Prosecutors this week will play video of the police interrogations of three men accused of covering up the slaying of the promising young lawyer.
The video will help prove that the housemates concocted a bizarre tale that an intruder broke into their posh Dupont Circle town house and fatally stabbed their guest Robert Wone, prosecutors said.
Defense attorneys have said that the videos will demonstrate that the accused trio never wavered from their truthful statements even under the withering accusations of veteran D.C. homicide detectives.
“If these men were not telling the truth, they would have broken that night,” said defense attorney David Schertler during his opening statement.
Joseph Price, 39, Victor Zaborsky, 44, and Dylan Ward, 39, are accused of cleaning up the crime scene and misdirecting police. The men say an intruder killed Wone.
No one has been charged in Wone’s death. The trio are charged with obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence and conspiracy. They face up to 38 years if found guilty on all counts.
On Aug. 3, 2006, during the early morning hours after Wone’s death, detectives drove the housemates to the D.C. police violent crimes headquarters for questioning. At first detectives considered the men as witnesses. But as they learned more from the men themselves and from investigators back at the crime scene, detectives began looking at the men as suspects.
That’s when the detectives turned on their cameras. Defense attorneys said that the detectives aggressively accused the men of knowing who killed Wone, and tried to turn one housemate against the other.
In the first week of trial, prosecutors portrayed the men as being in a three-way relationship held together by Price, a prominent lawyer and former partner at Arent Fox. The trio made a pact to cover up the slaying rather than break the “powerful bond” of their self-described family, Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner said.
A paramedic who responded to the scene testified that the trio acted strangely, and the police officer said that the men’s explanation seemed rehearsed and designed to throw detectives off the trail.
Prosecutors believe that Wone was injected with a paralytic drug and was sexually assaulted before he was stabbed.
The defendants’ attorneys say that police became obsessed with a bizarre theory of the case and never fully investigated the crime. To make the point during opening arguments, Schertler produced what he said was the missing knife that prosecutors had theorized was the murder weapon.
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