The case of Robert Wone’s murder has a “huge” piece of missing information that can only be filled by the people present in the house when the lawyer was murdered, Who Killed Robert Wone? director Jared P. Scott said Newsweek.
Wone, 32, was found dead in the guest bedroom of his friend Joe Price’s home in Washington DC on August 2, 2006. He had been stabbed three times and the circumstances around his death have meant it is still unclear who murdered him.
Price shared the home with his two romantic partners, Victor Zaborsky and Dylan Ward. All three have denied any involvement in Wone’s murder.
They claimed that Wone was killed by an intruder who they had not seen but had heard leaving the house when they went to investigate a series of grunts from the guest room. After giving their initial witness testimony to the police, the three men then refused to comment any further on the case.
Price, Zaborsky and Ward were charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to allegedly tamper with the crime scene in 2008, and they were later taken to court. In 2010 they were acquitted by a judge who said she could not determine beyond a reasonable doubt that they had tampered with the crime scene as the prosecution had claimed.
Wone’s wife, Katherine, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the three men in 2008, they pled the fifth amendment and did not answer any questions raised in the civil lawsuit. In 2011, the two parties reached a settlement for an undisclosed sum, per a statement shared with the Wall Street Journal at the time.
Nobody has ever been charged with Wone’s murder.
While making the two-part Peacock documentary, Scott attempted to contact Price, Zaborsky and Ward to be a part of the show but they did not respond to any requests that were sent to them.
The three men were in a polyamorous relationship at the time of Wone’s murder. In the documentary it is explained that Ward is no longer with Price and Zaborsky.
Scott told Newsweek that not having Price, Zaborsky or Ward involved in the series left a “black hole” in the narrative, and he shared how he would have liked to have heard their side of the story but since they have not spoken since their first police interrogation he never believed that they would.
“You always have to be careful in this case,” Scott said. “I mean when you’re reaching out to people. You have to remember that the only time that the three friends, later suspects, later defendants, spoke [was] the night of [the murder] at the homicide office, after that they did not speak to press, they did not testify at the trial, they did not speak out at the civil trial.
“They pled the fifth [amendment], and as Robert’s wife says in the show even on simple questions like ‘Did you kill Robert Wone?’ they pled the fifth. They haven’t spoken out, so the idea that they would speak to us… we didn’t have any hope that that would happen. We didn’t expect that.”
He went on: “We do our due diligence as storytellers, we would reach out, you send certified mail, you send letters, you send emails, you do certain things. You don’t harass, you don’t go door knock.
“I think there was a level of integrity that we wanted to bring to the show. There was no kind of ‘gotcha’ moments, we weren’t going to stake out their home or something like that, that’s not the tone and tenor of this piece. Again, we never thought we would hear from them.
“But, of course, it’s a huge piece that’s missing. There’s a huge black hole not having Robert’s voice and there’s a huge black hole not having Joe, Victor, and Dylan speaking. Of course I’d love to hear their side of the story, I think the audience would, I think the criminal justice system would. So, you know, of course we welcome that, but we never expected that to happen.”
Another person who is noticeably absent from the Peacock documentary is Wone’s widow, Katherine. Scott explained that he wanted to be “respectful” of her and not try to re-victimize her by making her appear on the show.
Scott said: “Just to quickly circle back on Joe, Victor and Dylan, we also have to respect that there was due process there, and there’s an amount of respect that when reaching out to them we have to be respectful as well.
“The same extends, of course, to Kathy, we have to be very respectful of her position. If we’re trying to advocate for her to figure out who killed Robert, if there’s victim advocacy you have to be careful not to then re -victimize the family and friends, retraumatize them and, at the end of the day, Kathy did not want to participate on camera and that’s totally understandable.
“I can’t speak for her, I do know from speaking with people that did spend a lot of time with her, the prosecutor, other journalists, that they all said she was a private person, a reserved person.
“This happened 16 years ago, I think she has her own reasons. She didn’t speak out much then, I think she only spoke out during one press conference a year later. So she never put herself right in the center, so, again, we also wanted to be very respectful of her, her feelings towards the case and and how she wanted to participate, or not, and at the end she thought it was best if she did not appear on camera.”
“We, of course, would love to have that heart and soul that she would bring to it,” the director reflected. “We’d love to have more about Robert. There wasn’t a lot of archival footage of Robert, of him speaking or where we could see him just to understand who he was and have that empathy towards him.
The case of Robert Wone’s murder has a “huge” piece of missing information that can only be filled by the people present in the house when the lawyer was murdered, Who Killed Robert Wone? director Jared P. Scott said Newsweek.
