Two academics, one attached to a US university and the other to Oxford University, who went on the run for eight days after a fatal stabbing in Chicago have surrendered to police in California.
Northwestern University professor Wyndham Lathem, 42, surrendered on Friday night at the Oakland federal building at around the same time that Andrew Warren, 56, a University of Oxford staffer, surrendered to police in San Francisco.
The men are accused of stabbing 26-year-old Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau to death in Chicago.
Michael McCloud of the US Marshals Service said the surrender of the men was "negotiated".
Lathem, an associate microbiology professor, and Warren, a Somerville College resident at Oxford University, will appear separately in court before being extradited to Illinois, where they face charges of first-degree murder.
A manhunt had been under way since shortly after Cornell-Duranleau was found dead in Lathem's Chicago apartment on the night of July 27. He had been stabbed several times in an attack so brutal that police said the knife broke.
Police said Lathem had sent a video to friends and relatives apologising for his involvement in the crime, which he called the "biggest mistake of my life". The video raised concern among investigators that Lathem might kill himself.
Warren arrived in the US three days before Cornell-Duranleau's death and was seen in surveillance video leaving the building with Lathem the day of the stabbing.
Police said Lathem had a personal relationship with Cornell-Duranleau, who moved to Chicago from Michigan after receiving his cosmetology licence.
They are not sure how Cornell-Duranleau or Lathem knew Warren, or if Warren knew them before he arrived in the US.
In a bizarre twist, police said that on the day of the slaying, but before the body had been discovered, Lathem and Warren drove about 128km to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where one of them made a $US1000 ($A1260) cash donation to the public library there in Cornell-Duranleau's name.
On the night of the slaying, police said the front desk of the high-rise building where Lathem lived in Chicago's trendy River North neighbourhood 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.
Share
