It's very much like the movie "Clue."
There were four people in the house that night.
79 minutes later, one person is dead
and three people are saying "not me."
What happened to 32 year old Robert Wone,
the prominent Asian American attorney found stabbed
inside his friend's house late Wednesday night.
When I first walked in, the three guys that were
in the house, Joe Price, Dylan Ward and Victor Zaborsky,
they had white robes on.
On the nightstand was the knife from a knife set in the kitchen.
There's just a little bit of blood on the pullout bed.
I remember thinking there's something wrong here.
Where's the rest of it?
All the homicide detectives were looking through it
with homophobic lenses.
"You're in a three-way relationship,
you're a freak, who else would have done it but you?"
He went to school with Robert. Joe was at his wedding.
Joe threw a surprise party for him.
What was his motive?
We have a victim with inexplicable
needle puncture marks, no defensive wounds,
and three perfect, almost surgical-like defects.
Our own theory was he had to be alive, paralyzed.
When we were searchin' Dylan's room,
we found hundreds and hundreds of sexual devices.
The medical examiner performed a rape kit.
She found semen around his genitalia and inside his rectum.
An intruder doesn't incapacitate
and sexually assault somebody and stabbed them three times,
all unbeknown to the three guys who live there.
We get the DNA results back.
It turns out it's Robert's own semen.
For the prosecution, Glenn's job is linear.
It's vertical.
It's to build.
Four people in the house, one person dead.
We think these guys did it.
This is the motive.
This is the murder weapon.
And it just builds and builds.
As the defense,
our job is nothing but utter destruction.
We just rip it apart.
Bernie's a worthy adversary.
Bernie's job is to pick apart one piece of evidence here,
one piece of evidence there.
And that's what defense attorneys do.
My job as a prosecutor, you put it together
and you see what picture emerges.
There is no perfect crime,
but this is about as close to a perfect cover-up
as I have ever seen.
The body of attorney Robert Wone
was found stabbed to death inside his friend's home.
Police say someone broke into this rowhouse
and fatally stabbed 32 year old Robert Wone.
A high-profile murder case that turned a Dupont Circle townhouse
into the center of a mystery.
The murder has been the talk of D.C. for years.
Detectives believe Robert was sexually assaulted
and then murdered.
Three D.C. men accused of covering up
the murder of their friend Robert Wone.
Four guys in the house, one guy ends up dead,
the other three say, "I didn't do it."
It's quite a mystery we got in here.
The big question is, who killed Robert Wone?
So it is now four or five days after the murder.
We believe Robert was incapacitated
when he was stabbed,
and we know he had his own semen inside his own anal cavity.
I remember thinking,
You've gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me.
We have semen, and it's Robert's.
The mystery was, how did the semen get into his rectum?
Was it inserted there for one reason or another
by someone who may have sexually assaulted him?
Who does it implicate? Who does it exonerate?
These are now the investigative paths we have to go down
to try to figure out what happened to Robert.
If Robert was involved in sexual activity
or if he was forcibly raped,
you would see that at the autopsy.
None of that was found.
But his semen was found inside him.
How does that happen?
So now we begin to consider
all of the fairly sophisticated S&M equipment
in Dylan's bedroom.
One of the things that we found in Dylan's room was
a pulse electric TENS machine.
The ErosTek electro stimulator device
designed to force stimulate ejaculation.
Well, now, perhaps that's related
to the fact that we found Robert's semen
inside his own anal cavity.
Then the question is, after Robert's semen got on him,
was one of the sexual devices
used to put Robert's semen in him?
It just sort of sends the investigation off
into a stratosphere
where we're not all that comfortable operating.
You can't ejaculate unless you want to.
It has to be some desire to be excited.
You can't stick some mechanical device onto your testicles
and say, okay, now I feel good.
He could have masturbated, I don't know.
But at the end of the day, there is no DNA of Robert Wone
found on any of the sex toys, period.
Another one of Glenn's dead-end theories.
What-- what's the relevance of Robert having his own semen
in his own rectum?
I have no idea how that even happened.
It was another one of those missing pieces of the puzzle.
Now, we're trying to find something
that was going to reveal a clue.
So, we got a search warrant for all the computers.
All you had to do was go to the basic history
and find just thousands and thousands of images of porn.
There was a significant amount of their own images
that Joe and Dylan created.
It was a lot of bondage and S&M.
If you asked anybody, Joe's in charge in everyday life.
Well, Joe was not in charge in the bedroom,
it was clearly Dylan.
We learned that Dylan was the dom and Joe was the sub.
BDSM relationships are not designed to be equal.
Dylan had a lot of power, certainly in the bedroom.
To find out what specifically this BDSM relationship
was between Joe and Dylan is very important.
Could you take that to the next level?
"I killed this person and you will shut up about it."
Is that the next level?
The BDSM stuff is consensual.
If I'm gay and I have two partners
and we have all sorts of dildos
and electronic things we attach to each other,
you're gonna think I murdered somebody?
It's preposterous.
Everybody is entitled to do whatever they want
as consenting adults,
but when you have somebody dead in your guest room
who apparently has been either sexually assaulted
or involved in sexual activity of this nature,
you have to explore all these possibilities.
We did a lot of research looking for something
that would tip us off.
We discovered Joe's online profile.
Joe's profile was on the particular
kind of sex site, ALT.com.
Activities enjoyed: electro torture,
EMS TENS unit,
bondage, masochism, master/slave, handcuffs,
shackles, humiliation, sensory deprivation,
power exchange, rack/medieval devices.
The S&M relationship between Joe and Dylan
was not dress up in leather and harnesses.
It was inflicting pain, it was caging in confinement.
It tended more towards the extreme.
In Dylan's room, we found cases
and cases of different restraints and devices
to hold another person down.
