Briton held in Chicago homicide mystery

Days into his first visit to the U.S., he and a professor are charged in brutal knife attack.

CHICAGO — The Facebook photo shows Andrew Warren at the helm of a tall ship, his hand gripping the wheel as he smiles into the camera.

“Captain Jack Sparrow,” the Briton’s sister posts, followed by three laughing emojis. “I was thinking more on the lines of Captain Pugwash,” a friend rejoins, referring to a British comic strip from the 1950s. The sister responds with two more laughing faces.

The exchange took place July 15. Nine days later, Warren would leave England for his first trip to the United States, apparently without telling his friends or family. The next time they would hear about him was when Warren was charged with a brutal stabbing death in Chicago late last month.

It would be another week before Warren would surrender in the Bay Area with the other suspect in the slaying, now-fired Northwestern University professor Wyndham Lathem.

On Friday morning, Warren appeared in a San Francisco courtroom on an arrest warrant charging him with first-degree murder. He was expected to waive his extradition rights and agree to return to Chicago, where he is accused of killing Trenton Cornell-Duranleau, 26, in Lathem’s apartment July 27.

Police have said little about the case, and Warren remains as much of a puzzle as the crime he is accused of committing.

Known as a reserved employee at Oxford University in England, he lived quietly with his sister and his boyfriend in the town of Faringdon, in the house where he grew up. Neighbors said he was a “quiet lad” who always helped out. They remembered him accompanying his mother to bingo.

Warren was still mourning the death of his father eight months ago when he decided to travel to the U.S. on July 24, friends said. He left so unexpectedly that loved ones filed a missingpersons report.

Three days after Warren’s plane landed, police found Cornell-Duranleau’s body stabbed and slashed in Lathem’s 10th-floor apartment, authorities said. Two bloody knives were found in the kitchen, one with a broken blade.

Arrest warrants were issued for Warren and Lathem charging them with first-degree murder. The two surrendered eight days later, Warren near the Golden Gate Bridge and Lathem across the bay in Oakland.