Sunday's event wasn't really a vigil. Brownstein and his co-editors at the blog whomurderedrobertwone.com - Michael Kremin, David Greer, and Doug Johnson - didn't make a big deal about getting together, or telling others that they were, though there was a live shot for Sunday's 11 o'clock news.

They just placed some Black-Eyed Susans, and other summer flowers picked from Brownstein's yard, by the front door, and then they stood around and talked about the case.

Wone's death was ruled a homicide - police say he was drugged, sexually assaulted, then repeatedly stabbed - but no one has been charged with murder. Three men living in the residence at the time - Victor Zaborsky, Dylan Ward and Joe Price - have been indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and are to stand trail in May. They deny involvement in his death.

It always comes back to the same point, Brownstein says: "We throw our hands up. We look at the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle and we can't make them fit."

Brownstein's blog is doing some anniversary coverage this week, pondering various theories, reprinting old news stories, and still asking: Who killed Robert Wone? He and the site's co-founders, together, spend as many as eight hours working on it most days; they have no direct connection to the case other than wanting to see it solved.

In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Brownstein and Greer chronicled a series of missteps and mistakes in the investigation. Some of the evidence has been lost, some was tainted from the start. Some has yet to be tested, they say, all this time later:

Many want to see justice in the scores of unsolved cases, but this one example has revealed a chilling fact: Being a homicide victim in the District may be a great equalizer; position guarantees you nothing. If the slain former colleague of the U.S. attorney general gets lethargic and sloppy treatment from authorities, then what hope do the rest of us have? The District may be a great place to live, but it's a bad place to die.

After about 45 minutes standing around outside the old crime scene Sunday, the small group went home. It had seemed the right thing to do.

"We've taken a certain responsibility," Brownstein says.

Over the weekend, the paper's ombudsman, Andy Alexander, wrote in favor of the decision to go with a Web-only presentation of a two-part series by reporter Paul Duggan on the mysterious 2006 murder of Wone, a 32-year-old lawyer.

Here's why Alexander determined that editors made the right decision in restricting the piece to washingtonpost.com:

The affluent and educated Washington market is unique. Post research shows that most area households have computers and that nearly 80 percent have broadband access. Even among households where The Post is read only in print, 86 percent have a computer and 81 percent accessed the Internet in the past 30 days. So while those readers may not like to read online, they have the capability.

And there's yet another crock of nonsense muttered in connection with the Wone two-parter. That well sure does run deep.

I mean, nice job by Alexander getting statistical in his analysis---that's what real reporters do. But if this region is so wired, and if print subscribers have broadband oozing out of their floorboards, then why have a print edition of the Washington Post to begin with?

Washington Post reporter Paul Duggan spent four months reporting and writing a two-part series on a juicy local murder case. The results were published on Monday and Tuesday, to great public acclaim. Yet faithful subscribers who scoop up their paper on the front steps each day found none of it in their pages---only a few teasers sending them to washingtonpost.com.

Is this a bold experiment by a savvy media institution to herd its readership across platforms? Depends on whom you ask.

When Duggan started out gathering facts on the Aug. 2, 2006, killing of 32-year-old lawyer Robert Wone, he got some welcome instructions from his editor. "I told him not to worry about length," recalls the editor, Lynn Medford.

Equipped with his mandate to go long, Duggan threw everything he had into the project. The fundamentals of the story demanded a generous treatment by the local daily: On the night of his killing, Wone, who lived in Fairfax with his wife, was staying in the D.C. home of three friends. He arrived at the house at about 10:30 p.m. Not long thereafter, he would end up murdered, with three stab wounds and a bunch of needle marks all over his body. Semen was found around his genitals and in his rectum.

The three housemates--Victor Zaborsky, Joseph Price, and Dylan Ward---claim the killing was the work of an intruder. Police allege "a weirdly elaborate sexual assault involving the injection of an incapacitating drug," in Duggan's words. Plenty of material, in other words, to keep a reporter occupied for a while.

The two-parter kicked off with a frenzied 911 call from Zaborsky, who told the dispatcher, among other things, "Oh, dear. . . . I can't believe this. . . . I can't believe this."

The full 911 call was a scoop. And if original reporting also counts as scoopage, so did many other details in the Duggan account, including an in-depth look at the bios and "polyamorous" lifestyle of the three housemates. "Who were these guys?" asks Duggan in an interview, pointing out that in previous media portrayals, they were merely "stick figures." Another high point of the series is that Duggan explains why the cops maintain that Wone was injected with an incapacitating drug even though toxicology tests have come up negative.

