Sunday, June 28, 2009
Do Y'all Get This?
Ok, so I'm really, really pissed off this week, with basically everything about me and my life. People disappoint me, I feel like study, work and hell, even breathing, are a waste of time, I don't want to leave the house or eat or talk to anyone... and when I bring myself to blog about it I just can't seem to articulate it.
What about you lot? Is it easier to write when you're calm and lucid or when you're spitting tacks?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Cos I Can't Actually Be Bothered Writing Anything...
Cracker Lilo found this very good post about the Gay Generation Gap...
The Gay Generation Gap
Forty years after Stonewall, the gay movement has never been more united. So why do older gay men and younger ones often seem so far apart?
From http://nymag.com/guides/summer/2009/57467/
By Mark Harris Published Jun 21, 2009
This week, tens of thousands of gay people will converge on New York City for Pride Week, and tens of thousands of residents will come out to play as well. Some of us will indulge in clubbing and dancing, and some of us will bond over our ineptitude at both. Some of us will be in drag and some of us will roll our eyes at drag. We will rehash arguments so old that they’ve become a Pride Week staple; for instance, is the parade a joyous expression of liberation, or a counterproductive freak show dominated by needy exhibitionists and gawking news cameras? Other debates will be more freshly minted: Is President Obama’s procrastinatory approach to gay-rights issues an all-out betrayal, or just pragmatic incrementalism? We’ll have a good, long, energizing intra-family bull session about same-sex marriage and the New York State Senate, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, Project Runway and Adam Lambert.
And at some point, a group of gay men in their forties or fifties will find themselves occupying the same bar or park or restaurant or subway car or patch of pavement as a group of gay men in their twenties. We will look at them. They will look at us. We will realize that we have absolutely nothing to say to one another.
And the gay generation gap will widen.
You hear the tone of brusque dismissiveness in private conversations, often fueled by a couple of drinks, and you see the irritation become combustible when it’s protected by Internet anonymity. On the well-trafficked chat site DataLounge, a self-described repository of “gay gossip, news, and pointless bitchery,” there’s no topic, from politics to locker-room etiquette to the proper locations for wearing cargo pants and flip-flops, that cannot quickly devolve into “What are you, 17?”–“What are you, some Stonewall-era relic?” sniping. And some not entirely dissimilar rhetoric is showing up in loftier media. In April, a 25-year-old right-of-center gay journalist argued in a Washington Post op-ed that many gay-rights groups are starting to outlive their purpose, and chided older activists for being stuck in “a mind-set that sees the plight of gay people as one of perpetual struggle … their life’s work depends on the notion that we are always and everywhere oppressed.” The scathing message-board replies pounded him at least as hard for his age as for his politics. “You twentysomething gays seem to think being out equals acceptance … Don’t be so quick to dissolve the organizations that made it possible for you to be so naïve,” wrote one reader. Another, blunter response: “Forgive me for not falling all over myself to do exactly what an inexperienced 25-year-old decrees … Don’t waltz in and start barking orders, little boy.”
Public infighting is a big minority-group taboo—it’s called taking your business out in the street. And it may seem strange to note this phenomenon at a juncture that, largely because of the fight for gay marriage, has been marked by impressive solidarity. But let’s have a look. Here’s the awful stuff, the deeply unfair (but maybe a little true) things that many middle-aged gay men say about their younger counterparts: They’re shallow. They’re silly. They reek of entitlement. They haven’t had to work for anything and therefore aren’t interested in anything that takes work. They’re profoundly ungrateful for the political and social gains we spent our own youth striving to obtain for them. They’re so sexually careless that you’d think a deadly worldwide epidemic was just an abstraction. They think old-fashioned What do we want! When do we want it! activism is icky and noisy. They toss around terms like “post-gay” without caring how hard we fought just to get all the way to “gay.”
And here’s the awful stuff they throw back at us—at 45, I write the word “us” from the graying side of the divide—a completely vicious slander (except that some of us are a little like this): We’re terminally depressed. We’re horrible scolds. We gas on about AIDS the way our parents or grandparents couldn’t stop talking about World War II. We act like we invented political action, and think the only way to accomplish something is by expressions of fury. We say we want change, but really what we want is to get off on our own victimhood. We’re made uncomfortable, or even jealous, by their easygoing confidence. We’re grim, prim, strident, self-ghettoizing, doctrinaire bores who think that if you’re not gloomy, you’re not worth taking seriously. Also, we’re probably cruising them.
To some extent, a generation gap in any subgroup with a history of struggle is good news, because it’s a sign of arrival. If you have to spend every minute fighting against social opprobrium, religious hatred, and governmental indifference, taking the time to grumble about generational issues would be a ridiculously off-mission luxury; there are no ageists in foxholes. But today, with the tide of history and public opinion finally (albeit fitfully) moving our way, we can afford to step back and exercise the same disrespect for our elders (or our juniors) as heterosexuals do. That’s progress, of a kind.
These unnuanced generalizations, as everyone who makes them quickly notes, do a gross injustice to both groups. The gay community—or more accurately, communities—is hardly monolithic, and its divisions, not just of age but of race, gender, region, and income, are too complex to paint with a broad brush. And Pride Week—which this year falls on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots—is a reminder that we have always been able to unite when faced with either a common cause or a common enemy. It’s when we’re not on the front lines that tensions flare. “On its simplest level,” says Jon Barrett, 40, the editor-in-chief of the 42-year-old gay magazine The Advocate, “we think they’re naïve. And they think we’re old.”
Even on those front lines, it’s a complex moment. Last November, eight days after the election, I found myself marching with thousands of gay men, lesbians, and friends of the cause from Lincoln Center to Columbus Circle to protest the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The air was charged; many of us were eager to call out the enemy—a well-organized, well-financed coalition of conservatives who were using churches as political-action bases designed to roll back civil rights for gay Americans. And our response was anger. We held up signs with slogans like TAX THIS CHURCH! We yelled ourselves hoarse.
But the demeanor of many of the young attendees felt unfamiliar to older protesters. They were smiling more than seething, and I noticed that many of their picket signs—LET ME GET MARRIED, LOVE ISN’T PREJUDICED, NYC LOVES GAY MARRIAGE—were more like let-the-sunshine-in expressions than clenched fists. Shouting did not come as naturally to them.
“There’s nothing duller than a young gay man whose curiosity about the world doesn’t appear to extend past his iPod.”
Activism is an unlikely realm in which to spot a generation gap; by definition, a rally attracts people who identify themselves by a shared goal. But it’s sometimes an uneasy union; the march marked an encounter between age groups that, although part of the same community, had previously spent little time together. And a difference in outlook was unmistakable. “After Prop 8 passed, a tremendous number of young people who had never been to a protest before wanted to release that energy,” says Corey Johnson, the event’s 27-year-old organizer. “And that night was a great example of the two generations being bridged in a productive way. But my impression is that there is a difference. Young people are, I think, upset, but it’s not with the level of anger that a lot of older folks feel, and perhaps there’s more hopefulness involved.”
To many young gay people, the passage of Prop 8 was shocking but not alarming; it has jolted them into action, but one suspects it’s out of a Milk-fed belief that identity-politics activism can be ennobling and cool. What doesn’t seem to be driving them is fear; their cheerful conviction that history is going their way seems unshakable compared to ours. That can lead to callousness on both sides; we patronizingly warn them that their optimism is dangerous; they patronizingly tell us that we’re too embittered by our own past struggles to see the big picture.
The notion that anger no longer has a primary place in the gay-rights movement can feel awfully uninformed to anyone raised on the protests of the late eighties, when say-it-loud outrage was one of the movement’s only effective weapons. To some of those whose identities as both homosexuals and activists were forged in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, this new aura of serenity is way too “Kumbaya.” It’s hard to overstate the centrality of the AIDS crisis in any gay generation gap (the divide between those who are currently 45 and their elders once yawned at least as wide). If you want to know where you stand in gay history, ask yourself where you were in 1982, when the disease took hold in public consciousness. If you were already sexually active by then and you’re still here to read this, you are someone who surely knows that fury has its uses. If you were in your teens, wondering how to take even your first steps into life as a gay man in a world in which a single encounter could become a death sentence, you understand fear, and its warping effects down through the decades. And if you were a kid, you grew up seeing AIDS as an unhappy fact of life.
But what about the ever-growing cohort of gay men who weren’t even born in 1982? For most of them, AIDS is not their past but the past. No wonder some of us feel frustrated; when we complain that young gay men don’t know their history, what we’re really saying is that they don’t know our history—that once again, we feel invisible, this time within our own ranks.
Were we that uninterested when we were that young? Actually, no, we weren’t; we were thirsty to acquire the vast range of knowledge, tastes, and encoded references that seemed to derive from some mysterious User’s Guide to Homosexuality, because even if we then rejected them, they still constituted a lingua franca (in an era well before LGBT studies programs or even many books on gay history made that kind of information easily accessible). Now, a familiarity with those movies, those plays, and those books will likely get you branded an “old queen” by people for whom “old” is by far the worse of those two epithets (unfortunately, a morbid fear of aging is one of the few ideas we seem to have done a good job instilling in the young).
For gay men who came of age 25 years ago in a tougher environment, knowing your (sub)cultural iconography was not only a way of connecting to past generations but a means of defiantly reorganizing the world, of asserting your right to literally see, hear, and perceive things differently. The need to hide yourself was thus transformed into the privilege of joining a private club with a private language. But to many younger gay men who grew up with gay public figures, fictional characters, and references, it’s a dead language—a calcified gallery of Judy Garland references and All About Eve bon mots that excludes them as much as it does the straight world.
So they react, as they react to many things, with a pose of bored indifference. Which is, of course, infuriating: There’s nothing duller than a young gay man who ornaments his ignorance with attitude and whose curiosity about the world doesn’t appear to extend past his iPod, certain that anything not already within his firsthand experience is by definition antiquated. But once we start blaming gay twentysomethings for not having gone through what we did, we turn into sour old reactionaries telling ourselves self-flattering lies about how misery builds character. Worse, we may in fact be doing damage. According to a 2005 report by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, our “emphasis on suffering reflects not the current reality of many LGBT adolescents so much as recollections of previous generations’ own ‘horror’ … LGBT adults’ residual fears and pain may be acting to magnify the real difficulties of LGBT teens.” Put simply, we talk too much, telling nightmare stories about AIDS and the Reagan administration when we should be listening—and then we get angry that they’re not listening to us.
