CHICAGO _ A British national pleaded guilty to a fatal stabbing with bizarre sex-fantasy overtones Monday and agreed to testify against a former Northwestern University associate professor who is charged in the killing as well.
As part of the deal, Cook County prosecutors agreed to recommend that Andrew Warren be sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Prosecutors allege that Warren, 58 and Wyndham Lathem, then an associate professor of microbiology at Northwestern, fatally stabbed Lathem's boyfriend, Trenton Cornell-Duranleau, 70 times in Lathem's Near North Side high-rise in July 2017 to fulfill a detailed sexual fantasy.
Warren signed a written plea agreement, but Judge Charles Burns took the extraordinary step of declining to make it public until after he could consult with Lathem's attorneys when his case is next up Tuesday at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
Warren was scheduled to go on trial next week.
Lathem has pleaded not guilty, but no trial date has been set for him.
About half a dozen of Cornell-Duranleau's family and supporters left the courtroom Monday without speaking to reporters.
The case's lurid details made international headlines. Lathem and Warren had chatted online for months about their shared fantasy of killing other people and themselves, prosecutors said in 2017 after bringing first-degree murder charges against both.
Here's the account provided by prosecutors at the time:
In late July 2017, Lathem paid for Warren to fly to Chicago, and the two came up with a plan to slay victims of Lathem's choosing. Both men would kill each other simultaneously _ Warren shooting Lathem while Lathem stabbed Warren.
Lathem lured Cornell-Duranleau, 26, to his apartment and texted Warren that they would kill him that night.
Warren came over about 4:30 a.m. the next day after Cornell-Duranleau had fallen asleep in Lathem's apartment. Lathem showed Warren a 6-inch drywall knife saw and gave him a cellphone with instructions to record video of Lathem fatally stabbing Cornell-Duranleau.
As Warren stood in the doorway to the bedroom with his cellphone in hand, Lathem stabbed the sleeping Cornell-Duranleau repeatedly. He awakened, screamed and fought back.
Lathem cried to Warren for help, so Warren walked in and put his hands over the victim's mouth, then hit him in the head with a heavy metal lamp.
"Wyndham, what are you doing?" prosecutors quoted Cornell-Duranleau as last saying.
The attack left Cornell-Duranleau nearly decapitated, prosecutors have said.
As Cornell-Duranleau bled to death in the bedroom, his attackers showered and then tried to clean up the scene, prosecutors said.
They left Lathem's apartment in the early morning hours and fled _ sparking a nationwide manhunt that ended when they surrendered to authorities in California nine days later, prosecutors said.
They were brought back to Chicago and ordered held without bail.
Lathem was fired from Northwestern after fleeing the city. Warren was suspended in England as a financial officer at Somerville College, part of the Oxford University system.
Neighbors said Warren lived quietly with his sister and his boyfriend in the town of Faringdon in the house where he grew up. He was a "quiet lad" who always helped out, they said, and remembered for accompanying his mother to bingo.
Warren was still grieving the death of his father eight months earlier when he decided to take his first-ever trip to the United States in July 2017, friends said. He left England so unexpectedly that loved ones filed a missing persons report for him the next day.
