SAN FRANCISCO — Far from their prestigious campuses, a Northwestern University professor and a University of Oxford finance officer were jailed in the San Francisco area on Saturday after eight days as fugitives in the death of a young hairdresser in Chicago who was repeatedly stabbed until the knife broke, police said.

The Northwestern microbiologist, Wyndham Lathem, had a personal relationship with the victim, although the nature of it wasn’t clear. While on the run, Lathem sent a video to family and friends apologizing for his involvement in the crime he called “the worst mistake of my life,” according to investigators.

Lathem, 42, was being held without bail in Alameda County and faced a Monday court appearance in the city of Pleasanton.

The other suspect, Andrew Warren, a treasury assistant at one of Oxford’s residential colleges in England, was being held at a jail in San Francisco.

Both men surrendered separately and peacefully on Friday evening in the Bay Area.

They had been fugitives since the body of 26-year-old Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau was found in Lathem’s Chicago apartment July 27.

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Police said Lathem had a relationship with Cornell-Duranleau, who moved to Chicago from the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area after receiving his cosmetology license.

Investigators have not elaborated on how Cornell-Duranleau or Lathem knew Warren, or if Warren knew them before he arrived in the United States.

Chicago police said Warren was 56; he was booked into jail as age 49.

A deputy U.S. marshal said Lathem’s surrender came after fast-paced negotiations through an attorney that led to the fugitive turning himself in at the federal courthouse in Oakland.

Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Frank Conroy told The Associated Press the telephone negotiations began late Friday afternoon and by evening, Lathem arrived by car at the courthouse.

Police said Lathem’s video to friends and relatives had raised concern among investigators that Lathem might kill himself.

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Warren arrived in the United States three days before Cornell-Duranleau’s death. He and Lathem were seen in surveillance video leaving Lathem’s high-rise apartment building the day of the stabbing.

In a bizarre twist, police said that on that same day, before the body had been discovered, Lathem and Warren drove about 80 miles northwest of Chicago to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where one of them made a $1,000 cash donation to the local public library in Cornell-Duranleau’s name. Lake Geneva police said the man making the donation did not give his name.

On the night of the slaying, police said the front desk of the building where Lathem lived in Chicago’s trendy River North neighborhood received an anonymous call from a person who said that a crime had been committed in Lathem’s 10th floor apartment. When police opened the door, they found Cornell-Duranleau’s body.

Police also said that by the time they found the body on the night of July 27, Cornell-Duranleau had been dead for 12 to 15 hours.


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