If there was a way to restrain Robert without injuries,
I think Dylan and Joe
were probably the guys to know how to do it.
They've got all these torture devices.
Why should it stop there? Do you go a little farther
and accidentally or intentionally kill somebody?
The assumption he was tortured,
Where's the evidence of that? None.
There would had been ligature marks
tied around his wrists like this,
or on his neck, legs, ankles-- they found none of those.
If Robert wasn't tortured, the other side of the coin,
or an alternative theory was that
Robert was a willing participant
in a bondage, sadomasochistic relationship,
and something went wrong.
I asked Mr. Price
every conceivable question under the sun.
Did you make passes at Robert? Did he make passes at you?
Did he say, Hey, what is this type of sex like?
Did he come over to your house because he was hiding it
from Kathy?
Everything. If I haven't asked it, tell me.
Mr. Price told me the exact same thing,
that he told investigators.
Married men sometimes have a fling
with somebody of the same sex.
That's not unusual.
Whether Robert Wone was agreeing
to engage in a fantasy scene
or an S&M role-playing scenario
that got out of hand and someone lost control,
we don't know.
Do I believe that Robert went over there for that?
Absolutely not.
There would be some type of evidence to show
that he wanted to experiment
or he was bisexual or gay or whatever.
There was nothing.
He had computers. He had a phone.
There was nobody that came out of the woodwork after the fact.
There was another curious piece of the puzzle:
among Dr. Goslinoski's findings
was that Robert had his night guard
in his mouth.
His wife, Kathy, said the last thing he did every night
after he brushed his teeth,
he would put his mouth guard in and he would go to sleep.
So if you have people who are theorizing that Robert was there
to partake in some kind of sexual activity,
why would his mouth guard be in his mouth?
Who has sex with a mouth guard in?
As the investigation is unfolding,
the toxicology results come in.
You had the question, was Robert drugged
by one or others inside the house that night?
Now, remember, we have a victim
with inexplicable needle puncture marks,
no defensive wounds,
and three perfect, almost surgical like defects.
All of that suggested he was unable to move.
The chief toxicologist for the District of Columbia
runs a battery of tests--
opioids, cocaine, phencyclidine--
drugs of abuse that can be associated with
people losing consciousness.
After the autopsy findings,
we were waiting for these toxicology results to come back.
We were looking for substances
that would render a person immobile or unconscious.
We have witness testimony that says that Joe and Dylan
did use different drugs.
We found ecstasy at the scene.
Our own theory was Joe's online screen name
was short for ketamine.
When that report came back...
The results were negative.
Clean.
Now, they didn't test for paralytics like succinylcholine,
the most common paralytic anesthetic
used in the medical practice.
But a tox screen would not disclose
if Robert had been injected with succinylcholine
because it naturally breaks down into compounds
that occur in the human body.
Substances like succinylcholine
have this pattern of metabolism
that makes them undetectable after a period of time.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they were not used.
It just means that we can't prove that they were used.
One of the theories run up the flagpole
was that Robert was incapacitated.
If there's a paralytic drug, they would have found it.
Look at the autopsy report, there's no sign of it.
It's defeated scientifically
by the government's own pathologist.
None of it seems to make sense because there's no evidence
that they have that Robert was drugged
and then sexually assaulted.
But there's evidence that something very strange and wrong
happened inside that house.
You go down all these paths,
you still come back to the same questions.
Was sexual assault part of what happened that night or not?
How did the semen get into his rectum?
Was Roberts shot up with some sort of paralytic agent?
And why didn't Robert react after he was stabbed?
And then you have to try and cram everything into
a 79-minute timeline.
That's what makes the story so maddening.
It's so convoluted,
so confusing, so confounding.
Nothing adds up.
It's an Escher drawing.
You get to the top of the stairway...
you actually find out it's going down.
The funeral was a Tuesday.
The family asked me to deliver a eulogy at the funeral.
So this is the eulogy that I wrote.
"Robert has been a friend of mine since college.
Robert said he wanted to be a lawyer
because he wanted to make a difference in public policies.
And see the effects of his efforts
improving the situation of people around him.
As those of us today can all attest,
Robert achieved his goals.
Robert and Kathy have a warm, loving marriage.
There is no doubt Robert continues to love her today
from his place in heaven."
I have no relationship with Joe, Victor and Dylan,
so I was suspected for them from the beginning.
But I remember that Kathy still really thought
that the guys were also victims in this.
She was still at a point where
she believed their story.
I was more on board with Kathy
and wanting to believe the best people
that had been our friends,
but by the time of the funeral,
it was clear that there was something wrong.
Kathy Wone knew that Joe Price
was a close friend of her husband's,
and Joe Price is a pallbearer at Robert's funeral.
I was standing across the casket from Joe.
I said, So how are you sleeping?
And he just buried his head, he didn't respond.
We heard Joe was playing the victim card at the funeral.
There was a receiving line for Kathy and the Wone family.
And Joe had his own receiving line to accept condolences.
I remember standing in the lobby kind of greeting people
and saw the detectives come in.
I knew something was odd.
How many times do detectives go to funerals?
We're about one week into the investigation.
After we hit a dead end on the sexual assault angle,
we turned our attention back to the first piece of the puzzle.
Where is the missing blood?
No blood on his body, almost no blood on the scene.
Everybody who set foot in that house
other than these three guys could tell you intuitively
this is an orchestration.
We needed to try to prove that blood had been cleaned up.
It was a theory that Robert wasn't stabbed inside that room.
Maybe it happened somewhere else in the house.
Maybe Robert's body was cleaned up and then put back in the bed.
If you rewind back to the way the scene was,
it looked like it was staged.
He was just stabbed three times: where's the blood?
You kind of come up with these theories like it had
to have happened somewhere else.
