Northwestern professor wanted in stabbing death of man
Police are searching for a Northwestern University professor and a University of Oxford employee suspected in the stabbing death of a Chicago man and have alerted law enforcement agencies around the country that the pair should be considered armed and dangerous.
Anthony Guglielmi, a Chicago police spokesman, said Wednesday a Cook County judge issued first-degree murder warrants for Wyndham Lathem, 42, and Andrew Warren, 56, in the killing of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau. Cornell-Duranleau, 26, was stabbed to death last week in a 10th-floor apartment believed to be Latham's in the River North neighborhood.
Guglielmi said detectives believe the pair have fled Illinois, but their passports have been flagged by the State Department, and the U.S. Marshal Service has joined the search, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
"The search for them will only intensify," Guglielmi said. "They should do the right thing and turn themselves in to any police station. It's only a matter of time."
Police have not released a possible motive or said how they linked the suspects to the killing, but Guglielmi said security camera footage shows them leaving the building that night.
Lathem and Cornell-Duranleau appear to have lived together at the River North apartment, Guglielmi said, but he didn't know any details about the relationship. Lathem is listed as the registered owner of the apartment, which sits just over a mile from his office in Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, Guglielmi said.
He said investigators determined that Warren, who lives in England, came to the U.S. recently for the first time, but he didn't know if Warren knew the victim.
Officers went to the apartment last Thursday night after the person working at the building's front desk called to report that he'd received an anonymous call about a crime having been committed in that unit. Cornell-Duranleau, who lived in the Heart of Chicago neighborhood on the city's lower West Side, was pronounced dead at the scene. The medical examiner's office said he died of multiple sharp force injuries.
A notice emailed last week to Grand Plaza residents by building managers after Cornell-Duranleau's body was discovered said Chicago police were investigating "a variety of motives, including a possible domestic incident." The murder is the first in the River North police beat that covers the 500 block of North State since at least 2001, according to the Chicago Police crime database.
In an obituary posted on her Facebook page, Cornell-Duranleau's mother, Mischelle Duranleau, said he was born in the small town of Lennon, Michigan, and loved animals, music, cars and video games. His biological mother died when he was young, and he was adopted by Duranleau and raised among a large family of adopted siblings.
"His enthusiasm for life was infectious. Trenton was a caregiver and loved to help others," Duranleau wrote.
His funeral will be held on Aug. 12 in Lennon.
A Northwestern University spokesman, Alan Cubbage, said in a news release the school is cooperating with the investigation and that Lathem has been placed on administrative leave and banned from entering school property. He said there is no indication that Lathem, an associate professor of microbiology-immunology who has been on the faculty since 2007, is a danger to anyone at the school.
Warren is a senior treasury assistant at Somerville College in England, which is part of the Oxford University network, according to a university website.
• The Chicago Sun-Times contributed to this report.