Wyndham Lathem and Andrew Warren have been charged with first-degree murder in the death of Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, a Michigan native who had been working in Chicago. Photos / AP
By James Law
On the evening of July 27, the doorman of the high-rise apartment building at 540 North State St, Chicago, received an anonymous phone call.
"Apartment 1004 should be checked. There has been a crime committed in the room," an unidentified man said down the phone line.
Acting on the tip, the doorman opened the apartment with police in tow.
What they found would have shocked even the most hardened officers.
Inside the bedroom, they discovered the bloodied body of a young man lying on the floor wearing only his underwear.
Next to his head was a broken knife with its handle missing. A damaged metal lamp was also lying nearby.
When police tried to move the body, his head appeared to have been nearly decapitated.
A later medical examination revealed the victim had been stabbed 70 times, including a sliced jugular, 21 wounds to the chest and abdomen, 26 cuts to the back, two punctured lungs and injuries to the colon, spleen, diaphragm and liver.
The discovery of the body set off a desperate manhunt that lasted the next nine days and eventually led authorities 3500km across the country to California.
Police have accused two unlikely men of carrying out the brutal murder: a distinguished 46-year-old American professor and a 56-year-old British university administrator who had only been in the country for a matter of days.
A court in Chicago heard on Sunday that the two men had made a pact to carry out a disturbing sexual fantasy that involved them killing others and then themselves.
Wyndham Lathem, whose defence lawyer described as a "distinguished microbiologist", met Andrew Warren, a British national who worked at the University of Oxford, on an internet chat room where they talked for months about their dark desires.
They allegedly put these fantasies into motion in July when Lathem offered to pay for Warren to fly to his home city of Chicago. Warren accepted and left England without telling family or friends.
"Defendant Lathem paid for defendant Warren to come to the United States in order for them to kill someone and then kill each other," Cook County assistant states attorney Natosha Toller told reporters outside court in Chicago on Sunday.
Lathem picked Warren up from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and they began discussing their deadly plot: The pair would kill people hand-picked by Lathem. Then, Warren would shoot Lathem dead while Lathem was in the act of stabbing Warren to death.
On the night of Wednesday, July 26, Lathem chose their first victim: his own boyfriend, Trenton Cornell-Duranleau, a hair stylist who was 20 years his junior.
Lathem invited Cornell-Duranleau around to his high-rise apartment in North State St that night.
"After the victim went to sleep in defendant Lathem's apartment, Lathem texted defendant Warren that it was time to kill Trenton and to come to his apartment," Toller said.
When he arrived, Lathem took a Stanley drywall knife saw with a 15cm blade out of its packaging and handed Warren a mobile phone to "record the murder".
As Cornell-Duranleau lay asleep in his underwear, Lathem began the attack.
"Defendant Lathem then stabbed the victim over and over in the neck and chest area," Toller said.
Cornell-Duranleau woke up and began to scream. He fought back so powerfully that Lathem began to yell "help me, help me" to Warren, who was standing in the doorway.
Warren put his hands over Cornell-Duranleau's mouth but when the victim bit his hand he struck the 26-year-old over the head with a heavy metal lamp.
Warren also retrieved two extra knives from the kitchen and allegedly joined in the stabbing frenzy. He used so much force that he broke the blade of one of the weapons.
The last thing Cornell-Duranleau said to his boyfriend was "Wyndham, what are you doing?"
The two accused murderers never followed through on their suicide pact.
While their victim bled to death in the bedroom, they washed the blood off their hands and bodies in the bathroom, before leaving the apartment about 5.30am on July 27.
They curiously made a US$5610 cash donation to a Chicago health centre in Cornell-Duranleau's name before fleeing the city in a rental car.
They drove about two hours northwest to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where they stopped to make another cash donation in their victim's name, this time US$1000 to a library.
There, Lathem asked to use a phone and he proceeded to call his apartment block's front desk to suggest anonymously that they check his apartment.
Police used hotel and hire car records to deduce that the killers they were looking for were Lathem and Warren, and their faces were quickly slapped on wanted posters as a desperate search began. The US Marshalls were called in to join the manhunt.
A little over a week later, both men turned themselves into police in California's San Francisco area.
The prosecution alleges that Lathem sent a video to his parents and friends while he was on the run where he admitted to killing his boyfriend.
"Defendant Lathem elaborated that he is not the person people thought he was and he admitted that the victim trusted him completely and felt safe with him but that he betrayed that trust," Toller said.
Both Lathem and Warren appeared in a Chicago court on Sunday to apply for bail.
The professor's defence lawyer Barry Sheppard pointed to his client's "lifetime of outstanding, unblemished citizenship".
"We simply ask the public to patiently allow the legal system to work and not to engage in any rush to judgment based on conjecture and speculation," he said.
In court, while the prosecution laid out a chilling narrative of the murder, Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr shook his head in apparent disgust, AP reported.
He deemed both men as potentially dangerous and flight risks, and ordered them to remain in jail until their murder trial.
"The heinous facts speak for themselves," he said.
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