Prosecutors: Professor killed boyfriend as part of sexual fantasy

CHICAGO -- The fatal stabbing of a hairstylist in Chicago was part of a sexual fantasy hatched in an online chatroom between a Northwestern University professor and an Oxford University employee, whose plan included killing someone and then themselves, prosecutors told a Cook County judge Sunday at a bond hearing for the men.

An Illinois prosecutor shared new details about the July 27 slaying, describing to the court how Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, the 26-year-old boyfriend of since-fired microbiology professor Wyndham Lathem, was stabbed 70 times at Lathem's Chicago condo and with such brutality, he nearly was decapitated. His throat was slit, and his pulmonary artery was torn.

Lathem, 46, had communicated for months before with Andrew Warren, 56, about "carrying out their sexual fantasies of killing others and then themselves," Natosha Toller, an assistant Cook County state's Attorney, told the court.

While the prosecutor used the plural in talking about the alleged fantasy to kill, she did not say there were other victims.

Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr. at one point shook his head in apparent disgust as he listened to the prosecutor offer a narrative of the slaying. He later deemed both men potentially dangerous and flight risks, ordering them to remain in jail pending trial on first-degree murder charges.

"The heinous facts speak for themselves," he said.

Lathem and Warren -- a British citizen employed as a financial official at the Oxford, England, university -- were dressed in their own clothes Sunday at their first court appearance in Chicago. They stood calmly, their hands behind their backs, as the prosecutor and judge spoke.

Lathem paid for Warren's ticket to travel to the United States and picked Warren up at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport a few days before the killing, the prosecutor said. On July 26, one day before the killing, Lathem booked a room for Warren near the condo, Toller said.

Cornell-Duranleau, a Michigan native, had been asleep in Lathem's high-rise Chicago condo when Lathem let Warren into the 10th-floor unit about 4:30 a.m. July 27, treading carefully so as not to wake the victim. As Warren stood in a doorway, Lathem crept up to Cornell-Duranleau and began plunging a 6-inch drywall-saw knife into his chest and neck, Toller said.