So you start looking at other places.
And we had the K-9 crew come in.
Cadaver dogs are trained to alert on either
decaying human skin cells or blood.
They hit on two locations.
One was the lint trap of the dryer,
indicating that human skin cells, blood,
may have cycled through that part of the dryer.
The dog also alerted on the rear stairwell drain.
Okay, did they clean something off downstairs in the drain?
But we can't find concrete evidence.
What happens is once that blood goes down into the drain
and it mixes with water,
it makes it unlikely that you'll be able
to pull enough of a DNA sample to develop a DNA profile.
We couldn't quite get there, but the dog did alert.
The dog gives a positive scent in a drain--
don't get me started on that.
One theory is, Robert gets stabbed
and they waited to stage and clean up the crime scene.
There's no Clorox, there's no Mr. Clean.
There is zero evidence after a complete investigation
that cleaning agents were used in that home.
The bottom line is there's no blood.
If there was evidence, they would have found it.
The police needed to see if they could find blood
elsewhere in the house, and they searched extensively.
And at one point they used a reagent called Ashley's reagent.
It's a chemical used to search for latent blood,
blood that had been cleaned up.
So we're going to bring in all these chemicals
and we're going to spray the place down and figure out
where the blood is that was hidden or cleaned up.
At first blush, we thought
that they got positive results all over the place.
And what Glenn calls the big ticket mistake
is that they applied it in a way
that was not on the directions,
and it was botched.
I spoke to the guy who invented Ashley's reagent.
You do not apply it to vertical surfaces
because it will drip and it'll obliterate blood stains.
But they sprayed it on the walls and you cannot get it off.
It's like the dye that blows up on your hands
when you rob a bank.
The great Ashley's reagent debacle,
yeah, we definitely took a hit.
There were mistakes made by the detectives,
by the evidence technicians, by myself.
Unfortunately, if it was applied correctly,
they may have found blood elsewhere in the house.
They blew it.
Glenn's theory was they moved the body and put it in the bed.
The government took 280 samples--
the wall, the stairs, the carpet.
They had the house for three weeks,
did in excess of a quarter of a million dollars in damage.
Not a single bloodstain.
We're a couple weeks into it now at this point.
This case is more of what we don't know than what we do now.
After the sexual assault angle
failed to identify any perpetrator,
and after the search for the missing blood was a bust,
the information about the knife took us down
a new investigative path.
The knife had been sent to a lab for analysis.
Once the forensic results are in,
we learn a few really interesting things.
Joe's already told the police that he touched it.
But once they examine that knife,
they don't find a trace of DNA
or fingerprints that can point to anybody inside the house.
And then Glenn was told by the forensic examiners
that those wounds don't match
the size of the knife.
The blade was about five,
or five and a half inches in length.
And yet the depth of the wounds
were about four and a half inches, give or take.
So how do you stab a victim three times?
But make sure you don't insert that last inch
up to the hilt of the knife into the victim's body?
The other suspicious thing is there was white fibers
that were on the knife
and were consistent with the towel
that Joe claimed to have used to stop the bleeding.
I believe that towel, with almost minute quantities
of blood on it, was not applied
the way they had been instructed by the 911 operator.
There were looped pattern impressions
consistent with the towel found in the blood on the knife blade.
How does the fibers from the towel
get on the murder weapon
that's sitting on the end table?
There was no blood on the cutting surface of the knife.
It appeared that somebody had taken a cotton towel,
dipped it in blood, and then applied the blood to the knife.
There were also three cuts to Robert's gray T-shirt
that loosely corresponded
to where the three stab wounds were on his torso.
There was an absence of gray fibers
from the T-shirt on the knife.
In my opinion, the only reasonable conclusion:
that was not the knife used to kill Robert.
That was the plant knife.
We discovered there was also a knife set in Dylan's room.
There is a three-piece cutlery set,
not in the kitchen, but in Dylan's bedroom.
It's where I keep all my good cutlery, is in my bedroom.
Carving knife, carving fork, smaller knife.
And the smaller knife is missing.
And it's a knife that had a shorter blade,
more consistent with the depth of those wounds
than the knife we found on the nightstand.
Come on, now. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes.
Put all that together.
A knife set with one missing knife.
Was that the knife that was used to stab Robert?
The detectives never did find the missing knife.
So if it was a plant knife,
did somebody inside that house that night go down to the block
in the kitchen, grab it, come back up,
put it inside a towel filled with blood
and wipe the knife and then lay it where it was?
Did somebody else take the real knife, go out of the house,
dispose of the knife somewhere that they couldn't find it?
Well, what happened?
That's an open question.
A few months after the murder,
Joe, Victor and Dylan aren't living at Swann Street anymore.
We get a report that
Swann Street has been burglarized.
That ends up getting reported not by Joe, Victor and Dylan,
but by Dylan's lawyer-- curious--
it turns out Joe's brother Michael Price,
comes in and apparently takes the flat screen TVs, pawns them.
You know, of course, we're looking at each other
like this is absolutely absurd.
The charges get dropped, but we come to learn
that Michael Price had a key to the house on Swann Street.
When Joe Price was interrogated by the detectives,
they asked him, who else has a key?
I believe he withheld from them that Michael had a key.
Why are you hiding that from the detectives in the immediate
aftermath of your friend being murdered in your home?
Then we find that Michael Price is attending college at night,
studying to be a phlebotomist, somebody who draws blood.
He has access to Holy Cross Hospital,
where I believe he can easily get his hands
on-- what?-- paralytics,
including succinylcholine,
the most common paralytic anesthetic,
which you can pick up off any crash cart
in any hospital in the country.
He was a phlebotomist. It's a person who draws blood.
He doesn't inject paralytic drugs.
Yes, he did have a key.
