A British man told a Cook County jury Wednesday he traveled to Chicago in 2017 to meet an accomplished Northwestern microbiologist as part of an elaborate, suicidal plan for the pair to kill each other, but instead they stabbed the professor’s 26-year-old boyfriend to death and fled town.
Andrew Warren, 61, said he saw Wyndham Lathem stab Trenton Cornell, who was screaming and struggling in Lathem’s bedroom, taking the stand on the second day of testimony in Lathem’s trial.
Lathem asked Warren to come in and try to quiet Cornell down that night in July of that year; in response, Warren tried to hold his hand over Cornell’s mouth, then hit him over the head with a nearby lamp, to no effect, Warren told the jury.
Then Warren said he grabbed a knife himself.
“I don’t know why. I’ll never know why,” he said. “I struck Trenton twice with the knife.”
Warren is prosecutors’ centerpiece witness: The only other person in the apartment during the gruesome stabbing. Lathem is slated to testify in his own defense next week and is expected to present a wildly different story, one in which Warren catfished him with promises of romance and then stabbed Cornell in a jealous frenzy while Lathem fled to another room.
Andrew Warren arrives at a police station escorted by Chicago police on Aug. 18, 2017. (Jim Young / AP)
Word of Warren’s appearance spread quickly throughout the Leighton Criminal Court Building. Eventually the courtroom grew so crowded that Judge Charles Burns announced that the room was at capacity, and sheriff’s deputies turned would-be spectators away at the door.
Shortly after noon, Warren walked out of lockup wearing a yellow jail jumpsuit — indicating he is being held in protective custody — and with dark circles under his eyes. He trembled visibly as Burns swore him in.
But he answered hours of questioning in a largely emotionless tone. When he wasn’t speaking, his mouth often hung open, giving him a hangdog, bewildered sort of look.
Warren was profoundly depressed in 2016 and 2017, he testified. His father had died in a tragic accident, he dealt with a mounting workload at his job, and his sister was struggling with substance abuse, he said. In addition, he was under investigation for child pornography, though he was ultimately not charged.
He took to the internet to find someone who would kill him. Eventually, he was connected with Lathem, suicidal like himself, Warren said. The two plotted to kill each other: Warren shooting Lathem as Lathem stabbed Warren.
“He was going to cut me open and fatally wound me,” Warren testified. “That’s what we discussed all the time.”
Lathem paid for Warren to fly from Britain to Chicago. They then drove to St. Louis and unsuccessfully tried to buy a gun, Warren said.
On the drive back to Chicago, Lathem started talking in general about wanting to kill someone. And when they got back into town, he texted Warren in the middle of the night, Warren said.
“I got this message saying that he wanted to kill Trent,” he told the jury.
Warren went to Lathem’s apartment, where Lathem showed him knives in a brown paper bag, and both men removed their clothes “in case there was blood everywhere,” Warren said.
Lathem instructed Warren to take video of him killing Cornell, but Warren couldn’t bring himself to do it, he said. Instead, he tried to quiet Cornell, he said, then stabbed him twice.
The two men showered and went on the run after that, to Wisconsin, then across the country to California, Warren said. Lathem dropped Warren off in San Francisco, where he wandered around trying to find a police station to turn himself in.
“I wanted to clear my mind, get everything off my chest,” he said.
The killing stunned Chicago at the time Lathem was charged. Prosecutors prior to the trial have described Cornell’s death as a sex-related thrill-killing that Warren traveled overseas for. But that motive so far has not found a place in the description of the crime that the jury has heard, leaving only Warren’s version that the slaying grew out of the unusual suicide pact.
Warren testified as part of a plea agreement with Cook County prosecutors. In exchange for his testimony against Lathem, prosecutors will recommend a 45-year sentence for first-degree murder.They also will not object if Warren applies to do sentence in the U.K., where he would only have to serve about half of his remaining time.
Lathem’s defense attorneys have painted Warren as a blatant liar whose claims are patently false. For one thing, they told jurors in opening statements, the knife Warren initially said Lathem used in the killing was tested and found not to have had any blood on it.
On cross-examination, Warren told defense attorneys that he did have romantic feelings for Lathem, even hoping to marry him, and that their online chats had been flirtatious. Warren was having financial problems at the time, he testified.
“Were you gold-digging?” defense attorney Barry Sheppard asked, prompting prosecutors to object.
And despite their purported plans to kill each other, they didn’t ever attempt to do so, Warren said on cross-examination, though they did make an unsuccessful attempt to kill themselves with carbon monoxide poisoning in their rental car after Cornell’s death.
“No overdosing? No jumping off the Arch?” Sheppard asked in his questions about their trip to St. Louis. “And during the drive back to Chicago, no further talk of this suicide, shoot, stab thing?”
In addition, Warren testified, his ticket to Chicago had been for a round-trip journey.
mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com
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