The Murder Of Robert Wone

Paramedics Jeffrey Baker and Tracye Weaver found Robert Wone dressed in shorts and a t-shirt on top of the made bed. His guard he used to prevent grinding his teeth at night was already in his mouth. His wallet and watch were on one table, a kitchen knife on another.

Weaver says it looked like Wone, after being wounded, had been cleaned up, dressed, and put back to bed. There wasn't much blood on the body and almost none on the bedclothes, though one of the three stab wounds was a gaping hole big enough to stick a hand in.

There was nothing to suggest forced entry or a violent struggle, and nothing had been stolen.

A police officer has stated that when he reached the house Joe Price, Victor Zaborsky and Dylan Ward were wearing white bathrobes and look like they'd recently showered; he says they seemed calm. Cops separated the men, and drove them to Anacostia for questioning. They interrogated Price for six hours, Zaborsky for 8, and Ward for 12.

A detective says that he saw Wone's BlackBerry, showing that at 11:05 Wone had emailed his wife to say that he had showered and was about to go to sleep. In a 11:07 email, Wone wrote colleagues to confirm a lunch date. But the detective says they were marked "Unsent."

And prosecutor Glenn L. Kirschner seems to think that Wone may not have been the one who sent those emails.

But the police failed to copy the phone's hard drive before giving it back to Radio Free Asia, which recycled it back into use. Any evidence that the BlackBerry could have preserved has been lost.

Whether Wone sent the emails at 11:05 and 11:07 and was then attacked and killed (and then cleaned up) within the 40 minutes that passed between the emails and Zaborsky's 911 call, or whether someone else sent the emails after killing or at least incapacitating him after his 10:30 office departure, this murder took place within a remarkably short period of time, all while three other people in the house were supposedly getting ready for bed or drifting off to sleep.

How did this crime happen so quickly and so quietly?