthetic or otherwise incapacitated."
And murdered. . . . after which came the alleged coverup, detailed in the affidavit and in a subsequent indictment charging the men with obstructing justice (punishable by up to 30 years in prison) and the lesser crimes of conspiracy and evidence-tampering.
The housemates, "individually and in combination," washed the victim, cleaned the guest room and neatly remade the bed, the indictment alleges. Then they "placed the body of Robert Wone" atop the turned-down sheets and comforter.
Not so, said the men's lawyers.
"This is a case of a prosecution theory chasing evidence and coming up empty," the defense attorneys declared in a statement recently, saying some of the forensic findings are "demonstrably inaccurate" and others have been misconstrued by investigators. "The government has cobbled together its case with tidbits of information that it interprets through innuendo and speculation, and then calls 'evidence.' "
The EvidenceAnd the rest of the story, as authorities tell it:
The Wusthof boning knife that Price said he found on Wone's stomach has a blade approximately 5 1/2 inches long. Each of the stab wounds was four to five inches deep. Goslinoski, who has handled dozens of stabbing cases, said it was unlikely that a knife-wielding attacker would inflict multiple wounds of nearly identical depth while each time stopping short of plunging the entire blade into the victim. The knife on the end table was inconsistent with the holes in Wone's body, she said.
Investigators showed her another knife, its blade an inch shorter. A weapon that size was consistent with the wounds, Goslinoski told them. The second knife, obtained by detectives from the manufacturer, was a duplicate of the one still missing from Ward's cutlery set.
An expert in blood-splatter patterns examined the knife from the end table and said he found blood on both sides of the blade. Yet there was no blood on its cutting edge, he reported. And after inspecting the modest blood spots on the white cotton towel, he said he did not think the towel had been used to put pressure on the victim's wounds.
The towel appeared to have been wetted with Wone's blood for a different purpose.
"The blood pattern on the towel was consistent with the pattern one would expect to see if someone . . . placed the knife on the towel, folded the towel over the blade of the knife, and swiped the blood from the towel onto the knife," the affidavit says.
A trace-evidence examiner put the knife from the end table under a microscope and reported finding more than 10 tiny fibers on it -- all white cotton. Although Wone's gray William and Mary T-shirt had three holes in it corresponding to his wounds, the examiner reported finding no gray fibers on the supposed murder weapon.
So, the theory goes, inside of about 79 minutes, with no apparent planning: The victim was subdued, drugged by injection and sexually assaulted electrically before being stabbed to death, then washed; the room was cleaned, a phony murder knife was doctored and planted, and the real weapon and other bloody leftovers were made to vanish -- with time remaining for the housemates to shower off and get their story straight.
Inside of 42 minutes, if Wone wrote the BlackBerry e-mails.
A head-scratcher.
Price, who went on leave from Arent Fox a few weeks before the indictment, has since resigned from the firm and ended his association with Equality Virginia. Zaborsky isn't with MilkPEP anymore. And Ward no longer works at Chi Spa.
"Our attorneys estimate that the cost of a trial, which will necessarily involve a number of experts, will run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars," the three told friends in an e-mail late last year, seeking donations to their legal defense fund. "We have no choice but to sell and liquidate every asset in order to pay this staggering sum as our very freedom hangs in the balance. Our parents are doing the same, sacrificing retirement savings and taking on unprecedented debt to aid us."
Released from custody to await the trial, which is set to begin in May 2010, the men now live on a third of an acre just outside of Washington, sharing a two-story, 2,600-square-foot home of brick and aluminum with its owner, Zaborsky's widowed 64-year-old aunt.
A trio of house guests now.
A family still.
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
View all comments that have been posted about this article.