But was there anything connecting him
to the night of the murder?
They had no evidence like that.
On August 2, 2006,
Michael, even though he had perfect attendance,
didn't show up for class.
He attends every single class until the night of the murder.
That's the first class he misses.
So, where is Michael the night of the murder?
Turns out Brian Wade tracked his phone
and determined that phone was nowhere near 1509 Swann Street.
People turn off their phones and commit crimes
where they leave them behind because they want an alibi.
It's just speculation.
But then you go, well, what's the motive?
Michael had an alibi that they could not refute.
Michael Price's partner told investigators
that Michael was with him
on the night of Robert Wone's death.
Again, they had no evidence,
Glenn was running out of theories.
What's the next magical act? I mean, who did it now?
Pretty soon they're just going to blame me.
To say that Joe's brother burglarized the house.
Therefore, he must have had something to do with it.
Are you kidding?
I have no idea if Michael Price would have had motive
to kill Robert or not,
but you can't ignore this angle.
We needed to investigate that angle
like we needed to investigate every other angle.
That's the way you assemble a puzzle.
Not by looking at each piece of the puzzle
and then throwing it away.
And we developed it as best we could.
Because let's face it, an intruder doesn't come in
and sexually assault somebody and stab them three times,
all unbeknown to the three guys who live there.
The three guys would have absolutely no incentive
to cover up that crime.
But if it was Dylan or Victor or Joe or Michael,
they're all family, so regardless of which one of
those four might have been involved,
it provides a motive to cover it up.
The more theories Glenn put up,
the more they dilute one another.
He was restrained,
there's a plant knife,
they stage and clean up the crime scene.
Joe's brother did it.
They had nothing on him--
not anyone's semen on Robert,
not any joy toys found in Robert's room.
There's no blood,
no evidence of struggle, nothing.
Robert Wone is murdered,
and the basic crime story hits the papers,
hits the TV stations, then quiet.
No arrests, no advances to the story, no information.
It got to the point where Kathy Wone
was putting pressure on the police.
She wanted to know what was happening.
Up until that point, Kathy,
it almost seemed like she was coming in and out of shock.
This whole story of an intruder. never made any sense.
Kathy goes to her husband's former law partners
at Covington & Burling.
Eric Holder, who had been the U.S. attorney in D.C.,
which is the top prosecutor,
is now head of Covington & Burling.
And then they held a news conference.
For those in 1509 Swann Street when Robert was killed,
you need to truly ask yourselves--
truly, truly, ask yourselves--
have I provided the police with all of the information
that might be relevant to the investigation of this crime?
That doesn't happen every day in Washington, D.C.--
to have a man of the stature of Eric Holder,
who's about to become attorney general of the United States,
to plead for some information.
Kathy then speaks a heartfelt entreaty.
I have a few words for the individual
who took Robert's life.
Having a murder on your conscience
is no small load to carry
as you try to live, I imagine,
as normal a life as possible.
After the murder it seemed like Kathy believed
or wanted to believe their story.
But by the time the press conference rolled round,
it was clear that Kathy was no longer giving them
the benefit of the doubt.
It appeared Kathy thought
that these guys are hiding something.
That was a pivotal point in the story for us,
because no one had heard from Kathy up until that point.
Kathy is a very guarded, reserved, circumspect person.
Over the course of the investigation,
it even seemed like she was going more and more
inside herself.
Kathy is a very private person,
and Kathy Wone says, "Please help us,
give me some closure."
It was so devastating to Kathy to have three--
what you believed were close friends--
apparently unwilling to even explain what happened.
If somebody is completely innocent
of a horrible crime like this,
wouldn't they be shouting that from the rooftops?
Why haven't they spoken out?
At the same time, Joe, Victor and Dylan pulled up stakes,
sold the house on Swann Street, moved to Florida,
and just went underground.
Nobody heard from them.
They stayed together.
They have no interest in being public
in any way, shape or form.
Nothing is happening! Nothing!
I mean, there is not a drip of information coming out!
Why is no one being held accountable?
We didn't have solid, concrete evidence
that you make an arrest on.
We only had some circumstantial evidence.
A good example of circumstantial evidence is,
I went to bed, and I woke up,
and there's snow on the ground.
Did you see it snow?
No, but you 100% know that it did snow.
Just because we haven't found the evidence
doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
We didn't have direct evidence.
In my opinion, the only three people who are in a position
to provide us direct evidence
refuse to and instead chose to cover up the crime.
The absence of evidence is a product of the cover up.
We're now two years down the road
and we needed to move forward.
The perceived weakness that we can't say who killed Robert,
we tried to embrace as a strength.
I never brought a murder charge
because I could never prove who killed Robert.
I believed what I could prove was that Joe Price,
Victor Zaborsky, and Dylan Ward covered it up.
They were part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
To seek an arrest warrant for charges like obstruction
when you don't know who killed Robert is not just unusual,
it was unprecedented.
Was it desperation? No.
The judge agreed that we had probable cause
and authorized us to make an arrest.
When you have three possible coconspirators
involved in a crime, who's the weak link?
Who do we try to break? Who do we try to flip?
And so it was decided we would go first
with an arrest warrant for Dylan.
A new twist tonight in one of D.C.'s
most high profile unsolved murder.
Dylan Ward charged with covering up
the murder of Robert Wone.
And they arrested Dylan, bang!
The story just took off from there.
When Dylan gets grabbed in Florida, they put him in a cell,
"Dylan, this is your only chance.
You're going to jail for the rest of your life.
We know you didn't do it. Tell us what happened."
The strategy was to isolate Dylan away from the other two,
get him into an interrogation room
and get him to tell the real story.
And he said, "What I said that night
is what happened."
Dylan didn't break.
As soon as they get Dylan back here to Superior Court,
the other two men are indicted.
