Robert Wone

Late on the evening of 2 August 2006, a 32-year-old lawyer named Robert Wone was finishing up work at his office at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C. Instead of commuting back to his home in Oakton, Virginia, Robert decided to crash for the night with a college friend of his. However, within two hours of arriving at this friend’s house, Robert was dead, and the circumstances surrounding his death were baffling...

On the night of August 2, 2006, a 32-year-old lawyer named Robert Wone was finishing up work at his office at Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C. His commute home was long; he lived outside of the city in Oakton, Virginia with his wife, Kathy, and he’d had a long day; rather than trying to get home via public transportation at 9:30 at night, he’d made arrangements with a college friend, lawyer Joseph Price, to stay in the guest room at his Dupont Circle home. Within 2 hours of arriving at Price’s 1.2 million dollar townhouse, Wone was dead, and the circumstances surrounding his death were baffling. Price and the two other people living in the home, Victor Zaborsky and Dylan Ward, were the last people to see him alive, but getting the truth out of them would prove to be a herculean task for investigators...

This is the story of the murder of Robert Wone.

Robert Wone was born the eldest of two sons to parents William and Aimee on June 1, 1971, in Brooklyn, New York. A 4th generation Chinese American, his great-grandparents immigrated from China to the United States in the 1930s; the family had lived in New York ever since.

Kind and competent, he was a bright kid who made friends easily. The kind of guy who snuck out of his college dorm room at night to scrub school statues clean of bird scat. Someone who put change into random parking meters so that the stranger wouldn’t get a parking ticket. He did good deeds just for the sake of doing them.

To describe Robert as promising would be an understatement. After being accepted as a top applicant to the College of William and Mary in Virginia, he worked as an aide to the President of the university. He folded seamlessly into a strong clique of equally promising friends. There he met Joseph Price, an ambitious future lawyer, who turned into a lifelong friend after the pair revamped a campus secret society called the 13 Club that did covert acts of kindness.

After graduating with his bachelor’s in 1996, Robert went on to obtain a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He landed a job with the prestigious law firm Covington & Burling and became a rising star within the Asian-American legal community.

At a legal conference in January 2002, he met his future wife, Katherine Yu. Katherine, or Kathy as she is known by friends and family, was the daughter of Korean immigrants and grew up in Chicago. Kathy had her own slate of academic achievements as well as a promising career as a lawyer. After the conference, she and Robert started a long-term relationship that quickly turned serious. Within a year, Robert proposed; she moved to Washington D.C., and they were wed in 2003. It was the beginning of a blissful and loving marriage.

By 2006, they had it all: careers they loved, friends who cared, and bright futures ahead.

Unfortunately, the Wone’s wouldn’t get the happy ending they were hoping for.

By early summer of 2006, Robert Wone knew he wanted something more out of life. He was prospering as a young lawyer at the Covington & Burling law firm in DC, but his desire to be of service to his community was strong. He told his wife, Kathy, that he wanted to try for a position as the General Council for Radio Free Asia, a non-profit American news organization aimed at supplying uncensored media content to under-served and oppressed communities in Asia.

It almost certainly meant a severe decrease in Robert’s salary if he accepted the job, but Kathy was all in. She wanted him to be happy and feel fulfilled with his work. She had a good job at a healthcare consulting firm. They would be just fine.

Robert went through the interview process and landed the job. By early August, he was settling into his new role. On August 2nd, Robert made arrangements to stay overnight in Washington D.C. There was a night-time legal seminar he was excited to attend, and afterward, he wanted to go back to the Radio Free Asia offices and introduce himself to the second-shift staff. He and Kathy talked it over, and both agreed that staying overnight in DC would be easier than trying to make the long trip home via public transportation back to their condo in Oakton, Virginia. It just so happened, a dear friend of Robert’s from college, a person Kathy also knew very well, lived in a prime location off of Dupont Circle: Joseph Price.

Joe Price met Robert Wone in college at William and Mary. He graduated in 2003 and went on to get his law degree from the University of Virginia. Joe Price was very active in the gay community, and when he graduated from UVa, he became the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association. By 2006, Price had made partner at Arent Fox, a high-powered national law firm with offices in Washington DC. Life was going well for him.

In addition to career heights, Price was also in a long-term committed relationship with Victor Zaborsky, a Senior Marketing Manager for Milk PEP, or Milk Processors Education Program, i.e., the people responsible for the famous “Got Milk?” campaigns of the early 2000s. The partners fathered two sons with a lesbian couple and seemed to be pillars of the gay community. By 2004, they had brought a second man into their relationship, Dylan Ward, a Georgetown graduate who seemed to bounce around to different careers. The three of them moved into a 1.2 million dollar townhome off of Dupont Circle. They described themselves as a family and maintained a polyamorous relationship with one another, though some assert that Joe was considered the patriarch of the clan.

