Friends of Northwestern prof, murder victim shocked by twists, turns

A hard-luck hairstylist found dead in a swank downtown high-rise. A Chicago professor renowned for his research on the plague, on the run with an unassuming payroll clerk from a British university.

If the story of killing of Trenton H. James Cornell-Duranleau and the flight of Northwestern microbiologist Wyndham Lathem and Oxford College bursar Andrew Warren seems strange to those reading about it in the news, the tale is stranger still to those who knew the three men now linked by a bloody murder scene 10 stories above North State Street, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

"We're all in a complete state of shock," said William Goldman, a microbiologist at University of North Carolina who supervised Lathem when Lathem was a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University. "I keep thinking there has to be some other explanation ... There's just nothing that would have led me to predict something like this."

Lathem, 42, surrendered Friday night at the Oakland federal building at around the same time that Warren, 56, was turning himself in to police in San Francisco, according to Michael McCloud, a fugitive task force commander with the U.S. Marshals Service. The two are expected to appear in court in California on Monday, then will be extradited to Chicago.

• This report was assembled in collaboration with the Chicago Sun-Times. To read the full story, visit chicago.suntimes.com.