Then we had that conversation with Victor.
Do you want to make a different choice
than the one you've made thus far to hold firm
as part of this conspiracy?
Or might you want to choose another path?
Victor never wavered.
So they were all three charged.
The three Swann Street housemates
charged with covering up
the stabbing death of Robert Wone.
The men were charged with obstruction of justice,
conspiracy to obstruct justice,
and tampering with physical evidence.
It was a bombshell.
Robert is killed August 2, 2006.
It's not until October 27, 2008,
the affidavit comes out,
and it just changes everything.
We punched the affidavit up on the laptop
and start poring through it.
It was written like a horror story.
"Police recovered implements of sexual bondage and torture
from Dylan Ward's room."
There were books, quote, relating to inflicting pain
on others for purposes of sexual gratification.
That's not everyday reading.
Is that the best Glenn's got?
Three guys in a three-way relationship--
"These guys must have done it, they're freaks."
It was salacious. It was sensational.
It was completely irrelevant.
Nothing to do with killing Robert.
Glenn needed the judgment of the court of public opinion
to get some inertia,
and that's why he generated the affidavit,
just for sheer humiliation.
The fact that the prosecutors and police made that public,
they wanted to stir up the pot and see if that would elicit
any reactions, evidence, confessions.
I really did sort of
go back and forth between the, should I believe them
or should I not,
until the affidavit came out.
I remember thinking,
I can't believe what I'm reading here.
The level of depravity is still to this day
stunning to comprehend.
I tried to make sure I kept Kathy apprised of developments,
knowing how hurtful this might be to her.
I recall Kathy just sitting in stunned silence.
It seemed to hit her like a freight train.
And even though you're not dragging the memory
of her husband through the mud, it just--
it feels like this violation.
In my conversations with Kathy Wone,
at this point, the ambiguity is gone.
When the affidavit dropped,
I think that she saw it as a horrible betrayal of trust.
Kathy Wone realizes that Joe Price knows more
and may have been materially involved
and may have actually killed Robert Wone.
I saw red. My blood pressure went up
and I couldn't hear anything except the heartbeat in my ears.
Such anger at the deceit and not having
aired this earlier.
If there was this much information,
how come this wasn't solved?
Up until November 2008,
the intruder theory was plausible.
Somebody broke into a house.
It was a random, senseless murder.
It was believable.
The affidavit drops,
and that was a real change in direction
for how the gay community approached the case.
People were conflicted and trying to reconcile a leader
who they respected with this heinous crime.
This happened in our neighborhood.
And so we thought we needed to jump on this.
Through the blog itself,
we might be able to shake enough trees
that some more information might drop.
We're the Scooby Gang and we're meddling wherever we can go.
It's frustrating. It's frustrating for us.
I know it's more frustrating for Robert Wone's family.
We were pretty much a gay family of choice,
looking at a family that was falling apart
three blocks away.
We had a good friend who ran in their circle.
We learned it was not a three-way relationship,
it was two two-way relationships,
two separate relationships within the same family.
Those dynamics set up
what probably exploded that night
in some way or some fashion.
This is where all theory and speculation comes in,
because you have to get from a house
that is a simmering cauldron of emotions
between three people,
to your friend is murdered
in your second floor bedroom.
Within a matter of an hour or so.
79 minutes to a methodical murder.
That is the leap that...
again, makes this case
really confounding.
The prosecutors have long believed that the three men
inside that house have known and know who killed Robert Wone,
but for whatever reason, they are conspiring together
to keep that from the government.
Joe, Victor and Dylan hired what we called
the million dollar defense.
This is a high priced defense team.
These guys are all very well known.
Some of them are former prosecutors.
And we all know Bernie Grimm.
He is one of the top notch defense attorneys in this town.
In a codefendant case where there's multiple people charged,
one lawyer can only represent one person.
But we agreed beforehand we would have a joint defense.
We all knew one another quite well.
Bernie Grimm, a longtime
criminal defense attorney in D.C.;
Dave Schertler, who represented Dylan Ward;
Tommy Connolly, who represented Victor Zaborsky.
Glenn was up against three of the absolute best
defense attorneys D.C. could produce.
Bernard Grimm, representing Mr. Price,
has probably one more not-guilties in homicides
in D.C. than anyone else practicing today.
Now, first of all, the BDSM stuff,
it only had relevance because Glenn realized
he had problems with the case.
Glenn files a discovery in a public court jacket
so everybody can see the dildos, the joy toys.
He wants to introduce all that stuff.
I need to go after that and try to tear it apart if I can.
We filed motions to have the sexual devices,
any mention of sexual misconduct,
suppressed as evidence.
The defense argued that there was insufficient evidence
to show that some of the findings
had anything to do with the murder.
The prosecution objected to the motion, but they lost.
We tried to admit it and the judge overruled us.
It clearly was a blow to the prosecution.
It was very dramatic.
The semen and all the S&M devices,
all of that evidence was tossed out.
When you have a victim
who appears to have been sexually assaulted,
and the judge doesn't seem to make the connection,
that was troubling to me; I was surprised.
Glenn never saw that coming.
The evidence was thrown out.
They entered this trial with a severe handicap.
And that was part of the strategy.
It was absolutely the correct. decision.
Judge Leibovitz reminding everyone that her action today
is not a verdict,
nor does it signal
how she may eventually decide this case.
As we're preparing to start the trial,
the defense attorneys filed a really unusual motion,
which was to let the judge decide their case.
In essence, that's the judge sitting as the jury in the case.
With a jury, most murder cases end up in convictions--
seven out of ten.
Because they look in the audience,
it's the victim's mother, father, brothers, sisters.
They hold the whole world in their hands.
The defense argument was that the case was publicized
so widely in the media that they didn't believe
they could get an impartial jury.
