Dinners were served in the basement. Ambassadors, generals with many stars, senior White House officials and closely read columnists — all would walk past the yellowing kitchen, which looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the Ford administration, and down a narrow flight of stairs into the dimly lighted dining room. Guests were arrayed around the table according to rank, with the most important ones squeezed in the center. Although the Old World meals could be quite elaborate — venison paté, duck in bitter orange — they were prepared and served entirely by the host, a stickler for protocol named Albrecht Muth.


Muth liked to refer to his Georgetown row house, which technically belonged to his wife, the journalist Viola Drath, as the Albrechtory. Guests at their dinners included Anne Patterson, Obama’s ambassador to Egypt; Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift; and Pierre Salinger, the Kennedy courtier, followed by his little white dog. Antonin Scalia was another guest, and Muth liked to joke about the time he asked Scalia to officiate his wedding: “Will you marry me?” Muth inquired. “Well, I’m already married,” Scalia replied. In 2006, even Dick Cheney emerged from his bunker to attend a party that Drath hosted.


The couple’s cachet had nothing to do with wealth, however. They lived frugally, mostly off Drath’s first husband’s pension. Nor was it based on their résumés. He once started a small NGO; she wrote articles for a German financial daily. What they possessed was an exquisite understanding of the anxieties of the city’s elite — and an awareness of the power of eccentricity in a city that has little of it. Drath was 44 years older than her husband, a disparity in age that was accentuated further when he referred to her as “madam.”


Albrecht Muth had his own rich lore. According to one tale, he once planted a bug in Madeleine Albright’s master bathroom on behalf of German intelligence, although the device managed to pick up only the sound of running water. Another placed him in Baghdad, working a furtive U.N. mission for Kofi Annan, or Uncle Kofi, as Muth called him. Even Georgetown neighbors who never attended his dinners speculated about the man who carried a riding crop and smoked cigars, which he kept tucked in his breast pocket as he marched past the preppy boutiques on Wisconsin Avenue each morning. After a neighbor once mistakenly referred to the riding crop as a marching baton, Muth sniffed in an e-mail, “I am not Mr. Sousa.”


On Aug. 12 last year, Muth called 911 and reported that he returned from his morning walk to find his wife splayed on their bathroom floor. A 91-year-old tumbling in a bathroom is hardly uncommon, so detectives didn’t initially investigate her death. It took the medical examiner to point out, a day later, that her scalp was bruised, her thumbnail torn and the cartilage in her neck fractured. She had been strangled and bludgeoned to death.


Drath’s murder seized the front page of The Washington Post, which was as awkwardly tangled in the story as the rest of the city’s elite. One of The Post’s columnists attended the couple’s dinners, as did the reporter who covered the case for The Wall Street Journal. Over the years, Muth flooded the in-boxes of his media contacts with messages containing his thoughts on the day’s events and knowing tidbits of insider gossip — speculations about covert operations gone awry or rumors about fights between top generals — a habit that didn’t end with his wife’s death. Four days after he supposedly found Drath’s body, Muth forwarded a note that he originally sent to officials in the Pentagon. He intimated that the police considered Drath to be the unfortunate victim of an assassin who was hunting for him. “I have to take a slain wife out to Arlington,” he wrote, “mourn her, then find her killer.”


When Muth first asked her out in 1982, Drath had been married for nearly 40 years. He was a teenage intern for a lesser-known Republican senator; she was a veteran journalist in her 60s. Muth flattered her by describing his devotion to her column, which he said he started reading in his “youth.”


The schnitzel joint he picked was said to be Henry Kissinger’s favorite restaurant in town. Muth ordered a bottle of expensive wine and, over the course of dinner, recounted the details of great battles, quoted Oscar Wilde and spoke of landing a top job in the United Nations. Although he had only recently arrived in Washington to study at American University, Muth name-dropped like a native. “He acted very entitled, and she liked that,” says Kathryn Livingston, a former executive editor of Town & Country whom Drath hired to edit her memoirs, which she never had the nerve to publish.