D.C. police arrested a man who could lead them to the killer of a young attorney who was stabbed to death at a Northwest Washington town house last summer.
On Nov. 11, investigators arrested Phelps Collins, 36, who told them that the brother of homeowner Joseph Price let him into the house nearly three months after the Aug. 2 homicide, documents say, opening the possibility that the killing of Robert Wone, 32, was connected to a drug-related burglary.
At the time of Wone’s death, one of the three roommates told police that an intruder had broken in through the back door, but police doubted the story because they found no signs of forced entry; nothing was ransacked and nothing had been taken.
Collins, 36, was arrested and charged in connection with an Oct. 30 burglary in which thousands of dollars in home entertainment equipment was stolen from the posh town house at 1509 Swann St., just off Dupont Circle. Collins, of the 1900 block of Calvert Street NW, told police that he and Price’s brother, Michael Price, entered the town house last month when no one was home to steal the electronics equipment, documents said.
Collins was ordered held without bond.
Homicide detectives are looking closely at the burglary, though they have found no definitive link to Wone’s slaying, police said.
Wone, general counsel for Radio Free Asia, was staying in the guestroom of his college friend when he was stabbed with a butcher knife. The $1.2 million home was owned by two men who are prominent in the gay community. Joseph Price, a lawyer at a prominent law firm, and his partner, Victor Zaborsky, shared the house with a third roommate, Dylan Ward.
Joseph Price told police last week that his brother used drugs and was friends with Collins, but he did not give them permission to enter the home. Michael Price has not been arrested in connection with the burglary.
All three roommates were home on Aug. 2, the night Wone was stabbed in the chest with a butcher knife. Police doubted that Wone was killed by an intruder. Detectives believed that crime-scene evidence had been cleaned before investigators arrived, according to a search warrant.
Police said at the time they were building their case around physical evidence rather than the statements of the three roommates who were home that night.
D.C. detectives took control of the house for three weeks, bringing in FBI experts to examine blood-splatter patterns and behavioral specialist to re-create the scene. They even brought in cadaver dogs to sniff out blood and other evidence that the high-tech devices couldn’t locate.