You have a right to a jury trial
under the Sixth Amendment; you don't have a right
to a bench trial, to a judge trial.
We have a right to object to that.
We could have forced these three men in front of a jury.
Instead of convincing 12 different people
from all different sections of Washington, D.C.,
Glenn needed to convince one single person
beyond a reasonable doubt.
And he certainly was charging hard down the hill
with confidence that they were going to get convictions.
Judge Leibovitz is a former homicide prosecutor.
She was my former chief of homicide
and I was her deputy years earlier.
So, I thought she would understand and appreciate
that the inexplicability of so much of what happened to Robert
is a tribute to the success of the cover up.
We ultimately settled on not opposing their request.
Who killed Robert Wone? It is a mystery
that's captivated the area for nearly four years now.
The men who lived at that house will go on trial tomorrow,
but not for murder, obstruction of justice.
It's fascinating. This is a murder case,
but it's not a murder trial.
This was a highly anticipated trial.
These were prominent people charged with an awful crime.
Now, the prosecution doesn't have to prove
a motive in this case: Why was Robert Wone killed?
All they have to do is prove
that the three men conspired together
to cover up the crime.
That was the most high profile case I ever covered.
The trial could last up to five weeks.
If convicted, they can each get up to 38 years in prison.
The courtroom was packed from the newspapers
to the radio stations to the television stations.
We were all in there.
There's no cameras.
So we had to have a sketch artist.
What I remember about that first day
is seeing all of these people
we've been talking about for years.
Finally, there's Joe, Victor, Dylan, all these attorneys,
Kathy Wone and a whole group of Robert's friends.
I get butterflies before every trial,
before every opening statement.
I knew I'd have to prove three key things at trial.
First, there was no intruder.
That's provable bullshit.
Second, we have three gaping wounds to his torso
but no blood-- no blood on the scene.
And that the knife that they left on the nightstand
was a plant knife.
All of that, I believe, proved beyond a reasonable doubt:
this was a clean up followed by a cover up.
So this is the scale model
constructed for the murder trial of Robert Wone.
These three guys claim that an intruder
scales the security fence,
comes upon an inadvertently left unlocked back door.
He's got to take a knife out of the butcher block in the kitchen
and make his way through the living room.
The intruder then walks up 16
more-than-hundred-year-old wooden stairs
that creak like all get out;
he gets to the top of the second floor,
has no interest in apparently, Dylan's bedroom.
Instead. turns 180 degrees,
walks all the way to the guest room,
opens the door,
walks around all the way to the other side of the bed,
and he inserts a knife into Robert's torso three times,
making three identical stab wounds.
He leaves the knife either lying across Robert's torso
or in Robert's chest--
because Joe Price told detectives both things.
Comes back through the second floor,
presumably runs, because you don't just leisurely
saunter away from your own murder scene,
comes back down the stairs without being seen,
without being heard, without being detected.
Makes his way all the way out the back door, over the fence,
without disturbing the pollen on the top rail.
So I think the only logical conclusion
is that the killer is Spider-Man.
Glen's a good courtroom lawyer.
I would say his biggest victory was his opening statement.
Remember, Glenn's job is to build.
We don't build a building next to it
that's bigger and nicer,
because then we're assuming a burden,
saying, Judge, our case is better.
Never assume the burden.
Our job is destruction.
You take their case and you start taking it apart
brick by brick by brick.
Glenn's basic format:
four people in a house, one person dead--
that is very persuasive.
It stops there.
The rest of it is nothing short of voodoo.
The defense says it's a case
based on assumption and innuendo.
The defense says the police never really investigated
the theory that an intruder broke into the house that night.
But today, they have the evidence to prove it.
The first time we were here with my investigator,
he realized that you could open this mail slot,
put your hand in and open the door from the inside.
The defense also submitted as an exhibit
a short clip of one of the defense attorneys
grab the top of the fence and vaulted it.
Not complex, you didn't need superhuman strength.
During the investigation,
we knocked on the door of this house right next door.
The housekeeper was there and she was home that night.
She explained that the morning following the homicide,
she finds that there are two foot impressions
on the sandbox,
as if someone had jumped over the fence
and landed right on this.
She walks next door, finds the detective and says,
"In my backyard, I might have something
you'd be interested in seeing,"
evidence that would show
that someone jumped over the fence at Price's house,
and the police detective says, "Don't worry about it.
We already have the people involved."
This is the next day.
Pretty compelling evidence ignored by the police.
Today's testimony could make or break the prosecution's case.
The deputy medical examiner took the stand.
The fact that there wasn't any blood found at the scene
was one of the biggest mysteries in this case.
A man is stabbed one, two, three times
in the chest.
One of the stab wounds goes through his heart.
There are a few drops of blood. Where's the blood?
The first day of my testimony
was all dedicated to the autopsy findings
and the three stab wounds.
These wounds injured his heart and major blood vessels
that would have caused significant blood loss.
I was able to measure blood
that had accumulated in Mr. Wone's body.
My estimation was approximately one third of his blood volume.
As to the whereabouts of the other two thirds,
I don't know.
The medical examiner testified
that she found a third of a normal human being's blood
in Robert Wone, but the defense is saying that there wasn't
the bleeding that the police would expect to see.
The defense does not necessarily have to provide
anything more than poking holes or questioning the evidence
and the claims by the prosecution.
And this is what the defense did.
The renowned crime scene expert, Dr. Henry Lee,
big time witness in the O.J. Simpson case,
brought to superior court today by the defense.
Dr. Lee takes the stand
and he is saying that Robert was stabbed through the heart,
he bled out internally.
And so all of the blood remained inside his body.
That's why you didn't get any blood spatter
out around the bed or in the room.
