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Interior designer Scott Hixson testified Monday about the night in August 2006 when he went to pick up his Swann Street neighbors from the police station.
“Scott, I’ve just had the worst night of my life,” Hixson recalled his former neighbor and occasional lover Joe Price saying over the phone that night. “Could you come pick us up at the police station?”
As they sat in Hixson’s Mercedes, Hixson recalled Price telling him how he had tried to help his friend, Robert Wone, after finding him stabbed on a pull-out sofa in the guest room of Price’s home at 1509 Swann Street NW earlier that night.
Did he say specifically how he helped? prosecutors asked Hixson.
“That he pulled the knife out of his friend,” Hixson replied.
Price and his Swann Street housemates Dylan Ward and Victor Zaborsky are charged with conspiracy, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence in connection to Wone’s mysterious murder. The three defendants have maintained than an unknown intruder broke into the home and stabbed their friend. Prosecutors accuse the housemates of cleaning up the crime scene and perhaps even substituting a second knife in place of the actual murder weapon in an attempt to confuse investigators.
Prosecutors say the men were motivated to obstruct the investigation in order to protect their unconventional family unit. On the witness stand Monday, Hixson described the housemates as having a “three-way relationship.”
Prosecutors introduced Hixson as “more than a friend” to the three men. Hixson, who lived just down the street from the housemates at 1518 Swann Street NW, testified to having sexual relations with both Price and Ward on multiple occassions—albeit apparently without either knowing of his intimate relations with the other.(Neither defendant showed much visible reaction to that disclosure on Monday.)
Hixson testified to hearing a commotion between 11 p.m. and midnight on the night of Wone’s murder. He looked out his window and saw one of the housemates exit in skimpy attire. Hixson wasn’t sure which housemate.”They were in white bikini underwear when they opened the door,” Hixson testified. He later saw Wone’s body being carried out of the house, he said.