“We’re just like our parents,” says a colleague of mine who came out right after college, in the mid-eighties. “We fought really hard so that our children would have things easier than we did, and now we resent them for it and sit around complaining that they lack character because they had everything too easy.”
That parent-child analogy also points to a larger cultural change, one that helped breed the hurt feelings that created the gay generation gap, which is that young gay men are, by and large, not our kids, even symbolically. The last twenty years—thanks to political progress, activism, education, the dying-off of a lot of homophobes, the Internet, and the mighty guiding arm of popular entertainment—have brought about a remarkable growth in straight America’s acceptance of homosexuality. Without forgetting that for too many gay kids, coming out is still hell, we’re also witnessing the rise of a parallel generation of gay kids with unflinchingly supportive parents, buddies who cheer their comings-out on Facebook, high schools with gay-straight alliances—in other words, kids who have grown up in a world that’s finally beginning, in a few places, to look like the one we wanted to create for them, or for ourselves.
And it would be dishonest to suggest that those kids—brash, at ease in their own skin, exuberant, happy—are being greeted by older gay men with nothing but uncomplicated joy. We can’t help but wonder how our lives might have been different if things had been easier for us, too. Some envy, some wistfulness, even some resentment is only human. And to add one further injury: Those kids don’t seem to need us anymore. For decades, gay men functioned as unofficial surrogate parents to the newly out and/or newly outcast. They’d offer reassurance that being gay didn’t mean being lonely. It was a bond that linked many generations of gay men across the age spectrum and created a real emotional connection, even if what necessitated it was pervasive prejudice. Today, though, the notion of quasi-parental gay mentorship feels ancient, a trope out of Tales of the City.
Unlike heterosexuals, most gay kids don’t grow up around adults who are like them, and gay adults in their forties, fifties, and sixties don’t have many occasions for routine, ordinary contact with a younger group of gay people. One of the benefits of Pride Week is that, however artificially, it breaks that barrier down and restarts the conversation. That’s appropriate for an occasion that’s meant to be steeped not just in optimism but in an awareness of history—a history that, by the way, includes a generation gap of its own. As author David Carter reminds us in his excellent 2004 book Stonewall, back in 1969, gay New York was deeply factionalized. Gay older men “passing” in coat-and-tie jobs on Madison and Park Avenues and then discreetly meeting each other in Turtle Bay bars had contempt for long-haired, sideburned Village hippies, and the reverse was also rudely, robustly the case. Even though gay Americans seem to have lived a century of tumult and progress since then, it’s good to know we still have something in common with our ancestral brothers-in-arms.
Comments:
I am a 29-year-old queer male and it is my belief that gay 20-somethings with no interest in the culture that gave birth to their own luxurious insularity are not so much a symbol of a generational gap as they are a reminder that LGBTQ History has been successfully marginalized in the education system -- despite the proliferation of Queer Studies as a tokenized academic discipline. LGBTQ Studies have been effectively relegated to a self-selecting minority of queer youth. From a pedagogical standpoint, the best course of action is to ensure the inclusion of the LGBTQ struggle for equality (and the slices of surrounding cultures that informed, inspired & supported those movements) within a broader framework of a living civil rights history. Trying to overturn Prop 8 is a noble and necessary stepping stone, but we won't bridge any gaps within or beyond our own movement until _all_ youth are educated that everyone is entitled to equal rights and treatment under the law (however far behind legislation is in making this a reality), and that all movements of oppressed groups are connected in that they all must struggle against bigoted policy. Our voices (angry or...gay) are important at a protest, yes, but perhaps not as paradigm-shifting as they are in history books.
By jorkane on 06/26/2009 at 2:14 pm
I'm 63. I came out during the Stonewall era. I feel enormously proud of what my gay brothers and sisters have accomplished over the last 40 years.
I feel proud every time I see how matter-of-factly kids say they don't think it's any big deal to be gay. It's only natural that they have a different point of view, and, in fact, we wanted them to feel the way they do.
But, if you're 25, it's unlikely you know how hard it was to get to this place. And, in a way, I'm glad you don't. But at the very least you should be aware that every gay man and woman who came out in the Stonewall era made social, financial, familial, and personal sacrifices to live openly and freely. And so did everybody else who came out after us.
If you're 25 and want to know what we were up against back then, take a trip to Saudi Arabia, or Nigeria, and live openly gay in those societies. Think I'm kidding?
When you're at the parade and see somebody my age, ask them what it was like. They'll appreciate being asked, and you might be surprised by what you hear. Don't assume we disdain who you are. We love who you are.
By ekeby on 06/25/2009 at 6:05 pm
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Fingers
These fingers of mine,
Neither slim nor long,
Neither manly nor strong
Nonetheless suffice
To service my vice.
The shower affords me
A suitable place
To invite my disgrace,
My fingers to employ
With horrible joy.
These fingers aren’t pretty
But neither am I,
We’re ideally suited,
These fingers and I.
Come fingers, I long now
To feel you within,
Punish me, purge me
Of gluttonous sin.
Come, fingers, now bring me
That I crave and yet loathe -
The hideous bliss of your
Rape of my throat.
-DannyR
Neither slim nor long,
Neither manly nor strong
Nonetheless suffice
To service my vice.
The shower affords me
A suitable place
To invite my disgrace,
My fingers to employ
With horrible joy.
These fingers aren’t pretty
But neither am I,
We’re ideally suited,
These fingers and I.
Come fingers, I long now
To feel you within,
Punish me, purge me
Of gluttonous sin.
Come, fingers, now bring me
That I crave and yet loathe -
The hideous bliss of your
Rape of my throat.
-DannyR
Dirty, DIRTY, Eugh!!
I found this video over at http://rosephase.blogspot.com/2009/06/propaganda.html and I have to say, for a film that that rails so insistently against pornography, nudity and sexuality, it sure doesn't leave much to the imagination...
;)
Baloney Detection Kit
Pilfered, with much love and respect, from http://www.thegayatheist.com/2009/06/baloney-detection-kit-how-to-be-good.html
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
The War Against Women
'... I think President Obama said it best during the debates - "no one is pro-abortion". No one wants to have an abortion. The only way to prevent abortion is not by killing doctors and forcing celibacy on unwilling teenagers, but by giving women and men education and access to birth control, sex education in schools, and encouragement of safe ways to experience sexual pleasure (masturbation, etc.). In a perfect world, no one would have an abortion. No one would make a mistake. No condoms would break. No one would get raped. No babies would have trisomy-13 or develop without brains or have Treacher-Collins. No women would have massive preeclampsia or placenta previa. But these things happen. And for that reason, abortion needs to remain safe and legal. Dr. Tiller's death at the hands of terrorists makes reproductive rights in this country one step closer to extinction. Imagine how many thousands of women will suffer and die in back alley abortions and from terrible, fatal diseases.The pro-lifers (most ironic group name ever) seem to prefer that gravely ill children are forced to suffer on respirators and women and raped 10 year old girls die in childbirth - unless, of course, it was their 10 year old daughter. Let's see how pro life they are then.
There is a war going on against women and their bodies. There is a war and there have been casualties, and no one will say that's what's going on because there are women fighting women (like Cheryl Sullenger from Operation Rescue, for instance). It is fine to make that choice for yourself in your own life and for your own religion, but it is NOT okay to make that choice for anyone else, and using violence to bully doctors and women into submission is terrorism. Plain and simple. Until we start using this kind of language, until we call this what it really is, until we TALK about it - we will lose this war. We are losing it now.'
(read the full brilliant post here, at My Infammatory Writ)
There is a war going on against women and their bodies. There is a war and there have been casualties, and no one will say that's what's going on because there are women fighting women (like Cheryl Sullenger from Operation Rescue, for instance). It is fine to make that choice for yourself in your own life and for your own religion, but it is NOT okay to make that choice for anyone else, and using violence to bully doctors and women into submission is terrorism. Plain and simple. Until we start using this kind of language, until we call this what it really is, until we TALK about it - we will lose this war. We are losing it now.'
(read the full brilliant post here, at My Infammatory Writ)
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Doctor WHO, OverVIEW :)
Anyone who knows me knows I'm a bit of a Scifi nut, and that of the many Scifi franchises out there, none have caused me to obsess and nerd out as much as Doctor Who.
I always enjoyed DW, it gave me nightmares as a kid but there was just something about it that kept me coming back. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, of course, but now that I'm a bit older I recognise the crucial element. it's originality. First, the very premise is quite unique, how many other shows are there where a man travels through space and time in a small blue box? Then there's its other most recognisable elements, nobody really knows who the man is, he changes his face all the time, he's always interfering in history and causing mayhem... if any other show did any of this it would be a blatant rip-off because DW not only did it first, it did it in such a way as to be instantly recognisable. And it's been doing it for longer than any other show around.
DW has also come up with some of the most distinctive villains in Scifi, sure, they've had plenty of men in rubber masks over the years, what Scifi show hasn't? but what other show has had centurions made out of volcanic rock, or a woman so obsessed with plastic surgery that she ends up as little more than a trampoline made out of skin? What other show has had a Repeating Meme, a stone angel, or a carnivorous shadow? Or an Abzobaloff, or thousands of little aliens made out of human fat? Not to mention the Daleks, perhaps the most easily recognised Scifi villains of the lot, and certainly the most popular. And don't forget that 30 years before Star Trek's Borg was were wandering around space turning people into cyborgs, DW's Cybermen were doing that very thing.
I'm really loving the series since it was revived in 2005 after 9 years off the air. Yes, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Catherine Tate and the rest are amazing actors, and yes, the special effects are increasingly superb, but what really makes me love the series is the writing, both the wider story arcs that Head Writer and producer Russell T. Davies has constructed, and also the writing for each episode. DW shows that script and story are of paramount importance, you can have all the CGI you want but if you can't tell a story about people, you're not going to get far(Star Trek: Enterprise, anyone?). So without further ado, here are my impressions of the new Who.
The 2005 season paved the way for a big budget reimagining of the DW universe (which, it has been suggested, is the same universe as Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy). Rose was a great introduction to the new series, showing what happens to an ordinary girl when a fairly extraordinary man walks into her life. The following episode, The End of the World was a powerful story set in the distant future, I particularly love the scene when Rose and the Doctor stand watching the remains of the shattered Earth drifting in space and Rose makes the comment that “nobody even noticed.” Hard-hitting, topical stuff, and what a great way to start a series, with the point at which most Scifi franchises finish! It seems every Scifi show and its dog these days is trying to blow up the Earth for their grand finale, well, all I can say is this is a refreshing change!!