I disagree with the defense theory
that there would have been minimal external blood loss.
And they tried to say that Mr. Wone died almost instantly
because of the wound to his heart.
There was internal bleeding.
We know that because he was forced to lie there
digesting his own blood before he ultimately died.
There also would have been external bleeding.
Jeff Baker said his torso appeared
as if it had been completely wiped clean.
I'm going to credit the first one on the scene
before I'm going to credit Bernie's take on any of this.
During the trial, what stood out to me
was the fight over the knife.
Glenn is saying it's a plant knife.
They dipped a towel in Robert's blood,
and then they took the knife
and then they drew the knife through the towel.
Dr. Lee proceeds to give a theory on the knife.
It is opposite of Glenn's theory.
He demonstrated it was like taking a knife
and dipping it into a catch a bottle.
So you're plunging it in and out, in and out.
And that he could see that kind of pattern on the knife
found at the scene.
I still remember Glenn Kirshner standing in the courtroom
arguing, "that knife is too long to inflict those wounds."
The knife that was perfect would have been
in the knife set that was inside Dylan Ward's bedroom.
Glenn said Dylan or someone used that knife, killed Robert,
then discarded the knife so the government couldn't find
the murder weapon.
And then you have the coup de grace here, right?
The defense attorneys bring Dylan's mother in to testify.
Dylan Ward's mother had said the cutlery set
that Dylan Ward had, she had mailed to him.
The one knife that was missing
that the government said was the murder weapon
was a knife she removed and kept for herself
and did not mail to Dylan.
This was a surprise.
You don't get to stop proceedings mid-trial.
We're surprised all the time.
You don't get a recess.
This is a shootout at the O.K. Corral.
You know, Wyatt Earp doesn't say, "Hey, I'm out of bullets,
do you guys mind waiting for a second?"
And it was not a surprise that the mother of a defendant
would come in and say, "Hey, I have a piece of evidence
that helps my son."
I don't call people liars in court.
Parents try to help their children.
It's human nature.
Trials are kind of like heavyweight championship fights.
You are in there throwing punches,
having punches thrown at you.
At the end, you're bloodied and you're beaten up, you know.
At some point, that final bell rings.
After sitting through all the evidence,
how the defense had argued so vociferously with Glenn
over the knife and hearing Dr. Henry Lee's explanation,
there were parts of the trial that made you really question
what kind of case the government had here.
Today, the defense rested its case.
They've called seven witnesses, including four doctors,
in an effort to prove that the three housemates
had no knowledge of the crime, no time to cover up that murder.
What I tried to prove was that these three men had lied,
engaged in misdirection,
and that they all did it jointly in a conspiracy,
full stop.
Glenn's evidence is just bullshit.
In order to find one, two or three guilty,
you have to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt
that all three of them conspired to obstruct justice
by cleaning up the crime scene, by delaying the phone call,
by getting rid of evidence-- and then, which person did it?
Therein lies your problem-- the math problem.
Glenn kept using the word "they"-- well, who?
Which one did it?
Which two did it? Did all three do it?
The prosecution has rested in the obstruction case
involving the murder of D.C. lawyer Robert Wone.
A judge is now deciding the fate of the three defendants.
I thought that Glenn presented enough evidence
to find those guys guilty of obstruction.
The misdirection to the intruder theory,
the guys being freshly showered--
to me, that alone told you they were hiding things.
I hoped every night when I went home
that they were going to get convicted.
Judge Leibovitz was deliberating.
The case was closed, she said,
"I'll be back in a week with the verdict."
The entire time you're on pins and needles.
Another big story, a ruling in the trial against three men
accused of covering up the murder of Robert Wone.
I remember being in the newsroom
and getting a call
that there was going to be a verdict,
and racing to Superior Court.
We all get in there, the place is packed.
Each of the defendants were very solemn when they came in.
There was no levity.
There was a hush when Kathy and Robert's family came in.
The judge takes the bench
and you could feel the tension within the room.
There was a tremendous amount of anticipation for this verdict
where either these three guys were going to be convicted,
handcuffed and taken away,
or they were going to walk free.
I turned first to the intruder theory.
I am persuaded by the trial evidence
that the murder of Robert Wone
was not committed by an intruder unknown to the defendants.
The judge pretty easily dismissed the notion
that an intruder, unknown, unseen, unheard,
had killed Robert.
It's a 38-page document.
I remember sitting there.
I had a reaction on virtually almost every page
where I would say, "Oh, she's going to convict."
This is not to say that there is no possibility whatsoever
that an intruder entered, as the defendants say one did.
And then the next page, "oh, she's going to acquit."
The essential question remains
whether the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt
as to any defendant
that he knew sufficient information about the murder.
Uniformly, they said that there was an intruder,
in separate rooms, in separate interviews.
She could not conclude that that was obstruction of justice
because she couldn't conclude specific intent.
Some of the most persuasive evidence supporting
the government's position
is each one of them displayed a demeanor
wholly at odds with what anyone would expect
from an innocent person whose friend
had just been murdered.
She shredded the three of these men's characters.
This was true during the 911 call.
And when the defendants were on videotape talking to police,
Mr. Zaborsky was histrionic and tearful,
but his words and demeanor on the 911 call
are at best odd and eyebrow raising,
and at worst, calculated.
- Bizarre behavior. - Bizarre.
Mr. Price was consistently arrogant,
unconcerned and dismissive.
Emotionless. It doesn't make any sense
with the loss of a deep, longstanding friend.
Mr. Ward was, from the start, distant and detached,
unmoved and calm.
Like, fuck-- it sounded like she was going to
find them all guilty.
It's almost as if you see a tractor trailer
about to T-bone your car,
and you don't know if you can get out of the way quick enough.
It was 47 minutes of terror,
absolute terror.
