Police and prosecutors charged three men with conspiracy in the Robert Wone homicide case because of their sexual orientation and their nontraditional relationship with one another and not based on any evidence, defense attorneys argued on the opening day of the trial.

The three main defense attorneys spent 90 minutes Monday telling a D.C. Superior Court judge that federal prosecutors have wrongly charged their clients with covering up Wone's 2006 fatal stabbing.

Instead, they told the judge, an unknown intruder climbed a seven-foot fence and came through the back door of the trio's Dupont Circle townhouse the evening of Aug. 2, 2006, when Wone, 32, was staying there, and stabbed him to death as he slept in a guest room. The attorneys argued that their clients had nothing to do with Wone's killing and have cooperated with police.

Joseph R. Price, 39, Victor J. Zaborsky, 44, and Dylan M. Ward, 39, were charged in 2008 with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence. They face a maximum of 38 years in prison if found guilty on all counts. No one has been charged with killing Wone.

Wone, a Washington lawyer who worked as general counsel for Radio Free Asia, was a college friend of Price's, and Price allowed Wone to spend the night after a long day at work so he wouldn't have to return to Oakton.

Defense attorneys said the three men, who are gay, are in a committed, three-way relationship and refer to themselves as a "family." It was that relationship that made police and prosecutors suspect they were involved in Wone's slaying, the attorney said.

"The police got mired and infatuated in a theory based on ignorance. Why is a straight man coming to the house of a gay man?" Price's attorney, Bernie Grimm, told Judge Lynn Leibovitz. Last week, the defendants opted against a jury trial, leaving Leibovitz as the sole arbiter of their fate.

The attorneys outlined for the judge how Price and Wone had been friends since their undergraduate college days at the College of William and Mary, how Price organized Wone's 30th birthday party at his home, and how the men, along with Wone and his wife, Katherine, had often socialized together.



"There is no reason Mr. Price would hurt his friend or let somebody hurt him and cover that up," Grimm said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner said the case has nothing to do with lifestyle. He argued that the men not only know who killed Wone but are also covering up for the killer and that their loyalty to one another has kept them quiet. "They consider themselves a tight, cohesive family. Sadly, Robert Wone was not a member of that family," Kirschner said.

The men were the only ones in the house at the time of the stabbing, and there was no sign of a break-in.

"In the short term, these men have gotten away with it. The murder has not been solved," Kirschner said.

A 911 call from a million-dollar townhouse in Dupont Circle on a sweltering summer night three years ago:

THIS STORY
Q&A, Transcript: Murder on Swann Street: The Robert Wone Stabbing
The Robert Wone Killing Remains 'a Head-Scratcher'
The Robert Wone Stabbing: Anatomy of a Murder Case
View All Items in This Story
"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.