Suspicious minds

When she got back from the hospital the morning after her husband's murder, Katherine Wone called one of his old roommates, Jason Torchinsky, another lawyer. He and another friend started informing Robert Wone's many friends and colleagues of his death.

Torchinsky has said that after Katherine Wone talked with Detective Bryan Waid, Joseph Price grilled him about what Wone and the cop had discussed. A former Milwaukee federal prosecutor, Torchinsky told Price thatas the fellow lawyer well knewhe would be violating attorney-client privilege if he repeated their conversations. Torchinsky soon concluded that he was too close to the case to serve as Katherine Wone's attorney. He emailed one of Wone's old colleagues at the law firm of Covington & Burling, who put him in touch with Eric Holder, then a partner at the firm. Holder would help Katherine Wone with the case until he was named U.S. Attorney General in early 2009.

A few days after Wone's mysterious death, Joseph Price, Dylan Ward and Victor Zaborsky joined other friends at the Wone house in Virginia to help plan the funeral.

Price was among Wone's pallbearers on Tuesday, August 8, at Columbia Baptist Church. Tara Ragone remembers that Price seemed crushed by their mutual friend's deathbut she would also recall that there were whispers at the funeral that some people didn't believe the trio's story about an intruder. She was long convinced that the three men she thought she knew so well couldn't have done anything to hurt their friend; later, after hearing more and more rumors, she wasn't sure what to believe.

Detective Waid, who attended the funeral, certainly had his doubts about what really went on that night. Police were convinced that it didn't make sense that a stranger would wander into the house, past Ward's room and into Wone's, quickly and quietly killing him, without even bothering to take anything. Cops questioned the trio. They latched onto the men's homosexuality and their three-way relationship, suggesting that the men had been drinking that night and had been trying to seduce their straight friend when something went wrong.

By the time Wone's William & Mary classmates had organized a memorial for him at the school's homecoming celebration that October, things were tense enough that friends asked Price and his partners to stay away from the event. Price and Zaborsky were on campus, but they didn't attend the memorial.

Meanwhile, Eric Holder publicly begged the trio to give the police any evidence they had. And prosecutors were bearing down on the men, if slowly.