And then-- - I conclude that the knife used
to commit the stabbing was, in fact,
the kitchen knife found on the nightstand.
She did not believe that that knife was a plant.
She believed, based on the evidence that she had heard
from Dr. Henry Lee, that that was the murder weapon.
But as she's going through the evidence against Joe Price,
she believed that he had tampered
with the knife at the scene.
It is very likely that Mr. Price
pulled the murder weapon from the victim's chest,
wiped the blade, and even possibly
the handle of the knife.
But she couldn't come up with the intent.
I cannot say why he pulled the knife
or that his reasons for failing to tell the police about it
were to obstruct justice.
This is a roller coaster you're going through
as you're sitting there, as she's reading this,
you're going back and forth.
I conclude that the government's evidence
does not prove the defendant's timelines are false.
She didn't believe that they had delayed the call to 911
or that they had cleaned up the blood.
The American criminal justice system
presumes a person innocent
until the prosecution proves him guilty.
The degree of certainty necessary to convict a defendant
is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Based on the foregoing, I find Joseph Price,
Dylan Ward and Victor's Zaborsky...
Not guilty.
It all just sort of went up in a puff of smoke at the end.
There was just a collective exhale.
The judge says "not guilty,"
and you just walk out of there stunned.
And at that point, I recall Kathy Wone
and the other members of the family
quickly exiting the courtroom
before the judge even gaveled out.
There was no justice for a woman who lost her husband,
no justice for a mother and father who lost their son.
There was no elation on the defense side.
There's no winners. Everyone loses.
Kathy lost her husband.
Joe lost his reputation, his partnership.
They were excommunicated from the District of Columbia.
It's a tragedy.
Even if the defendants did not participate in the murder,
some or all of them knew enough about the circumstances of it
to provide helpful information to law enforcement
and have chosen to withhold that information
for reasons of their own.
The judge even acknowledged
that she did not buy
the story they were telling.
So, how do you find them not guilty?
My focus on the difference between moral certainty
and evidentiary certainty in this case
is probably cold comfort to those who loved Robert Wone
and wish for some measure of peace or justice.
Judge Leibovitz said, "Make no mistake,
I know what happened in there,"
which was completely gratuitous and unnecessary.
Judge Leibovitz made an observation
that there's a difference between moral certainty--
that these guys covered up the crime
and we all kind of know it--
and evidentiary certainty--
more precisely, proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The judge has acquitted all three
on obstruction of justice charges.
Kathy Wone left the courthouse in tears,
her quest for justice in a shambles.
She declined to comment.
As they have since the night of the murder,
all three defendants also had nothing to say.
We have no comment right now.
We all understand and accept the judge's verdict.
We can only hope that further evidence
continues to come to light
that will allow us to move forward
in the homicide investigation.
I-- "regret" is too strong a word;
I question myself.
I think we made the best decision
for the right reasons at the time.
Maybe I should have seen things that I didn't see back then,
because perhaps the result would have been different.
I think the Court's verdict reflects just a lot of time
that the judge spent over the evidence,
over the testimony.
Unless there's other evidence I'm unaware of,
you'll never shake me that Price is innocent.
I could be fooled, but after 33 years,
I can get a pretty good read on people.
He was factually innocent; and if he is, the other two are.
There's not unanswered questions,
there's one singular question, which is: who did it?
A bombshell dropped in the trial of three men accused
of covering up the murder of a friend.
A source familiar with the case says his widow has agreed
to settle her $20 million wrongful death
civil suit out of court.
Kathy brought a wrongful death suit against the three guys,
Joe, Victor and Dylan.
Kathy wanted them to speak. She begged them to come
and testify at the civil trial.
They took the Fifth.
They are hiding behind the Fifth Amendment
on very straightforward questions like,
Did you kill Robert Wone?
Kathy Wone settled for a cash settlement to a charitable trust
because the trio refused to cooperate.
It's undisclosed, the dollar amount--
we have no idea.
When you settle a civil suit,
when you've been accused of wrongfully
causing the death of somebody, and you decide,
I'm not going to go to court and fight that,
rather, I'm going to pay out to make it go away--
I don't equate that with justice.
It's very draining.
It does require a lot out of you,
both emotionally and physically.
You come to realize that it's actually very sacred.
That makes a big difference,
rather than just viewing that emotional void
as just a black hole.
The four and a half years that I had with Robert,
it is a very sacred.
There are three people who know who murdered Robert Wan.
And they're still not talking.
It angers me that
Joe, Victor and Dylan
abdicated their responsibility
to their good friend Robert.
It's not over yet.
It may be a long time, but it's not over.
To this day, we don't have answers.
I'm hoping that somebody will recall something
about that night that they never told anybody and come forward
and give us the keys or the clues
that help detectives solve what happened.
When I die, first question I'm going to ask God:
Who killed Robert Wone?
One of the things I've come to learn
over my career as a prosecutor is,
justice is a never-ending journey.
It's a process.
Glenn has told me, even though he's retired
from the U.S. Attorney's office, this will always be his case.
There's no statute of limitations on murder
in the District of Columbia.
If evidence surfaced down the road
that would prove what happened inside that house that night,
somebody could be prosecuted.
The homicide case is still out there lurking--
all's Glenn needs is one statement, one accident,
somebody says something out of context,
and he's back in the ball game.
They bring them up on murder charges and I'll try it.
I-I'll do it for nothin'.
I don't feel like I've ever stopped.
We'll keep working to find Robert's killers.
That final chapter remains to be written.
Why would it be Dylan as opposed to Joe or Victor?
This case has more questions than it has answers.
I don't know. And it will bug me forever.
But yeah, you're right, if somebody said,
"Bernie, there's a gun to your mother's head,
what's your best guess?"
I'd say Dylan.