The three of them hosted Robert Wone’s 30th birthday party in 2004 and shared a close friendship with both Robert and Kathy- Joe and Victor had even gone to the Wone’s wedding in 2003. So, when Robert brought up the possibility of staying in Price’s townhome on the evening of August 2, 2006, Kathy had absolutely no issue.

The Wone’s started their day on August 2nd, just like any other. They went to the gym by their home in Oakton before riding the metro together into Washington DC. They parted with a kiss before heading to their respective offices. When they both arrived at their offices, they emailed each other that they were safe and sound, a daily habit.

After work, Robert grabbed a sandwich and headed to a continuing education legal seminar. That ended around 9:30 pm, and he called Kathy while in the cab heading back to his office to meet with the night staff at Radio Free Asia. After that, he told her he would hail a cab to take him to Joe Price’s and then go to bed. That was the last time she heard her husband’s voice.

At 12:06 am, Kathy got a shocking phone call from Joe Price. “Kathy,” he said, “I can’t believe I’m calling you about this. Go over to George Washington Hospital. Robert has been stabbed in the back.” (per Washingtonian article)

Kathy immediately called her in-laws; they had just moved to the area from Brooklyn, New York in order to be closer to them. Robert’s younger brother was also in town on a visit. The entire family rode over to George Washington Hospital expecting to find Robert in critical condition… but when they got there, he was already dead. Furthermore, Robert had been stabbed in the chest and stomach, not in the back as Joe Price had said. Perhaps Kathy didn’t think much of it at the time, but this was just the first in a long line of discrepancies that would eventually lead to a bazaar and frustrating murder investigation into the death of her husband.

At 11:49 pm on the night of August 2, 2006, a 911 dispatcher in Washington DC received a call from Victor Zaborsky at 1509 Swann Street, N.W. He was crying and frantic as he told the operator they needed an ambulance at the residence. He said an intruder had been inside his house “evidently” and stabbed a friend of theirs who had been staying the night.

“Is someone bleeding,” she asked?

“Yes,” Victor said.

“Where is he bleeding from,” she asked?

“His stomach,” he replied.

She then asked him if the person was breathing, and he said he didn’t know. At that point, the 911 operator sounded confused: “Who is with him?”

Victor said his partner (Joe Price) was with the victim down on the second floor where he had been stabbed, that he (Victor) had gone upstairs to call the police.

“Do you know who did this?” She asked repeatedly.

“We have no idea who did this,” Victor said.

She told him paramedics were en route and to go downstairs and apply pressure to the knife wound with a towel. Her instructions were very specific, and she repeated herself several times: get a towel, apply pressure. When that towel fills up with blood, apply another one on top of it: do not remove the initial towel.

In the background of the call, Victor can be heard telling someone to apply pressure to the wound.

Victor had described a gut wound, and possibly a heart wound as well. The dispatcher knew that meant buckets of blood- massive blood loss from knife wounds to the abdomen was completely normal.

BUT- nothing about this case was normal, and when paramedics arrived minutes later, one of them said the scene they walked into “made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”

The 911 operator told Victor to go open the door for the paramedics, and as Victor made his way downstairs, he volunteered the information that the killer must have run out of the house with one of their knives… She asked him again if he knew who did this, and he replied that he had no idea.

The paramedics arrived at 11:54 pm, 5 minutes after Victor placed the call. He was on the porch wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe, still on the phone with the 911 operator. He pleaded for them to help, said the stabbing victim was on the second floor, and then and then started to sob uncontrollably.

The two paramedics had 25 years of experience combined, and what they found inside the house alarmed them. Usually, when they responded to a stabbing or a shooting, occupants of the house were screaming and directing the paramedics to the victim. Pure chaos. The people at this scene, however, with the exception of Victor on the porch, appeared calm and serene.

As they went up the stairs, they encountered another inhabitant of the house, Dylan Ward, coming out of a hallway bathroom on the second floor. He was freshly showered and wearing a robe. The paramedics asked him what was going on, but he didn’t acknowledge them. Instead, he walked right past them into a bedroom and closed the door.

The paramedics continued down the hall to the guest room where they found the body of 32-year-old Robert Wone lying on a fully-made pull-out sofa bed. No one was attempting to hold a towel over his stab wounds. The house’s owner, Joseph Price, was seated on the bed in his underwear with his back to the door. The paramedics again asked what was going on, and Joe Price simply replied without turning around that he had heard a scream.