The next episode, The Unquiet Dead was brilliantly creepy, the following two-parter Aliens of London/World War Three was a bit of a let-down, I loathed the Slitheen, butit wasn't all bad, I really thought the characterisation and dialogue between the cast was fantastic. Father’s Day was great but those Reapers were a little cheesy, however the storytelling and acting more than make up for it. Dalek is very nearly the best episode of the entire revived series, but I hardly need to mention that as it’s consistently rated among the top episodes.
The Long Game was good fun and I loved seeing Simon Pegg as a villain, and ‘Max’ was a very cool monster of the week. Stephen Moffat’s The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is, needless to say, utterly enthralling, sweet but horrific and fantastic fun. Unfortunately the following episode, Boom Town, is a little disappointing, though I do have to give it some credit for making the awful Slitheen a little less irritating, and for showing the ongoing development of Rose’s relationships with Mickey and the Doctor.
And then we come to Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, which finish the season in a fantastic way. I have to say, Bad Wolf is possibly my absolute favourite episode of the entire series, it’s fun and silly and sweet, but it captures the menace of the Daleks, it first introduces and then dispatches the Controller, which is quite tragic, we get to know sweet little ‘Lynda with a Y’ (whose death went a long way to reinstating the Daleks as the ultimate bad guys in the universe), Jack kisses both Rose and the Doctor, and both Rose and the Doctor get their Crowning Moment of Awesome – “Rose, I’m coming to get you” and “You are tiny; I see every atom of your existence, and I divide them.” Serious Wow.
The following Christmas special, The Christmas Invasion, was pretty good, as David Tennant’s introduction it couldn’t have been much better. But the following episode and official opening of the second seasonis far more heartwarming and funny. New Earth is good silly fun, and it’s great seeing Rose and the Doctor ‘on a date’ as it were. Matron Casp is the perfect cat person, the Face of Boe makes a welcome return, and Cassandra’s double entendre on possessing the Doctor’s body, that it’s ‘hardly been used’ is classic. What really won me over with this episode, however, was the tragedy of Cassandra/Chip. I cried. New Earth is a much stronger opening than Rose, and would have to be one of my favourite episodes. This is followed by the visually impressive but ultimately forgettable monster of the week story, Tooth and Claw.
School Reunion was a good follow-up, and it was great to see classic series regular Sarah Jane Smith return. The Girl in the Fireplace was also a wonderful episode, the clockwork creations were pretty horrifying and I’m damn sure that if I’d seen that episode as a child it would have haunted me for the rest of my life. But these two episodes are utterly outclassed by the sheer badassery that is Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel. The alternate London, the re-imagined Cybermen, the ‘ear-pods’ and the long trek through the dark within arm’s reach of slumbering Cybermen, it all adds up to a really exciting story, it could totally have been a series finale. It also felt a lot like the Doctor Who I remember from the 80s, so this two-parter stands out as a highlight of the show’s second season.
The Idiot’s Lantern was another great episode, a little piece of history spiced up with some cheap horror. It was a bit of a breather before the traumatic ordeal that is The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. This double episode is definitely Nightmare Fuel, but it also makes explicit Rose and the Doctor’s feelings for each other in a powerful and moving way. The next episode however, Love and Monsters, is kind of cute but utterly forgettable.
The season’s penultimate story, Fear Her, should be excised from the narrative, I’m sorry but it’s just awful. It's followed by the Army of Ghosts/Doomsday story arc, which is right up there among the best, we get the two ultimate Who enemies squaring off and insulting each other before engaging in all-out war; it’s hilarious and exciting, frightening and bitter-sweet. Rose’s departure is heartbreaking. And I just love that the season finishes with the unexpected and ludicrous introduction of a bride in full wedding regalia into the TARDIS, to the Doctor’s utter dismay. Classic.
This of course leads us into what is, for me, the defining moment of the new Who, the second Christmas Special, The Runaway Bride. It’s fast paced, bombastic, thrilling, funny, charming and utterly absurd, and I absolutely love it. Catherine Tate rocks my world. Seriously.
Then we have the introduction of Martha Jones in Smith and Jones, the first episode of the third season, and the first Who episode to feature a recurring black companion. It’s a strong start, and a great introduction for the character, she’s smart and beautiful, sensible and strong. Sadly, the third season was the weakest in the revived series, and she didn’t often get much of a chance to shine. The Shakespeare Code, Gridlock, Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, The Lazarus Experiment, and 42 are all either terrible or completely forgettable.
The series only finally starts to live up to its potential in the stunning Human Nature/The Family of Blood two-parter. This story saved Season Three from mediocrity, I for one would have liked to have seen it strung out over several more episodes. It’s moving and mature, frightening and exciting. It’s followed by the indescribably good Stephen Moffat story Blink (often picked by fans as THE best Who episode, like, EVER), notable for its unusual storytelling and strong horror element, and then by the series finale in three instalments.
The first of these, Utopia, is a great set-up for the final two episodes, the Master’s introduction is enthralling, wonderful and tragic and quite satisfying. It’s like watching a train crash, it feels disturbingly real. The second act, The Sound of Drums is delightfully manic and satisfyingly apocalyptic. What a shame, then, that the trilogy is concluded with the deux ex machina ending of Last of the Time Lords. Nevertheless, Martha Jones endeared herself to me forever by walking out on the Doctor with her head held high. All up, after a promising beginning, Season Three at first failed to deliver, and only recaptured my interest in its second half. Even the by-now traditional surprise season ending, this time a collision with the Titanic broaching the TARDIS hull, failed to deliver.
It turns out that the Titanic that we see smashing a hole in the TARDIS at the conclusion of the third season is not the Titanic that we expect, but a jumbo-sized space-going replica. Voyage of the Damned subjects us to the horror that is Kylie Minogue’s acting, inflicts upon us an irritating cast of stereotypes and smacks us across the face with messianic imagery. Oddly enough, the emotional heart of the tale belongs not to the officially recognised Companion, but to two older gentlemen in minor roles, the first being the amazing Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott, the second being a fraudulent professor who would have made a wonderful Companion.
Wilf’s appearance provides a nice bridge between seasons three and four, as it is revealed in the first episode of the season that he is in fact the Bride’s grandfather, and that the two share a special and close relationship. Donna’s reappearance is one of the funniest moments in the entire series, and makes Partners in Crime one of the most watchable season openings of the new Who.
Season Four goes from strength to strength, fans voted it their favourite season and it is hardly surprising. After the strong first episode we get another historical adventure in The Fires of Pompeii, and a reminder of why the Doctor needs someone with him, and why Donna fits the bill so perfectly. We’re also given a taste of what’s to come; Donna will do a whole lot of crying over the course of this season, and as it turns out, so will we. Case in point: the following episode, Planet of the Ood, picking up on some of the subtler aspects of Season Two’s The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. This is hands-down the most beautiful and uplifting instalment of the whole of the revived series, and ranks as one of my ultimate favourite episodes. On an emotional level, it would be hard to top, and the following three episodes, The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and The Doctor’s Daughter wisely don’t even try, opting instead for military manoeuvres and fast paced action.
The return of Martha Jones in those three episodes is something of a disappointment, she displays none of her customary strength and genius, and instead ends up crying pathetically in a puddle on some alien planet, but this is more than made up for by the enjoyable exchanges between the Doctor and Donna. I’m struck by the thought that perhaps it was necessary to bring Martha back and show her failings to underline the suitability of Donna as the Doctor’s long-term companion. In any case, the season progresses strongly, continuing with the charming and more than slightly ridiculous The Unicorn and the Wasp, replete with comic moments and subtle meta-fictional references.
What follows is what I can only describe as Stephen Moffat’s big sales pitch for where he will take the series when he takes the top job after the departure of Russell T. Davies. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead return to the Moff’s favourite themes of horror, mystery and romance, with beautiful sets, impressive special effects and fantastic casting choices. The Doctor and Donna get no happy resolution this time, but their close companionship is once again highlighted, setting us up nicely for the next two instalments, in which they’re mostly kept apart.
The first of these is Midnight, featuring the Doctor going off on his own for a spell, and I would argue that this episode is a strong contender for ‘Best New Who Episode.’ There’s only one set for the duration of the adventure, and the special effects are kept to a minimum, but this the most tightly scripted and tense show of the season, and I would say the series as a whole. It’s stressful and nerve-wrecking, cleverly written and brilliantly acted, showing what RTD can do with not much.
It’s followed by Catherine Tate’s powerhouse performance in Turn Left, another strong contender for best episode. Donna wanders off and gets in trouble, and we get some nice continuity touches but more importantly a glimpse at what might have been and a greater understanding of Donna and her potential and bravery, a leap of faith and a whole lot of emotion, from despair and depression to horror and bewilderment, hope and happiness. Watching it, you feel as if they couldn't possibly have packed any more emotion in, and it could be too much of an ordeal if they had somehow managed to.
The episode dovetails nicely with Season Four’s grand finale, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, bringing together all the threads from the various stories, demonstrating how the Doctor sows the seeds of destruction everywhere he goes and providing fan service and more than a few surprises along the way. It has often been noted that the science of this double episode makes absolutely no sense, but it almost seems intentional, it’s as if RTD is simply saying “Who cares? The story’s the thing,” and certainly he manages to juice every last drop of emotion out of fans and puts poor Donna through the wringer. The story is huge and dramatic, fast-paced and exciting, and ultimately tragic. The ending is heartbreaking, thanks to some brilliant writing, but also to the considerable talents of David Tennant, Catherine Tate and Wilfred Mott.
We’re left broken and miserable, which is exactly how the Doctor is supposedly feeling, and so the Doctors elated mood at the beginning of the Christmas special that follows, The Next Doctor, is somewhat refreshing, although given the title of the episode we may be apprehensive. But the title is intentionally misleading, what we end up with is far and away the best Christmas Special of the series thus far.
