New HIV Strain Discovered

From the Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON — A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been discovered in a woman from the African nation of Cameroon. It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

The finding "highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence for new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa," said the researchers, led by Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen, France.

The three previously known HIV strains are related to the simian virus that occurs in chimpanzees.

The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But they added they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans.

The 62-year-old patient tested positive for HIV in 2004, shortly after moving to Paris from Cameroon, according to the researchers. She had lived near Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, but said she had no contact with apes or bush meat, a name often given to meat from wild animals in tropical countries.

The woman currently shows no signs of AIDS and remains untreated, though she still carries the virus, the researchers said.

How widespread this strain is remains to be determined. Researchers said it could be circulating unnoticed in Cameroon or elsewhere. The virus' rapid replication indicates that it is adapted to human cells, the researchers reported.


I found this post at http://www.thegayatheist.com/2009/08/new-hiv-strain-discovered.html

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.