A worker from Oxford University is being hunted alongside a U.S. professor in connection with the murder of a man in Chicago.
Andrew Warren, a 56-year-old treasury assistant at Oxford’s Somerville College, and Wyndham Lathem, a 42-year-old professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, are suspected of killing Trenton Cornell-Duranleau.
The 26-year-old was found stabbed to death in a 10th floor apartment thought to belong to Lathem in the city’s River North district last week.
On Wednesday, a county court judge issued first-degree murder warrants for the pair while law enforcement agencies described them as “armed and dangerous”.
Police have not yet released a possible motive or revealed how the suspects were linked to the killing, Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the footage from a security camera shows the pair leaving the building that night.
Guglielmi added that Lathem and Cornell-Duranleau knew each other, but that he had no detail about the nature of their relationship.
He also said that investigators had learned that Warren, who lives in England, came to the U.S. recently for the first time, but did not yet know if he was known to the victim.
Detectives found the body after a worker on the apartment block’s front desk reported receiving an anonymous tip-off about a crime being committed in the building.
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.
Dr Alice Prochaska, Principal of Somerville College Oxford, said staff only learned of the events on Wednesday evening, adding: “We have been in contact with the police in the U.K. and are ready to help the U.S. investigating authorities in any way they need.
“Andrew Warren’s colleagues at Somerville College have now all been informed and we are all shocked to learn of the case.”
Alan Cubbage, spokesman for Northwestern University, said in a statement that the school is cooperating with the investigation and that Lathem has been placed on administrative leave and banned from entering school property.
He added there was 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 an obituary posted by the victim’s family on the website of Michigan’s The Argus-Press of Owosso, Cornell-Duranleau had a cosmetology license, but gave little other detail.
