‘Armed and dangerous’ Oxford University worker on run after US murder
‘We are all in shock’
an ‘armed and dangerous’ oxford University worker was on the run last night from US police investigating the murder of a male hairdresser.
andrew Warren, a senior administrative assistant at Baroness Thatcher’s old college, Somerville, disappeared from his UK home last week and is understood to be with an american professor who is also a suspect in the case.
Warren was reported missing on July 25 from the home in Faringdon near Swindon that he shares with his sister – a day after he flew to the US.
Two days later, the body of Trenton Cornell-Duranleau, 26, was found. It is alleged Warren, 56, and Professor Wyndham lathem, 42, stabbed the victim to death in the professor’s Chicago flat and then fled in a grey Hyundai saloon.
Warren’s sister and his boyfriend, Martin Grant, have told British police they have no idea what he was doing in america – a country he had never visited before.
US detectives are looking into the possibility Warren had met lathem, who is also gay, online.
They warned both men were ‘considered armed and extremely dangerous’. Friends say Warren had been left devastated by the death of his father, Dereck, in a car crash earlier this year.
last Saturday his sister Tracey posted picture of herself with Warren and their late father on Facebook. She wrote: ‘Miss dad and wake up bruv, life is too precious to waste.’
Mr Grant, an accounts worker, lives nearby and had knocked on the doors of his neighbours asking if they had seen Warren. a close friend said Warren had not told anyone about his plans to visit the US and none of them had ever heard of his alleged accomplice.
She added: ‘Tracey is devastated and we are all in shock.’
The victim’s mother, Charlotte Cornell, insisted yesterday her family knew neither of the suspects. However, neighbours of Mr Cornell-Duranleau said he had been in a relationship with lathem but had recently told the academic he had found another man.
lathem, a microbiologist at northwestern University in Illinois who specialises in the bubonic plague, is listed as a friend of the victim on Facebook.
Police found Mr Cornell-Duran-broken leau’s body in lathem’s ninth floor home on July 27 after a man rang the building’s staff with an anonymous tip that a crime ‘may’ have occurred there.
They found blood on the bedroom door and, inside the room, the victim’s body lying face down.
He had died from stab wounds in his back. In the kitchen waste bin, officers discovered a knife with a blade and another lying near the sink. Four days later, a judge issued arrest warrants for both men on a charge of firstdegree murder. Chicago police say surveillance video showed the two suspects leaving the building on the night of the killing.
Pledging that the nationwide search ‘will only intensify’, they have urged the pair to ‘do the right thing and turn yourself in to any police department’.
officers say they are examining various motives, including that it was a ‘domestic incident’.
a Chicago police spokesman said yesterday that investigators believe the pair have left the state of Illinois and that they know where they are heading.
Warren’s friends were yesterday mystified how the former bus driver and train lover could have become involved in a murder.
His cousin Bernard Wilson’s wife, Christine, said: ‘I’ve known andy for 30 years and I don’t believe he would do it.’