CHICAGO (AP) — More than 30 colleagues and friends of a former Northwestern University professor charged in the brutal stabbing death of a 26-year-old man wrote letters supporting him both as a friend and a scientist whose research included academic work on the bacteria that cause plague.
“I feel his contributions will eventually lead to the eradications of these infections, which continue to kill several thousand people every year,” one colleague wrote about Wyndham Lathem in a letter on Northwestern stationery that Lathem’s attorney submitted to the court in hopes of persuading a judge to allow Lathem to post bond for his release from jail, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Lathem and Oxford University employee Andrew Warren are charged with first-degree murder in the July 27 slaying of Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, a Michigan native who had been living in Chicago. Prosecutors allege that Lathem and Warren had been planning for months since they met online to kill someone and then kill each other as part of a sexual fantasy. They say that after Warren flew to Chicago, the pair attacked Cornell-Duranleau as he slept in Lathem’s Chicago high-rise apartment.
Friends, relatives and co-workers of criminal defendants often write letters to judges asking for leniency, but they are almost always written in anticipation of sentencing and are rarely sent to judges before trial. In this case, the judge read them before the defendants appeared before a hearing Sunday in which prosecutors detailed the killing.