Local
Opposing attorneys spar as Wone trial begins
Prosecutors say case ‘not about sexual orientation’
Opposing attorneys in the complex Robert Wone murder conspiracy trial clashed during opening arguments Monday over whether the defendants’ sexual orientation prompted authorities to prosecute them.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Kirschner said the government would point to the fact that Joseph Price, 39, Victor Zaborsky, 44, and Dylan Ward, 39, were in a three-way relationship as a means of showing that their “strong bond” played a role in their alleged conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Wone, a Washington attorney, was found stabbed to death in a guest room in the men’s Dupont Circle area townhouse in August 2006. The defendants, all of whom are gay, have been indicted on charges of obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and evidence tampering in connection with the police investigation of the murder. No one has been charged with the murder.
The men face a maximum sentence of 38 years in prison if found guilty on all three charges.
“This case is not about sexual orientation,” Kirschner told D.C. Superior Court Judge Lynn Leibovitz, who is poised to decide the men’s fate after the prosecution and defense attorneys opted to forego a jury trial.
“This case is not about the personal relationship of these three. There is nothing negative that can be inferred due to the sexual orientation or the lifestyle choices of these men,” he said.
But he noted that Price, Zaborsky and Ward “had powerful bonds among them,” which amounted to a “tight knit family” that is protecting its members from the harm that would come to them “if the truth came out.”
Kirschner then spent more than an hour outlining the government’s contention that the men tampered with the crime scene, repeatedly misled police and homicide detectives investigating the murder, and know but refuse to disclose the identity of the person or people who fatally stabbed Wone three times in the chest.
He reiterated the government’s assertion in numerous briefs and a police affidavit that the evidence refutes the defendants’ claim that an intruder killed Wone after entering the house from a rear door while they were asleep in their bedrooms.
Among other things, Kirschner noted that paramedics and crime scene investigators found far less blood on the bed where Wone was found with three “gaping” stab wounds and found no signs of a struggle or defensive wounds. He said this is evidence of crime scene tampering.
Defense attorneys representing the three gay men countered that the evidence doesn’t support any of the government’s allegations, including an assertion that more blood should have been found on the scene. From the moment homicide detectives arrived at the house to investigate the murder, they became “marred and infatuated in a theory based on ignorance,” prompting them to suspect the men were involved in the murder, said Price’s attorney, Bernard Grimm.
“Why is a straight man coming to the house of a gay man,” Grimm quoted a detective as saying while interviewing one of the defendants.
Grimm said the defense would present expert witnesses to prove that one of the three stab wounds that pierced Wone’s heart would have rendered him dead within five seconds or less. Grimm said this, rather than a sinister conspiracy, was the reason there were no signs of a struggle and more blood did not flow from the wounds.
And he said there was “no orchestrating of the crime scene,” contesting the evidence tampering charge.
Ward’s defense attorney, David Schertler, said prosecutors were basing their case on “faulty assumptions, speculation and innuendo.”
Following the opening arguments, Wone’s wife, Katherine Wone, took the stand as the first government witnesses. In response to questions by Kirschner, she told how her husband met Price and recounted the friendship they shared as undergraduate students at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.
She said that her husband, whom Kirschner described as “exclusively straight,” arranged to spend the night at the home of Price, Zaborsky and Ward on the night of the murder because he planned to work late at his nearby office at Radio Free Asia, where he served as general counsel.
The trial, which is expected to last weeks, recessed shortly before 5 p.m. Monday. Katherine Wone was to return and complete her testimony Tuesday.
D.C. attorney Dale Edwin Sanders, who practices criminal law, said the part of the government’s case that appears the strongest is its assertion that no evidence exists to show an intruder entered the house to kill Wone. He noted that in cases based on circumstantial evidence, sometimes “missing” evidence becomes the key to the case.
In his opening arguments, Kirschner noted that an intruder would have had to scale a seven-foot security fence surrounding the back yard of the house, even if the rear door to the house was unlocked, as the defense says was likely.
He pointed to police findings that there were no footprints or other signs that someone jumped into the patio and grounds inside the fence. He said police findings also showed that dust, pollen and other debris on the top surface of the fence was “completely” undisturbed, indicating that an intruder did not go over the fence.
Additionally, Kirschner asked if an intruder entered the premises to burglarize the house, as suggested by the defense, why didn’t he take a host of valuable items in clear view, including a laptop computer, which were in his path en route to the guest room where Wone slept.
Schertler, however, disputed the arguments. Among other things, he said that an intruder could have bypassed the fence by using a nearby trash container to climb onto a shed next to the house where Price, Zaborsky and Ward lived, and jumped over the fence. He also noted that the prosecution could not determine the intruder’s “state of mind” as to why he did not steal anything in the house.
Baltimore
This John Waters interview has been edited for readability — but perhaps not human decency
Pope of Trash dishes on Trump, plane etiquette, last meal, and more
By WESLEY CASE | At 80 years old, John Waters is still the ideal dinner guest — incisively sharp, quick-witted and funny as hell.