While The Runaway Bride might have uproariously good fun, this Christmas Special follows the more threatening feel of The Unquiet Dead, Rise of the Cybermen, and Utopia , perhaps appropriately given the recent loss of Bride's star. The result is captivating, and David Morrissey brings real depth and gravitas to his role. Finally, however, we see the Doctor accept the invitation to spend Christmas with friends, providing some relief from the increasingly gloomy turn of events in the show.
Planet of the Dead, the show’s first Easter Special and most recent instalment, continues in this vein, being a light and frothy adventure with some impressive CGI and a return to the Doctor’s more cheerful, manic behaviour of days past. RTD promises, however, that this will be the last respite, and that the final three episodes featuring David Tennant as the Doctor and Russell T. Davies as Head Writer and producer will be frightening, depressing and traumatic. The first of these, The Waters of Mars, will go to air in November, and the concluding two-part story will play over Christmas and New Years.
I'm looking forward to it :)
I always enjoyed DW, it gave me nightmares as a kid but there was just something about it that kept me coming back. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, of course, but now that I'm a bit older I recognise the crucial element. it's originality. First, the very premise is quite unique, how many other shows are there where a man travels through space and time in a small blue box? Then there's its other most recognisable elements, nobody really knows who the man is, he changes his face all the time, he's always interfering in history and causing mayhem... if any other show did any of this it would be a blatant rip-off because DW not only did it first, it did it in such a way as to be instantly recognisable. And it's been doing it for longer than any other show around.
DW has also come up with some of the most distinctive villains in Scifi, sure, they've had plenty of men in rubber masks over the years, what Scifi show hasn't? but what other show has had centurions made out of volcanic rock, or a woman so obsessed with plastic surgery that she ends up as little more than a trampoline made out of skin? What other show has had a Repeating Meme, a stone angel, or a carnivorous shadow? Or an Abzobaloff, or thousands of little aliens made out of human fat? Not to mention the Daleks, perhaps the most easily recognised Scifi villains of the lot, and certainly the most popular. And don't forget that 30 years before Star Trek's Borg was were wandering around space turning people into cyborgs, DW's Cybermen were doing that very thing.
I'm really loving the series since it was revived in 2005 after 9 years off the air. Yes, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Catherine Tate and the rest are amazing actors, and yes, the special effects are increasingly superb, but what really makes me love the series is the writing, both the wider story arcs that Head Writer and producer Russell T. Davies has constructed, and also the writing for each episode. DW shows that script and story are of paramount importance, you can have all the CGI you want but if you can't tell a story about people, you're not going to get far(Star Trek: Enterprise, anyone?). So without further ado, here are my impressions of the new Who.
The 2005 season paved the way for a big budget reimagining of the DW universe (which, it has been suggested, is the same universe as Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy). Rose was a great introduction to the new series, showing what happens to an ordinary girl when a fairly extraordinary man walks into her life. The following episode, The End of the World was a powerful story set in the distant future, I particularly love the scene when Rose and the Doctor stand watching the remains of the shattered Earth drifting in space and Rose makes the comment that “nobody even noticed.” Hard-hitting, topical stuff, and what a great way to start a series, with the point at which most Scifi franchises finish! It seems every Scifi show and its dog these days is trying to blow up the Earth for their grand finale, well, all I can say is this is a refreshing change!!
The next episode, The Unquiet Dead was brilliantly creepy, the following two-parter Aliens of London/World War Three was a bit of a let-down, I loathed the Slitheen, butit wasn't all bad, I really thought the characterisation and dialogue between the cast was fantastic. Father’s Day was great but those Reapers were a little cheesy, however the storytelling and acting more than make up for it. Dalek is very nearly the best episode of the entire revived series, but I hardly need to mention that as it’s consistently rated among the top episodes.
The Long Game was good fun and I loved seeing Simon Pegg as a villain, and ‘Max’ was a very cool monster of the week. Stephen Moffat’s The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is, needless to say, utterly enthralling, sweet but horrific and fantastic fun. Unfortunately the following episode, Boom Town, is a little disappointing, though I do have to give it some credit for making the awful Slitheen a little less irritating, and for showing the ongoing development of Rose’s relationships with Mickey and the Doctor.
And then we come to Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, which finish the season in a fantastic way. I have to say, Bad Wolf is possibly my absolute favourite episode of the entire series, it’s fun and silly and sweet, but it captures the menace of the Daleks, it first introduces and then dispatches the Controller, which is quite tragic, we get to know sweet little ‘Lynda with a Y’ (whose death went a long way to reinstating the Daleks as the ultimate bad guys in the universe), Jack kisses both Rose and the Doctor, and both Rose and the Doctor get their Crowning Moment of Awesome – “Rose, I’m coming to get you” and “You are tiny; I see every atom of your existence, and I divide them.” Serious Wow.
The following Christmas special, The Christmas Invasion, was pretty good, as David Tennant’s introduction it couldn’t have been much better. But the following episode and official opening of the second seasonis far more heartwarming and funny. New Earth is good silly fun, and it’s great seeing Rose and the Doctor ‘on a date’ as it were. Matron Casp is the perfect cat person, the Face of Boe makes a welcome return, and Cassandra’s double entendre on possessing the Doctor’s body, that it’s ‘hardly been used’ is classic. What really won me over with this episode, however, was the tragedy of Cassandra/Chip. I cried. New Earth is a much stronger opening than Rose, and would have to be one of my favourite episodes. This is followed by the visually impressive but ultimately forgettable monster of the week story, Tooth and Claw.
School Reunion was a good follow-up, and it was great to see classic series regular Sarah Jane Smith return. The Girl in the Fireplace was also a wonderful episode, the clockwork creations were pretty horrifying and I’m damn sure that if I’d seen that episode as a child it would have haunted me for the rest of my life. But these two episodes are utterly outclassed by the sheer badassery that is Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel. The alternate London, the re-imagined Cybermen, the ‘ear-pods’ and the long trek through the dark within arm’s reach of slumbering Cybermen, it all adds up to a really exciting story, it could totally have been a series finale. It also felt a lot like the Doctor Who I remember from the 80s, so this two-parter stands out as a highlight of the show’s second season.
The Idiot’s Lantern was another great episode, a little piece of history spiced up with some cheap horror. It was a bit of a breather before the traumatic ordeal that is The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. This double episode is definitely Nightmare Fuel, but it also makes explicit Rose and the Doctor’s feelings for each other in a powerful and moving way. The next episode however, Love and Monsters, is kind of cute but utterly forgettable.
The season’s penultimate story, Fear Her, should be excised from the narrative, I’m sorry but it’s just awful. It's followed by the Army of Ghosts/Doomsday story arc, which is right up there among the best, we get the two ultimate Who enemies squaring off and insulting each other before engaging in all-out war; it’s hilarious and exciting, frightening and bitter-sweet. Rose’s departure is heartbreaking. And I just love that the season finishes with the unexpected and ludicrous introduction of a bride in full wedding regalia into the TARDIS, to the Doctor’s utter dismay. Classic.
This of course leads us into what is, for me, the defining moment of the new Who, the second Christmas Special, The Runaway Bride. It’s fast paced, bombastic, thrilling, funny, charming and utterly absurd, and I absolutely love it. Catherine Tate rocks my world. Seriously.
Then we have the introduction of Martha Jones in Smith and Jones, the first episode of the third season, and the first Who episode to feature a recurring black companion. It’s a strong start, and a great introduction for the character, she’s smart and beautiful, sensible and strong. Sadly, the third season was the weakest in the revived series, and she didn’t often get much of a chance to shine. The Shakespeare Code, Gridlock, Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, The Lazarus Experiment, and 42 are all either terrible or completely forgettable.
The series only finally starts to live up to its potential in the stunning Human Nature/The Family of Blood two-parter. This story saved Season Three from mediocrity, I for one would have liked to have seen it strung out over several more episodes. It’s moving and mature, frightening and exciting. It’s followed by the indescribably good Stephen Moffat story Blink (often picked by fans as THE best Who episode, like, EVER), notable for its unusual storytelling and strong horror element, and then by the series finale in three instalments.
The first of these, Utopia, is a great set-up for the final two episodes, the Master’s introduction is enthralling, wonderful and tragic and quite satisfying. It’s like watching a train crash, it feels disturbingly real. The second act, The Sound of Drums is delightfully manic and satisfyingly apocalyptic. What a shame, then, that the trilogy is concluded with the deux ex machina ending of Last of the Time Lords. Nevertheless, Martha Jones endeared herself to me forever by walking out on the Doctor with her head held high. All up, after a promising beginning, Season Three at first failed to deliver, and only recaptured my interest in its second half. Even the by-now traditional surprise season ending, this time a collision with the Titanic broaching the TARDIS hull, failed to deliver.
It turns out that the Titanic that we see smashing a hole in the TARDIS at the conclusion of the third season is not the Titanic that we expect, but a jumbo-sized space-going replica. Voyage of the Damned subjects us to the horror that is Kylie Minogue’s acting, inflicts upon us an irritating cast of stereotypes and smacks us across the face with messianic imagery. Oddly enough, the emotional heart of the tale belongs not to the officially recognised Companion, but to two older gentlemen in minor roles, the first being the amazing Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott, the second being a fraudulent professor who would have made a wonderful Companion.
Wilf’s appearance provides a nice bridge between seasons three and four, as it is revealed in the first episode of the season that he is in fact the Bride’s grandfather, and that the two share a special and close relationship. Donna’s reappearance is one of the funniest moments in the entire series, and makes Partners in Crime one of the most watchable season openings of the new Who.
Season Four goes from strength to strength, fans voted it their favourite season and it is hardly surprising. After the strong first episode we get another historical adventure in The Fires of Pompeii, and a reminder of why the Doctor needs someone with him, and why Donna fits the bill so perfectly. We’re also given a taste of what’s to come; Donna will do a whole lot of crying over the course of this season, and as it turns out, so will we. Case in point: the following episode, Planet of the Ood, picking up on some of the subtler aspects of Season Two’s The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. This is hands-down the most beautiful and uplifting instalment of the whole of the revived series, and ranks as one of my ultimate favourite episodes. On an emotional level, it would be hard to top, and the following three episodes, The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and The Doctor’s Daughter wisely don’t even try, opting instead for military manoeuvres and fast paced action.