The paramedics later said that Price’s behavior was so eerie they looked at his hands to see if he had a weapon, and positioned themselves in such a way that they could both attend to Mr. Wone while keeping an eye on Joe Price.

Robert was found lying with his head on a pillow and his hands down at his sides, his sleeping mouthguard used to keep him from grinding still nestled snugly between his teeth. He was wearing a gray William and Mary T-shirt and had been stabbed three times in the front of his torso through the shirt. One of the paramedics described the heart wound as “gaping,” so big you could fit your finger in it.

There was a knife with a light smearing of blood on the blade sitting on the bedside table, presumably the murder weapon.

Wone had no pulse, and the paramedics knew he had been dead for some time. They performed an EKG on him that resulted in a flat line, indicating no activity in his heart. They transported him to the hospital where he was officially pronounced dead at 12:25 am.

Robert Wone had arrived at the flat Joseph Price shared with Victory Zaborsky and Dylan Ward at 10:30 pm that night, and by 12:25 am on August 3rd, he was dead. What had transpired? Who had killed him, and why did the crime scene look so bizarre? Police had many questions to answer, and they wasted no time in questioning the last three people to see Robert Wone alive.

The Metropolitan Police Department arrived on the scene before the paramedics had taken Robert Wone’s body to the hospital. They noted the guest room was neat and orderly. There was no sign of a struggle, and nothing was out of place. Robert’s work clothes were neatly folded at the foot of the bed, and his wallet, Blackberry, and expensive watch were lying undisturbed on a table nearby. If robbery had been the motive, the thief missed the mark.

Everything indicated to investigators that there had been no struggle. Robert’s pillow had one indentation from his head, just as if he had laid his head down and not moved throughout the entire attack.

Save for a light blood smear that looked as though it had been intentionally wiped across the skin of his abdomen, Robert Wone had almost no blood on his body. This was exceedingly odd for someone with two stab wounds to the stomach and one to the chest.

Stranger still, except for two small blood stains on the sheets beneath Robert’s body, there was almost no blood on the bed either. The sheet was folded down at a 45-degree angle, just like you would see at a five-star hotel, and Robert was almost completely clean. They said the body looked as though it had been “showered, redressed, and placed in the bed.”

Police confirmed the knife on the bedside table came from a knife block in the kitchen, but they doubted it was the murder weapon. For one, the blade was longer than the entry wounds in Robert’s chest. Blood was completely absent from the cutting edge of the knife, as were any cotton fibers from Robert’s T-Shirt. Police did discover a cutlery set in a cabinet in Dylan Ward’s room. The set was missing a 4 ½ inch knife, which would have been consistent with the depth of Robert’s stab wounds. That knife has never been found.

On the floor by the bed, police found a white cotton towel with three bloodstains. The three men alleged that was the towel they used to put pressure on Robert’s wounds… but the stains measured “approximately two-and-one-half by three inches,” hardly the amount of blood you would expect to find on a towel used to stop the bleeding from a knife wound. In fact, the stains looked like ones you might find on a towel after wiping blood off a knife.

Everything about the scene was wrong; none of the forensic evidence matched with what the men were saying to police.

The police took Ward, Price, and Zaborsky to the police station and interviewed them all separately, but they all had the same story..

Robert Wone arrived at the Price/Zaborsky/Ward home around 10:30 pm via taxi. At the time, Victor Zaborsky, having just returned home from a business trip, was already upstairs in bed watching the television show Project Runway.

Ward and Price allegedly stood in the kitchen with Wone, drank water, and chatted for a few minutes before they showed Wone to his guest room. Price went to the third-floor master bedroom that he shared with Zaborsky and went to bed. Ward said he went to his bedroom on the second floor shortly thereafter, read for about five minutes, and then took a sleeping pill and went to bed. He said he heard Wone take a shower in the hallway bathroom and then heard the guest room door close and latch.

After everyone went to sleep, Price and Zaborsky said they were awakened by the door chime. The house on Swann Street apparently had an alarm system that made a sound whenever the exterior doors were opened. They told police they weren’t concerned because they figured it was just their fourth roommate, Sarah, returning home for the night. Then, they heard a series of low grunts or screams, and Price and Zaborsky said they jumped out of bed and ran down to the second floor where they found Wone’s guest room door ajar and him lying on the bed bleeding from stab wounds.

They said neither of them heard another door chime or heard anyone running down the stairs.

