Yahoo News British man pleads guilty to role in violent murder of US hairdresser
A British man accused of murdering a hairstylist in Chicago as part of a sexual fantasy has agreed to plead guilty and give evidence against his co-defendant in exchange for a 45-year prison sentence.
Andrew Warren's written plea agreement comes almost two years after the body of Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, riddled with stab wounds, was discovered at an apartment in the US city.
Prosecutors said the 26-year-old victim had been stabbed 70 times and with such brutality that he was nearly decapitated.
The discovery of his body in July 2017 prompted a manhunt for Warren and Wyndham Lathem, a professor at Illinois' Northwestern University who lived in the apartment and was eventually identified as Mr Cornell-Duranleau's boyfriend.
Lathem and Warren, who worked at Oxford University at the time, surrendered to authorities in California days later.
It is alleged that Warren and Lathem met in an online chatroom where they hatched a plot to kill Mr Cornell-Duranleau and then themselves.
Prosecutors described the alleged plot as a sexual fantasy and claimed the pair lost the nerve to take their own lives after they killed Lathem's lover.
It is claimed the pair then fled Chicago on a strange road trip to California that included a stop at a public library, in which they made large donations in Mr Cornell-Duranleau's name.
Both men had pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and are being held in custody in Chicago.
A trial date has not been set for Lathem, once a respected associate professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern.
He is due to return to court next week.
About half a dozen friends and relatives of Mr Cornell-Duranleau attended Warren's court hearing on Monday.