The return of Martha Jones in those three episodes is something of a disappointment, she displays none of her customary strength and genius, and instead ends up crying pathetically in a puddle on some alien planet, but this is more than made up for by the enjoyable exchanges between the Doctor and Donna. I’m struck by the thought that perhaps it was necessary to bring Martha back and show her failings to underline the suitability of Donna as the Doctor’s long-term companion. In any case, the season progresses strongly, continuing with the charming and more than slightly ridiculous The Unicorn and the Wasp, replete with comic moments and subtle meta-fictional references.
What follows is what I can only describe as Stephen Moffat’s big sales pitch for where he will take the series when he takes the top job after the departure of Russell T. Davies. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead return to the Moff’s favourite themes of horror, mystery and romance, with beautiful sets, impressive special effects and fantastic casting choices. The Doctor and Donna get no happy resolution this time, but their close companionship is once again highlighted, setting us up nicely for the next two instalments, in which they’re mostly kept apart.
The first of these is Midnight, featuring the Doctor going off on his own for a spell, and I would argue that this episode is a strong contender for ‘Best New Who Episode.’ There’s only one set for the duration of the adventure, and the special effects are kept to a minimum, but this the most tightly scripted and tense show of the season, and I would say the series as a whole. It’s stressful and nerve-wrecking, cleverly written and brilliantly acted, showing what RTD can do with not much.
It’s followed by Catherine Tate’s powerhouse performance in Turn Left, another strong contender for best episode. Donna wanders off and gets in trouble, and we get some nice continuity touches but more importantly a glimpse at what might have been and a greater understanding of Donna and her potential and bravery, a leap of faith and a whole lot of emotion, from despair and depression to horror and bewilderment, hope and happiness. Watching it, you feel as if they couldn't possibly have packed any more emotion in, and it could be too much of an ordeal if they had somehow managed to.
The episode dovetails nicely with Season Four’s grand finale, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, bringing together all the threads from the various stories, demonstrating how the Doctor sows the seeds of destruction everywhere he goes and providing fan service and more than a few surprises along the way. It has often been noted that the science of this double episode makes absolutely no sense, but it almost seems intentional, it’s as if RTD is simply saying “Who cares? The story’s the thing,” and certainly he manages to juice every last drop of emotion out of fans and puts poor Donna through the wringer. The story is huge and dramatic, fast-paced and exciting, and ultimately tragic. The ending is heartbreaking, thanks to some brilliant writing, but also to the considerable talents of David Tennant, Catherine Tate and Wilfred Mott.
We’re left broken and miserable, which is exactly how the Doctor is supposedly feeling, and so the Doctors elated mood at the beginning of the Christmas special that follows, The Next Doctor, is somewhat refreshing, although given the title of the episode we may be apprehensive. But the title is intentionally misleading, what we end up with is far and away the best Christmas Special of the series thus far.
While The Runaway Bride might have uproariously good fun, this Christmas Special follows the more threatening feel of The Unquiet Dead, Rise of the Cybermen, and Utopia , perhaps appropriately given the recent loss of Bride's star. The result is captivating, and David Morrissey brings real depth and gravitas to his role. Finally, however, we see the Doctor accept the invitation to spend Christmas with friends, providing some relief from the increasingly gloomy turn of events in the show.
Planet of the Dead, the show’s first Easter Special and most recent instalment, continues in this vein, being a light and frothy adventure with some impressive CGI and a return to the Doctor’s more cheerful, manic behaviour of days past. RTD promises, however, that this will be the last respite, and that the final three episodes featuring David Tennant as the Doctor and Russell T. Davies as Head Writer and producer will be frightening, depressing and traumatic. The first of these, The Waters of Mars, will go to air in November, and the concluding two-part story will play over Christmas and New Years.
I'm looking forward to it :)
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Also...
I win!!
Semester over, I get four weeks off now (two of which will be in Christchurch but oh well).
I think I aced my exam, and I'd already passed the paper through good marks on my assignments through the semester. I so rock ;)
Semester over, I get four weeks off now (two of which will be in Christchurch but oh well).
I think I aced my exam, and I'd already passed the paper through good marks on my assignments through the semester. I so rock ;)
No 'Mosexual
I'm a thief!! I thiefed this from The Colonic :)
Visibility at what cost: gay marriage and gay night life
My pal over at the Gluten Freeway sent an interesting article about the demise of the Boston gay bar scene. While the internet and online social networking has been described as a contributing factor, the acceptance of gay marriage is also thought to be nurturing mixed-orientation socializing at the expense of gay bars.
This raises the issues of "visibility at what cost?" Enclaves, whether religious, ethnic, or sexual, are created when a group of people is "othered" or differentiated on the basis of a specific characteristic. This is why I believe that Judaism is alive today--because of the vicious and even more subtle forms of Antisemitism that have followed Jewish people throughout history. Tolerance and assimilation would not have forced into preservation a strong identity and rich cultural heritage the way fierce hatred excluded and thereby cultivated a growing and strengthening sense of Jewry over time.
I think it's far too utopian to suggest that the acceptance of diverse sexuality will lead to the magical disappearance of gay bars. Exhibit A: Prop 8. However, I think communities will face changes differently at different times. And while many people choose to assimilate, others still choose to self-segregate--and some prefer a hybrid of the two.
Visibility at what cost: gay marriage and gay night life
My pal over at the Gluten Freeway sent an interesting article about the demise of the Boston gay bar scene. While the internet and online social networking has been described as a contributing factor, the acceptance of gay marriage is also thought to be nurturing mixed-orientation socializing at the expense of gay bars.
This raises the issues of "visibility at what cost?" Enclaves, whether religious, ethnic, or sexual, are created when a group of people is "othered" or differentiated on the basis of a specific characteristic. This is why I believe that Judaism is alive today--because of the vicious and even more subtle forms of Antisemitism that have followed Jewish people throughout history. Tolerance and assimilation would not have forced into preservation a strong identity and rich cultural heritage the way fierce hatred excluded and thereby cultivated a growing and strengthening sense of Jewry over time.
I think it's far too utopian to suggest that the acceptance of diverse sexuality will lead to the magical disappearance of gay bars. Exhibit A: Prop 8. However, I think communities will face changes differently at different times. And while many people choose to assimilate, others still choose to self-segregate--and some prefer a hybrid of the two.
Wrap Your Sexy Rope Around Me
(Stolen, with much respect and admiration, from http://rosephase.blogspot.com/2009/06/random-poly_08.html)
Times Online
“In those heady, pre-internet days, when fetishes were buried deep, mainstream comic-books artists already provided a service of sorts to those who liked their sex lives spiced up with high heels and corsets. Wonder Woman not only had the requisite sexy shoes and bountiful bust, she also had a penchant for tying up her, usually male, adversaries in her magical lasso, rendering them powerless and unable to lie. She was created by the psychiatrist William Moulton Marston, who further defied convention by living happily in a polygamous and poly-amorous relationship with two women. How many young boys growing up in the 1940s and 1950s must have longed to have Wonder Woman fly into their bedrooms in her invisible plane, wrap her sexy rope around them and force them to admit what it was they really, really, wanted?”
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Murder?? Jumpin' Jiminy Cricket!!
Ready for some serious reading??
Through Polyamory In The News I found a link to the following rather sordid story:
Heads up; here's a really ugly case of "polyamory in the news" that bodes to get more attention in the coming year. The online edition of the Washington Post presents a very long, thorough story on the impossibly strange killing of a young lawyer named Robert Wone, in the Dupont Circle home of three wealthy, well-connected gay professionals living as an MMM family.
"We need an ambulance," Victor Zaborsky blurted, his delicate voice pitched so high that the operator mistook him for a woman.... "We had someone . . . in our house, evidently," Zaborsky said, gasping, "and they stabbed somebody."
...So began a real-life parlor mystery — an unsolved killing and alleged coverup in the guest room of an elegant home in the heart of Washington's gay community, with a trio of seemingly unlikely suspects: a self-described "polyamorous family" of three men. The bizarre murder that evening of a young Ivy League lawyer named Robert Wone, still grist for gossip and conjecture on the city's gay blogosphere, has vexed police and prosecutors since the 911 call just before midnight Aug. 2, 2006....
..."These three males describe themselves as a family, using the term 'poly-amorous' to describe their relationship," a detective wrote in an affidavit....
The Post didn't print the article in its paper edition, but it did tease it there:
The housemates he was visiting — three professional, highly educated men, a self-described “polyamorous family” — immediately fall under suspicion. But how could they have done it? And why would they?
A trial isn't scheduled to start until May 2010. The lawyer for the victim's wife was Eric Holder before President Obama named him attorney general.
June 7, 2009
Murder in DC; Poly gay triad suspected
Paul Duggan
Washington Post online
Retrieved June 8th, 2009 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/31/AR2009053102510.html
A 911 call from a million-dollar townhouse in Dupont Circle on a sweltering summer night three years ago:
"We need an ambulance," Victor Zaborsky blurted, his delicate voice pitched so high that the operator mistook him for a woman.
"What's wrong, ma'am?"
"We had someone . . . in our house, evidently," Zaborsky said, gasping, "and they stabbed somebody."
Over the next eight minutes, stammering breathlessly on the phone, he would report that while he and his two housemates were asleep, an unseen "intruder" had slipped into the residence and attacked a visiting friend of theirs.
"Are they bleeding?" the operator asked. "See someone bleeding?"
"Yes," said Zaborsky, then 40, in words that echo today: "Someone is bleeding in our house."
So began a real-life parlor mystery -- an unsolved killing and alleged coverup in the guest room of an elegant home in the heart of Washington's gay community, with a trio of seemingly unlikely suspects: a self-described "polyamorous family" of three men. The bizarre murder that evening of a young Ivy League lawyer named Robert Wone, still grist for gossip and conjecture on the city's gay blogosphere, has vexed police and prosecutors since the 911 call just before midnight Aug. 2, 2006.
"Is he conscious?" asked the operator. As she spoke, paramedics and patrol cars were being dispatched to 1509 Swann St. NW, the 19th-century townhouse where Zaborsky, a marketing executive for the milk industry, lived with his registered domestic mate, Joseph Price, then 35, a partner in a major D.C. law firm, and another gay man, Dylan Ward, then a 36-year-old massage student with degrees in international relations, children's literature and culinary arts.
"He's not conscious," Zaborsky said of Wone, 32, who lived with his wife in Fairfax County.