One more plug for the project: It was presented in a compelling and seamless thread---great, great late-spring-early-summer reading.

Craig Brownstein, one of the editors behind whomurderedrobertwone.com, credits Duggan for adding fresh material, and then some: "I think the real value of Duggan's series was putting most of the pieces into one coherent and compelling narrative....We're just glad he tackled the project and did it in a thoughtful and thoroughly informative way. He's a crackerjack reporter and writer."

Yet the series wasn't compelling enough, somehow, for the Post's top editors. When Medford, a top Metro editor, shopped the completed product to the brass, she was told that it'd have to be hacked way down to make it into the paper. It was a "newsprint issue," Medford recalls being told.

The next stop for the Wone manuscript was the Washington Post Magazine, a logical resting place for such a narrative. But Duggan-Medford got the Heisman there as well. Sydney Trent, an editor at the magazine, writes via e-mail that the story didn't quite clear the publication's bar: "We weren't let in on the Wone story until it was finished and while it was the sort of finely-executed piece you'd expect from Duggan, it wasn't written as a Magazine cover but as a story for the front page. The differences in that regard are considerable, and it was too late in the game to go back and try to retrofit."

Let's halt this blog post right here to contemplate the load of garbage in front of us. First off, who cares if you weren't "let in on" the story till it was finished? That's territorial nonsense. Second off, a narrative is a narrative is a narrative, and this whole mag. v. front page distinction is precious and illusory. How many magazine readers do you really think would have clogged the Free For All page with complaints that the Wone story read too much like a piece from the front section? Third off: "late in the game." What game? The obstruction-of-justice trial for the housemates isn't till May 2010. This thing could have held all summer---who else was going to spend four months reporting the Wone case---Express? Fourth off, retrofitting is what editors are paid to do. Trent showcases the sort of overthinking that leads to disastrous editorial decisions: Here's a story that has new facts and a tight narrative about a murder case that involves polyamorous men and an electro-ejaculation device. End of analysis!

With no foothold in the magazine, the piece wound up as a Web exclusive. Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli suggests the placement was something of a strategic coup:

We wanted to try something new, offering readers a multimedia approach to a fascinating crime narrative about which we'd already written extensively in the paper. And it worked. Readers came, read, looked, interacted and commented in droves. As for space, we have plenty of space in print and in the magazine. The Post will publish stories, in print or online, at any length they justify. If you're suggesting that we're so constrained in print that we're putting stories online, that would be wrong.

Hey Brauchli: See testimony from Medford, above. Also: The Post hadn't already "written extensively" on the case. Its coverage was pretty much limited to "day stories"---breaking news pieces---as the case has progressed over the years. Also also: There was nothing terribly new about this model---the paper did just about the same thing with Bob Kaiser's monster series on Gerald S.J. Cassidy.

Why all the fuss here about Web-only publication? Brauchli's indeed correct that readers have logged on "in droves" to check out the story. So what's the harm in keeping it out of the paper?

Well, it's that subscribers don't get the best that the Post has to offer on their front steps. Post Ombudsman Andy Alexander has written that he's received complaints from readers about the online-only presentation. I'll speak up for this group. We, the subscribers, don't want to click through five pages of Web presentation just to goose pageviews and soak in a story that we'd rather read in print---that's why we, like, subscribe!

It would take a lot of transgressions for me to cancel my subscription to the Post, but this whole Wone thing is a step in that direction.

Keeping the story out of the paper also expresses a certain amount of news arrogance on part of Post leaders. It's as if they think that all the stuff that occupies the 16-or-so pages in the front section is just so precious that it cannot possibly be preempted for something, well, far more interesting and readable.

Take a look at the front section of Monday's Post, the day that the Duggan series debuted online. There's a lot of Washington Post gruel in there, lots of places where room could have been made for Duggan. For starters, there's an AP story on Monday regarding some illegal-immigrant probe in Colorado on page A5. There's some fluff on Valerie Jarrett on A13. There's a big, tepid front-page story looking back on the tenure of former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. And A3 carries a heading "Education Policy & The Nation," featuring a story titled "46 States, D.C. Plan to Draft Common Education Standards." Perhaps some of that stuff could have gone Web-only?

Next time, Brauchli & Co. would do well to heed the lessons of the Chandra series of July 2008. Here was a project with virtually the same formula as the Duggan series: Famous crime + well-constructed narrative + incremental advances in reporting=smashing success with subscribers. When you have something like that, you put it on all your platforms---print, Web, cellular, Kindle, flying saucer, whatever.

During the hearing, Price's attorney Bernard Grimm stated that the drug allegation was news to him.

