Two Men From Elite Universities Charged With a Killing ‘Dark and Disturbing’
Before the killing, the two men — Wyndham Lathem, who had been a professor at Northwestern University,
and Andrew Warren, an administrator at the University of Oxford in England — had talked for months in an internet chat room about their “sexual fantasies of killing others and then themselves,” prosecutors said.
A few days after Mr. Warren arrived at O’Hare International Airport
and was picked up by Mr. Lathem, they prepared for the killing, the prosecutors said: Mr. Lathem was to kill his boyfriend with a drywall knife while Mr. Warren was to record it on a cellphone, though no recording was made.
It was a little more dark and disturbing, as far as I’m concerned.”
Barry Sheppard, a lawyer for Mr. Lathem, 43, said after the hearing
that his client was “a distinguished microbiologist” and urged the public “not to engage in a rush to judgment.”
“He has led a lifetime of outstanding, unblemished citizenship,” Mr. Sheppard said of
his client, who appeared before the judge in glasses and a patterned flannel shirt.
The attack, the prosecutors indicated, was the culmination of those conversations, with Mr. Lathem paying to fly Mr. Warren to the United States
and the two men carefully plotting the killing of Mr. Lathem’s boyfriend, Trenton Cornell-Duranleau.
According to court documents, the initial plan was for Mr. Lathem
and Mr. Warren to kill Mr. Cornell-Duranleau — and perhaps others — and then one another.