Earnest and meticulously efficient, Wone had planned about two weeks in advance to stay in the city that evening to introduce himself to the night-shift staff at Radio Free Asia, where he was the new general counsel. Rather than trek home late on the Metro, he had arranged to bunk at the townhouse, a mile from his office, with his old college pal Price and his friends Zaborsky and Ward, whom he had met through Price.
Now, less than 90 minutes after walking into the Swann Street home, Wone was dead in the second-floor guest room, lying on the mattress of a convertible love seat, three knife wounds in his chest and abdomen.
"Okay, who was the person that stabbed him?" the operator asked.
Zaborsky, sounding terrified, was soon heaving sobs. "I don't know. We think it's somebody . . . an intruder in the house. We heard the chime at the door."
But there was no stealthy intruder, authorities allege. Citing a strange-as-fiction web of circumstantial, forensic and autopsy evidence, investigators have publicly theorized that one or two of the housemates, or the three together -- all professional, highly intelligent men, none with a criminal record -- murdered Wone in a weirdly elaborate sexual assault involving the injection of an incapacitating drug.
Having a theory is one thing; proving it is another, especially when the theory has significant holes. Without a cooperating eyewitness to help cement a murder case, the U.S. attorney's office has filed no charges in the killing. And despite being pressured by prosecutors to turn on one another, the men have steadfastly denied any wrongdoing.
"The person had one of our knives," Zaborsky said to the operator, composing himself momentarily.
"Okay, any type of description of the person that came in the home?"
"We have no idea," he replied. "We have no description." Then a note of sadness crept into his voice. "We heard the chime," he said. "And we heard the screams from our friend."
No description, no witnesses -- just a dead man in the guest room and three housemates with a shaky story, as detectives see it.
This is an account of what is known and not known about a murder that remains unpunished, a tortuous whodunit with elements straight from a pulp novel: the boning knife missing from the cutlery box; the spider seen crawling on the patio light; the curious findings (and lack of findings) of the autopsy; the botched search for blood traces by the crime-scene techs; the neatly made bed; the mishandled BlackBerry; the peculiar stains on the white cotton towel.
An odd, unfinished tale.
Indicted last fall for allegedly obstructing justice in the case, the housemates are scheduled to go on trial May 10, 2010. In agreeing on the date recently, the defense and prosecution told a D.C. Superior Court judge that it probably will take at least two months to present the complex evidence to a jury. The men are accused of carrying out an ambitious, albeit flawed, coverup the night Wone died, disposing of evidence and altering the crime scene to hide their suspected involvement in the killing -- after which Zaborsky dialed 911.
"Here they are, here they are," he said abruptly, sounding relieved as an ambulance pulled up out front. Then the magnitude of what had happened that night seemed to hit him again like a punch, stealing his breath.
He was crying hysterically.
"Oh, dear. . . . I can't believe this. . . . I can't believe this."
A College Friendship
Williamsburg, 1991:
After leading a tour for prospective students at the College of William and Mary, Joe Price, a junior, stood patiently outside a campus building for more than half an hour, answering questions from the diligent parents of Robert Wone, who eventually would be salutatorian of his Catholic high school class in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In helping their firstborn child pick a college, Wone's mother and father, a school librarian and a technology executive at Chase Manhattan Bank, were leaving little to chance. As other tour guides smiled at the scene, Wone, 5-foot-4 and boyish looking, stood quietly with his parents while they politely interrogated Price.
That was the first meeting of the two future lawyers. As their friendship grew, Price, older by three years, would remain Wone's guide, introducing him to student government at William and Mary, where each majored in public policy, and later helping him navigate law school. Both would land jobs at prominent Washington firms: Price at Arent Fox, specializing in intellectual property rights, and Wone in the real estate department at Covington & Burling.
And finally Price, a suspect in Wone's murder, would be one of his pallbearers.
The story of how Wone, Price, Zaborsky and Ward came to know one another -- how the four ended up together in the townhouse Aug. 2, 2006 -- has emerged from public documents, including court filings, and from people familiar with the men's backgrounds, most of whom declined to speak on the record because of the criminal case.
The three suspects, advised by their attorneys to keep low profiles, have said almost nothing publicly about their friend's death, while the lore surrounding the murder has grown in the city's gay community. On the Web (particularly a blog called whomurderedrobertwone.com), armchair sleuths debate the arcana of the case, parsing the clues and speculating on a psychosexual meaning to it all.
Price, a popular and busy man on the William and Mary campus, met Wone again in the spring of 1992, months before the studious New Yorker began his freshman year. As one of a group of academic high achievers entering the college as Monroe scholars, Wone was invited to spend a weekend in Williamsburg. While there, he was paired with Price, an honor society member soon to be a senior who was president-elect of what is now called the Student Assembly.
A former Eagle Scout, just under 6 feet tall with a broad face, Price was an energetic campus organizer and openly gay. Raised in Texas, Japan, the Florida Keys and Cape Cod, a son of career Navy petty officers, he had whimsically titled his college-application essay "My Mother Wears Combat Boots." As the student government's new chief executive, he appointed Wone to a presidential advisory council, which seemed to suit the freshman's interests and personality.
"Robert always stepped up as a willing and able leader when asked to lead or when he saw a need that was not being met," his wife, Kathy Wone, said in an e-mail interview not long after the killing. "But he was most comfortable being the man behind the scenes so that the man at center stage would truly shine."
Price graduated in 1993, bound for law school at the University of Virginia. By the time Wone (affectionately nicknamed "the Congressman") got his degree in 1996, he had been involved in so many service projects at William and Mary that he received a prestigious commencement award, citing his exceptional "characteristics of heart, mind and helpfulness to others."
By all accounts, he was at ease with his friend's sexuality. "They respected each other," wrote Kathy Wone, who has since filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the housemates and recently declined to be interviewed again about the case. Recalling her husband as open-minded, she said, "He understood that every person had this innate desire . . . to be accepted."
The two men stayed in touch throughout the 1990s while Price was at U-Va., then while Wone was a law student at the University of Pennsylvania and Price was a new associate at Arent Fox.
The year 2000 brought big changes for both of them -- a law firm job for Wone, who was hired by Covington & Burling, and a romantic union for Price, who met Victor Zaborsky, a marketing executive for the Milk Processor Education Program, or MilkPEP, the trade group behind the long-running "milk mustache/Got Milk?" ad campaign.
A native of Philadelphia, soft-spoken and slender at 5-foot-8, Zaborsky, like Price, had grown up in scattered places: His father is a chemist whose corporate job took the family to the South and Midwest. After graduating from the University of Tulsa in 1988 with a degree in finance, Zaborsky, five years older than Price, eventually moved to Washington as a branch manager for First Union Bank, then switched careers, joining MilkPEP in 1996.
The two men, who in time would exchange gold wedding bands, were introduced by a mutual friend March 24, 2000, and six months later they took up residence on Capitol Hill, buying a two-story brick townhouse with a basement apartment. Price was gaining stature as a legal advocate for the gay community in addition to handling trademark litigation at Arent Fox. A longtime board member of the gay-rights group Equality Virginia, he became its chairman and general counsel in 2002.
By then he also had a biological son, a toddler being raised by a lesbian couple in Silver Spring.
Shortly before meeting Zaborsky, Price had donated sperm to one of the women, a friend, who gave birth to a boy in December 2000. Zaborsky later donated sperm to the same woman, fathering her second son. "We are forging new territory here," he told USA Today before he and Price witnessed the younger child's birth.
The mother's partner adopted both boys as infants, and the men are active in their lives, attending school events and birthday parties, soccer games and karate lessons. The brothers, now 8 and 5, call Price "Dad" and Zaborsky "Papa."
A New Housemate
Wone found a soul mate, too.
When he wasn't racking up billable hours at Covington & Burling, he continued immersing himself in service projects, doing pro bono work for such groups as AmeriCorps in Virginia, which now presents an annual Robert E. Wone Award, named for "a tireless activist and volunteer who advanced the interests of many charitable organizations." Meanwhile, he was deep in a long-distance romance with Kathy Yu, a lawyer on the staff of an American Bar Association commission in Chicago, whom he had met at a diversity conference.
"On the last weekend of June 2002," she wrote, "Robert and I were admiring a friend's wedding invitation, when suddenly he asked, 'What would you like our wedding invitation to look like?' The word 'our' stunned me, as we had not talked much about marriage. . . . The realization hit us both very suddenly (at least it did for me). We were never more certain about how perfect we were for each other."
They were married June 7, 2003, in Itasca, Ill., near the bride's home town of Hinsdale, a Chicago suburb. Price and Zaborsky, who had celebrated their third anniversary a few months before, flew out for the wedding. That was the summer when Dylan Ward leased the English basement of the gay couple's Capitol Hill townhouse, and the partners' domestic life took on a new dimension.
Finished with graduate school in Boston, Ward, then 33, decided to move to Washington. He was a gay friend of a friend of Price and Zaborsky, so they rented him the apartment. Over time, though, he would become more than just their downstairs tenant, authorities said. "These three males describe themselves as a family, using the term 'poly-amorous' to describe their relationship," a detective wrote in an affidavit.
Although police and prosecutors have declined to comment on the investigation, details have come to light in numerous court filings, including about a dozen affidavits used to obtain search and arrest warrants. The housemates' lawyers recently denounced the government's case in a joint statement but would not discuss specific evidence or the men's private lives.
Ward, 5-foot-8 and wiry with piercing brown eyes, had been raised mostly in the Pacific Northwest, spending some of his childhood in Germany, where his father, now a cardiologist, was an Army doctor. "Incredibly smart and truly engaging," one professor in Boston said of him. Yet "not really career-minded," Ward has said of himself, according to acquaintances.
After graduating summa cum laude from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in 1992, he taught English on the Japanese island of Kyushu, where he befriended a couple who owned a restaurant. That got him interested in cooking, and he enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America in New York's Hudson Valley. With a two-year degree in culinary arts, he worked as a caterer in Oregon for a while, then quit in 1996 to teach English again, this time in Taiwan.
When a friend in Taipei, Taiwan, opened a small publishing business in 1999, Ward joined her. The company, called House of the Tiger Aunt, produced storybooks, which Ward helped write, and other materials used to teach English in Taiwan's primary grades. That got him interested in children's literature theory, and in 2001 he began studying for a master's degree in the subject at Boston's Simmons College.