The allegation struck us as odd. A check in D.C. Superior Court files shows that Joseph Price does not have a criminal record. He has never been charged or convicted of a drug offense. In response to an inquiry, Channing Phillips, the U.S. Attorney's Office spokesperson, stated in an e-mail that he could not comment.

"I'm not able to elaborate beyond what Kirschner said in court," Phillips stated.

But U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, chief of the homicide division, said that his office is seeking additional charges for all three---namely, a tampering with evidence charge.

Also in the Post story was the allegation that Price had possessed or distributed meth, coke and E. Price's attorney argued that he was unaware of the alleged drug use. [We're checking with the courts and Kirschner's office on this one]. If Price had a criminal record, you'd think that would have come out in the already extensive court documents.

On November 25, attorney Benjamin J. Razi filed civil suit on behalf of Robert Wone's widow. The suit was filed against the three roommates---Joseph Price, Victor Zaborsky, and Dylan Ward---who have been charged with obstruction of justice. The civil complaint lays out a wrongful-death case; the family is seeking $20 million. But I wonder if there isn't a huge flaw in the case already. Did the family file its civil case too late?

Under "Count One: Wrongful Death," plantiff's attorney Razi cites the District of Columbia's Wrongful Death Statute, D.C. Code 16-2701.

That statute basically defines wrongful death and sets the definition and scope. But D.C. Code 2702 lays out who can bring a wrongful-death case and the statute of limitations for such cases:

"An action pursuant to this chapter shall be brought by and in the name of the personal representative of the deceased person, and within one year after the death of the person injured."

Robert Wone was murdered on August 3, 2006. His death is more than two years old. So, did Razi---a partner with big-time firm Covington & Burling---make such an error and file his wrongful-death case too late?

Razi isn't saying.

When reached on the phone last night, Razi refused to discuss this potential screw up. “We’ll address that and any other legal issue in our pleadings," he said. "I don’t have any other comment.”

One prominent attorney we talked to says: "The statute of limitations on a wrongful death case is one year. I know of no exceptions. But I haven't seen the complaint. Maybe they thought of some thing I don't know about."

You can read the civil case complaint. (PDF, 3.6 MB)

*photo courtesy of Model Minority.

The murder of Robert Wone is a tragic case. The circumstances of his murder are presented in the affidavit's now famous, grim narrative of drugging, stabbing, and sexual assault. Yesterday, a prominent lawyer called me to point out two holes in the law man's narrative involving the three---Victor Zaborsky, Dylan Ward, and Joe Price---now charged with obstruction of justice. The lawyer, who has zero involvement in this case, says these are holes any defense attorney would do well to exploit.

Defense attorneys have already started filing stuff in D.C. Superior Court. They may well turn their attention to these holes in the prosecutor's case if they haven't already.

Question No. 1

On pages five and six of the affidavit, Deputy Medical Examiner Lois Goslinoski notes that none of the knife wounds found on Wone would have rendered him "unconscious immediately." And that "unless otherwise incapacitated (e.g. by being injected with some type of incapacitating or paralytic drug), Mr. Wone would have reacted instinctively to protect himself and/or physically fed off his attacker." It goes on to state that no defensive wounds were found on Wone's hands or forearms. The affidavit notes three needle marks on his body.

Then there is this. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not find any incapacitating drugs in Wone's system. Standard toxicology tests were performed but those tests only screen for a series of drugs like cocaine, methadone, carbon monoxide, meth, ethanol, and barbiturates, among others. "All of which were negative," the affidavit states.

Now here's the admission of a possible mistake the defense attorneys will exploit: "However, there are various incapacitating or paralytic drugs for which no tests were run as there was no early indication---in light of the statements that Price, Zaborsky and Ward gave to the police---that Mr. Wone may have been injected with any such drugs while at the Swann Street residence," the affidavit states.

Oops. Did the ME's Office keep a sample of Wone's blood to do further tests? Why wasn't a more extensive toxicology test performed since the needle marks were surely noted and the lack of defense wounds were probably easily picked up? Who messed this up---detectives or the ME's Office?

Question No. 2

After the crime scene was processed, the affidavit reports, that "a 'cadaver dog' trained to detect human blood and human remains was taken through the house." The dog alerted to possible blood in two locations---the lint trap from a dryer located outside Ward's bedroom, and an outside drain located "at the bottom of a set of stairs leading down to the rear entrance into the basement apartment."

So did police crime techs swab the lint trap and drain and see if Wone's blood was actually there? The affidavit doesn't say whether Wone's blood was found in those two places. If the police didn't check for Wone's DNA, why not?