The chic Baltimore native proved it again and again in a recent Zoom interview, calling from his summer home in Provincetown, Mass.
The occasion was the Blu-ray releases of two of his movies — the 1977 dark comedy “Desperate Living” and his enduring 1988 musical “Hairspray” — on June 23 by the Criterion Collection, which publishes restorations of films it deems culturally important. The Criterion stamp of approval has become the gold standard among cinephiles.
“It’s like getting an award,” said Waters, who wrote and directed both films.
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
District of Columbia
D.C. Council approves expanded grant funding for Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs
Measure introduced by Zachary Parker faces second vote
The D.C. Council on June 9 gave its first round of approval to an amendment to the city’s fiscal year 2027 budget that calls for increasing the number and size of funding grants that the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs provides for local organizations providing services for the LGBTQ community.
The amendment, titled the “LGBTQ Community Grant Amendment Act of 2026,” was introduced by D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), the Council’s only gay member.
The amendment calls for the LGBTQ Affairs office to issue a $980,000 grant in fiscal year 2027 to a private, nonprofit organization in partnership with the office “for the purpose of supporting programs that promote the welfare of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning community.”
The organization would also initiate its own fundraising effort to expand the amount of funds beyond the amount the office would provide, enabling it to provide larger grants to a greater number of local LGBTQ organizations.
Among other things, the amendment says the organization chosen for this new role should have a “proven track record of success in grant making and fundraising” and agree to undergo an annual audit and submit quarterly reports to the office on its use of the funds it receives.
Under its rules for approving legislation, the Council must hold the second vote on the budget bill with the Parker amendment before it is sent to Mayor Muriel Bowser for her signature. It must then go to Congress for a congressional review that does not require approval, but could result in a vote to disapprove the measure, an action Congress usually does not take.
In a June 12 statement, the D.C. LGBTQ Budget Coalition called the D.C. Council’s initial approval of the Parker amendment, “a historic measure that establishes the District’s most sustainable model for a vehicle for investing in LGBTQ communities.”
The statement adds, “The legislation arrives at a critical moment, as LGBTQ-serving organizations face unprecedented uncertainty. Growing demand for services is colliding with shrinking resources, federal attacks on LGBTQ programs, and ongoing threats to local funding streams.”
It says the new program that the Parker amendment would create, if it reaches final approval, “creates a durable mechanism to protect and expand investments in the organizations that thousands of District residents rely upon every day.”
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said he was looking into the mayor’s position on the Parker amendment but didn’t immediately get back with a response.
Virginia
Gay 1920s-era Hollywood star to be honored in Staunton, Va.
Billy Haines became acclaimed designer after anti-gay policies ended his acting career
A project is underway in Staunton, Va., to honor William ‘Billy’ Haines, who was born and raised in Staunton before becoming an out gay 1920s and early 1930s-era Hollywood movie star whose acting career ended around 1934 when he refused demands that he conceal his sexual orientation and end his relationship with his male partner.
Haines left the movie business around that time to start what became a highly successful interior design and furniture business in Los Angeles that he led until his death in 1972 at age 72, and which remains in business today, according to the Arcadia Project, a Staunton-based nonprofit initiative.
In a statement released last month, Arcadia Project announced it is working to revitalize a long-vacant movie theater in downtown Staunton that it plans to rename after Haines. It says a fundraising campaign is under way to support efforts to reopen the theater and the larger building in which it is housed as a “dynamic mixed-use cultural center.”
The statement notes that Haines left Staunton at age 14 and resided in Hopewell, Va., and Greenwich Village in New York City until 1922, when he was “discovered” by a talent scout and sent to Hollywood.
“Between 1922 and 1934, Haines appeared in 54 movies during his meteoric and highly successful career,” the Arcadia Project statement continues, noting he transitioned from silent movies to talkies and was fully open about being gay. “But when Hollywood’s moral crackdown of the 1930s demanded that he end his relationship with his longtime partner Jimmie Shields, Haines refused,” it says.
“For LGBTQ people – then and now – Haines’s choice resonates deeply. Rather than deny who he was, he reinvented himself as an interior designer to the stars,” according to the statement.
It says he helped invent the so-called Hollywood Regency style home and designed homes for Hollywood legends such as Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Carole Lombard, George Cukor, and Jack Warner as well as for political figures like Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.
“As there is no monument, marker or public recognition for Haines in his hometown of Staunton, Va., Arcadia Project, in collaboration with the LGBTQ+ community in Staunton seeks to commemorate him inside a new cultural center,” the statement says.
It quotes Arcadia Project Executive Director Pamela Mason Wagner as saying, “Naming the movie theater in Haines’ honor is more than an act of historical recognition – it is a powerful statement about visibility, belonging, and whose stories are valued in our community.”
The statement says project leaders hope to open the cultural center in early 2027, with a fundraising campaign seeking to raise $250,000 to renovate the theater.
“If the full goal is not reached, a smaller space within the building will be named for Haines, scaled to the amount of funds raised,” it says. “We truly hope friends and admirers of Billy Haines everywhere will want to participate.”
Donations for the project can be made through this site: www.thearcadiaproject.org
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