In the District, meanwhile, a friend of his, Peter Dernbach, was living with his domestic partner in the basement of the Capitol Hill townhouse. Dernbach had gone to law school with Price and was a fellow associate at Arent Fox. While Ward was a student at Simmons, he occasionally visited Dernbach -- which was how he met Price and Zaborsky.
Then, just as Ward was finishing the master's program in 2003, Dernbach left for a job in Asia. With the apartment available, Ward moved back to the city where his higher education had begun, an intellectual wanderer unsure of what to do next.
Price, the chairman of Equality Virginia, helped him get a fundraising job with EV early in 2004. By all accounts a persuasive writer, Ward worked mainly from his apartment, composing donation appeals and assisting with the group's annual Commonwealth Dinner. At the same time, he got to know friends of Zaborsky and Price -- including Price's good friend from William and Mary. When Wone turned 30 in June 2004, the three men hosted a party for him in the Capitol Hill home.
As for what went on privately among Price, Zaborsky and Ward, that was their business, until the hot light of a police investigation later shone on them. A detective said in an affidavit that although Price and Zaborsky are "committed, intimate" partners, Price at some point also became involved in a sexual relationship with Ward. The affidavit says nothing about any physical relationship between Zaborsky and Ward but quotes Zaborsky as calling him "one of the nicest, sweetest people I've ever met."
Unconventional, yes. But to acquaintances, they seemed a happy trio.
In the spring of 2005, after seven years at Arent Fox (where the starting salary for new law school graduates is $165,000), Price was about to be made a partner in the firm.
By then, the townhouse on Capitol Hill was worth $900,000, or 2 1/2 times what Price and Zaborsky had paid for it. In a sizzling real estate market, they sold the home and bought a nicer place, paying $1.25 million for the three-story brick townhouse at 1509 Swann St. Built in the late 1800s, all modern inside, it has six rooms plus a basement apartment and a coveted historic preservation marker attached to its pale gray exterior.
Ward's growing closeness with the couple showed in their living arrangement. When Zaborsky and Price moved to the more spacious Swann Street residence, Ward moved with them -- but no longer as their downstairs renter. He settled in a bedroom upstairs in the main quarters, while another tenant, a female friend of theirs, leased the English basement.
To the siblings in Silver Spring, he became part of the family.
"Uncle Dylan," they call him.
A Domestic Partnership
And so there they were, ensconced in Dupont Circle in the months before the killing.
Price continued to thrive at Arent Fox, representing companies such as Netscape, Warner Brothers and America Online in trademark and Internet domain-name disputes, and Zaborsky traveled frequently in a job he enjoyed, promoting milk as a hip and healthier alternative to Coke and Pepsi. On April 13, 2006, a few weeks after their sixth anniversary, the couple made their relationship official, registering with the city as domestic partners.
Ward, meanwhile, had decided what to do next: While still with Equality Virginia, he began 18 months of study at the Potomac Massage Training Institute, and by June 2006, he was nearly two-thirds finished.
That spring, when Price's term as board chairman ended, Ward left the gay-rights organization and took an office job three blocks from the townhouse. With a recommendation from Equality Virginia (specifically from Price), he was hired by A.B. Data Ltd. to help solicit donations for the company's clients, mainly progressive nonprofit groups. After work, he attended massage classes.
Those were the men the public saw.
To give jurors in the obstruction-of-justice trial a fuller picture of the housemates, the U.S. attorney's office said, it will seek to introduce evidence of their intimate connections. In addition to Price's spousal union with Zaborsky, authorities said in court filings, Price and Ward were involved in a "dominant-submissive sexual relationship," which prosecutors said is relevant to the case in light of what they think happened to Wone.
Ward kept a wide array of esoteric sexual implements in his Swann Street bedroom, many of them designed to inflict pain, according to a police affidavit. Investigators said Price used the name "culuket" on the Web and posted a member profile on the fetish-oriented site Alt.com, listing "electrotorture" among his "activities enjoyed." Culuket's posting listed a dozen other favored sex practices, described in explicit terms, and sought a third man to join a sadomasochistic relationship with "me and my dom."
Later, in a police interrogation, Zaborsky would refer to his and Price's emotional commitment to each other, saying Ward did not "share an equal part" in that relationship. But he added, "We're trying to develop it in that way."
A respected law partner. A successful marketing manager. A direct-mail fundraiser studying for a massage license.
A gay family.
Those were the housemates Robert Wone visited the last night of his life.
Aug. 2, 2006, a Wednesday: The sun had gone down after baking the region in triple-digit heat.
Wone, no longer with Covington & Burling, now the new general counsel at Radio Free Asia, got off the Metro near his office in Dupont Circle and telephoned his wife. He had worked all day, then had sat through an evening seminar in grant law at a conference center downtown. It was about 9:30 when he spoke with Kathy Wone, who was home in Oakton. He let her know he was headed back to the radio station at 2025 M St. NW to introduce himself to the night staff.
"Robert was, as usual, upbeat and happy that day," she said in the e-mail interview.
A Chinese American proud of his heritage, he was pro bono general counsel to the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York's Chinatown and to the national Organization of Chinese Americans. That summer of 2006, he was elected president of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association's Washington area chapter. And in July, he joined U.S.-backed Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts news to Asian countries where the media are shackled by government controls.
Wone was a careful planner, a man who urged friends to draft wills and buy insurance. In July, Kathy Wone said, her husband began arranging "to take care of three things all at once" on Aug. 2. He was scheduled to be in the seminar until 9 p.m., so he figured "that night would also be a good night" to meet the 10 o'clock crew at Radio Free Asia. "As an added bonus, he thought it would be nice to spend the night" in the city with Price, who lived just a mile from the radio station.
"I thought it was a great idea," Kathy Wone wrote. Then "a few days before Robert's death, Robert did tell me that plans between him and Joe had been confirmed, and that he would be spending the night at Joe's house."
In three years of marriage, she said, "This was the first time Robert ever chose to stay overnight at a friend's house. . . . The only times we were away from each other was when one of us had to travel for business." Yet, "as with all his friends," she said, "Robert was good about keeping in touch with Joe."
As Wone walked from the Metro stop to his office that evening, talking with his wife for the last time, "we ended our call with, 'Okay, have a good night, I love you.' "
Colleagues said he arrived at the radio station before 10. At 10:22 p.m., finished shaking hands with the staff, he called the Swann Street townhouse from his office, saying he would be there shortly.
Tomorrow: A murder investigation leads to a strange theory.
Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
The Robert Wone Killing Remains 'a Head-Scratcher'
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
Retrieved June 8th, 2009 from
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060103472.html?sid=ST2009053102566
(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 Struggle
Lugging 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-Scratcher
The 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 Case
Under 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 Evidence
And 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.
Murder on Swann Street: The Robert Wone Stabbing
Authorities Think Housemates Killed the Lawyer in Dupont Circle Home, but Proof Is Elusive
Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 2, 2009; 1:00 PM
Retrieved June 8th, 2009 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/05/31/ST2009053102566.html?sid=ST2009053102566
Washington Post staff writer Paul Duggan was online Tuesday, June 2, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss an unsolved killing and alleged coverup in the guest room of an elegant home in the heart of Washington's gay community. The bizarre murder of a young Ivy League lawyer named Robert Wone is still grist for gossip and conjecture on the city's gay blogosphere and has vexed police and prosecutors since the 911 call just before midnight Aug. 2, 2006.
Paul Duggan: Hi ... Paul Duggan of The Washington Post here, welcoming any questions about the Swann Street murder narrative running yesterday and today on Washingtonpost.com. ... Ask away.
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Washington, D.C.: Thanks for your reporting on this case. I can only imagine how frustrating it is to report on an event with so many unanswered questions, but I thought you told the story well and fairly.
One thing I don't understand is the motive behind the alleged murder. The prosecution has theories and some evidence, but there doesn't seem to be any reason behind the murder, right? It is a long jump from sexual assault to stabbing.
Paul Duggan: You're right about that -- there's no clear evidence of motive that I know of. One thing people sometimes get confused about, though, is the notion that prosecutors in trial need to prove a motive. They don't. Evidence of motive is great to have, but at all not necessary. They don't have to prove or even suggest WHY someone did something. They only have to prove that the person actually did it. Period.
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Delmarva: So how firm is this timeline? By their actions described in the article these three look guilty as can be but I can't reconcile that all this took place (the sexual activity, the death, the cover-up, the call to 911) took place in that amount of time.
How firm are Wone's activities prior to arriving at the house around 10:30? Is it possible that Wone got there earlier or that he went there, possibly for sexual activity, left and went back to work and later returned? Even with that the timeline seems a real stretch.
Paul Duggan: I can't speculate on what might've happened at various times when the whereabouts or activities of one or some or all of the people in the story are unaccounted for. I can only tell you that Wone, the general counsel of Radio Free Asia, went to the night seminar (with a friend, the general counsel of Radio Free Europe), that he called his wife afterward, that RFA colleagues remember him arriving back at the station before 10, that he called Swann Street at 10:22, and that Zaborsky called 911 at 11:49. The tight time frame (even without the BlackBerry issue) is a big part of the stubborn, confounding mystery of this.
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Washington, D.C.: The word on the street is that these guys were methamphetamine users and that their partying and S and M activities got out of control that night. Have the police investigated the meth angle? What do they know about the history of drug abuse by there three men? It would seem to explain quite a lot.
Paul Duggan: I can't say. ... But I'll tell you, in all my years of doing this kind of thing, I've never been able to actually locate the person who is in charge of putting out "the word on the street," to ask him how he knows so much. Unless he was hiding in the closet of the guestroom, I'm not sure how he'd know what did or didn't get out of control that night.
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D.C.: So a few questions. The articles don't really address how or why they were charged. How, according to the indictments, did they specifically obstruct justice? Also, why did it take two years for them to be charged? I'm not doubting the charges, just the content and the timing.
Paul Duggan: I think the story, at the end of Part 2, is pretty clear on how they allegedly obstructed justice -- by allegedly disposing of evidence and altering the crime scene. One reason it took so long for charges to be filed, I believe, is that it often takes many months to process forensic evidence. When the D.C. police turn something over to an FBI lab, for instance, they typically have to wait their turn, while the lab, slowly but surely, processes stuff from a hundred other cases in a hundred other jurisdictions or whatever. And it this case there is quite a large amount of forensic evidence.
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Fredericksburg, Va.: Why is it that no one has been charged when it is very clear that there was no intruder?
