Two Men From Elite Universities Charged With a Killing ‘Dark and Disturbing’<br />Before the killing, the two men — Wyndham Lathem, who had been a professor at Northwestern University,<br />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.<br />A few days after Mr. Warren arrived at O’Hare International Airport<br />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.<br />It was a little more dark and disturbing, as far as I’m concerned.”<br />Barry Sheppard, a lawyer for Mr. Lathem, 43, said after the hearing<br />that his client was “a distinguished microbiologist” and urged the public “not to engage in a rush to judgment.”<br />“He has led a lifetime of outstanding, unblemished citizenship,” Mr. Sheppard said of<br />his client, who appeared before the judge in glasses and a patterned flannel shirt.<br />The attack, the prosecutors indicated, was the culmination of those conversations, with Mr. Lathem paying to fly Mr. Warren to the United States<br />and the two men carefully plotting the killing of Mr. Lathem’s boyfriend, Trenton Cornell-Duranleau.<br />According to court documents, the initial plan was for Mr. Lathem<br />and Mr. Warren to kill Mr. Cornell-Duranleau — and perhaps others — and then one another.