*photo of Robert Wone by Model Minority.

Also in the motion, which was filed the same day Kathy Wone, Robert's widow, filed a civil suit against the three men:

Frustrated at its inability to determine how Wone died, the government’s logically-flawed affidavit argues that since the police were unable to identify a third-party ‘intruder’ responsible for Wone’s death, then all three defendants must know more than they are telling, must have tampered with the crime scene, and must have lied to the police....

Without distinguishing among the three defendants, and without specifically attributing any illegal action to any of the three men, the government tosses them all into the affidavit and grossly assumes that they must have done something to obstruct justice....Lacking evidence that any of the three men had anything to do with Wone’s death, the government relies on rank speculation in an attempt to make its case.

The motion marks the first substantial public statements from the three men since their indictments.

Full disclosure: I am acquainted with the accused in this case and met Kathy Wone at her husband's funeral.

One other aspect of the Wone case jumped out: There are some powerful attorneys on all sides of this case.

You have Benjamin J. Razi representing the family in the civil suit. He is a partner with Covington & Burling. His resume boasts more than a few solid examples of his case work from public accountability cases to pro-bono work as a defense attorney in a major drug case.

The U.S. Attorney's Office lawyer handling the criminal case is long-time, respected prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. The guy is a total pro and has taken on some of the more high-profile cases in the city's recent history. I've seen him in action and he's a bulldog. Very few lawyers that call D.C. Superior Court home are as articulate and passionate.

And finally, two of the defendants are represented by Bernard Grimm and David Schertler.

Grimm is a long-time criminal defense attorney, who recently started handling white-collar cases. Don't hold the fact that he is a regular talking head on Fox News against him.

Schertler is a former prosecutor who has tried more than 50 jury trials. From 1992 to 1996, he served as the U.S. Attorney Office's chief of the homicide division. He has gone on to represent clients in some high profile cases involving Enron, KPMG, and the Teamsters. And, well, Paul Strauss' drunk-driving case.

Whatever happens in the Wone case, expect some legal fireworks, expert arguments, and no BS. These guys are some of the toughest attorneys in town.

Where's he going? Well, Ward will be living with the two other former roommates who were also recently charged with obstruction of justice.

The Post account of the mundane proceedings had one bit of news: "Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner said there were additional charges against Ward before a grand jury, but declined to identify what those charges were."

Update 3:15 p.m.: Robert Wone's family just filed a wrongful-death civil suit in D.C. Superior Court. The $20 million lawsuit was filed against the three defendants charged with obstruction of justice. The Post writes that the civil suit complaint alleged the defendants covered up the murder.

Three men were just indicted by a grand jury with obstruction of justice charges stemming from the investigation into the August 2006 homicide of attorney Robert Wone. All three were former roommates in a Dupont Circle house where Wone was found dead. Police say he had been drugged, sexually assaulted, and stabbed to death. As alleged details have leaked out about that night, Wone's death has become one of the most notorious in recent District history.

The U.S. Attorney's document on the case states: "From on or about August 2, 2006 through on or about August 3, 2006, within the District of Columbia, Joseph Price, Dylan Ward, and Victor Zaborsky, corruptly obstructed and impeded, and endeavored to obstruct and impede, the due administration of justice in an official proceeding, namely the criminal investigation into the murder of Robert Wone."

*photo courtesy of Model Minority.

I was at Robert's funeral. It was perhaps the saddest funeral I have ever attended and I never even met him. Both my husband and one of our dearest friends went to college with Robert and with Arent Fox attorney Joe Price, one of the three men who lived in the house where Robert was killed. I know Joe, his partner, Victor Zaborsky, and Dylan Ward, who was charged last week with obstruction of justice, tangentially and have been to the Swann house a couple of times for cocktails. All three of them are funny and sweet and I have seen true acts of kindness from them regarding our mutual friend.

I don't know what happened the night Robert was killed, but the affidavit describes a murder worse than I imagined, inferring that he was drugged, sexually assaulted, and was alive for some time after being stabbed repeatedly in the chest. It's a difficult read for anyone, but I especially worry about Robert's wife. Kathy Wone clearly lost the love of her life and, amazingly, was able to stand in front of a packed church in August 2006 and give a eulogy that was touching and funny and heart-breaking. I often wonder what I would do if faced with a situation like hers; in no way do I begrudge the way she's conducted herself in an effort to find out what happened to her husband. I truly hope some day she does find out. And I would caution that no one at this point has been found guilty of a crime. There seems to be only one certainty in this case so far: It's a tough, fraught situation for everyone involved.