Price told Zaborsky to go upstairs to call 911, and he knelt beside Wone and tried to stop the bleeding. He told police he found the murder weapon lying on Wone’s stomach and picked it up and placed it on the side table. Oddly, Price told police they might find his DNA on the knife because he moved it, but they might not find the “real killer’s” DNA because he probably used gloves.

Price told police he didn’t see Ward until after he had sent Zaborsky upstairs to call 911. Zaborsky corroborated this by saying he didn’t see Ward when they initially found Robert, but that he had come out of his bedroom by the time he came back downstairs on the phone with 911.

All three men agreed that an intruder must have come into the house and murdered Wone and suggested the perpetrator might have climbed over the security fence behind the house and entered through the back door.

Investigators doubted this theory. For one, analysis of the fence showed the area had not been disturbed; there were cobwebs and dust that would have been tousled had someone roughly climbed over it. Also, nothing was taken from the house, and there was expensive electronic equipment all over the place. The intruder would have had to bypass Dylan Ward’s room on the second floor and head straight to the guest room to kill Robert Wone, indicating the murderer would have had to know Wone was in the house that night. The only people who knew Wone was in the house was his wife Kathy, and Price, Zaborsky, and Ward.

Police brought in cadaver dogs trained to locate evidence of blood and decaying flesh. Other than the small amount found on Robert’s bed, the only other traces of blood located in the house were found in the dryer lint trap on the second floor next to Dylan Ward’s room and near an outside drain on the back patio. Perhaps someone had washed blood off of themselves on the patio and then dried their clothes on the second floor.

According to a quote from official documents, “By all accounts and evidence, Price, Zaborsky, and Ward have a very close relationship and clearly have the motive to preserve and protect the interests of one another.”

Each of the men gave police information about their relationship to one another and the living arrangements within 1509 Swann Street. Zaborsky told investigators that he and Price had been in a committed relationship for many years, and they brought Dylan into the relationship about four years earlier. Dylan was in a sexual relationship with Joe Price but not with Zaborsky.

Police found various items related to BDSM sex play in Dylan’s room, including shackles, gags, restraints, and a host of other toys. The men explained that Dylan and Joe were in a dominant/submissive sexual relationship in which Dylan was the dominant and Joe was the submissive.

They also found a device commonly referred to as a “milking machine,” designed to be placed on a man’s penis and force him to ejaculate. This became especially pertinent to the police’s theory about what happened following the autopsy of Robert Wone’s body.

Dr. Lois Goslinoski autopsied Robert Wone’s body the day after he was stabbed on August 3. She found three symmetrical stab wounds in Robert’s torso and discovered a broken blood vessel in his eye, indicating he had been smothered in addition to being stabbed. She determined all of the stab wounds had been made with the same roughly 4 ½ inch blade, and each wound was between 4 to 5 inches deep; this effectively removed the possibility that the knife found at the scene was the murder weapon.

In addition to the knife wounds, Dr. Goslinoski found several other strange things on Robert’s body. She noticed several needle marks on his neck, nest, right foot, and left hand that had all been inflicted before he died. She ran a routine drug scan, all of which came back negative, but unfortunately, she did not test for any paralytic agents, and none of Robert Wone’s blood was preserved prior to his burial.

There was no indication that Robert had put up any kind of a struggle; any and all defensive wounds were completely absent from his hands, arms, and legs. It was as though he just laid there unmoving throughout the entire attack.

She also performed a rape kit on his body, swabbing his anus, the inside of his penis, his rectum, and his mouth. The lab found semen present in each cavity, but strangely, all of the DNA found belonged to Robert Wone.

Based on Dr. Goslinoski’s findings and the limited evidence collected at the scene, Police surmised that Robert Wone was attacked, incapacitated with some sort of paralytic agent, sexually assaulted, and stabbed to death on the night of August 2. More troubling, the police found a gap in the timeline. A neighbor heard a scream come from the house while they were watching the nightly news. Though they couldn’t pinpoint the exact time, the program was on from 11 to 11:30. Zaborsky didn’t place the 911 call until 11:49 pm, meaning there was at least a 19-minute gap between when they discovered the body and when they called the police.

The problem was, police had no concrete evidence to point to who actually committed the crime, and Price, Zaborsky, and Ward were no longer cooperating with investigators; they had hired attorneys right after their initial police questioning.

The day after the murder, Price, Zaborsky, and Ward all went to Kathy Wone’s house to pay their respects to their friend’s widow. They all grieved together; Kathy had no idea how fishy their stories were. Joe Price even served as a pallbearer at Robert’s funeral. But, as more information came to light, and it became clear the three men living in 1509 Swann Street weren’t telling everything they knew, distance grew between them and Kathy Wone. Two weeks after the murder, police released a statement saying they believed the crime scene had been altered.