Paul Duggan: I'm obviously not privy to the decision making in the U.S. attorney's office, but here's some educated speculation: Prosecutors believe (rightly or wrongly) that they can make a case on obstruction based on the forensic evidence they have, which they say clearly indicates that the men engaged in a cover-up. But they simply don't have what they think is sufficient evidence to prove that one, two or all three of them committed murder. Their mere presence in the house that night isn't enough by itself. Prosecutors can theorize all they want that the housemates are responsible for Wone's death. But in a trial, they'd have to prove it (four important words here) "beyond a reasonable doubt," which isn't as easy as you might think.
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Washington, D.C.: Can't the District charge all three with murder and hope one of them cracks? With all the circumstantial evidence I would think they could get a conviction.
Paul Duggan: Generally speaking, when the government charges someone with murder or any crime, the speedy-trial clock starts ticking, meaning the prosecutor better be ready for trial within a certain period, and then comes the trial, and if the evidence isn't there, and the jury acquits, then that's the end of it. The government gets one shot, and that's it. So in this case, until they feel they can prove someone guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt, the US attorney and police will keep looking for evidence, and hold off seeking an indictment.
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Logan North, D.C.: Two basic questions:
1. Why was this series published at all at this time? Nothing new has happened in this case in recent weeks, and no trial proceedings are imminent. The articles, notwithstanding their length and luridness, contain little new information. Nearly all the pertinent information was reported by local outlets such as Legal Times and the Washington Blade last year. If this article was worth publishing by the Post, shouldn't it have been published six months ago, when the information was actually timely?
2. If the information was worth publishing, why wasn't it published in the print edition? Aren't the Post's subscribers who pay good money for the print edition entitled to at least a summary of the article's findings? (Of course, that would have required an article that merely recited facts, not the sort of extensive yarn-spinning that characterizes the series.) What message is conveyed about the value of the print edition when such an extensive article is only available in the free online edition?
washingtonpost.com: The Robert Wone Killing Remains 'a Head-Scratcher'
Paul Duggan: It's being published now because, after weeks of reporting and many late nights of writing, it's done now. Yes, the Legal Times, the Blade and others have done a fine job covering incremental developments in the case -- but nowhere (that I'm aware of) has the entire story been laid out, top to bottom, in one coherent narrative, which is what I set out to do. And I'll be venture to say that many thousands of Post readers haven't followed the case in those blogs, as evidently you have. As for new details, yes, in fact, the story does contain a fair amount of them, especially concerning the backgrounds of the three housemates and how they came to be together in that place on that night. Beyond that, I think just having the complex case explained clearly is something new in and of itself to many Post readers. As for why the story isn't in the physical newspaper, that's a question for senior editors here, not me. I'm a mere typist. But I will say, generally, that some stories, to be told right, need A LOT of space, and there is a finite amount of it available in the printed paper. Fortunately in this age we have a boundless digital venue that can accommodate narratives like this one.
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Washington, D.C.: I understand that they were charged with obstruction, etc. because they refused to testify at a grand jury inquiry into the matter.
Paul Duggan: No, the obstruction charge has nothing to do with the grand jury. No one can be compelled to give evidence against themselves. The obstruction (and conspiracy and evidence-tampering) charges are related to the alleged cover-up in the townhouse after Wone was stabbed.
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Washington, D.C.: Is it proper to use the word "murder" when describing this case? Isn't is technically a homicide until someone has been convicted?
Paul Duggan: Ah, a copy editor!! ... You're absolutely right. Murder is a legal term, the unlawful killing of another with premeditation. We don't know that Wone's "murder" wasn't actually a "manslaughter," and not a murder, do we? That's why newspapers use that awful word "slaying" so much (which absolutely no one uses in ordinary conversation). ... Anyway, I argued (and won) that we should use the term "murder" in a generic sense in the story, to make it more readable. "Slaying mystery" doesn't quite have the ring of "murder mystery."
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Washington, D.C.: Did they dust the blackberry for prints? I can't believe they lost that info.
Paul Duggan:
I tried really hard to find that out, and I got no indication whatsoever from the people I spoke with that the police fingerprinted the BlackBerry. It'd be interesting to know if any of the housemates' prints were on it, no? I can't be sure, but it would not surprise me at all if the BlackBerry wasn't fingerprinted.
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Arlington, Va.: Who does Robert Wone's wife think killed him?
Paul Duggan: She has alleged in a wrongful death lawsuit that the three housemates were responsible for his killing. Her attorney has made no secret of the fact that he (and she) believe all three were complicit in his death.
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Arlington, Va.: That really is a weird story. What are the chances Ward did it acting alone? But that maybe the other two helped clean up the aftermath? Could Ward have done it under the influence of the sleeping pills somehow? You hear stories about people doing all sorts of things in their sleep that they have no idea about having done afterwards, including killing people.
Paul Duggan: You'll have to weigh that yourself.
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Washington, D.C.: There is an old film -- Mandarin Express or something -- where all accomplices to a murder each stab the victim once so that they each share accountability, ensuring that nobody sings to the police. 3 roommates, 3 stab wounds. Coincidence?
Paul Duggan: I'll let you ponder that one.
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Dupont Circle, D.C.: Where was the basement tenant during all of this? Is there any hint that she might be involved? And what's Michael Price's alibi for that night?
Paul Duggan: The basement tenant, Sarah Morgan, said she had gone out to spend the night with a friend. The Michael Price aspect of the case is almost as tortuous as the story I wrote, but the long and short of it is this: In August 2006, Michael Price was living with a man in Silver Spring. This man provided an alibi for Michael Price, saying he and Price were home in bed together on the night Wone was killed. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist.
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Vienna, Va.: Were any lie detector test given to the three suspects and, if so, what did they reveal?
Paul Duggan: Ward took a polygraph test, according to some court filings I've read. It's unclear whether the other two took polygraphs (or were asked to), but I don't believe they did. I'm not sure what conclusions the polygraph examiner reached in Ward's test.
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Fairfax, Va.: Has the former involvement of Eric Holder (current Attorney General) created any pressure on the prosecutors and detectives involved to obtain a confession or conviction?
Paul Duggan: I can't say, but I doubt it.
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Washington, D.C.: In all of your interviews with law enforcement officials and the prosecution, did you get the impression that homophobia is a driving force behind this investigation? It sounds like during the first interview with Price on the night of the murder that the lead investigator was pushing that theory without having any facts to back it up. It just seems to me that first impressions rooted in homophobia have colored the direction of this case from the get-go.
Paul Duggan: I think when the homicide detectives first encountered these three men, and the nature of the relationships among the three started to become clear, the cops' minds went straight to a possible sex angle to the case. It's obvious from Wagner's questions to Price that the idea of a straight guy spending the night in a house with three gay men was pretty foreign. Did that social/cultural divide amount to homophobia? I suppose you'd have to look into the heart and mind of each individual cop to answer that.
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Venice, Fla.: Mr. Duggan, has anyone looked at whether the needle marks could have been the result of an acupuncture-type event? Since the housemate is schooled in massage therapy and has trained in Thailand, it seems plausible that he may have picked up some training in the use of acupuncture to sedate or immobilize someone -- something that would fit in with his fetish lifestyle and also would leave no traces of drugs in the victim's system. Thanks for a great series and for keeping the attention on this case.
Paul Duggan: That's a very interesting question, on the acupuncture, and I know it's been looked into by at least one interested party, in Kathy Wone's wrongful-death lawsuit against the three men. Perhaps it's been a focus of interest on the criminal-investigation side, as well. I don't know.
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Washington, D.C.: On a website called alt.com Price used a name, culuket, that someone suggested combined might be a combination of the Spanish word for anus and a short form of the drug (keratine?). Do you know about this?
Paul Duggan: I've heard that before, yes.
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Washington, D.C.: The first thought I had when I read your article was that Wone's family should file a wrongful death civil lawsuit, and your answer confirmed that they have. Do you know the current status of the law suit?
Paul Duggan: It's pending. One complication has to do with discovery. Kathy Wone's lawyers, in pursuing the civil case, obviously want access to all the evidence that the police and U.S. attorney's office has gathered in the criminal case. The housemates lawyers in the criminal case have successfully argued that Kathy Wone's lawyers in the civil shouldn't being allowed access to that evidence until the criminal case is resolved. So the civil case is essentially in a pause. Got all that?
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Anonymous: The brother of one of the housemates trying to rob the place seems an odd angle -- what more can you tell about that?
Paul Duggan: You want another 8,000 words? Because that's what it would take to explain that whole tangent. The bottom line: The burglary, allegedly by Michael Price and an accomplice named Phelps Collins, was almost laughably inept, and they were quickly arrested (though the charges eventually were dropped). There was a long effort by the police to link Michael Price to Wone's death, but it ultimately led nowhere.
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Washington, D.C.: Have you discovered any explanation for why the burglary charges (of 1509 Swann Street) were dropped against Michael Price and his accomplice? It seemed like a slam dunk case, and you'd think the police would want to keep pressure on the parties involved/their closest relatives ...
Paul Duggan: Good question. There are some followers of the case who think that the government suspects that the burglary was part of an overall cover-up conspiracy, to show that, yes, it was possible for an intruder to get in the house -- and that was why the government didn't pursue it. To this day, prosecutors refer to it as "the alleged burglary." But I can't say for certain why the charges were dropped.
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Anonymous: Do the Wone's have any children?
Paul Duggan: No. At the time of his death, the couple had been talking about adopting a baby from China, Kathy Wone said.
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Washington, D.C.: Hi Paul -- What was reasoning for scheduling the obstruction trial a year from now? Do prosecutors hope that more evidence will emerge at that trial or do they anticipate discovering more in the interim? What if the defendants are found not guilty of obstruction? Does that all but quash the possibility of indicting one or more of the men for the homicide?
Paul Duggan: The reason is simple. The defense has to wait for some of its own testing to be done. That may take into the fall or early winter. The obstruction trial is expected to take two months. But two of the housemates' lawyers also represent defendants if the Blackwater case, the killings in Iraq. That is locked-in to start in January, and will occupy them well into March. Then they'll need a month to gear up for the trial in the Wone case. Thus the May 2010 trial date.
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Paul Duggan: Thanks everyone, for reading and for your questions. We'll try to keep you up to date on developments in the case the months go by, headed toward the schedule trial beginning next May. Have a great rest of the day.
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