It’s safe to say that unemployment isn’t Professor Wyndham Lathem’s biggest problem right now. Northwestern University abruptly fired him after he and a chat-room buddy from England allegedly stabbed Lathem’s boyfriend 70 times while carrying out a gory sexual fantasy and then fled across the country, giving rise to a nationwide manhunt.
According to prosecutors at a bond hearing last week, Lathem and Warren planned to first murder several others and then themselves in an I-shoot-you-while-you-stab-me grand finale. But after killing 26-year-old cosmetologist Trenton Cornell-Duranleau in the early hours of July 27, Lathem and Warren apparently reconsidered. They showered, rented a car, and stopped to make two donations in Cornell-Duranleau’s name: $5,610 to the Howard Brown Health Center, and $1,000 to the Lake Geneva Public Library, where Lathem used the phone to anonymously alert management at his North State Street apartment building that a crime had been committed there. Eight days after the murder, the duo turned themselves in, separately, to San Francisco-area police. According to prosecutors, Lathem had also sent a video to family and friends admitting his guilt.
Northwestern political science professor Jacqueline Stevens, who has her own pending issues with the university, noted the abrupt firing on her blog and wondered, “Is there anything in the handbook that says you can be fired at will when police allege a crime but it has not been proven?”