"Technicians were able to determine that the crime scene had been tampered with, including that the area where the victim's body was located had been cleaned," said the document, which was first reported in Legal Times.

By the 1 year anniversary, police were still no closer to understanding the crime or learning who killed Robert.

Kathy Wone and her attorney Eric Holder, who had worked with Robert at his former law firm and coincidentally later served as Barack Obama’s Attorney General, held a press conference to commemorate the anniversary and try to get the investigation moving again.

Holder confronted Price, Ward, and Zaborsky directly:

“For those in 1509 Swann Street, where Robert was killed, you need to truly ask yourselves—truly, truly ask yourselves—have I provided the police with all the information that might be relevant to the investigation of this crime? Only you, your conscience, and your God know the answer to that question, but that is the question you must ask yourselves if you care about Robert, if you truly care about his family, if you care about Kathy—come forward and share all of the information that you have.”

If they thought that rousing speech would loosen the three men’s tongues, they were sadly mistaken. By November 2008, DC prosecutors had had enough. They charged all three of them with obstruction of justice, first Dylan Ward, then Price and Zaborsky.

Six days later, on November 25, 2008, Kathy Wone filed a 20 million dollar civil suit alleging that her husband’s three friends had done nothing to help him after he had been stabbed, and instead spent the last moments of Robert’s life covering up a sinister crime.

The criminal case went to trial about a year and a half later in the Summer of 2010. Despite all of the suspicious circumstantial evidence against the defendants, Judge Lynn Leibovitz said she didn’t believe beyond a reasonable doubt that they had committed obstruction of justice. She told the court that she absolutely believed that Ward, Price, and Zaborsky all knew who killed Robert Wone, but she ultimately acquitted them of the charges.

In August 2011, Kathy Wone settled her civil suit with the three men for an undisclosed amount. She explained her decision to a Washington Post reporter:

“I am moving on. I want to spend the next 40 years of my life focusing on good. They can rot from the inside out from all the secrets they chose to keep. That’s their choice. I chose to move on.”

Police don’t have a concrete theory as to who was responsible for Robert Wone’s murder, but they do have suspicions.

Joseph Price’s brother, Michael, was notorious for getting into trouble. Three months after Robert’s murder, Joe Price’s townhome was burglarized, and it was revealed that Michael Price was one of the perpetrators. The charges were dropped, but police looked into where Michael was the night of the murder. It turned out, Michael, who was taking college courses at Montgomery College, missed the class he had scheduled the night of August 2, 2006. Acquaintances of the Prices told police that Joseph always tried to help his brother out of whatever trouble he was in. If Michael had assaulted and killed Robert Wone, it stands to reason that Joseph would alter the crime scene to keep Michael from going to prison. No conclusive evidence exists to prove this, however.

It is also possible that any other combination of things happened, carried out by the other three men inside of the home on the evening of Robert's murder. While I typically refrain from naming people suspects that haven't officially been named by police or charged, the stories of these three men - Joseph Price, Victor Zaborsky, and Dylan Ward - makes them incredibly suspicious. Their behavior on the night-in-question stands out as particularly unusual, and the details of the crime scene - just feet away from where they supposedly slept - make it hard for me to believe that they don't know what happened.

The sad truth, is that whatever these three men know... they seem committed to taking to the grave with them.

Unless Joseph Price, Victor Zaborsky, and Dylan Ward decide to reveal what really happened when Robert Wone died, we will probably never know what exactly transpired in their townhouse that night. What we do know is a kind and generous soul was snuffed out for no apparent reason, and no one has been brought to justice. It’s tragic and frustrating. Hopefully, one day, their conscience will get the better of them.

Until such a time, the story of Robert Wone will remain unresolved.

Episode Information

Research & writing by Maggie Coomer

Hosting & production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on July 18th, 2021

Producers: Roberta Janson, Travis Scsepko, Ben Krokum, Gabriella Bromley, Bryan Hall, Quil Carter, Steven Wilson, Laura Hannan, Jo Wong, Damion Moore, Scott Meesey, Marie Vanglund, Scott Patzold, Astrid Kneier, Aimee McGregor, Sara Moscaritolo, Sydney Scotton, Thomas Ahearn, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Tatum Bautista, Denise Grogan, Teunia Elzinga, Sally Ranford, Rebecca O'Sullivan, Ryan Green, Jacinda Class, Stephanie Joyner, James Weis, Kevin McCracken, Lauren Nicole, Matthew Traywick, Sara Rosario, and Stacey Houser