A former professor convicted of the grotesque homicide of his boyfriend was sentenced Tuesday in Chicago to 53 years in jail.
Wyndham Lathem, 47, had surrendered to federal marshals in Oakland in August 2017, eight days after an nameless name led police to the physique of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau in his Chicago house.
His alleged confederate, Andrew Warren, turned himself in at a San Francisco police station.
Warren, a British nationwide, later made a deal to plead responsible to homicide and testify that Lathem had killed the 26-year-old sufferer, who was stabbed greater than 70 instances and practically decapitated.
Lathem was convicted of first-degree homicide in October after a trial of practically two weeks.
Prosecutors say Warren and Lathem — then a professor of microbiology at Northwestern College — had chatted on-line for months about their shared fantasy of killing different individuals after which themselves.
In July 2017, Lathem paid for Warren to fly to Chicago, and the 2 reportedly got here up with a plan to slay victims of Lathem’s selecting. Each males then deliberate to then kill one another concurrently, investigators mentioned.
However after the bloody slaying of Cornell-Duranleau with a drywall noticed, the 2 males deserted the suicide pact and went on the run. It's believed that Lathem himself known as within the nameless tip from a Wisconsin library. On the similar library, somebody made an nameless donation of $1,000 in Cornell-Duranleau’s identify.
Prosecutors say that whereas a fugitive Lathem despatched a video to his mom by which he mentioned: “I killed him, I did do it, it wasn’t an accident but it surely was a mistake.”
In imposing the sentence, Decide Charles Burns mentioned he thought-about Lathem’s uneventful private life and his achieved skilled profession, based on the Chicago Tribune. Lathem was fired by Northwestern after his arrest.
“Clearly, he had a darkish secret,” Burns mentioned. “The Dr. Lathem that we noticed stroll by the doorways to this courtroom clearly had a Mr. Hyde to him.”
In an announcement through the sentencing listening to, Lathem mentioned he was “grief-stricken with regret because the second every thing occurred.” The sufferer’s mom, nevertheless, mentioned the household doesn't consider he has proven regret.
Warren was sentenced to 45 years however as a part of his plea deal he will likely be imprisoned in his native United Kingdom, the place he's more likely to be launched in lower than 30 years. He was a employees member at Somerville Faculty, part of the Oxford college community, and till his fateful journey to Chicago at age 56 had been dwelling along with his mom.