A British man charged alongside a former Northwestern University professor Wyndham Lathem in a gruesome 2017 murder has accepted a plea deal with Cook County prosecutors.
As part of a deal announced Monday, Andrew Warren, who had been set to go to trial next week, will testify for the prosecution against Lathem in exchange for a 45-year prison sentence. Warren will not be formally sentenced until after Lathem’s trial.
The pair are charged with the murder of Lathem’s 26-year-old boyfriend, Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, who was found stabbed some 70 times in Lathem’s River North apartment.
Warren has been jailed without bond since Lathem dropped him off outside a police station in San Francisco two years ago. Lathem surrendered to police in nearby Oakland soon after. No date has been set for Lathem’s trial.
Prosecutors have said that Warren, a payroll clerk who worked for a branch campus of Oxford University, had discussed plans for the murder with Lathem in online correspondence for weeks. Lathem was to stab Cornell-Duranleau to death while Warren filmed it on his camera phone, then Warren was to kill Lathem, then kill himself, prosecutors said of the plan.
Warren had arrived in the U.S. just the day before Cornell-Duranleau’s murder.
Prosecutors said Monday that Lathem began stabbing the sleeping Cornell-Duranleau as he lay in Lathem’s bed, and Warren helped by restraining the young man, hitting him with a lamp and stabbing him. At a previous hearing, prosecutors said Warren got two knives from the kitchen and began stabbing Cornell-Duranleau so forcefully that the blade broke off one of the knives. Police in San Francisco said Warren had given a statement to detectives there after his arrest. After the two were arrested, Chicago police said that Warren had confessed to the killing.
The two suspects, apparently losing the nerve to carry out their suicide pact after killing Cornell-Duranleau, began a bizarre trip as fugitives that included stops at a health clinic and the public library in Lake Geneva, where they made large donations in Cornell-Duranleau’s name, prosecutors said.
Police only discovered the body after the front desk at Lathem’s apartment received an anonymous phone call, with the caller saying “a crime may have been committed” there. Lathem allegedly also sent video messages to his family, as well as Cornell-Duranleau’s, in which he expressed remorse for betraying Cornell-Duranleau’s trust and making “the biggest mistake of my life.”
Lathem was a successful researcher on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine as one of the world’s top experts on the plague.
Cornell-Duranleau’s mothers traveled from Michigan for Monday’s hearing, and were in the courtroom gallery, joined by a half-dozen supporters.
